Journalism vs the people

From the moment Brits voted for Brexit and Americans put Donald Trump into the White House eight years ago, there has been a lot of talk about just how divided and polarised Western publics are.

Yet while the public is divided, it appears to be a different story for mainstream journalists. In multiple different countries across the West, they tend to hew to the same themes and offer identical analyses. They tend to be globalist in orientation and ‘progressive’ in outlook. This means that even if they are from different national cultures with different political systems and histories, they are often singing from the same hymn sheet – a hymn sheet that is at odds with millions of their compatriots.

The ideological conformism of many mainstream journalists today is in part a product of the uniformity of their backgrounds. In the UK, they tend to be upper-middle-class graduates, many from private schools. In 2022, the National Council for the Training of Journalists found that 80 per cent of journalists can now be classified as having ‘professional- and managerial-class origins’ – a record high, up from 72 per cent in 2016.

It’s a similar story in the US. A 2019 study by the Asian American Journalists Association revealed that 69 per cent of interns from big-brand newsrooms were selected from elite universities. Another study found that nearly 44 per cent of employees at the New York Times and 50 per cent at Wall Street Journal attended prestigious universities.

The result is a socially and culturally homogenous media elite. An elite dominated by credentialed, largely upper-middle-class people who share more in common with journalists in other countries than they do with vast swathes of the public in their own countries.

In alternative media, which are often oppositional to ‘progressive’ politics, there is a tendency to refer to the ‘traditional media’ when speaking about state-funded broadcasters like the BBC, or legacy companies like the New York Times. I myself have used the phrase often.

However, I’ve come to realise the adjective ‘traditional’ is unsuitable for the current iteration of the most famous media brands in the world. They are now quite detached from the actual historical traditions of the press. Journalism used to be a rather ornery, rough-and-tumble, disreputable trade. Of course, there was always an elite cadre of moneyed types reporting on their clubby acquaintances in politics or business. But up until a generation ago, ambitious kids with no family money or connections could climb the journalistic ladder. So to refer to today’s large news companies as ‘traditional’ is something of a misnomer. They are corporate entities benefitting from reputational legacies forged in a more equitable time – but they are not ‘traditional’.

Today, the world of corporate media is becoming an increasingly closed shop. Without the right, college-shaped opinions, connections and ability to do unpaid internships in the world’s most expensive cities, it doesn’t matter how great a writer or dogged a newshound you are. It’s a pay-to-play game. It’s those who can afford to join, or are born into this elite class, who are reporting, investigating and opinion-forming on behalf of millions and millions of us across the world.

At the same time, survey after survey shows that much of the public now distrust mainstream media. This should hardly be a surprise given the media tend to frame so many issues in the unpopular terms of identity politics, from race to gender. This is perhaps the biggest indicator that many corporate journalists are no longer serving or even familiar with their own fellow citizens.

This is certainly the view of American journalist Ashley Rindsberg, author of The Gray Lady Winked, a critique of the New York Times. He tells me that many journalists working for mainstream brands are part of a ‘meta media’ who are ‘not reporting for the benefit of their local audiences’. Instead, they tend to share ‘the ideas of the global establishment and ensure that this right-think reaches people on a mass scale’.

Rindsberg points to the business model that pays the salaries of the transnational media class. ‘The ownership structure of the media is highly corporate with one or two exceptions’, he explains. ‘When you have a parent company that is a Viacom or Disney, these are the people who go to Davos every year and trade policy ideas. And the media’s job is to message that policy, to get it into the public conscience.’

The ownership structure of mainstream media plays a significant role in its output. But this is not to say that journalists today are conducting a cynical propaganda operation on the part of large corporations or state backers. They are wholly sincere in their views, honed as they are in the same schools and elite universities. They truly believe in their shared, ‘progressive’ worldview.

The existence of this transnational media class was brought home to me this summer. In August, veteran La Repubblica journalist Enrico Franceschini provided an ‘analysis’ of the riots that rocked the UK, following the murder of three young girls in Southport. His explanation for what happened amounted to a checklist of liberal-elite clichés which bore no relation to the political realities on the ground. He said there were ‘two Englands’, one that is ‘white, violent, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, racist and fascist’ and another England that is ‘of all colours, multicultural, multi-denominational, democratic and anti-fascist’. He went on to attribute the rioting to ‘fake news’ on social media and ‘Russian trolls’.

There is no doubt that the riots were despicable. But that they were used to damn large swathes of England as ‘white, racist and fascist’ reveals more about the prejudices of our media elite than any actual journalistic understanding of the riots themselves. It was doubly absurd given the blind eye that large parts of the media have turned towards the virulent anti-Semitism and support for the fascist Hamas on display at various ‘pro-Palestine’ protests and encampments throughout the West over the past year.

Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of the lack of understanding that the transnational media elites have of their own fellow countrymen happened in Ireland in 2023.

In 2022, schoolteacher Ashling Murphy was stabbed to death in broad daylight while she was out running in County Offaly. In the immediate aftermath, Murphy’s murder garnered a huge amount of sympathetic media attention, including much soul searching about violence against women.

That sympathy started to subside when it emerged her murderer was a Slovakian immigrant called Jozef Puska. He had come to Ireland in 2013, and lived on benefits in a five-bedroom council house with his wife and five children. After Puska’s trial in November 2023, Murphy’s fiancé, Ryan Casey, gave a victim-impact statement. He told the court that it ‘sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare and free medical care for over 10 years’ and ‘never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form [and] can commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence on such a beautiful, loving and talented person who, in fact, worked for the state, educating the next generation and represented everything that is good about Irish society’. He concluded: ‘We have to, once and for all, start putting the safety of not only Irish people but everybody in this country who works hard, pays taxes, raises families and overall contributes to society, first.’

The media widely reported the part of Casey’s statement where he spoke about his love for his fiancée. But his comments about Puska were excised by almost all media outlets.

A few weeks after the trial, Irish Times journalist Kitty Holland was asked on a BBC television show, The View, about those parts of Casey’s statement that had been largely unreported. She said that his comments were ‘not good’, and claimed they ‘were incitement to hatred, and that’s why the media left out aspects of them’. Holland acknowledged that Casey had ‘lost the partner of his life’, but went on to say that the nationality of the man who murdered Murphy is irrelevant – as if Holland had been appointed the final arbiter of what was relevant to this heartbroken young man. ‘He’s entitled to his views, but the media have a responsibility to not report views that are incitement to hatred, and he’s being held up as a hero of the far right’, she said.

Holland concluded by asserting what she and the rest of the media believed was the correct narrative: ‘The problem is misogyny, and hatred, and entitlement to inflict violence on women and children.’ In other words, the Irish media wilfully framed this brutal murder in terms they deemed acceptable, while rejecting any other framing as ‘far right’. In doing so, they wilfully ignored widespread public concerns about high levels of immigration in Ireland. Casey is now suing the BBC for defamation.

Irish journalist and commentator David Quinn sees the selective reporting of Casey’s statement as an example of a broader problem among Irish media. ‘You can’t go off script, even if your fiancée has been brutally murdered’, he tells me. ‘I think some of it is old-fashioned snobbery’, he continues: ‘Journalistic consensus is rigidly enforced on pain of being socially ostracised, with many in the Irish media thinking, “This makes me look good, it makes me look respectable”, like drinking a particular kind of wine.’ And the result? ‘It’s basically propaganda we’re getting.’

Quinn explains the Western media’s shared worldview in terms of writer David Goodhart’s distinction between those who come from ‘Somewhere’ – rooted in a specific place or community, usually socially conservative and less educated – and those who could come from ‘Anywhere’ – urban, ‘progressive’ and university-educated. ‘Journalists are Anywhere people’, Quinn says. ‘They despise people who are attached to their place, culture, traditions and customs.’

Ian O’Doherty, writer for the Irish Independent, concurs. ‘It’s class contempt’, he tells me. ‘It’s very rare that you’ll see any overt editorial interference’, but the pressure to conform is huge. Irish journalists, he says, ‘are all middle class… They all know each other, they all go to the same dinner parties, they all have the same opinions.’

And these ‘same opinions’ cross borders. Those who work for Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, O’Doherty says, ‘would have much more in common with someone from the New York Times or the BBC than with someone from Crumlin’.

Similarly, Paddy O’Gorman, a retired RTÉ reporter and now a successful independent podcaster, points out that when it comes to what gets covered in Irish media, the ideological slant only goes one way.

Take the very different treatment of two similar cases. In 2022, Irish woman Natasha O’Brien was beaten unconscious in Limerick. Cathal Crotty, an off-duty Irish soldier, was convicted of assaulting her but walked away with a suspended sentence. The judge said that Crotty’s lack of previous convictions and army service were two key factors in the sentencing decision. There was media outrage, and O’Brien became an outspoken presence at rallies protesting violence against women, and received a minute-long standing ovation in the Irish parliament.

O’Gorman highlighted the differences in coverage between the O’Brien case and that of another female victim of assault, also in 2022, whose attacker was also spared prison. The victim in this case was a resident of a woman’s shelter, and her attacker was a transwoman living in the same shelter.

Writing for Genspect, O’Gorman pointed out that ‘journalists will absolutely overlook the most newsworthy element of the story’ – namely, the fact that a man with 15 previous criminal convictions was being allowed to live in a shelter for homeless women, before he attacked one of them and was then spared prison. Instead, the Irish media uniformly described the attacker as a female hairdresser who simply attacked ‘another’ woman. As O’Gorman put it at the time, ‘the media, and the politicians who are so vocal now on the O’Brien case, cease to be concerned about keeping women safe from violent men if such men have a gender-recognition certificate and a wig’.

Support for gender ideology dominates mainstream media across the West. Former New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart, a staunch progressive and an award-winning member of the New Zealand media elite, discovered this to her cost a few years ago. In 2018, she wrote a column urging caution over proposed new gender self-identification laws. ‘I thought people needed to think about the consequences of that’, Stewart told me earlier this year. ‘But boy, what a furore.’ She was quickly ostracised by ‘famous people’ and ‘fellow journalists’, some of whom ‘had been at my house, hunting, the week before’, she said. Stewart has since left journalism and lives on a farm with her girlfriend of two decades.

On issue after issue, the transnational media class toes the same line. These journalists share a similarly disdainful attitude towards what they see as the backwards ‘masses’, and agree with each other on issues from immigration to gender-identity theory. And the more the transnational media seal themselves off from a plurality of their fellow citizens, the more closely they hew to the views of the powerful.

British conservative commentator Ben Harnwell, the international editor of the American podcast War Room, run by former Trump adviser and current federal inmate Steve Bannon, has experienced first-hand the cosy relationship between the media and powerful officials. Earlier this year, Rome-based Harnwell was finally vindicated by Italian courts after being sued by Italian state prosecutors. They alleged that he had fraudulently obtained a lease from the Ministry of Culture and had failed to pay rent on a monastery outside of Rome, where Harnwell and Bannon had planned to open an ‘academy for the Judeo-Christian West’.

The gruelling five years of criminal and civil trials were triggered by reports of alleged wrongdoing carried by the Italian state broadcaster, RAI. The producers of the RAI show in question, Harnwell told me, had ‘basically been assured by the Italian Ministry of Culture that I was as guilty as sin. So they felt as if they didn’t need to employ the usual standards of weighing everything up.’

The growing hand-in-glove relationship between the transnational media and the ruling elites is already coming at a huge cost to journalistic reputations, as the public increasingly looks to alternative sources of news and opinion – sources that resonate with and reflect their own experiences and concerns. The mainstream media’s response to all this has been to double down. This has involved talking up the threat of ‘misinformation’ from alternative media, and even happily celebrating the ban on Elon Musk’s X in Brazil on the grounds it is spreading misinformation and worse.

Many mainstream journalists may still imagine that they’re ‘speaking truth to power’. But all too often they’re siding with power against the people.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.