A particular image of the worker — generally white, male, and employed in the manual trades — has been a recurring idiom of Americana for at least a century. It’s revealing, given this ubiquity, that since 2016 the white male worker has also become a persistent object of media fascination and puzzlement: the central character in a seemingly endless deluge of newspaper reports and longform essays in which metropolitan journalists depart their coastal havens for exotic safaris into the hinterland, intent on discovering and investigating “working class Americans” (who are often, incorrectly, depicted as implicitly white and male) in their natural habitats.

As the University of Iowa’s Christopher R. Martin notes at the outset of his forthcoming book No Longer Newsworthy, “Who are these people?” fast became the anguished cry of major media outlets in the wake of Donald Trump’s shock 2016 election victory — and the subject of a whole genre aimed at providing a primarily middle-class readership with a neat and compelling answer. But, he argues, such attention should not be misconstrued as earnest concern or a renewed interest in the working class as such. The really existing working class — vast and diverse — in fact remains largely invisible, except as a reductive caricature opportunistically invoked by politicians and media elites.

This is the thesis of Martin’s effort in media criticism, which charts the press’s persistent erasure and misrepresentation of America’s working-class majority and the gradual transformation of the journalistic lexicon into a language virtually indistinguishable from that of management, capital, and the bipartisan neoliberal consensus.