What matters: affluence or politics?

Tim Rutten's media column today is another talker (his second this week). He opens with a swipe at what he calls the "nattering class" of self-proclaimed media critics so obsessed with political biases they don't see what really influences journalists.

To hear many of these people tell it, the average American newsroom is something like Barcelona in 1937: wall-to-wall revolutionary cabals buffeted by right-wing reaction....Programmatic politics of any sort are at best a vestigial presence in all but a handful of American newsrooms.
To the extent any bias is generally operative in the news media today, it is the middle-class quietism that the majority of reporters and editors share with other Americans. They are the suburban voters who now cast the majority of ballots in our presidential elections — mildly libertarian on social issues, mildly conservative on fiscal matters, preoccupied with issues of personal and financial security. They are suspicious of ideology with its sweaty urgency and wearying demands for consistency.

From there the argument is taken up by retired New York Times columnist Russell Baker, who responded to a letter in the current New York Review of Books by writing that reporters are more likely to be skewed by class, not politics:

"Today's top-drawer Washington news people are part of a highly educated, upper-middle-class elite; they belong to the culture for which the American political system works exceedingly well. Which is to say, they are, in the pure sense of the word, extremely conservative.
"Most probably passed childhood in economically sheltered times, came to adulthood in the years of plenty, went to good colleges where they developed conventionally progressive social consciences, and have now inherited the comforting benefits that 60 years of liberal government have created for the middle class.

"This is not a background likely to produce angry reporters and aggressive editors..."

OK, D.C. journalists tend to be better paid than most Americans -- no argument here. Then Baker took a phone call from Rutten and began to ad-lib, showing how little he knows of actual American newsrooms aside from the high end of the most gentrified few.

"I was a journalist for 50 years and hate to pronounce, but these are not adventuresome people. How could they be? Most have been to college and then have gone directly into journalism. What can you expect with that sort of background?"
(skipped)

"When I started out as a police reporter, I lived next door to a cop. Reporters don't come out of those neighborhoods nowadays. We've all moved uptown. Today, reporters join clubs. They play golf."

Baker is right that mainstream reporters today are anything but activists. He's laughably unfamiliar though with pay scales, especially most of those in Southern California. I spoke to a young Daily News writer the other night who says he could never hope to buy a home in the Valley on a Singleton salary. LAT staffers do much better, of course, but there aren't many club members among the rank and file unless 24 Hours Fitness counts.

An e-mail correspondent writes L.A. Observed: "As an occasional j-school teacher, I know that a startup reporter is lucky to pull $25,000 a year. A rooky LAPD officer of 19, minus college, pulls $50,000. And that's by no means the top local starting pay. You got to be pretty near the journalistic top rank to live next door to a cop these days."

Expect some rants on this one...why, there's one now.