I have written a very long post on the lack of diversity in journalism but have not yet published the post; it will go live whenever it is ready, which could be quite a while yet.

Journalism is a mono-culture where 77% have degrees in the arts and humanities – yet oddly, many of them have titles such as “Senior Science Correspondent”, even though they have no training in the sciences.

At the national news bureaus, many if not most are graduates of elite universities, usually private universities – and often attended for both undergrad and graduate programs. Many have studied, lived or worked abroad.

They have backgrounds very different from those they report about, and for whom they create stories.

Here is a quote from a published column that points to these problems:

The steady decimation of local news has also decimated the careers of working-class journalists without elite educations. We’ve lost many of the journalists who would have been best suited to cover labor issues exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis and related topics like housing insecurity and the cost of healthcare.

Next year, we should expect stronger demands to recruit staff from a broader range of education backgrounds. This will in turn lead to more editors and writers from a broader range of class backgrounds. We must do this to provide accurate and rigorous coverage of the issues impacting most Americans.

There has been increased scrutiny of the homogenous class and education backgrounds of journalists in recent years.

Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism » Nieman Journalism Lab (niemanlab.org)

The above column goes on to note how the media piled onto the “work from home” mantra, and outsourcing one’s risk to people who do the actual work, during the pandemic. This was the attitude of snobs, the coddled, affluent professional class workers, unaware of how food reached their own table – literally the national journalist caste that attended elite universities. And who have no idea how the real world works.

We had young people in their 20s, with a BA in English Literature from an elite $80,000/year university, with global abroad experience – writing that we could solve Covid by working from home (as elite reporters could do but not so much the people who make our lives possible), and outsource our Covid risk by having food, products and services delivered (by people who had not gone to elite schools). Sadly, these stories actually happened – by story writers that were oblivious to how silly this appears.

There’s more on this topic from many others including the journalism field itself – they know this:

• Let’s make journalism work for those not born into an elite class – Columbia Journalism Review (cjr.org)
• Journalism of, by and for the Elite – FAIR
• The College Backgrounds of America’s Talking Heads by Tom Wood | NAS
• (And humorously, how the media itself lies about students applying to college: Shut Up About Harvard | FiveThirtyEight)
• How the Media Became Elitist – The Atlantic

In that article, they have a chart showing where reporters and editors are located in the U.S. Most are in New England, Los Angeles and Chicago, and a handful of big cities. Hardly representative of the people of the U.S.