FORESEEABLE, YET POORLY FORESEEN.

I'm still cleaning out some old copies of magazines and journals and recently found, in the March-April, 1998 issue of The American Enterprise, "Clueless: Why the Elite Media Don't Understand America," by Joel Kotkin and David Friedman.

Back in the day, the magazine (which has since been replaced by a different American Enterprise Institute periodical) provided a compuserve.com electronic mail address for its editor, and evidently none of the magazine's content ever made its way to the Wayback Machine or any other server of the era.

Never mind that, let me transcribe a bit of the article, at good old forty words per minute.

All four national news networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox -- are headquartered within walking distance of each other.  The nations two most dominant papers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, are published within a subway ride of opinion-shaping magazines like Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and Fortune.

More than liberal bias, this conglomeration of media power increasingly reflects a retrograde Northeastern elitism out of sync with the rest of the country.  In response, more and more Americans are tuning out the messages.  The establishment media continue to influence one group heavily, however -- and that is other elites throughout the country.

Messrs. Kotkin and Friedman argue, the influence tends to epistemic closure -- I'm not sure that was even a thing in 1998 -- and not in a good way.

By rights, our national media should be reflecting and explaining the country in all of its far-flung economic, technical, and political hues.  Yet with the notable exception of talk radio and a few journals, they do very poorly on this front.

Because the nation's media elite increasingly resemble an aristocracy, hailing from the same exclusive schools and privileged backgrounds, it's not surprising that surveys show key members share remarkably narrow common views on issues like the environment, abortion, and economics.

We could once upon a time speak of a Washington Consensus or a "vital progressive center," and yet there were cracks showing.

Compared to Main Street, media types marry less, divorce more, are oftener childless, are mostly unchurched, and frequently lack familiarity with normal American suburban life.  One result of all this is that our major press regularly misses, ignores, or scoffs at important trends sweeping the heartland of the nation.  Over the last two decades, this has happened with scores of big stories.

For instance, our major media didn't spot the religious renewal now underway in America until long after it had taken off.  They were completely surprised by the recent flipover to a Republican Congress -- a flummoxed Peter Jennings, remember, called the '94 vote a "temper tantrum."

Perhaps the Normals have their attention now.  Or perhaps it's still OK to be smug and condescending.

So why does [Keith] Olbermann get away with making bigoted stereotypes of hunters and reporters from Mississippi and threaten them on social media? Why are ESPN and Twitter fine with that? Probably because the people who sit in the boardrooms of ESPN and Twitter think Olbermann’s assessment of Mississippians is basically true.

This contempt of our larger institutions are towards the people in the middle of our country is a dangerous illness, and Olbermann is a living symptom of it.

Perhaps so, or perhaps Keith Olbermann is a marginal figure in the Era of Trump. Therapy comedy for the elite, if you will.