When Pinot Noir Democrats Attack!

Anyone with even a moderately long lived memory when it comes to American politics has to be mesmerized by the class role reversal going on today. It wasn't all that long ago when the print media was the domain of the working and middle class in this country. Oh, sure there were a few papers that catered to the "country club" set, and others that wrote for the East Coast financial elite. Typical was the stance announced by Joseph Pulitzer and still adorning the Editorial section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

"I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Noble words, and words echoed on newspaper mast heads across the country.

Too bad the people working at newspapers today never take the time to read them.

While it is true that newspapers of Pulitzer's day violated the letter of his pledge, many lived up to its spirit. Today does anybody, left or right, really believe that is true? Today, maybe because of dimly understood "post-modern" ideas concerning the nature of truth, most newspapers seem to be operating under the assumption that it is impossible to be objective therefore there is no need to try to be. If anyone complains about the treatment they receive, well, they must be hypocrites because "objectiveness" is a fraud. "They," so the argument goes, "must be on the side doing the sinning just as often as they are on the side being sinned against." This would make sense if print or electronic media catered to different ideological groups in a roughly proportional manner. However, they certainly do not. A disproportionate number of papers, for example, serve a left of center ideological group, even if they do so imperfectly. For example, in a 2006 Pew Center survey on the media, self identified Democrats found the following news sources more reliable than did Republicans:

NewsHour
NPR
AP
their daily newspaper
60 Minutes
CBS News
Local TV News
CNN
ABC News
MSNBC
C-Span
NBC News
New York Times
USA Today
Newsweek
Time

The following were found more trustworthy by Republicans than Democrats:

Wall Street Journal
Fox News

So, if it is fair to say media sources have done a better job catering to those on the left of the ideological spectrum, it is also fair to say they also do the same for the better educated and wealthier. (Go read the entire Pew Survey for confirmation of that.) Indeed, as time goes on, the focus of most of the media has moved further and further away from that laid out by Pulitzer for his newspapers. In one sense this does seem logical; if more highly educated and wealthy consumers use your product than you will customize it to best suit that audience. However, it would be wrong to assume that this is merely a question of market forces playing out. Let's face it, it helps the bottom line of these media sources if their paying customers have more cash. So, in some sense at least, media in this country have the audiences they recruited. As a result, the ideological makeup of that audience is not a result of happenstance but it is deliberately cultivated. Publishers know how to read market research. They know that poor people are not buying and reading their products, so why should they write for them?

So who are they writing for? I think it would be fair to call them the Pinot Noir Democrats; they are college educated, largely urban, relatively wealthy, non or lightly religious (in a mainline Protestant or Catholic sense,) liberal ideologically, and either ignorant or disdainful of lower middle class lifestyles or values. For themselves they see their personal worldview as "normal" and anything else as decidedly "reactionary" or "deviant." This explain, I believe, the reaction of the MSM to the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican VP candidate. William Kristol summed it up:

A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing--but well-received--presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media's prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin's tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren't being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin--who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times--lamented in a piece for Slate: "So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison." I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

What is amazing about Kristol's complaint about the media is how true it rings, even coming from the old bastion of what used to be called "country club Republicans." The fact the media has reacted with such incredulity to the criticism directed towards it (for example), simply underscores how alien they have become to huge segments of the American population.

Their response has been, in effect, to sneer at middle America. "You ignorant hayseeds! Don't you understand we know what's best for you? Sure, we don't respect you, understand you, or even like you, but you must believe we have your economic well being as our number one priority. Therefore, if you ever feel the need to get involved in politics, don't bother. Leave it to us. Besides, you will be too busy with all of your deformed babies."

It's the new style of noblese oblige and it's every bit as distasteful as the old style.

However, the sad fact is this is all they have to offer. This is the approach to news they have crafted to appeal to the Pinot Noir Democratic audience and they don't know how to do much else. So, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a different approach to emerge this election cycle.