Urban liberal elegy

jerrymberger
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory it has become fashionable to bash the media for ignoring the people who cast their ballots for him out of frustration over the growing divide between “the coasts” and “flyover country.”

There is little dispute the media did not listen to the voices of frustration in a country increasingly of, by and for lobbyists with the cash to buy Congress and governments up and down the chain.

But perhaps it’s time to start listening in the other direction. Not all of us who earned a living reporting and writing on government and politics are effete, brie-eating, chablis-sipping snobs.

And when we express our amazement, six months into the Trump administration about Trump Country’s apparent indifference to the unfolding saga of Russian intrusion into basic American values perhaps it’s time to state our case as effectively as the other side. So here’s one person’s effort.

Before I made it to a Ivy League graduate school to study journalism I was the child of working class parents in northeast Ohio. My first job, at age 11, was to get up more than an hour before dawn to deliver newspapers. After that I “graduated” to sweeping factory floors and taking deliveries and stocking hardware store shelves.

My suburban hometown paper carried school bus schedules and short write-ups about the local PTA and other community groups, just like the Hillsboro Times-Gazette. I admit it’s somewhat foggy now but I believe it also carried local school and government news and would localize bigger state and national stories.

That was clearly the case when I landed my first job in journalism, reporting in a not yet up-and-coming central Massachusetts city for a daily newspaper where Rotary Club speakers were as important, if not more so, than the candidates for statewide office that would come calling every few years.

We still covered our local city council, board of selectmen and school committees and paid close attention to what local legislators had to say. Good thing too: one of them wound up as governor about two decades later.

My first all-nighter as a journalist came waiting for the results of the presidential election in which “blue” Massachusetts was part of the winning Reagan Coalition.

My point is simple: many journalists spring from working class roots and paid their dues in small community publications where they struggled to get by in a profession that traditionally touted long hours and low pay.

And when I hit the “big time,” a wire service’s Boston bureau, I managed to put together a decent career despite collecting a pay check that read, for much longer than I care to remember, “debtor-in-posssession” as the company struggled through the first of two Chapter 11 bankruptcies.

Just as not all rural folks are rubes with hay stalks in their mouths coping with addiction, not all journalists are clueless urban liberals looking down their noses as they jet off to some exotic locale.

And while we admittedly missed the problems that generations of elected officials of both parties downplayed or ignored, our rural counterparts are missing one of the most important stories in the history of our republic: the rise of a multi-b(m)illionaire, pathological liar who appears to disdain the trappings of the Constitution and the law.

This is a president who has expressed more admiration for the Russian president-for-life than the intelligence community that has uniformly found Vladimir Putin was the likely leader of the effort to undermine the election with the goal of electing Trump.

He is being aided and abetted by elected officials from “flyover country” who, armed with the campaign donations, are working to undermine the promises upon which Trump was elected in the service of their own political masters, the big donors who set the agenda in Washington and many state capitals.

Gutting Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the “job creators” is not in the best interests of the Hillsboro-Times Gazette readers, holding out at least as much if not more importance than the opening of the next Dollar General.

I propose a compromise: effete liberal journalists will pay less attention to polls, pundits and rhetoric and focus more on real issues like wage stagnation, income inequality and the problems of raising a family and staying afloat.

In return, I propose that the good folks of flyover country pay more attention to what a rich New York real estate developer with a total disdain for anyone and anything that can’t enrich himself and his family is doing to the values, traditions and laws of the nation we all call home.

It’s never been an either-or situation to be able to report on what is important to people, whether in Hillsboro, Ohio or Boston. No reason (or excuse) to start now.

jerrymberger

Written by

Strategic communicator dabbling in political punditry. Professing journalism at @COMatBU. Strangely still loyal to Cleveland Indians & Browns. Opinions my own.

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