In my last programme in this series, I talked about how the mainstream news was abandoning the working class.
The news in America began to shift its focus away from the whole population, of which the overwhelming majority was the ordinary man and woman in the street, to the more elite members of our community, which mostly meant the people working in offices and the more up-market offices at that.
Sir Robert Menzies, in 1942, had used the term, the Forgotten People. Well ordinary working class people were now being forgotten by the media. They didn’t matter.
To put this into context, people with office jobs in America only represent a small proportion of working people. There are also 64 million people who earn less than $15 an hour none of whom work in offices. All of these people, the majority of people, steadily found that the newspapers had nothing that they wanted to say to them.
This change happened progressively over the years. In 1971, less than half of the journalists in America, just 39% said that it was “extremely important” to focus on news that’s relevant to the “widest possible audience”. By 1992 that was down to 20%. By 2013 it was a miserable 12%. What they were telling the majority of people of America was that they didn’t matter. Australia isn’t immune from this.
The public that the media were aiming at stopped being the workers and their families, important because of their contribution to the well being of society. The media was now only interested in the top people, well off, big spending, very highly educated, elite consumers.
So where did this go?
Tag words: Sir Robert Menzies; Christopher R Martin; No Longer Newsworthy; New York Times; Wall Street Journal; National Public Radio; NPR; Fox News; Pew Research Centre; Benjamin Day; Joseph Pullitzer; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn; Fourth Estate; Edmund Burke; William Cobbett; Elon Musk; Twitter; Voltaire; I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it; Rolex watch; Jeff Bezos; Amazon; Washington Post; CNN; Facebook; YouTube;
