Beat the Press by Timothy Egan

"It’s  open season on journalists. More than 20,000 newsroom jobs have been lost in this country since 2001. Into the vacuum have emerged powerful partisan voices, injecting rumors and lies into the public arena, with no consequence.The true media elites are in talk radio and right-wing television — multimillionaire gasbags . Every day, nearly every hour, they attack reporters.Real reporters get threatened, or vilified on social media, while trying to cover city hall, the state legislature, a rally of heavily armed militants or a campus protest. The main reason that Republican politicians sound so crazy of late is because they get their information, and validation, from the twisted world of partisan media outlets. Meanwhile the mean salary of reporters in 2013 was $44,360 poverty-level wages.Take this perspective into account the next time you hear somebody attack the “media elites.”