Journalism’s Ivory Towers

In a recent essay entitled “The Resentment That Never Sleeps,” New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall explains how a lowering of social status among non-college-educated white Americans has increased that demographic’s anxiety and helped fuel the populism that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. Reporters at many of America’s most prestigious journalistic outlets have echoed these sentiments. But none of those reporters ever seems willing to acknowledge their own complicity in the situation. Plenty of jobs that once used to require no university degree or special certification now do. According to a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the number of American jobs requiring state certification has risen from one in 20 60 years ago to one in four today. Technically, journalists do not require a university degree in order to practice their trade. Practically speaking, however, they do. No-one who writes for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or any other major US journalistic venue lacks a college degree. In fact, to write for one of those publications, you’d better make sure that your university degree comes from a highly prestigious institution.

The New York Times has more regular op-ed columnists who are transgender (Jennifer Finney Boylan) than who lack a college degree (none). Transgender people make up anywhere from 0.6 to five percent of the US population. According to the US Census, 36 percent of Americans have a college degree. So, roughly two-thirds of the Americans you see on the street will probably lack a college degree, but walk into the offices of a prestigious newspaper or magazine, and you’ll find almost no-one other than the janitors and possibly the receptionist from this cohort. That is not to say that legacy publications never provide column space for non-college-educated writers (I have been published by the Times on occasion), just that it is exceedingly rare.

It wasn’t always thus. Many of the most famous American journalists of the 20th century lacked a college degree. And I’m not talking just of ancient fossils who did their reporting back in 1910 or 1920. As recently as the 1970s, when I first became a consumer of American journalism, daily newspapers were filled with the work of syndicated journalists such as Art Buchwald, Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, and Jack Anderson, none of whom possessed a university degree that wasn’t honorary. Perhaps the most storied newspaper columnist in Northern California during the second half of the 20th century was Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, another journalist who never went to college. Visit the Wikipedia page for American Print Journalists, and you’ll find plenty of famous 20th century reporters who lacked a college degree: Ernie Pyle, H.L. Mencken, Harold Ross, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, I.F. Stone, Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, and even Hunter S. Thompson. Not all of these reporters were paragons of journalistic virtue (Hopper and Winchell in particular were egregiously unscrupulous), but the same can be said of contemporary reporters who possess impressive university credentials.