“…the national press is undoubtedly cosmopolitan in its outlook…”

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I have worked in a number of newsrooms, and I know writers and editors in many, many more. There’s no mainstream newsroom I know of that is uncompromising in its advocacy for single-payer health care, or that has launched a longtime crusade for more foreign aid. If anything, the press tilts toward deficit hawkery in its economics and a (deserved) skepticism of governmental competence and honesty in its instincts.

But the national press is undoubtedly cosmopolitan in its outlook — it is based in New York and Washington and Los Angeles, and it prizes diversity, tolerance, pluralism. Within newsrooms, these ideas aren’t seen as political opinions but as fundamental values. There is no “other side” worth reporting when it comes to racial equality, no argument that needs to be respected when it comes to religious intolerance or anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

More than Trump’s campaign is conservative, it is anti-cosmopolitan. Trump’s comments on Mexicans, on Muslims, his reaction to the Khans and to Megyn Kelly, his jingoism and instinctual mistrust of immigrants — all of this amounts to an anti-cosmopolitan ideology that really does run him smack into a deep-seated bias in America’s urban newsrooms.

Ezra Klein, “The media vs. Donald Trump: why the press feels so free to criticize the Republican nominee”, Vox (16 August 2016) [http://www.vox.com/2016/8/16/12484644/media-donald-trump]

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