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Notes -
Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".
In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:
The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.
And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".
A bit of a tangent, but as to the first half of the above, I think it is a two-way street. It’s not just “get woke, go broke”, but also and likely more the case, “get broke, go woke”.
All this leftward movement in the prestige press came after journalism’s financial peak and did not cause it. Social media companies and search engines siphoned off ad revenue, Craigslist killed the classifieds section, etc. The industry was shrinking, and the number of people that could make at least a middle-class living within it was, too, with the added strain imposed by aggregation of news on free sites and the increased ability of readers to shift to non-local coverage provided by the largest outlets (NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Guardian, FT, etc.)
This downward trend in financial prospects for journalists meets with the accelerating desirability of journalist as a prestige job and the increasing number of journalists who attended a select set of colleges (Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, Mizzou, etc.). Gone is the very-old industry joke of, “Please don’t tell my mother I’m a journalist — she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.” Also, not gone, but largely-diminished, are the kids who graduated from state schools and worked their way up from small beats, with normie political views, because there aren’t enough newspapers and jobs anymore to provide jobs for them, and they can’t list a degree from a highly-ranked J-school on their resume, nor draw on significant networking resources.
What happens when an industry contracts is that you get a lot of people with significant professional experience applying for the same jobs. And then also a lot of kids out of school trying to get their feet in the door against that current. So to Ms. Hoyt’s point, networking is certainly very important and this does make at least not outing yourself as not having “correct” views important. But that follows on the heels of the contraction.
The impact of millennials entering the industry was also two-fold.
(1) In the digital age when revenue was tight, both traditional and online outlets noticed opinion and reaction got as many clicks as first-hand coverage and investigative journalism, and that it could hire millennials just out of school to crank the former stuff out on the cheap. Those millennials had come through American universities that had already gone through their leftward shift, and brought that political orientation with them.
(2) Those millennials would not stay satisfied being cheap fodder as they got older. Paying one’s dues in one’s early twenties is one thing, but many would change careers as they got older. Those that landed choice jobs had to contend with a glut of some straggling boomers and a slew of gen-Xers above them. Twitter and Slack provided spaces for millennial journalists to try and enforce an industry culture. Then the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests while America was doomscrolling during pandemic lockdowns, and the collective national freakout and heightened sensitivities. Millennials were able to pounce and clear out a few older colleagues as the gen-Xers were on aggregate less likely to be up on their intersectionality, id-pol, etc. These incidents while few had a chilling effect that is only now starting to thaw just a little bit. Also, millennial tech staffers at big outlets had enough clout to feel emboldened to weigh in on journalistic matters in company Slack channels. In the pre-digital economic model, editors did not care what anyone in the print shop thought about the paper’s focus of coverage, and also might have to listen to ad salesmen complain, but would not have treated them as peers — would have considered the thought insulting.
Multiple factors have coupled the media’s leftward shift to its digital-age financial decline. It isn’t as simple as normies not liking the leftward shift and withdrawing their attention/subscription revenue.
The prestige press has been leftist for at the better part of a century. Ask Walter Cronkite... or Walter Duranty.
So you don’t think there was a noticeable shift left that at a minimum overlaps the digital age, whatever the press’s aggregate position before it?
I don't think that "all this leftward movement" came after journalism's financial peak.
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