Paul Jay on "Journalistic Mythology"

"[T]he biggest deception of mainstream news—and this goes for television and the newspapers— at the very heart of the deception or the mythology, is they report as if we don't live in a class society. I believe, it's absolutely the heart of the problem. Everyone knows we do. Every reporter knows we do. Everyone they report on knows we do. In fact, when Obama ran his campaign, it was all about we're for the middle class. How can you have the middle class if you don't have some other classes? They don't talk about them... During election times you hear all kinds of talk about the middle class. But if you have a middle class, you also have elite. However, you may want to describe that elite, you have to have one [or] else, you don't have the middle class either. And everyone that does news knows that every story you approach, you have to decide where is your starting point, who's your audience, who you speak to. And the people who are most honest about this are people that report for the business press—to some extent The National Post, a little bit The Globe and Mail, but even more honest are, say, The Wall Street Journal or some of the other financial papers. What's honest about them is they know their audience is a section of the elite that has the most capital, and they write for them, and try to write more or less as realistically as they can for them. But there's no independent journalism who says straightforwardly, we're not going to report or side with or be an appendage of one section of the elite or the other, because what's called diversity of opinion here is diversity of opinion amongst the elite, 'cause there are very competing interests amongst the elite. But if you try to say, okay, well, we want to represent what's in the interest of workers, well, then you're marginalized, you're utopian, you're naive, you're a lefty, you're this or you're that."