Dana Goldstein

Journalism's Elitism Problem

Journalism is a really fun job. Everyday, I get to research topics that interest me, call smart people and ask them to tell me about their ideas and beliefs, and then write-up what I learn. Sure, it's stressful: there's constant deadline pressure, sort of like being a student during finals week...forever. And if you can't write cleanly and quickly, forget it. But this job is so awesome that sometimes, I'm pretty astounded that I get paid for it at all.

So it's not hugely shocking that journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier (in terms of family wealth; salaries remain modest), and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class. While journalism was once a career that didn't require a college degree, today it is highly elitist and dominated by graduates of selective colleges. In some fields, like political "think" journalism, the Ivy League schools are grossly overrepresented. (Yep, that includes me. I went to Brown.)

A report by the British Cabinet Office, "Unleashing Aspirations," now documents the trend. In the U.K., 98 percent of journalists are college graduates, and under 10 percent come from working class families. In fact, journalism has become the third most socially exclusive profession in Great Britain, just behind medicine and law. Another fascinating tidbit:

Between the 1958 and the 1970 birth cohorts, the biggest decline in social mobility occurred in the professions of journalism and accountancy. For example, journalists and broadcasters born in 1958 typically grew up in families with an income of around 5.5% above that of the average family; but this rose to 42.4% for the generation of journalists and broadcasters born in 1970.

At the blog Working-Class Studies, Alyssa Lenhoff and Tim Francisco focus on the problem of unpaid (and barely-paid) internships. These are, indeed, a culprit, but the issue is far more complicated. The average student debt burden in the United States is $23,186. Believe it or not, that's also a typical entry-level salary at a "thought-leader" magazine. It is economically irrational for a highly-educated person with that level of debt to choose journalism over law, consulting, advertising, or public relations. That's not to say journalists don't have student debt -- many do. But it's a difficult, sometimes discouraging slog, and you have to truly love this work.

What's the solution? Federal student loan reform, currently in front of Congress, would help. So would an agenda of actually pressuring colleges to decrease their tuition, which Michael Dannenberg outlined in our pages last month.

At Slate, Jack Shafer is critical of non-profit journalism, because donations from foundations often come with "strings." This is a fair critique, though the influence of social justice-oriented donors is hardly more nefarious than that of corporate advertisers or local elites, the kind of people who have been influencing the news for centuries. But one thing media-interested philanthropists can definitely add to the profession is funding for paid internships, and recruiting efforts that target low-income people of color. It should be a major priority.

cross-posted at TAPPED

What I've Been Up To + A Great Book

First of all, apologies for being away from this space for so long; I've been in a particularly busy period at the Prospect, live-blogging the presidential candidates' forum at the SEIU meeting on Monday, and for the past week, working on a meaty piece about No Child Left Behind's failure to confront racial and economic segregation in shools. Here's an excerpt:

Most fundamentally, NCLB ignored a key underlying sociological problem -- segregation -- that contributes to the achievement gap. We've known for a long time that separate cannot be equal, but as NCLB's supporters well understood, it is doubtful the bill would have passed had it imposed on privileged white people any substantive responsibility for the achievement of minority students. When George W. Bush introduced NCLB during a 2000 campaign address to the NAACP, he said, "No child in America should be segregated by low expectations." But he didn't mention segregation inside brick-and-mortar school buildings, the kind caused by state school district lines cutting off rich people from poor people, or by highways separating black neighborhoods from white.

Parts of the piece were inspired by a truly excellent book that surfaced in TAP's offices, The Children in Room E4, by Susan Eaton. An education Ph.D. and experienced journalist, Eaton spent a year in Hartford, CT observing how poor black and Latino children learn in a segregated elementary school. Her findings are dire: Although the students Eaton gets to know have a loving, skilled classroom teacher, they are held back by a stifling curriculum and an almost total lack of understanding of the social world beyond their ghetto neighborhood. Alongside her classroom observations, Eaton tells the story of Sheff v. O'Neill, the Connecticutt Supreme Court case that ruled the state was negligent in providing minority kids an integrated, quality education. The ruling was a major civil rights victory. But then the governor, state legislature, and local districts did....next to nothing to change the system.

I'm hoping to write a lot more about education policy; it's something that has fascinated me and gotten me riled up for a long time -- probably my whole life -- in part due to being raised by two adamantly pro-public education parents, one of whom worked in New York public schools his entire career. I took some education courses in college, but I want to read more, so book recommendations in comments would be greatly appreciated!

Rich People's Money

One of my first assignments as an intern at BusinessWeek in 2005 was to write a capsule profile of Eli Broad, the real estate magnate who has, in retirement, become one of the country's foremost philanthropists in the arts and education. His project at the time was the flash-in-the-pan reality television show "The Scholar," which provided the high school winner with a $250,000 college scholarship paid for by Broad. Today the New York Times uses Broad as a jumping off point for an exploration of philanthropy's utility, asking the question of whether society benefits more from lavish private acts of charity that earn tax-breaks, or simply from the taxes the wealthy pay. For every $3 a wealthy person donates, the government loses $1 in tax revenue.

The wealthy generally favor museums, universities, libraries, and other cultural insititutions in their philanthropy. In my view, high culture, and even beautification of the public space, is important. The Jackie Kennedy Onassis-championed renovation of New York's Grand Central Terminal in the 1980s restored grandeur, safety, and a sense of pride to one of the city's most important landmarks. And when I travel in Europe, I'm consistently struck by the fact that most of the magnificent public buildings we enjoy today were paid for by regressive, anti-democratic regimes whose values we now abhor. Yet from Michaelangelo, to the Impressionists, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Western high culture has always been in thrall to the wealthy institutions and individuals who can pay for its production. Today, philanthropists argue that by funding elite institutions, they are creating a trickle down effect; for example, a better funded university biology lab might make a stem cell breakthrough that could save millions of lives.

Still, the Times reporting is pretty depressing. It seems that the richer an American is, the less likely they are to direct their philanthropy toward poor Americans: "Research shows that less than 10 percent of the money Americans give to charity addresses basic human needs, like sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry and caring for the indigent sick, and that the wealthiest typically devote an even smaller portion of their giving to such causes than everyone else." That should quiet claims that the private sector can fight poverty, disease, and inequality as effectively as government could -- if it tried.

Whiteness and Women and Jews and Me

"Whiteness was a self-invisible norm that many of the women could not identify with; to identify as white in any concrete way seemed racist to most of them."

That quote is from the Guardian's obituary of Ruth Frankenberg, the Welsh-born sociologist whose work is a key building block of intersectional criticism, or analysis of the interplay between class, race, sexuality, and gender. She has died of lung cancer at the age of 49.

Frankenberg's groundbreaking 1993 book The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters, was based on a very small number of interviews (30) with American white women on how they perceived race in their own lives and the lives of others. What Frankenberg found is that many women professed to a "color-blind" mentality, claiming they felt they had no racial identity and did not ascribe racial identities or characteristics to others.

Now I'm going to tell a story about my mom, and I hope she doesn't mind. I may have forgotten the details because she shared this memory with me when I was about 10 years old. My mom grew up in the Bronx during the 1950s and 1960s in a very racially and ethnically diverse working and middle class neighborhood.  One day after school, she accidentally bumped into a group of black girls on the sidewalk. The girls responded angrily toward her with racially-tinged words. (I can't remember exactly what they did or said.) This shocked her, my mom remembered, not only because her bump hadn't been malicious, but also because she had always considered herself "color-blind," and was thus especially hurt by intimations that her behavior could be racially-motivated. The black girls, on the other hand, thought about color all the time.

One other anecdote: A former baby-boomer colleague of mine considers Jews "people of color." While I describe my ethnic identity as Jewish, I consider my race to be white. I think there's two reasons for this. First, I grew up in a town and attended a public school system that was about 50 percent white and 50 percent African American, Latino (including many new immigrants), and Asian. Race and class were very much linked in my hometown, so much so that when I arrived at Brown, while other white kids talked about their excitement to be in such a "diverse" atmosphere, the bigger change for me was unlearning my assumptions about the family structures and economic statuses of people of color.

For me as a kid, being upper middle class and Jewish was a subset of being a white person, in large part, I think, because of my school environment, which felt somewhat polarized between "white" and "non-white." To whatever extent my idea of myself as white was unformed or unarticulated in me before college, it crystallized at Brown. Freshman orientation featured readings and lectures about "unpacking your backpack" of all your privilege. But now that I revisit it, that idea of "unpacking" privilege is rather odd. Once you take your wealth, whiteness, able-bodiness, and the like outta there, what do you do with it? Do you put it on the table and discuss it? Do you try to leave it behind you and continue life as an identity-less person in the name of egalitarianism? Or do you pack it right back in there and try to use that privilege to do some good?

I know I've bitten off a lot here, but these are my thoughts after reacquainting myself with Frankenberg's work. I think that fundamentally, her theories are about that lifelong process of learning to "unpack."