Share this page!

Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
Twitter logo
1 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Chris Cuomo using his journalistic star power to protect his brother who was using his political star power to grope women and kill seniors is such a perfect literalization of the role our elite chattering class plays consolidating the power of its chosen celebrity politicians.
In this case they were literally brothers, but this is just a super literal version of what happens across the board. Politicians and journalists go to the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods. And as part of the American elites, they work to defend the same status quo
What Chris Cuomo did was a huge dereliction of journalistic ethics, and it's astonishing how long CNN let it go on. But the problem goes so much deeper. It's what happens when the Fourth Estate is part of the elite, made up of the highly educated and very affluent.
Journalists aren't outside power demanding justice on the part of the little guy anymore. They are power. And power tends to defend itself.
“Elite journalists resemble Senators, billionaires, and World Economic Forum attendees in terms of educational attainment.”
researchgate.net/publication/32…
If you are at all curious about how American journalism, which started as a populist, anti-elite revolution and ended up personified by millionaires sneering at the working class and defending celeb politicians, I wrote a book that tells that exact story:
amazon.com/Bad-News-Media…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Batya Ungar-Sargon

Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @bungarsargon

Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
30 Jul
Journalists and the incentives of digital journalism have played a big role in devaluing the institutions claiming to represent or explain "The Science." The person many of us should be upset with when people refuse to get vaccinated is in the mirror.
You can't routinely insult people's values and their intelligence and then just expect them to do what you say. Humans don't work that way, nor should they. But our media and political elites expect obeisance from those they openly show contempt for.
"Germs don't spread at our virtuous protests but they come and spread a lot at your crappy gatherings, now go fight the spread exactly how I tell you to even though I've been wrong a lot about this, what you don't want to, you rube, how dare you, you anti-science ignoramus?"
Read 5 tweets
Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
2 Jun
If only the perpetrators of this violence were carrying signs and flags and screaming at their victims about why they were attacking them, Vox might be able to crack this impenetrable code, figure out this riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma!
For the past few years, those of us who dared point out that anti-Semitism was being normalized on the Left were subjected to ridiculous amounts of abuse. Now that it's actually broken out into violence, they're breaking out calculators to minimize and dismiss it.
What we're seeing is the mainstream media blatantly normalizing anti-Semitism, following SEO and Twitter trending topics and Google search and politician celebs down a path of hate that's turning America into Europe when it comes to Jews.
Read 7 tweets
Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
31 Mar
"Subjects with college degrees were 5 percentage points more likely to apply a principle harshly to Jews than to non-Jews. Among those with advanced degrees, subjects were 15 percentage points more unfavorable toward Jewish than non-Jewish examples."
tabletmag.com/sections/news/…
The data here backs up what many of us have experienced first hand. Still, it's absolutely staggering to learn that a graduate degree is correlated with such a higher rate of anti-Semitism. What an indictment of our university system. Here are the questions the researchers posed:
"When asked whether 'attachment to another country creates a conflict of interest,' respondents with a four-year degree and those with advanced degrees were respectively 7 and 13 percentage points more likely to express this concern over Israel than Mexico."
Read 5 tweets
Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
18 Mar
The people in charge of delivering the news to you are a group of supposed grownups terrified of overgrown teenagers stuck in a high school mentality holding them hostage on Twitter. It's not going to stop until you demand better and stop being the marketplace for a moral panic.
Firing someone for something they tweeted when they were 17 is preposterous - until you consider that the editors and publishers in charge of the nation's leading publications are taking their cues from 17 year olds. Then it makes perfect sense.
It's bad enough that these people can't tell right from wrong, that they rely on a faceless online mob to adjudicate their morals, and are too cowardly to speak up when they know it's wrong. But these are the people literally in charge of telling you what is true and what's not.
Read 4 tweets
Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
16 Mar
It's good we're talking about gross elite schools being gutted by wokeness. But what's happening downstream is also important - children everywhere being taught they're racists, they're stewards of white supremacy, taught to see race as the first thing they notice about a person.
This happened with Robin DiAngelo, too: There was a moment when the dam broke and people started to realize how gross White Fragility is, and everyone called it out, as though Robin DiAngelo were the problem and not the million people who bought her book and "Anti-Racist Baby"
I get it! Gross elite prep schools torn apart by gross racial essentialism - you have to be pretty invested in the elites not to chuckle. But because success in America today is so limited to the top, these kids will make up most of tomorrow's leaders, which makes it less funny.
Read 7 tweets
Batya Ungar-Sargon Profile picture
24 Feb
A student at Smith got a janitor put on leave and a security officer tarred as racist, both of whom make less than her $78,000 yearly tuition, because she insisted on eating in a deserted dorm she wasn't meant to be in. Wokeness is a smokescreen for class.
nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/…
A cafeteria employee with lupus making $40K a year, half of Smith tuition, told the student that the dorm was closed but still let her in. The student posted the woman's photo and email to FB, captioned, “This is the racist person." She's now unemployed and no one will hire her.
Moral panics are always bad. But our current moral panic around race is a way for affluent liberals drunk on the fiction of meritocracy to erase the class chasm in America, hoarding power while still feeling like the heroes of a social justice morality play.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @bungarsargon has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @bungarsargon!

Read all threads by @bungarsargon

:(