The American media has a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.
“ Bootleggers and Baptists ” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.
There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.
Across the ideological spectrum, from the Chomskyite left to the Bannonite right, partisans, politicians and journalists themselves inflate the power, influence and importance of “the media.”
Let’s stay with the journalists for a moment. Members of all professions have a tendency to hold themselves in high regard. Nearly everyone, from politicians to plumbers, wants to believe that what they do matters. But with the possible exceptions of politicians and actors, journalists probably have the highest estimation of their own importance.
My point isn’t that they’re wrong — heck, I like to believe what I do matters. It’s that they exaggerate not just their power and influence but also their celebrity and personal authority. Heart surgeons are famously arrogant, but there is not an endless stream of conferences, books, editorials, essays and academic courses dedicated to the indispensable role of cardiothoracic medicine. I doubt there is any sanitation or plumbing trade journal that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Sewage” on its front page.
In psychological terms alone, it’s in the interests of journalists to encourage the widespread obsession with the Fourth Estate. But the media are a mess in part because they believed their own hype.
I should be clear: I’ve had my own obsessions over the years, working as a conservative media critic and writing scores of columns about liberal media bias — which is real.
But I’ve grown weary with media criticism, again not because the criticisms are necessarily wrong but because they overestimate the power of the institutions they question. That’s the Baptist and Bootlegger problem: The outsize power and influence of the media is a lie that all sides have agreed on.
It’s like American journalism is an exhausted prizefighter on the brink of collapse, held up by his opponent to give the crowd a good show.
According to many on the right — who often unwittingly repurpose old left-wing formulations first introduced by progressives, “cultural Marxists” and other lefty bogeymen — “the media” create narratives and manufacture consent (a term coined by Walter Lippmann and adopted by Noam Chomsky) that the rest of us are powerless to overcome.
Consider climate change. The press has invested vast resources to climate coverage and has been hectoring and catastrophizing about it for 20 years. And yet, climate change remains at or near the bottom of every public opinion survey about the “most important issue.” If the media can manufacture consensus, why is there so little consensus about climate change?
This is just one example of the media thinking not just that it should — but can — define the interests of the public. The amount of energy and handwringing that has been put into, say, AP Stylebook revisions over terms like “ illegal immigrant ” or whether to capitalize “Black” or “white” when discussing race is premised on a grandiose theory of the role of the press as guardians of the American mind or soul. The whole “defund the police” conversation in the press transpired amid near-zero support for the idea among most Americans.
Or consider Donald Trump. I’m no fan, but I look like a MAGA rally front-seater compared to many in the media (and not just among opinion columnists), and yet Trump not only won but improved his standing with nearly every demographic group.
The response from some on the left is a variant of the old “but real socialism has never been tried!” trope. If only the media had really held him accountable — or took climate change, race, etc., more seriously — things would be different.
The response from many in the media is to wrap themselves in the mantle of heroic martyrdom as Trump attacks them.
And on the right, the ineffectiveness of the media to control the narrative is occasionally celebrated but it never diminishes the hysteria about its alleged omnipotence. The media, Michael Shellenberger insisted last summer, “is arguably more powerful than the government itself.”
Really? It has a funny way of showing it. The industry has been shrinking for decades. Since 2000, of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers saw the single sharpest decline, 77 percent. Trust in the media is in the gutter.
So here’s an idea for the press: Just tell the truth as best you can and stop worrying about narratives. The American people will write their own.
Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.