There ought to be a rule: Anyone wishing to work in major-league news media must first spend a semester abroad in the Midwest.
There ought to be a rule: Anyone wishing to work in major-league news media must first spend a semester abroad in the Midwest.
T here ought to be a rule: Anyone wishing to work in major-league news media must first spend a semester abroad in the Midwest learning what the other half of the country thinks about, well, anything. Because the ignorance that certain members of the press have for anyone outside their immediate ideological bubble really is scandalous.
The New York Times published an essay recently bearing the none-too-subtle headline: “Billionaires Love This School Policy. Many Regular Parents Hate It.” The article is more than 1,500 words long, so here’s a brief summary: Public schools are good even when they’re failing because they’re diverse and equitable; school choice, which is the pet project of religious-fanatic billionaires, is bad.
You’re never going to believe what the author pegs as the real problem throughout: a lack of sufficient funding for the public-school system, which is subsidized separately from the school-choice voucher program, meaning that the latter does not siphon any cash from the state’s already generous allocation of wealth to the public-school systems.
Just how much wealth, you might ask. It’s to the tune of $105 billion. Or, to put another way, approximately the gross domestic product of Venezuela (or roughly the GDPs of Jordan and Bahrain combined).
At no point in the essay does the author, opinion writer Jessica Grose, bother to articulate or engage with the core conservative case for school choice. She treats the entire concept as a side hustle for the ideological wealthy, administered by crooked Republicans, and all to the detriment and loud protestations of self-described “superconservatives” in the Lone Star State. As far as the essay is concerned, school choice has nothing to do with freedom of movement or choice — a word that is otherwise hallowed in the Times newsrooms — but everything to do with kickbacks for weirdos, zealots, and people who apparently hate the disabled.
One cannot help but come away from the essay with the suspicion that the author doesn’t actually know what the conservative case for school choice is.
If it’s any consolation for Grose, she’s not alone in this sort of thing — operating with apparently total ignorance about a major conservative position. We’ve covered this phenomenon before, the reality that many in media have no idea what conservatives actually think or believe.
One memorable example came shortly before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, when liberal commentator Noah Smith suggested that pro-life conservatives would support abortion if only they knew how much it disproportionately affects minority communities.
“OK,” he remarked on social media, “who’s going to be the first to let conservatives know that since people of color are disproportionately high users of abortion, banning abortion will hasten the ‘Great Replacement.’”
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the pro-life movement would know that it regards abortion’s disproportionate effect on poor and minority communities as one of its great sins. Indeed, it’s the fact that Planned Parenthood specifically targets these vulnerable communities that motivates the lion’s share of the pro-life movement’s ire.
It is such an ingrained talking point among pro-lifers that during a primary debate Ben Carson casually mentioned the spittle-flecked eugenicist racism of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. This both shocked and outraged members of the press who apparently had no idea of any such history. Smith would’ve known all of this had he spent more time with people outside of his immediate circle.
Puck News’ Julia Ioffe displayed a similar ignorance when she characterized the concept of paternal responsibility as novel to the pro-life movement. “If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute?” she said. “Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone?”
Pro-lifers support stable two-parent households, yes. Have these people ever met a pro-lifer?
Elsewhere, in the same genre of “not knowing things,” the New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones once sought to criticize school-choice advocates for supposedly not doing exactly what they propose to do.
“Why do ‘school choice’ advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities?” she asked. “They don’t really want choice, they want privatization.”
The elimination of boundaries and allowing underprivileged students to attend the same schools as their wealthier peers — this is called “school choice.”
Though it alone cannot account for the generally inferior quality of reporting outside of the main media hubs in New York, D.C., and L.A., the ignorance of journalists regarding the world outside their own is a large part of the explanation. It’s really no more complicated than this. A great deal of people who claim to cover the country and the world for a living have little idea what anyone outside of their immediate community wants or believes. It’s all general ideas and assumptions, which is how you can get the specter of a journalist threatening pro-lifers with responsible fatherhood.
There was a reason everyone in the press mis-predicted the 2016 election: They couldn’t fathom meaningful support for Trump, let alone a Trump victory. It’s shameful that an industry whose job is to document and explain the world missed the electoral power and existence of some 63 million voters.
Yet, here we are in 2026 and the problem still persists in many corners, including in coverage of school choice, the right to life, and even in the coverage of the Supreme Court, where every decision is analyzed through the prism that believes the Republicans justices are as partisan and ideologically lockstep as the court’s liberal bloc.
So, just as abroad programs are predicated on the belief that it is good for a student’s overall formation for him to be exposed to different cultures, so too should we start thinking about abroad programs for aspiring journalists, sending them off to the hinterlands of Muncie, Ind., for a few months.
Sure, Muncie may not be as glamorous as a semester in Rome, but the service is better. Plus, a “Semester in the Midwest” initiative may go a long way toward keeping the broader press informed of what the other 50 percent of this country thinks about, well, anything.