Anyone who understands that the essence of American freedom is that we have the right to defend our lives with modern and commonly owned tools we call guns, must then feel frustration whenever they read or listen to mainstream-media members who not only don’t understand this, but are also opposed to this foundational principle of our individual liberty.
So, how did this come to be? Why is so much of the mainstream, legacy or corporate media opposed to our right to keep and bear arms? This three-part series attempts to answer these critical questions—understanding, after all, leads to solutions.
Let’s begin with a classic film you likely have not heard of, as it noted the central cause as to why the mainstream media lost touch with the American public.
Teacher’s Pet, a 1958 movie starring Clark Gable and Doris Day, addressed the first part of the answer. In the film, Gable is Jim Gannon, a hard-boiled, big-city newspaper editor. Gannon does not have a college education, which was normal for editors and reporters at big and small newspapers well into the twentieth century. Many editors and reporters came from the trades. The people writing the news tended to have diverse backgrounds. They either began as an apprentice or came from some other blue-collar career. To them, working for a paper offered a paycheck that, at best, gave newsmen a middle-class life.
This life appealed to the curious, perhaps irascible and cynical and mouthy individuals. Perhaps they read voraciously in their spare time or maybe they just liked to question authority.
Gannon is from this blue-collar mindset. He is assigned a story on a journalism school and, at first, he refuses the assignment. He tosses his head and points out that he mocks the elites. He does not want to sit in a classroom with them. He learned his trade—how to report, write headlines, and articles, from obits to features, in newsrooms working alongside other cynical, working-class editors and by competing with other reporters. Before they had ink on their hands, reporters at the time got dirt under their nails and callouses on their palms as they did practical things—they were not indoctrinated in an ideology in classrooms with professors who might never have worked in a real newsroom.
Gannon nevertheless gives in and goes to the school. Right away, he runs into a university journalism professor (Doris Day) he loathes. While seated at a desk in a row of desks, Gannon refuses to even say what he does for a living. He is openly contemptuous of this journalism school and of this professor, as he believes real reporting can only be learned in the newsroom.
As the scenes move on, much of the dialogue contrasts Gannon’s practical experience with the credentialed, college-trained journalists he is seated beside.
Unfortunately, the film falls apart soon thereafter; first, because Gable, at the time, is much too old—he was 56—for the romance that ensues with then 35-year-old Day; but also, because the film soon muddies the distinction between working-class journalism and the rise of the accredited elites who were then taking control. In sum, the amusing contrast falls apart as Gannon starts to look like a behind-the-times denizen of a fading world.
Still, the studio that made the film had recognized a real rift in American culture, as things were changing.
Many of the working-class members of newsrooms in 1950 America had practical views of guns, hunting and personal protection. If they didn’t, their instinct and training told them to go and speak with some gun owners to find out. They were not above going to shooting competitions (even The New York Times once covered NRA matches), gun ranges or gun stores for answers.
The first journalism school in America, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, opened in 1908. The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism began in 1912. Columbia University established the Pulitzer Prize in 1917 and has used it since to reward left-leaning journalists and to thereby control what investigative teams work on.
During this period, groups like the American Association of Teachers of Journalism (1912) and later the American Association of Schools and Departments of Journalism (around 1917) began to take control of journalism. The chaotic, lets-get-the-story mentality of the newsroom was too dangerous for the elites; they wanted to be able to prevent criticism of themselves and to gain control of the messaging.
Over the proceeding decades more schools began to teach journalism and the big papers increasingly hired them as graduates from such schools tended to hire graduates like themselves.
Today, almost all the top journalism jobs go to college-educated, often elite-university graduates. Whereas historically, journalism was not a career that required a college degree—indeed, it was looked down on as an occupation not worthy for the well-educated and monied classes—this has changed so much that today employees in big newsrooms don’t reflect a cross-section of any of the towns or cities they serve.
As of 2022, only about 3.6% of full-time U.S. journalists lack a bachelor’s degree, according to an American Journalist survey. Indeed, this and other studies indicate that reporters and editors at prominent newspapers and other mainstream newsrooms disproportionately come from elite universities and higher-income families. Research looking at staff at major U.S. newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal found that most reporters and editors attended top-tier schools: about 43.9% of Times staff and nearly 50% of Journal staff attended elite universities, with many also holding graduate degrees. In contrast, only a small fraction of the U.S. population attends the most selective universities.
This has created a wealthy, elitist, preachy, ideologically left-leaning class of members of the media. If they don’t know something, such as about guns, their training, nor the culture of the newsrooms they are in, implores them to go and meet actual gun owners; instead, they look to the biases of their bubble so they can sound like the intelligentsia they see themselves as part of.
They are then reflexively anti-gun and are often rewarded for this bias. Any honest story on this part of our freedom could open them up to attack from members of their own newsrooms; people don’t get promoted by disagreeing with their elitist, ideological bosses.
In the next installment, we’ll look at how money has reshaped this media bias.
