Bad News

by Batya Ungar-Sargon

Book Reviews

  • @bungarsargon @balajis @AshleyRindsberg Batya's book is out now, and is worth reading for the history of American journalism and how we got here alone. https://t.co/FsQYNridfZLink to Tweet
  • Batya's book 'Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy' is a look at how media went from a working-class occupation concerned with the economic underdog, to a woke crusade led by elites, for elites. https://t.co/G8UnYFjVHnLink to Tweet
  • See also @arianapekary on cable news [tweet below], @mtaibbi’s book Hate Inc [1], @bungarsargon’s recent book Bad News [2], and how hate drives clicks [3]. [1]: https://t.co/BQu9pJSU1V [2]: https://t.co/TycPqFlze0 [3]: https://t.co/fcrTybTxJj https://t.co/sFkd0vdcJh https://t.co/HfzIuXMfqdLink to Tweet

About Book

"Bad News is a response to Thomas Frank's 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas." I ask the same question he asked about the right, but about the left: Why is the media obsessed with racism, even though it's getting objectively better by every measure we have? I argue that the liberal media is mainstreaming a woke culture war based on ideas that were relegated to the academic fringe as recently as a decade ago because it's in their economic interests to do so. It explores how digital media and social media supplied journalists, now part of the American elite, with an alternative way to feel like heroes while further consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few rather than the many. The book then explores the larger context of the great American class divide, and how journalism has been both a product and accelerator of inequality"--