Newsweek Editor on the Media Most out of Touch with Americans

”With the rise of the internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalized, and journalists, academic and ideological,” she says. “Where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades’

According to Ungar-Sargon, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does nothing but consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their own economic interests. ‘In the process, the media has abandoned the working class and undermined American democracy,’ she concludes. Bad News explains how and why it happened, and the dangers posed by this trend if it continues unchecked.

“Batya Ungar-Sargon is the Opinion Editor of Newsweek. Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.”