I’m a journalist and I’m here to help you ignorant bigots
And I knew There was no help, no help from you
AC/DC - Thunderstruck
Since so many intelligent people have praised Tom Stites’ speech on journalism and democracy I hope he won’t mind my less charitable critique, from the other half of the Bell Curve.
Mr. Stite’s speech is hogwash from start to finish (well, not his opening anecdote about yesteryear’s awful newspaper owners).
His definition of democracy strikes as more peronist than republican. He’s flat out wrong when he says meaningful journalism requires democracy. It does not; it requires liberty.
Superficially, Mr. Stites speech is about the role of media in democratic society. In reality, it’s just a rehash, with a twist, of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a book which might as well have been titled “What the fuck is wrong with white hicks?” Mr. Stites has helpfully figured it out: They don’t read the Boston Globe because Wal-Mart doesn’t advertise in it. Since they don’t read the Globe they vote the way FoxNews tells them to, instead of voting with their class/economic interests.
That’s pretty much what Mr. Stites has to say.
The right answer to Mr. Stites’ question is blood. Working class whites are quite similar to African Americans when it comes time to vote: They put blood before class. So while Democrats scoop up almost all of the black vote, the Republicans get a solid majority of the white vote, in particular among rural and exurban whites (not that the phenomenon is limited to hicks and blacks: Cubans mostly vote Republican, while Jews overwhelmingly side with the Democrat party, and so on).
Mr. Stites absurdly laments that newspapers no longer strive for 100% market penetration, as they used to do when he was a kid. In 1967, when America had 200 million residents, 83% of Americans were white and fewer than 5% were immigrants. Today, there are 300 million people in America, about 2/3 of whom are white, perhaps 13-14% are immigrants and almost a fifth speak a language other than English at home. Perhaps that single mom from East Boston that Mr. Stites wants us to imagine can’t read English and therefore not the Globe, or perhaps she just prefers El Mundo or some other newspaper written in her native language.
Progressives are loath to admit it, but much of the health insurance crisis is driven by immigration: 13% of natives don’t have health insurance, compared to an astounding 45% of non-naturalized immigrants (who make up the substantial majority of all immigrants). Immigration also drives up the share and number of poor. Like so much else in today’s America, Wal-Mart’s expansion is in no small part an entreprenuerial response to the supply and demand effects of the vast and extended influx of unskilled, low-income foreigners.
Newspapers like the Globe and the New York Times are written by and for liberal minded, well educated, overwhelmingly white, globalist elites. They are not for the imported servants of those elites, nor for the elites’ much despised economic and educational native lessers. The notion that they have much to offer blue-collar whites is laughable. To take but one example, the elites like to talk big about affordable housing, but cheap single-family housing that actually appeals to working and middle class whites is slurred as sprawl.
It’s one thing to say that the Republican party has in many ways failed to protect the interests of blue-collar whites, it’s quite another to suggest that said whites should vote for people who have no interest in protecting them at all.
