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Journalism USA: The New Priesthood
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10760 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1986 |
6,325 Words |
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Richard Grenier
Richard Grenier's latest book is Capturing the Culture. |
One of the most extraordinary changes that has come over the United States in the last quarter century is the spectacular rise in prestige of the American media, and, even more remarkable, their divergence from the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the American people at large. It is as if the American media now constitute a new self-appointed priesthood, the custodian (as some of its members have actually said) of the nation's "virtue." Some of the journalists even adopt clerical terminology, one of the prominent columnists of the New York Times (Anthony Lewis) frequently urging his readers to "save our soul."
A recent survey of the "national media elite" revealed that 81 percent had voted for George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, an election in which Richard Nixon carried 49 states out of 50. A well-known writer of the New York (with possibly the highest subscriber income per capita of any publication in the U.S.) revealed her acute puzzlement at the Nixon victory, since she didn't know a single person who had voted for him. In 1980, eight years later, even with the Teheran hostage crisis inflaming popular nationalism to a point possibly unequaled in the U.S. since Pearl Harbor, journalistic attitudes had not shifted radically. Times Inc., a magazine group that would have to be considered right of center in the current U.S. journalistic spectrum, polled the top editors of all its magazines. Six had voted for Carter, four for Anderson and all of two for Reagan. Reagan swept 44 out of 50 states.
Members of the media elite, other studies have shown, evince a persistent hostility towards business (of which they know very little), the military (which protects them), people who are "overly patriotic" (most of
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