Once considered largely a “blue-collar” profession, the news business is now increasingly an exclusive club of the affluent.
So intimates a Sun-Sentinel story on a panel discussion with New York Times columnist David Brooks and former Times reporter Judith Miller.
The two journos were speaking at the Fourth Annual Leadership Educational Forum sponsored by the American Friends of The Hebrew University.
Location? The Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach.
Here’s a Brooks summary:

Media professionals are perceived to be part of a “hereditary meritocracy” exclusive only to the top economic tier of society, Brooks said. On the job, journalists operate in an “insular bubble” that does not reflect the country’s geopolitical reality.

Top economic tier of society? Maybe that’s why the news media increasingly stacks itself with those who are spewed from the nation’s most expensive universities in the country.
Is it an unconscious hazing process used by corporate managers to cull out those who lacked the sophisticated and worldly good taste to have parents with the money?
This brings to mind one of my former editor’s thoughts on the bad entry-level pay at many news operations. Such salaries are often competitive with what an illegal immigrant makes pulling turnips out of the ground in California.
“Don’t think of those $15-20,000 entry-level salaries as crappy pay,” notes Robert Hodierne, now senior managing editor of Gannett’s 20-percent-net money-churning Army Times Publishing, in a Poynter Forum.

“Think of those jobs as full-ride journalism scholarships with a fat stipend to live on….So work hard, suck it up and call mom and dad for help with the rent. Just like you would have done if you’d gone to graduate school.”

Oh, just call mom and dad to subsidize you.
Meanwhile, a guest column in The Los Angeles Times bemoans the newspaper’s absence of a labor reporter position to spot trends affecting the working class.
“Where was The Times‘ expose on the federal government’s failure to regularly inspect mines and enforce mine-safety laws before the recent tragedy at the Sago mine in West Virginia?,” asks Peter Dreier, professor of politics and director of the urban and environmental policy program at Occidental College, who penned the column. “Where was the Page one takeout on the federal government’s devastating budget cutbacks for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration?”

“Why relegate most union news to the paper’s Business section? Indeed, since there are vastly more employees than business owners in Greater Los Angeles, why doesn’t The Times create a Labor section?”

Good question.
Maybe working people don’t read newspapers because they are too busy working — or maybe newspapers don’t bother talking about things that affect the lives of working people.
Then again, maybe working people just don’t offer the appealing demographic to advertisers that they once did.
I’m toying with the view that globalization, technology and the velocity of capital movement is dividing the haves and have-nots more than ever.
The affluent will increasingly share more in common with the affluent on the other side of the globe then they will with those less-fortunate living across town — and so will the interests of corporate executives running our news operations.