QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Have Journalists Ever Met the People They Write About?

This isn’t a conservative-vs.-progressive thing. It’s not a Republican-vs.-Democrat thing. It’s not a coastal-elite-vs.-flyover-country thing. It’s not even a Trump thing. It’s a journalists-vs.-normal-people thing. Outside of the narcissistic and incestuous Thunderdome that houses the American media, it remains the case that people simply do not think in the way that the Beltway-media class believes they do. They are not traumatized by the daily news. They do not make key life decisions based upon the behavior of the president, nor wait for him to leave office before deciding that they are so disturbed that they no longer wish to work. They are not fixated upon the latest congressional MacGuffin or the implications of a given riot or the occasional mistakes of the police. And when they are looking to enjoy a good “cultural drama,” they do not look for it in the same places as the editors of the Washington Post do.

Only journalists and politicians do that. Why? Because they’re freaks. I mean that quite seriously, and I happily include myself in the description. People who argue about the national news every day are straight-up oddities — doubly so when they do it from New York or Washington, D.C.; triply so if they do it in pursuit of a comprehensible political ideology; and quadruply so if they do it using the digital funhouse we call Twitter. Don’t mistake me: There’s nothing wrong per se with being a weirdo. It’s a free country. But there is a lot wrong with being a weirdo who is totally unaware that he is a weirdo. And there’s even more wrong with being a weirdo who spends his days projecting his own interests, obsessions, anxieties, pathologies, and ideologies onto an unwitting and normal population that is nothing at all like him, while claiming that he is giving a voice to that same unwitting and normal population. Increasingly, I see it accepted that “Twitter isn’t real life.” Well, journalism isn’t, either, I’m afraid.

Yesterday, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman noted that Joe Biden had said, of journalists: “You’re the brightest people in the country.” Then he added, sadly: “Trump didn’t say that.” But why would Trump have said that? Why would anyone say that — other than, perhaps, a paid therapist? I’m sure there are some bright journalists out there, just as there are some extremely stupid journalists out there. But is there anybody with a pulse who believes that, as a class, journalists are the “brightest people” in the United States? If their output is any guide, half of them can’t even read.

Related flashback: “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”, Ace of Spades’ John Ekdahl asked on Twitter at the beginning of 2017. As Sean Davis of the Federalist noted in his article on that seemingly innocuous tweet, “Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck.”