"In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers," writes a somewhat bemused Jack Shafer at Politico in "The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think."
The “media bubble” trope might feel overused. But it's real. And it's more extreme than you might realize https://t.co/ucAus0IM4Z pic.twitter.com/9qqxpe3z2E
— POLITICO (@politico) April 25, 2017
Shafer should have asked us. We've been on the media navel-gazing case for decades. He attributes his "surprising" discovery to "the data on where journalists work and how fast it's changing":
The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political.
"Wasn't true as recently as 2008"? You're off by decades, sir. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air explains:
This might shock everyone who lives inside that bubble, but not anyone on the outside. Conservatives have long accused the media of living in a bubble, and Jack Shafer writes today at Politico that they were right — even if the bubble might not be exactly what they thought. In fact, there may be more than one bubble, one ideological and the other geographic, and the impact of both together may make it worse than people — even conservatives — imagine. However, Shafer’s analysis has its own limitations, and misses a key point…
He’s correct in that limited sense, but he’s got the root cause wrong, or at best incomplete. The trend toward cultural narrowness and ideological blinkering started long before the Internet shook up the news business, and in some ways the Internet’s impact was a reaction to bias in newsrooms. At least they agree on one core outcome: America’s media exists in a series of self-reinforcing bubbles, and it’s getting worse.
As we tweeted Ed:
@EdMorrissey Terrific analysis, Ed. Blogged about it myself for years & "snail blogged" before that: Soylent green https://t.co/0jssGvrZIt pic.twitter.com/qyPLtu8nEK
— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) April 25, 2017
We were delighted with his reply: "Excellent. Just added it as an update":
Sissy Willis has further thoughts on the timeline … or rather had further thoughts. In 2004. And used a 1990 critique from Insight magazine to make the point.
*NOTE: Author of the quote in our title is the fiery presidential strategist and former executive chair of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, quoted by Shafer in his Politico piece:
“The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country. It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f***ing idea what’s going on.”
Haven't we been saying that forever? Self-awareness is not their strong suit. As we quoted William Staneski in our 2010 post "Marc Ambinder and the epistemic echoes of his mind":
This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march.
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