It has everything to do with class and epistemic closure.

Interesting confirmation of one part of thesis I have frequently argued - that part of the shoddiness and unreliability of the prestige media in the US is a function of cultural homogeneity bubbles.  The prestige media is concentrated in a small handful of cities (Washington, D.C. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago), they are far more likely to baseline their norms on the unusual circumstances of those cities (massive inequality, low religiosity, high crime, heavy government regulation, etc.), they have a disproportionate overrepresentation of "elite" credentials from exclusive universities, they are overwhelmingly registered Democrats, they earn significantly more than the average American and experience little in the way of the prototypical American life.  

They socialize with one another, they herd-like cover the same stories, they share the same postmodernist mindsets, they hobnob with governmental and commercial elite.  And, unstated, they seem to believe themselves to be Plato's unacknowledged Philosopher Kings while everyone else views them as intellectual idiots living experientially circumscribed lives, the very exemplars of Dunning-Krueger arrogance.  

But all that is a set of aggregated anecdotes rather than empirical data.  From Graduates of Elite Universities Dominate the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Study Finds by Zaid Jilani.  The original research is Expertise in Journalism: Factors Shaping a Cognitive and Culturally Elite Profession by Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina.  

From the Abstract:

What qualities are important in the development of journalism expertise? And how can the study of elite journalists shed light on our understanding of expertise more broadly? This study examined a sample of 1,979 employees of The New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal(WSJ), arguably two of the most influential papers in the U.S. and the world. Almost half of the people who reach the pinnacle of the journalism profession attended an elite school and were likely in the top 1% of cognitive ability. This means top 1% people are overrepresented among the NYT and WSJ mastheads by a factor of about 50.  Placed in the context of other elite occupations, this provides evidence for the influence of the cognitive elite across a wide variety of expertise, including domains that provide prestige and influence rather than monetary rewards. Roughly 20% attended an Ivy League school. Writers were drawn from higher-ranking schools, reflecting higher cognitive ability than demonstrated by editors’ schools. Almost all elite journalists graduated from college, and the majority did not major in journalism(roughly 80% of typical journalists graduate from college). Only a handful of select schools feed the mastheads of the NYT and the WSJ, suggesting the importance of networks. Data on typical journalists were analyzed to provide characteristics of editors and reporters/correspondents. This approach shows that cognitive ability should be accounted for in more comprehensive theoretical models of expertise and that deliberate practice cannot be the full explanation of success.  It also provides a unique test of the generality of expertise models into more nontraditional expertise domains such as journalism and other occupations and ultimately may shed light on the extent to which general cognitive ability, the role of selective institutions, opportunity, and other factors may play in expertise development broadly.

 I set high store by cognitive ability - it is materially predictive of many desirable life outcomes.  But it is not the be-all and end-all.  It is influential but not determinative.  The corollary is true as well; people of more moderate cognitive ability are also fully capable of achieving disproportionate desirable life outcomes.

What is the missing elixir?  Knowledge, experience, skills, values, behaviors, capability, motivation, etc.  

Wai and Perina seem to focus more on cognitive ability.  I am looking at this from a broader perspective.  IQ is important but it does not strongly predict overall success/ability.  Many professions have far lower a representation of elite universities among their senior achievers.  And, crucially, those individuals often operate successfully across multiple fields.  A leading CEO can transition to successfully running a government agency or a non-profit or a university in a fashion not conceivable for journalists.  

What I am interested in is the epistemic closure arising from the majority of prestige journalists attending the same 40 universities.  Yes, they are bright, but they can be extraordinarily circumscribed in their knowledge, experience and perspective.  It is also important to keep in sight that the great majority of the brightest people actually graduate from solid but non-elite universities.  

The fact that "elite" educations are not synecdoche for significant beneficial life outcomes or achievement is demonstrated in this table.

Click to enlarge.

Millionaires, Federal judges, Fortune 500 CEOs, and even US Senators are far more consequential and successful than prestige journalists and yet come from measurably less prestigious education backgrounds.  They probably have as high or higher IQs than the prestige journalists but more importantly they almost certainly have a richer mix of knowledge, experience, skills, values, behaviors, capability, motivation, etc.  than your average NYT journalist.

There is a great irony in here which is not infrequently observed but rarely really discussed.

For all the postmodernist, critical theory left leaning, equity and equality obsesses world views demonstrated by prestige journalists, those journalists emphatically do not look like America.  They are naive novices of a sheltered priesthood.

It has nothing to do with their simplistic obsessions about race and gender.  It has everything to do with class and epistemic closure.  Prestige journalists cannot report accurately or usefully on America because they are experientially and ideologically homogenous and distinct from all those charting success in American society at large.