Matt's Reviews > Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy by Batya Ungar-Sargon is a 200-year history of the news. Understanding how the news works is critical to understanding the news itself. Much of Bad News focuses on the paper of record, The New York Times. This builds on recent work done by Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi and the Grey Lady Winked by Ashley Rindsberg.

There is this longing amongst the intellectual class for the days of Walter Cronkite, if we just could agree on the facts again in the years following the Trump election in 2016 then everything would be alright, but it is the elite media itself that has caused this split, first there was a transition to writing stories that catered to the business and intellectual classes in order to have a targeted audience to sell advertisements back to them, then in the digital age, and when the newspaper's online pages were free to all, there was another switch to subscription-based models which further entrenched this business model. Such that the working class had no place to read about the issues that were important to them until they were eventually scooped up by radio and FoxNews.

Bad News helps us understand this new landscape, in which an op-ed from a United States Senator (Tom Cotton) could tear a newsroom apart, where moderate voices, such as Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan are forced to leave legacy platforms for substack, or why the legacy media is so critical of technology companies, not because it is the news to fit to print but because they are now in direct competition. At first, newspapers were for the business elite, then there was a robust market for newspapers for the working class, the elites battled back with the New York Times that would come to cater to the broader intellectual class, which drove the working-class market to radio and television, and now we have another response, independent media in the form of podcasts and newsletters. It all comes down to class inequality and not the racial inequality that the elite media claims, they make this claim because breaking down the class inequality would remove themselves from the top. Bad News helps you to better understand what are the forces behind the news you are getting, and how the woke media is perpetuating this class inequality while undermining democracy.