The Deepest Bias in Media? Fear of Looking Old
you know who tweets the Steve Buscemi "how do you do, fellow kids?" picture to accuse someone else of being old? old people
Media bias is tough to define and tougher to speak about intelligently. I’ve often tried to find an elegant, short way to convey the fact that the media is structurally capitalist, militarist, and nationalist, with certain strong status quo biases, profoundly anti-left, and yet also fundamentally liberal, almost hegemonically so on cultural and social issues. I’ve never found one. But I’m also increasingly convinced that the various axes of what we might call media bias are always more interesting when they aren’t simplistically binary or partisan. And perhaps the most powerful of them all is the bias against looking old.
For various reasons of sociology, education, and self-selection, media tends to attract the types of people who are deeply invested in seeing themselves in a certain light in regards to youth and engagement with contemporary culture. Obviously, those who write about pop culture have a particular inherent professional incentive to privilege the new and the young. We tend to think of media bias in terms of partisan valence, but even on the conservative side, there’s been a sea change in the direction of a culture of radicalism and disruption where staid normalcy once reigned. The shift from a George Will to a Ben Shapiro, in other words, is a meaningful one, and of course in context with some of the “new right” freaks Shapiro is positively restrained. And the left, always associated with the young and the new, has become particularly obsessive as generational demographics have become more decisive in the spectacle of politics, as the generation we call “Boomers” went from being the young radicals to the selfish fogeys, hoarding the American dream. Social media opened the door for people in the industry to directly express and enforce a set of values, and a core value was lionizing the young - the young were left and the left was young, at least in the progressive imagination, and anyway, no one wants to feel old.
More, our culture has just gotten more and more blatantly obsessive about celebrity and physical attractiveness, both of which are largely provinces of the young, just as we’ve engendered a culture of self-obsession and “main character syndrome.” And we’ve built cultural structures to defend those obsessions, most obviously the way that old people love to accuse other people of being old as a way to foreclose on criticism of the young. When some 37-year-old music critic dismisses someone else as An Old for criticizing any element of youth culture, when a bunch of softening soccer parents take to X to defend a perceived slight against Gen Z, that’s the communal fear of aging expressing itself, taking the form of those who are most afraid of aging themselves.