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

The Death of Macho?

Photo of women workers in Nepal by Libby Abbott, via Flickr.

In the latest issue of Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam argues that the global financial crisis will lead to "the death of macho." It's a provocative essay, and well worth a read. And while I don't want to diminish the world-historical importance of the shift from an industrial to an information economy -- and the impact that will have on men in particular -- I'm not nearly as convinced as Reihan that the upside of all this will be huge gains for feminism.

Of course, it's true that 80 percent of all American jobs lost during this recession were held by men. But that is due to occupational segregation; blue-collar men have always had access to better, higher-paying jobs than blue-collar women. The collapse of the American manufacturing sector is ending that stable lifestyle for non-college-educated men and the families they support. But it isn't clear at all that blue-collar women, who've been stuck in service-sector jobs, are benefiting from their husbands' and brothers' misfortunes. Instead, the result could be continued rising class inequality, as both working-class women and men get stuck in the service economy with irregular hours, poor pay, and no benefits.

Meanwhile, in many parts of the non-Western world, women remain radically underrepresented in the labor force. In Iran, for example, where feminist frustration is a key driver of the reform movement, only 13 percent of women have paid work outside the home. Presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi actually had campaign advertisements promising to help women gain access to the job market. But during times of high male unemployment, women typically have more trouble, not less, finding work. This is doubly true in traditional societies that still have not fully accepted women in public roles.

In short, there are significant global political barriers to women's economic independence -- especially in the many, many nations where sex discrimination is written into the legal code. But there are also barriers in the United States, where women are disproportionately affected by many of the problems of poverty, from single parenthood, to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, to lack of health insurance.

cross-posted at TAPPED

A Good Argument Against Opting Out

Late last week, everyone was buzzing about Edmund Andrews' Times Magazine piece, in which he documented his family's descent into a sub-prime mortgage and crippling debt -- all despite the fact that Andrews earns a generous $120,000 annually as a New York Times staff writer. Megan McArdle spent the weekend reading the book from which the piece was excerpted, and she confirms what I suspected: that Andrews' troubles can be traced back, rather clearly, to his habit of marrying women who have opted out of the work force.

The precipitating cause of Andrews' financial problems were a divorce and a rather hasty second marriage, to a woman named Patty. Andrews and Patty dated bi-coastally for one year before Patty and her 10-year old daughter moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The couple merged their households and bought a half-million-dollar suburban home immediately, despite the fact that Andrews was paying his first wife $4,000 each month in alimony and child support. That left him with just $2,777 in take-home pay -- and with a new wife who hadn't held a full-time job since the early 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, at first, Patty was unable to secure a middle-income job. When she finally did, she was fired less than a year later. Patty's ex, meanwhile, was in arrears on his $700/month in child support. That meant Andrews was attempting to support two women and four children, essentially maintaining two totally separate households.

Megan's interpretation is that Andrews "couldn't afford to get married. At all." In fact, what Andrews couldn't afford was to marry women unprepared to participate in the work force. (And if he was going to do so, he really should have rented instead of bought real estate.) I'm not suggesting that people in love shouldn't get married. Rather, life is precarious, both emotionally and financially. An effective way for women to inure themselves and their children against this precariousness, at least somewhat, is to work -- regardless of their marital status.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Obama on Gender and the Recession

For me, the most fascinating segment of Obama's New York Times Magazine interview with David Leonhardt was the one on how the recession is impacting gender roles. Leonhardt begins with the premise -- a false one -- that the recession is primarily impacting men, especially on a sort of psychic level. He likens the situation to that of Obama's grandfather, who is portrayed in Dreams From My Father as feeling less-than -- in terms of masculinity -- because he earned less than his wife, a bank manager.

LEONHARDT: I think there are a lot of men out there today, working at G.M. and Chrysler and other places, who feel the same kind of dejection that your grandfather did. What do you think the future of work looks like for men?

THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s an interesting question, because as I said, you know, you go in to factories all across the Midwest and you talk to the men who work there — they’ve got extraordinary skill and extraordinary pride in what they make. And I think that for them, the loss of manufacturing is a loss of a way of life and not just a loss of income.

The thing is, this is not a male economic crisis. There is no nationwide pandemic of women out-earning men. Indeed, the opposite is true; women continue to earn just 78 cents on the male dollar, even for the same work, with the same educational background, and the same number of years on the job. Women still make up slightly less than half the workforce (49 percent). And while it is true that four of five jobs lost in this economic crisis -- so far -- were held by men, that speaks mostly to the inequalities borne of occupational gender segregation. Men are losing more jobs because they had more of the good, unionized jobs in construction and manufacturing to begin with.

In other words, just because men are losing-out, it doesn't mean women are winning. A recession is no time for a battle of the sexes. Rather, it's a time to remember that as more and more families lose the salary of male breadwinners, we must make sure that the jobs held by women pay better and have better benefits. Obama goes on in the interview to discuss the importance of attracting men to professions like nursing and teaching. The same logic should be applied to women getting into "green jobs" in sectors such as transportation and construction.

cross-posted at TAPPED

History and Crisis

It has long been Barack Obama's habit, here at home, to compare our current economic crisis to the Great Depression. Back in October, during a debate with John McCain, Obama said, "We are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." Speaking at Columbia University last month, Paul Volcker, chair of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, went further, saying, "I don't remember any time, maybe even the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast."

So it's been interesting this week to hear how Obama's historical references change as he reaches out to Europeans at the London G-20 meeting. At his press conference with Gordon Brown yesterday, Obama compared the recession not to the 1930s but to the late 1940s. "All of us here in London have a responsibility to act with a sense of urgency," he said. "Make no mistake: We are facing the most severe economic crisis since World War II."

The comparison to World War II is both sensitive and strategic. It is sensitive because it acknowledges a key difference in the American and European experiences of the 20th century; Europe was left completely devastated, physically and emotionally, by the ravages of Nazism, while the United States soared to the height of its power. And strategic because the World War II example hearkens back to a time of internationally recognized American moral leadership, when the Marshall Plan and Berlin air lift demonstrated to the world the United States' commitment to human rights.

Could George W. Bush have pulled this off? It never would have occurred to him.

cross-posted at TAPPED

How the Stimulus Package Sells Women Short

There are two story lines circulating in the media about the recession's effect on women: The first, more ridiculous one, is that the primary impact of the recession is on women's romantic lives. Laid-off, ego-bruised boyfriends and husbands! No more expensive dinners! At Salon, Rebecca Traister has a good take-down of these faux "trend" pieces.

The second story line is that the recession is actually some sort of feminist watershed, since four out of five laid-off workers are men. "Working women may soon outnumber working men!" the headlines trumpet. (Currently, women make up 47 percent of the workforce.) And while it will indeed be historic if women soon account for the majority of American workers, the reality is that for many children and women, the loss of a father's or male partner's income is disastrous. Why? Because both the pay gap and occupational gender segregation continue to depress women's incomes.

Women are more likely to be employed part-time and work without benefits. On average, single women earn $12,000 less annually than single men. And in the typical household headed by a heterosexual couple, the woman contributes just 35 percent of the income. At a Legal Momentum briefing on women and the economic crisis this morning, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) summed up the situation: "[Women] are still paid less, they're taking home less, and they have an increasing economic burden. ... Watch the way statistics get turned around on this issue."

The stimulus package does little to address this problem. The legislation focuses on infrastructure projects that are supposed to result in large-scale job creation. But the fields that will be bolstered are dominated by men. For example, just 2.7 percent of construction laborers, 1.9 percent of carpenters, .5 percent of highway workers, and 1.7 percent of electricians are women. Democratic members of the House, led by Colorado freshman Jared Polis, failed in their effort to include provisions in the law that would have required affirmative action in the hiring for these new positions. And while Obama's plans to expand early childhood care will create jobs for women, those jobs are, notoriously, among the lowest paid in the country. The average income of a childcare worker is just $17,630 annually.

What's the solution? States could require firms receiving stimulus funds to give a certain proportion of new jobs -- say 25 percent -- to historically excluded groups. But that is unlikely to happen. More promising is the Pathways Advancing Career Training Act, which would create programs to give women the skills they need to compete for high-skills, unionized jobs. DeLauro will be introducing that bill this year.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Recession Lessons

I was going to reconsider my habit of dating writers. But then I read this and changed my mind.

Bill Clinton Revisits His Economic Legacy

At a meeting with progressive bloggers and journalists at the Sheraton New York Monday night, Bill Clinton, preparing for the opening of his Clinton Global Initiative conference, spoke freely about the financial crisis, and re-examined his own administration's economic legacy in light of the meltdown.

"I have thought about that," Clinton told me when I asked whether he was reconsidering any of the deregulatory economic policies his administration pursued under Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Earlier this year, Rubin downplayed the extent of the mortgage crisis, and implied more of the blame could be placed on American consumers than on the excesses of Wall Street. But Clinton's assessment was quite different.

"I actually called Bob Rubin," Clinton said, relaying their recent conversation about what could or should have been done differently during the 1990s to help prevent today's crisis. Clinton said he has two regrets: First, not pursuing more aggressively an aborted attempt to provide stricter oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to Clinton, the move was stymied by Democratic and Republican members of Congress and by mayors, who saw the lending giants as "the New Jerusalem" and "pure" because of their role in increasing homeownership to historic levels. But "it just didn't feel good," Clinton said of Fannie and Freddie's outsized political influence.

Clinton also said he should have subjected derivative trading to more public oversight. "We would have failed, but at least we could've sounded the alarm."

One policy Clinton said he doesn't regret is his 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which, for the first time since the Depression, allowed commercial banks to engage in investment-banking activities. Clinton said the commercial banks were an important moderating force on the risk-taking of the big investment firms that collapsed this week. "In the case of the current crisis, I believe the bill I signed allowed Bank of America to take over Merrill Lynch," he said.

Also during the interview, Clinton urged congressional Democrats to work quickly to pass a bailout package for Wall Street, but said Democrats must lobby in the current weeks to pass a comprehensive package of "Main Street" economic measures, including a moratorium on foreclosures, and should create a homeowners' loan corporation similar to the one active during the Depression. Such an agency would refinance sub-prime mortgages into traditional ones but should do so only for borrowers with steady incomes, Clinton said. During the Democratic primary campaign, his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, supported similar measures.

The former president mentioned his wife frequently during the meeting, sharing her thoughts on how the economic crisis was playing differently in her home state, New York, than in Kentucky, where she recently traveled to campaign for Democrat Bruce Lunsford, who is hoping to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Hillary called and said it's really interesting how this is going down [in Kentucky]," Clinton said. "She said, out here, they don't yet see it as a big crisis requiring an urgent response, because they've been in trouble for years."

That is why, Clinton reiterated, Democrats must sell the bail-out of Wall Street as an investment in regular Americans' retirement savings and the security of their mortgages.

cross-posted at TAPPED

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.

Why Do Working Mothers Feel Bad About Themselves?

A full 42 percent of Americans believe maternal employment has been detrimental to American society. Only 20 percent of us think this is a positive development for our civilization. These are results from a new Pew survey of and about working mothers. Pew finds working moms give themselves lower marks on parenting and express a desire to cut back on hours. But the survey doesn't ask women how they'd like to see our politics and businesses change to make their lives easier (not to mention ask what they'd like to see men doing to help). That's why I'm skeptical of Ross Douthat's reading of Barack Obama's work-family balance proposals as more "market friendly" than "family friendly." It's possible that given a different set of social and economic realities that make working come less into conflict with parenting, working moms would feel very good about their choices.

Here are steps I think would help mothers feel less conflicted about work:

1. If married and partnered men did their full 50 percent share of domestic labor, so tidying up and picking up at school and making doctor's appointments and cooking dinner and doing the laundry and calling the plumber and meeting with the teacher and getting the groceries felt less like a full-time job for one family member.

2. If work schedules were flexibile across the board.

3. If our government provided high quality child care and health care, so parenting became less about massaging an uncooperative system into providing services for one's child.

4. If active fatherhood became valued and expected so that even when a man is no longer romantically-involved with his child's mother, he remains a caretaker. Yes, I realize this is a pipe dream. Currently, 80 percent of children live with their mother after divorce. Sixty percent of children of divorce have little or no contact with their dads. More than one-fifth of divorced kids haven't seen their dads in the last five years.

For more on public opinion about maternal work, check out Judith Stadtman Tucker's article at TAP. Tucker, the founder of the wonderful Mother's Movement Online, writes:

The Ozzie-and-Harriet model of marriage and family life -- full-time breadwinner dad and full-time homemaker mom -- is rotten for women who want economic independence and a larger kind of life. ...

The "great for men" aspect of the stay-at-home mom equation is what makes critics fume -- and rightfully so. But for those who suggest that at-home mothers are responsible for prolonging the gendered division of social power, the Pew survey offers a timely reality check. What mothers do -- and what mothers want -- appears to have a limited impact on public values and societal norms. At the very least, the two-fold increase in maternal employment over the last 30 years has yet to result in a dramatic reversal of cultural attitudes that safeguard male privilege in the public and private sphere.

Amen.