Adam Serwer: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
Adam Serwer:
The New Flyover Country: President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by assembling a coalition of unprecedented diversity… 44 percent of Obama voters were no[n-white]. But in the dull lexicon of Washington political reporters, a rich, NPR-listening white liberal remains the favored stereotypical shorthand for a Democratic voter…. Politico describes Obama's coalition as more ominvorous in its media appetites because "There are as many, if not more, NPR-oriented liberals as MSNBC devotees on the left; the Democratic media ecosystem is larger and more diverse."… That's when they're being polite. If they're trying to affect a derisive tone they might go with "the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis."
The NPR stereotype itself is overblown—liberals make up 36 percent of the NPR audience, while 39 percent consider themselves moderates and 21 percent conservatives. NPR's audience is more highly educated than the country as a whole, but the candidate who won Americans without a college degree was Barack Obama…. More importantly, the notion that people with liberal or left-of-center views are all NPR devotees is a right-wing meme the mainstream media has mindlessly parroted for years…. There is no room in that political shorthand for the retired black Marine in Ohio who knocked on doors for the Obama campaign, or the Latina mom who stood in line for hours—at three different times—just to be able to cast a ballot. The working class people of color who now make up much of the base of the Democratic Party often seem as invisible to political media as they were to the Romney campaign, whom the New York Times described as being shocked that the Obama operation turned out "voters they never even knew existed."…
The national media doesn't talk to these voters much—they work hard and play by the rules but were never the group that politicians used to refer to as "working hard and playing by the rules," because before Obama, only white people were described that way…. [A] political press used to communicating the soul of America in tired metaphors meant to paint a superficial portrait of a certain kind of working class white voter from the South or Midwest is ill-equipped to tell you about them. References to NPR and lattes won't cut it, not that they ever did.
