In his excellent 2019 book, No Longer Newsworthy, Christopher R. Martin charts the gradual erasure of America’s working class from its media landscape. This process, as Martin shows, has brought about profound changes in the way all kinds of stories are written and framed. And, far from being a product of some unknowable alien force, it has both observable causes and discernible material roots. Amid consolidation and competition from the then-ascendent medium of TV, newspapers pivoted to a business model premised largely on advertisement aimed at upscale and middle-class audiences — transforming not only their own readerships but also the way vital issues were conceptualized. As Martin writes:

In this new vision of how a newspaper should serve its community, the newspapers and their corporate owners only wanted the right kind of readers, those who were “well-to-do,” “affluent moderns,” “influentials,” and people with plenty of “effective buying power” and “giant-sized household incomes.” Nearly every newspaper began publicizing their readership as if they were the children of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon: all above average.

Among the most memorable illustrations of what these changes have done to transform the news comes midway through the book as Martin contrasts New York Times coverage of two strikes separated by roughly forty-two years — a chasm, it turns out, defined at least as much by ideology as the actual passage of time.