Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses.
Those who can afford it left the city, shining a spotlight on class divisions in the media.
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Real estate out here is too expensive for a working person, so the East Hampton Golf Club usually provides shared houses for its caddies. But Covid-19 means no boardinghouses, and no boarding means no caddies, and no caddies means that the media moguls who pay more than $400,000 to join (putting it in the middle range for initiation fees in the Hamptons) now must pull their own clubs around, which they’ve been telling one another reminds them of their youth, and which is just the kind of sacrifice that the coronavirus has brought to East Hampton.
That’s not all. The parties and attendant deals are off, and executives face a summer without tiki-torch-lit pathways leading to raw bar spreads on the beach, catered for tens of thousands of dollars for a few dozen friends. Parents are growing desperate: “With no camps being open, they’re looking for things to do,” said Boomer Jousma, a yacht broker, who has met that need by selling twice as many yachts as usual, including four of the $1 million-plus Vanquish brand in the last two weeks.
There’s also not so much Instagram. Everyone saw what happened when their neighbor, David Geffen, who paid $70 million for his spread on Lily Pond Lane in 2016, posted a picture of a sunset over his $590 million superyacht in late March and shared that he was “isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” provoking a wave of public shaming. Out here, they’re being careful to avoid both the disease and the anger seething out of New York City, where much of the working media is both exhausted from covering the story of their lives and in open revolt.
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Underlying much of this tension is a sense — in media as in the rest of American society — of just how deep the gaps can be. I felt that sting last week when I saw a tweet from Amber Jamieson raging about rich New Yorkers who fled the coronavirus, leaving behind spacious houses and apartments that would have made for a relatively easy quarantine. “Genuinely hope they feel deep shame their whole lives,” she wrote.
I was Ms. Jamieson’s editor at BuzzFeed News until earlier this year, and I couldn’t help thinking this was about me, since I headed up to Columbia County, N.Y., in early March, and so I called Ms. Jamieson, 34, an Australian native who lives in a studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to ask her what she meant.
“The biggest story in the world came to your front door and you left — that to me is insane,” she said, adding that her experience — the woman who works the front desk of her gym died, and she wrote about a funeral procession for another neighbor — has been essential to her reporting. “You left for your own personal safety and because it made you stressed and anxious.”
She paused.
“I feel bad that I feel like everybody should feel absolutely self-loathing and shame,” she said.
I asked Ms. Jamieson if what she was feeling was rooted in a desire for justice, or for better journalism, or just free-floating, Australian-inflected rage.
“All of those things,” she said.
Nothing personal, of course. Ms. Jamieson has reporter friends who left a small apartment for a place in Aspen; she understands that people have children, parents, health conditions. “They wanted more space for their kids, or to care for an elderly relative, OK, everyone has a reason,” she said. But she thinks that the bosses, and journalists, have a special obligation to stay: “Being a leader means staying with your people and seeing what they see.”
But Ms. Jamieson said it had been an eye-opening experience.
“It revealed the money in journalism — who has cash and who doesn’t and how much this industry is from people with trust funds or well-connected parents and they could stay in the Hamptons or the Catskills,” she said. (On that note, I should disclose again that I don’t extensively cover BuzzFeed, which I left in February, in this column because I have yet to divest my stock options in the company, as required by The Times.)
more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/business/media/media-executives-hamptons.html
best comment in response:
https://nyti.ms/3fuMQWK#permid=107606522
Media bosses' and news readers' extreme wealth goes a long way to explain the infuriating obsession with propping up the status quo. This system benefits them and that is why, while their front-line people are being harassed and assaulted at Trump rallies and beaten by police, they push the both-sides narrative with such vigor and always have. Truth and facts have taken a back seat to "balance" for years. Judith Miller ring any bells? There is not a left/right bias in media. It is a bias in favor of the oligarchs at all costs and that is because the oligarchs run the media. This article confirms the suspicions of most people who have been paying attention.
= new reply since forum marked as read
should be viewed with a skeptical eye. 
and all his right-wing minions, funders and corporate friends.
It's a hard job but the ultra-wealthy feel they must do it......
KY.......
The virus doesn't care what your race, creed, or socioeconomic status is. 
because every time something happens to throw the grabbers onto their own devices, I think of it:
The word is, folks from down south...coastal northeast / coastal New England...are buying Vermont property sight unseen, cash on the barrel head. I guess as a potential "safe place" when things flare again this Winter. Not sure, but I'd suspect the same in the NY north country, northern NH and northern ME. Well...they better remember their wintaa tieaas or they'll starve to death by spring. Summer here lasts for 6 weeks and then it's back to the deep freeze.
