Rating A Times Reporter's Social Class

TV networks have ratings-driven “sweeps weeks.” Upmarket newspapers, in contrast, go for “sleep weeks” when the guilt-ridden find themselves nodding off in the midst of a 97-part series on a Very Important Subject. For readers of a certain, dare I say it, social class, Sunday brought with it the daunting discovery that the New York Times intends to spend the next three (count them) weeks educating them Tom-Wolfe-style in the contemporary nuances of social class.

The topic is tricky to write about since no one (let alone a phalanx of earnest Times reporters) can be totally objective about where they stand in the status hierarchy. Typical was Paul Fussell’s 1983 book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which archly ridiculed the pretensions of every sub-category of Americans, except, curiously enough, academics who write about social class. Fussell created a special “X” group to cover self-aware creative thinkers like himself who floated blissfully above the status anxieties of Beverly Hills dentists and Dallas developers.

So the big question raised by this “Class Matters” series is how does the Times rate the status level of, say, a $120,000-a-year reporter for a New York City broadsheet armed with an Ivy League B.A. degree and $400,000 in assets. Rather than having to spend the next three weeks wading through enough words to rival the collected works of Henry James, the curious only have to plug in four simple values in an interactive “How Class Works” graphic on the Times web site.

Despite the scruffy, press-card-in-the-fedora lineage of journalism, our typical Times reporter is doing quite well, thank you, on the social-class grid. A bachelor’s degree alone (even without that membership in the Harvard Club) rates in the 91st educational percentile and a can’t-afford-Manhattan-real-estate $120,000 salary comes in at the 95-percent income level. Throw in an 85th percentile score for the $400,000 in real estate, used press passes and other tokens of wealth. All that is missing from the status equation is to find the added-value occupational boost of actually working for the Times.

Scroll down the menu under Media until you get to “News Analysts, Reporters, Correspondents.” Leaping Lois Lanes, what is this? How could a guardian of the First Amendment, a co-creator of this soon-to-be-legendary 21-part series, a courageous survivor of the Howell Raines era, possibly score in the 64th percentile in occupational status. Don’t you know who I am? Even the sociologists quoted endlessly in this series rated better at 65 percent.

So what is our take-away from this interactive investigation? The only thing keeping New York Times reporters from claiming their rightful places in the power elite is working for the New York Times.