260. Batya Ungar-Sargon — Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2022

⏱️ 139 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? It all has to do with who our news media is written by — and who it is written for.

Michael Shermer speaks with Batya Ungar-Sargon about her new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy in which she reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century — from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers.

Ungar-Sargon avers that, in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy.

Transcript

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0:14.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. Welcome to the Michael Shurmer Show.
0:16.0	This is the host Michael Shurmer.
0:18.0	My guest today is Bacha Ungar Sargon.
0:21.0	Her new book is called Bad News,
0:24.7	How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.
0:28.6	Oh boy, as you can imagine, this is a good one. Bacha is the deputy opinion editor at
0:35.5	Newsweek before that she was the opinion editor of the forward the largest
0:40.4	Jewish media outlet in America and she's written for the New York Times
0:44.1	the Washington Post Foreign Policy News Week the New York Review of Books daily
0:49.4	and other publications she's appeared numerous times on MS NBC, NBC, the Brian Lear Show,
0:56.6	NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
1:04.0	Batcha and I discuss what is news, a brief history of news,
1:09.0	what Benjamin Day and Joseph Pulitzer invented, about labor, corruption, and crime, and what
1:16.4	happened to that over the decades, how media of modern media was invented to
1:21.4	empower the poor and how the media of late has left the
1:25.9	poor behind and now caters almost exclusively to the interests of urban upper-class
1:30.6	liberals. She identifies three trends that we discuss,
1:35.6	respectability counter-revolution, that is working class cultures,
1:40.0	as unworthy of media attention.
1:42.1	This is recent trends she's identifying
1:45.3	that she says leads to bad news.
1:48.2	The second is status revolution.
	...

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