How The News Went Insane: Batya Ungar-Sargon On The Social Rise and Intellectual Fall of Legacy Media

Regular listeners of this podcast are no strangers to the subject of political bias in the news media - especially the left wing, elite-driven bias that’s in heavy rotation in the opinion and culture sections of big news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR. But as much as we talk about the social movements driving this trend, we think less often about the practical reasons and bottom line root causes. That’s exactly Batya Ungar-Sargon explores in her new book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. In this conversation, Batya explains how journalism underwent a “status revolution,” with the job of reporter going from an almost blue collar profession to something on a par (at least socially) with lawyers and bankers. She also explains how the digital era forced a reframing of the business model of media organizations. The bills were no longer paid by advertisers but by subscribers who demanded fealty to their political values. Batya, who was formerly the opinion editor of The Forward and currently deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, considers herself not just on the left, but something of a socialist. As such, she worries that the much of the social justice posturing that dominates mainstream discourse today is distracting from the real emergency of economic inequality. Guest Bio: Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.