The media's bias we should actually care about

While the most famous bias of the media is its sway towards liberal policies, there is a much more prominent and dangerous bias that has been extremely prominent lately. More and more the news (and by the news I mean the New York Times) is being catered to an extremely small percentage of Americans. Just this week the New York Times has run articles on the plight of female lawyers unable to make partner in big law firms, the anxiety of teens applying to top colleges, and a set (here and here) of articles on the SAT scoring controversy.

The common thread amongst all of these articles is that next to no one cares. How many people are actually high profile lawyers are big law firms? How many people have shitty, minimum wage jobs? I'd argue that there are a lot more of the former than the latter and I'd also bet that the low income fast-food worker won't be shedding any tears for the woman out of law school who is pulling in half a million but can't make partner.

On top of that, it is time to be realist about college. Only 11% of high school students go to colleges that reject a majority of applicants, and I'd be willing to be that only a slightly higher percentage apply to more than a handful of state and community colleges (not the obscene number that many of the top tier college bound seniors apply to). For these students, a discrepancy on their SAT score is meaningless. The much bigger issue for most American students, as Matthew Yglesias points out, is not getting into the college, but getting out with a diploma:

Only 37 percent of college students graduate in four years, less than two-thirds finish in six. For low-income and minority students, graduation rates are even worse.

While the media clearly does this to pander to that pay to read the newspaper, the trouble is that it makes the lawyer whose son is applying to top-tier colleges think he is an average guy. I always find it ridiculous to hear people whose annual incomes exceed 150 to 200 thousand a year classify themselves as "middle class." Median annual income in the US is around 43 thousand, but you would never know it from reading the New York Times. For the vast majority of Americans the question is not which ivy league college, but whether to go to college at all. Its time the media acknowledge these realities, as opposed to making what ought to be a story buried on A20, front page news.

-Mr. Alec