America Needs a Working-Class Media
“In the seven years Kaia Sand edited Street Roots, a publication that serves unhoused people in Portland, Oregon, she would often find herself unsettled by how more mainstream publications covered the lives of poorer Americans. She’d find herself wondering, for instance, what the “real estate” beat—whose very name offended her—had to do with the daily struggles of those she worked with. The 2024 presidential election underscored for her the need for a more class-aware and class-diverse media.
Freelance reporter Joshua Hunt also looked at media through the lens of his lived experience of economic insecurity—he grew up working-class and Tlingit in Alaska but has recently moved abroad to Japan. Long frustrated with what he perceived as an industry inhospitable to journalists from poorer backgrounds, he recently fired off a tweetstorm about how few “editors go looking for working-class journalists.” Why don’t they? “Well, the short answer is: tradition.” When I emailed him, he elaborated: “In cases like mine, when someone from an impoverished background makes it to the kind of elite institutions from which top newspapers and magazines hire staff, there is a tendency, I think, to want to fit in by obscuring one’s background.” As a result, he says, the rare working-class reporters “who somehow make it through that gantlet” start representing “poverty and class through the same lens” as their more privileged media peers.
For Sand and Hunt, there is a clear understanding of what must be done. America needs a working-class media. It’s something that has preoccupied me for years. If we thought of it as precariat media, we would also include the falling middle class that I have called the middle precariat (including most freelance writers right now). After the 2024 election, the punditocracy has seemingly rediscovered the working-class voter for the second time—following Donald Trump’s first victory, when J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy emerged to “explain” the rage of those left behind economically. Neither time, however, did they “rediscover” the value of working-class journalists.”
Read more at Columbia Journalism Review.