4 ms·
> the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more ti
by dangond 4y ago
> the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media.
I was surprised by this claim. I was always under the impression that poorer people spent more time consuming news media, and that the wealthier a person was, the less news they consumed. I don't know where I got such an impression, and I think I may have confused the statistics for television watching in general. Does anyone have a good source showing a correlation in either direction?
- JKCalhoun 4y agoConfused me as well. Perhaps David Brooks believes the working class get their news from Facebook memes. It's the only explanation that allows me to make his statement congruous.
- panzagl 4y agoDo you know any old people? My family is 24 hours Fox news, my wife's is 24 hour CNN, I can't say that either has a rosy view of where the country is going. Both would be considered well-off. Everyone else (especially the working poor) is too busy to listen to that noise.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYou're only underscoring my same feeling of incongruity reading Brooks' statement. Yes, I know old people (ha ha, I'm old as well, but perhaps that's beside the point). My father has the TV on 24/7 with, I assume, FOX news playing (I wouldn't know since it's been over a decade since I chose to visit him, sadly). I haven't had cable for over two decades now. I only catch cable news in the early morning when I'm in a Best Western lobby trying to pull a waffle out of the waffle iron.