Wednesday, April 18, 2012YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The working class in America is invisible to the vast majority of U.S. reporters, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine said Tuesday night at Youngstown State University.
Unlike a half century ago, “They no longer speak to and for the working class,” said George Packer, author of the well-received 2005 best seller, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Irag. Assassins was chosen one of the best books of that year by a host of newspapers including The New York Times and the Washington Post.
As he’s visited working class neighborhoods and towns throughout the United States – Packer is also writing a book on the subject – he called trying to report on the challenges these Americans face “almost like reporting from a foreign country.”
And Packer spent five years covering the United States’ invasion and occupation of Irag. He made six visits there during that period.
Packer was in town to deliver the last Center for Working Class Studies lecture of this school year.
He related the irony that as so many members of the working class were losing their jobs and homes “during the depths of the [Great] Recession, you’d read about a hedge fund manager who’d lost half his net worth” instead of about “a regular guy who lost his job.”
Newspaper and news magazine editors gave reporters the latitude to write about the social upheaval resulting from unemployment, he continued, but abroad, not at home. “In Iraq, someone [newly unemployed] might pick up a gun and join an insurgency,” a topic editors found interesting and thought their readers would as well.
Packer furnished the answer to the title of lecture, “Do American Journalists Care about the Working Class?” moments into his presentation. “My glib answer is no, not very much.” He spent the remainder of his talk exploring how this development came about.
Unlike other countries, especially Great Britain, “Americans don’t have a strong sense of class,” he observed. And if you ask an American which class he belongs to, most will claim membership in the middle class. “I’ve found anecdotally,” he elaborated, “that if you ask a bus driver or waitress, they will say ‘middle class.’ “
In four states, including Ohio, he posited, there is “no more middle class.” These states “are divided between rich and poor.”
Another reason the working class is invisible, Packer suggested, is the perception, or misperception, that most work in factories. And as so many factory jobs have disappeared, so has awareness of the existence of these workers and their families.
Fifty years ago, Americans got most of their awareness of what was taking place – whether at home, their state capital, Washington, D.C., and abroad -- by reading their hometown newspaper. The reporters who wrote and edited those papers often lacked a college education. “Reporters were not professionals. They were tradesmen and prided themselves on their street smarts,” Packer noted.
Daily papers tended to have tiered wage scales modeled after apprenticeship programs and reporters, college graduates or not, often learned the ropes by serving as apprentices. That slowly faded away as papers became more professional. The best working class reporters who stayed on -- Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in New York City and Mike Royko in Chicago, even Mike Barnacle in Boston – grew comfortable in their higher pay and celebrity as they wrote about where they came from. But they were a vanishing breed.
As college graduates and people with masters’ degrees in journalism replaced the retirees who lacked their diplomas, the new breed “rubbed elbows with people who had more money,” Packer said. “[Reporters] no longer had a feel for that [working class] life.”
In the major media centers such as New York and Washington, said Packer citing former Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, “In journalism, it’s increasingly about where you went to school” – Ivy League universities or at least the most highly regarded state supported colleges and universities – “and you must be able to afford an unpaid summer internship,” something working class students can’t afford to do.
Schultz, wife of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, should know of what she speaks.
Reporters in New York City and Washington “have life experiences that are narrow,” Packer said. “They haven’t known failure. They go to the same parties. They all know each other, date each other and marry each other.”
The economics of journalism is changing as well. Americans don’t want to read about the working class or watch them on television. Its members would rather read or watch coverage of celebrities, sports or less serious subjects. “Working class people want to read about people who have made it,” the writer for The New Yorker said.
And covering the working class does not interest advertisers in buying space or airtime. The New York Post and Daily News, both working class publications, devote less coverage to the working class and its concerns than The New York Times, Packer said.
All media suddenly becomes interested when a disaster, such as a mining accident, occurs. But that’s transitory and “articles are not written about people who make less than $30,000 a year.”
Since the 1980s and the improved coverage of business and finance, “Financial news has exploded while labor news has dwindled,” Packer said.
Two trends could reverse the lack of interest in and coverage of the working class, Packer suggested:
Whether these trends will prompt more reporters, with the blessing of their editors, to visit and interview members of the working class is unclear, but Packer is hopeful that shoe-leather reporting will make a comeback.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.