The Times’ Prole Rat Threat

Slate’s Jack Shafer commits to print (or pixel, as the case may be) what we’ve long assumed to be true about New York journalists in a piece from last week about the Times’ recent Class Matters series:

Journalists are notoriously sensitive to matters of class and status, especially a New York journalist with a $125,000 salary that might make him an object of envy to a reporter living in Lansing, Mich., but that stigmatizes him as a knuckle-dragging proletarian on his home turf. Rising housing prices, high taxes, pressures to enroll children in private schools and dress fashionably, et al., contribute to a permanent state of status anxiety in many New York-based Times and Journal reporters and editors. Financial journalists in New York have their noses rubbed into their relative pauperhood on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis by the lawyers, hedge-fund traders, business executives, and investment bankers they report on. If they’re blue about class in America, you can’t blame them.

Specifically, I’ve often wondered who exactly the audience is for some Times stories — the real obnoxious ones, the ones that by all rights the 92.5 percent of the rest of us (journalists included!) shouldn’t really understand. And sometimes you get to thinking that 92.5 percent of us (journalists included!) are just millions of court jesters sitting around this big castle with that funny Indian name — those rivers are the moat!

NB: Credit where due.