Class, Not Race - Washington Post journalists ignore working class issues

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1995 by Amy Waldman

The Washington Post's racial politics are making national headlines. What about that paper's--and the rest of the media's--neglect of the working class?

"His investigations often turned on the misuse of money, but since he had become rich himself, he discovered that money was more subtle than it had seemed when he was poor."

--Ward Just, Jack Gance

Now all my friends are rich. Curiously, they want me to be rich, too," wrote James Glassman, fresh to Washington, in a 1980 New Republic article called "Prisoners of Real Estate." He had missed the boat, he said, by not buying a house in the seventies, while his contemporaries--"the ones who railed against the Vietnam War and big business and private property in the 1960s"--profited from the housing run-up. Still, he mocked those friends as part of a real estate class "obsessed with money," with "no use for drag clinics in the neighborhood, for property taxes, for quaint bars or the trappings of progress. They climb on board and pull up the ladder."

"I guess there's a sort of irony there," says Glassman of that article today. Indeed there is. For Glassman is now not only a homeowner, but he is rich, very rich, having sold off a healthy stake in the congressional newspaper Roll Call and become a gum to the investing class. His hair has grayed; he wears sharp suits. He hosts two TV shows. He writes a personal finance column for The Washington Post and, since March, a weekly op-ed column as well--a column in which he often proselytizes for "pulling up the ladder," whether discouraging an increase in the minimum wage or lambasting the Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefits the working poor. Glassman is the market's cheerleader, and he is very much in vogue in Dick Armey's Washington.

Twenty-five years ago, Glassman favored a different sort of radical chic--that of the left. When he graduated from Harvard in 1969, anti-war fury and civil-fights agitation were consuming the campus. He wore a motorcycle jacket; he protested the Vietnam War; he railed against corporations. "They wanted to tear the establishment down," recalls Patrick R. Sorrento, production supervisor for the last 28 years at The Harvard Crimson, where Glassman was managing editor. "And Jim was right in the thick of it."

In a recent New Republic story on affirmative action at the Post, Ruth Shalit asserted that the paper's top figures are fuzzy liberals whose sensitivity about race is compromising "the paper's traditional role as a gadfly." On questions of race, Shalit may have a point. But on economic issues the Post is far from a gadfly--because it's not liberal.

Something of the way the Post approaches these issues can be understood by looking at the background and views of the individuals who cover them--people like Glassman and his peers. He and several of his Crimson compatriots--economic columnist Robert Samuelson (`67), financial correspondent Jay Mathews (`67), and assistant managing editor for financial news David Ignatius (`72)--play critical roles in the way one of the country's most important papers covers some of the most important subjects: the economy and business.

Their personal stories are part of a broader phenomenon. They reflect the transformation of journalism from a craft into a well-paid profession. They were born into the middle class or higher and attended fine colleges. They have reaped the bounty of an age of media affluence. They also happen to work for a wealthy company, and in a newspaper business that has suffered an attrition in readership over the past two decades among lower-income readers.

Their individual arcs show how a paper can lose touch with the average worker: Its journalists lead ever-more comfortable lives, with minimal contact with less fortunate counterparts, even as they succumb to the subtle pressures of their employer's own corporate self-interest. Where many of the children of the sixties once burned to challenge the status quo, today they are complacent, even cynical. The idealists and radicals who thought they could change the world grew up and changed their minds instead.

Post-Naderism

After graduating from Harvard, David Ignatius wrote a story for the Monthly in 1973 in which he attacked the dean of Harvard Medical School for serving as a consultant to the pharmaceutical manufacturers, E.R. Squibb and Sons, and helping the company get Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for a controversial drug. (Ignatius was an editor at the Monthly in the mid-1970s.)

As a college student, Ignatius--bearded, longhaired, and passionately anti-war--had worked for consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who remembers him as "a firebrand." Today, as a top editor at the Post, the well-groomed Ignatius is no longer a radical reformer. "I'm not embarassed to have worked for Nader," Ignatius now insists, although I hadn't asked if he was. Nader, in turn, is frequently critical of his former employee's business section, which he feels lacks a commitment to covering the hazards of the marketplace.