I experienced the media bubble personally after the 1980 election. The media did not know anybody who had made the Reagan landslide.

And they were PROUD of it.

They even had ME on National Public Radio at least three times! They admitted freely that they didn’t know anybody in the group that had nominated and elected Reagan, but if you listen as carefully as I do, it was noticeable that they were no at all apologetic about it.

In any other country on earth, it would be considered a bit odd if no one in the media had any contacts in the group that just took over the government by popular vote. But the American media considered itself a world unto itself. You belonged to it because you did NOT belong to the masses.

Reporters who wanted to be “in” referred to American between New York and Los Angeles as “flyover country” even if that is where they worked

ESPECIALLY if that was where they worked. They had to work harder to prove they weren’t hicks.

This is a lot less blatant today, but it was absolutely universal when I was coming up. They made a point of it. As “inner circles” the media people pointed out that they didn’t know anybody in the Reagan ranks to show that they were above all that. Of course big city sophisticates didn’t know those people.

They also made a blatant point of who they DID know. I remember one time during the 1980 convention when they followed a liberal Republican around, someone they knew well, and he bitched constantly about how none of the people he had “worked with all these years” were there.

Well, if you are part of a group that has consistently lost both Houses of Congress for a generation, one might expect even the dumbass Republicans to cut them out, but that was of course never mentioned as a reason.

I got the impression he thought there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” at work.

And after Reagan got a landslide against a sitting president and led Republicans get to a majority in a House of Congress — the Senate — for the first time since 1952, they kept repeating that “the votes are in the middle of the road.”

Jerry Ford kept repeating that until he died, but he was the original person Lyndon Johnson said couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Republicans won in 1980 and in 1994. Both times they went what the media called “far right.”

And today you can’t be a professional commentator unless you say, “the votes are in the middle of the road.”

The media are not in business to be right. If you are a member of the media, you have to answer to your own bureaucracy. I can’t remember anyone being punished for being dead wrong, as long as you are dead wrong saying what FITS.

Yes, it sounds like I am repeating what you already know. My problem is that everyone who SAYS the media are out of touch act like it is IN touch.

It is about time we started seeing this advantage as a PRACTICAL reality. It doesn’t do a hell of a lot of good to keep noticing that the other army makes a consistent set of errors unless you take advantage of them.