"Missing Middle" misses

Check out “Missing Middle” by Michael Massing in the March/April edition of Columbia Journalism Review.

As a Midwestern newspaper journalist, I heartily agreed with his analysis – that the national news media give short shrift to any stories that are vitally important to the majority of Americans who have the misfortune to live west of the Hudson and Potomac.

But his recommendations are the height of condescension.

"Wouldn't it be refreshing to assign a reporter to Iowa or Ohio for a full year before the election so that he or she could get some real insight into what the people there are thinking?"

The New York Times did precisely that for the 1996 presidential campaign – Michael Winerip moved his family to Canton, Ohio, chosen because the city and surrounding Stark County were considered such a bellwether. The fact Massing doesn't know – or forgot – about Winerip's year in the provinces is the best evidence it didn't have impact.

Massing's other suggestion – that the eastern media elite hire a few more of us yokels – would be equally futile.

Just look at the argument used by the University of Missouri Journalism prof in promoting his student for an internship at Smithsonian magazine: "she was, he said, 'as good as anybody who went to Choate, St. Paul's, and Harvard.' "

Mull that sentence a moment. It assumes that everyone who goes to elite prep schools and an Ivy League college is good. Anyone hired with that attitude quickly adopts the prejudices of his or her benefactor.

Instead of bringing a heartland prospective to the Smithsonian magazine, I'd expect the poor intern will be too busy trying to fit in – no doubt by demonstrating how she can talk "knowledgeably about Foucault."

Heartland stories have to be told by heartland media to be effective. That's what Massing doesn't get and why his recommendations are so lame.