Thread by @brooklynmarie

That's how they keep us in line, keeping us tied to piddling little grants that many of us ending up depending on in order to be able to do our increasingly important work. Sometimes they make us go into debt to pay "tuition." It's a way of keeping the Poors out of the plum jobs

https://twitter.com/jessicahuseman/status/1392479930332635137

Newsrooms are absolutely rotten with one huge and often completely invisible bias. Because the pay is so poor and investigative journalism work in particular can be relatively expensive and time consuming (I don't let anybody buy me food or drinks when I'm interviewing them, for

example, and never have -- which means I'll pick up the tab for us both, which can get expensive if you let interviewees choose the place to meet) it means that it self selects for people who can AFFORD to work in journalism. Which carries a HUGE set of expectations and biases

I've never had a lot of money, but I do have some local name recognition and a family legacy. Without those, I doubt I would have gotten very far. Particularly my family legacy -- my favorite people on earth are the crusty old news bastards I grew up around. I'm one of them now.

Even so, it's been so hard for so long. And I have also been asked, more than once, by men and women in charge of different newsrooms, why I am asking for a raise because can't my husband pay all the bills? Or advised to marry rich. I find all this deeply insulting

That's why I'm a proponent of unionization. Every newsroom, every writer, reporter, producer, should seriously and openly talk about unionizing. We all deserve to be able to afford to raise families if we want them.

Self-selecting for hiring the comfortably rich affects coverage too. Consider how someone who grew up in a high income gated community might cover poverty versus someone who grew up in a trailer park, or the angles they might look for vs. observable reality ("economic anxiety")

But that's how you get journalists farting out really tone-deaf takes. It's artificial selection for rich people. It's gatekeeping.

Anyway pay journos fairly and give them loads of free rein and democracy will thrive. Otherwise, we get what we're living through right now. That's a non-negotiable universal rule about democracy: It requires an informed public in order to exist. The alternative is fascism.