Imperial City: Why the Media Doesn't Care About the Poor

This isn’t an excuse. The media is intentionally protecting Barack Obama at all costs (see: cover up, Libya), and the media is populated by hive minds terrified of what might happen should they jump off the Narrative Plantation and actually report on the state of the economy. But via Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit, we learn a third reason the media doesn’t care about those struggling in Obama’s economy: Washington DC has become the Imperial City:

The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now–as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums–that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress.  … Washington’s fortunes and America’s are increasingly at odds. The region is prospering because it’s becoming something that would have horrified the Founders: an imperial capital on the Potomac.

Hey, if you’re going to allow yourself to become a tool of the state, it must ease the conscience some if your surroundings insulate you from a reality you’re trying to pretend doesn’t exist. Reynolds wrote about this himself back in November:

Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly, in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.

Throughout the Obama “recovery,”  I’ve lived in both Southern California and Western North Carolina. In east Los Angeles, I saw store-front after store-front after store-front close and never re-open; the main drag looked bombed out, and these were all small businesses. Here in my small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, after eighteen months, my ridiculously employable wife still can’t find a full-time job — which cost us our health insurance.

Last week the unemployment rate increased, hardly enough jobs were created to keep up with population growth, and the GDP tanked over three-points into negative territory. And yet, the reaction to this troubling news from the sycophant media ranged from spinning it as good news, to blaming it on a lack of the government largesse that funds the go-go DC life to which the elite media have become accustomed.

There’s just no group of people more provincial or culturally myopic than the media. If I were to poll my small southern town,  I have no doubt I’d discover that more of my neighbors have spent at least a week in a  New York or a DC or a Los Angeles than members of the media have spent in a small southern town.

• Hundreds murdered in Chicago: Connecticut.
• The economy tanked: The government’s too small.
• Unemployment increased: That’s a good thing.
• Poverty increased: Todd Akin said rape.
• Personal incomes are declining: Romney’s taxes.
• The labor force has shrunk to thirty-year levels:  Birth control.
• Gas prices nearly doubled: Gay marriage.
• Long-term unemployment is 14.4%: Look at the Dow.
• 1-in-5 are on food stamps: Racist.

For a few years now, I’ve watched the media closely, and almost as sickening as the Obama worship, is the culture. Though there are a few exceptions (too few), these people all think alike, talk alike, report alike, like the same things, and desperately want to be liked by one another. They’re cloistered and corrupt and indifferent and/or bigoted towards anything outside their culture.

But why should they care? They live in DC — a city that creates, manufactures, and innovates nothing — and lives high on the hog off the tribute of the forgotten.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC