On 1 January 2014 19:31, Michael Kenward <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

While it may be only circumstantial, having numerous contacts who work in the gearbox and oil-sump of the Stateside media machine supplies plenty of evidence; if you won't take an unpaid position in journalism, you won't get a position. Which means that if you can't afford to work for free for a few years (whether as an intern, or as a high-capacity self-promoting blogger who'll work for free "for the exposure") you're not getting your foot in the door. Hell, just google "journalism unpaid internships", and look at the number of articles that turn up; that's a lotta smoke from a non-existent fire, no?

Perhaps they are all working class white folks with no rich parents to fund unpaid internships and who climbed the ladder in other ways.

I'm not a gambling man, but I'd be willing to bet pretty much everything I own that this statement is provably false. 

The point isn't that it's *impossible* for the unprivileged to climb the ladder; the point is that a) it's always been harder, and b) it's getting radically harder for them to do so due to the unpaid internship system. The situation is more complex in the States, of course, where race carries the same explosive political charge as class does for us on this side of the pond... but as far as privilege goes, well, your response here -- coming as it does from an experienced white male journalist who did his degrees in the late sixties, which were a golden age by comparison with today as far as free-to-air higher ed and a social safety-net are concerned, and which are another world entirely away from the experience of an American POC during the same period -- is pretty much a textbook case thereof. This is not an insult; privilege is defined by its invisibility to its beneficiaries. I'd just like to suggest that perhaps, when the working class, women, or people of colour are in the conversational frame, it might be worth considering that your own perspectives on the issue may not be as informed or useful as you imagine them to be.

And anyhow, to state that working class persons and persons of colour are disadvantaged when it comes to accessing the upper echelons of the employment market is not controversial; if anything, it's tautological. It is the extraordinary claim that carries the burden of proof, as a science journalist of long standing surely knows better than I; as such, can you provide evidence for the huge cohort of white working-class journalists in the States that you posit as an alternative explanation?

PGR