Hannah Groch-Begley put together some interesting statistics from Media Matters, The Media in 2014 by the Numbers. None of it is shocking, but it is all disturbing.

She started the article with what is perhaps the most surprising statistic: none of the top editors at the ten biggest newspapers are women. That statistic wouldn’t be surprising if we were talking about almost any other industry. But women are extremely well represented in writing. I have always taken this to indicate that women are naturally better writers. That’s certainly been my experience. I had to work very hard to write as well as most of my female friends who didn’t ever work on it. Regardless, if you look at technical writers, there are more women than men. On the other hand, in Hollywood, where I assume the money is better and the prestige is more, there are more men. Regardless, I would think the new business would do better. But of course not! Silly me to be the least bit optimistic.

There is a pair of statistics that I’ve seen before that I’m not sure is as meaningful as it seems:

The truth of the matter is that the Ebola freak out seems to have just corresponded to the interests of the Republican Party. And I doubt it mattered anyway. I don’t think that Democratic voters stayed home because they felt that the administration was doing a bad job with it. What I think is a bigger issue is that if a Republican had been in the White House, Ebola would have received perhaps a quarter of the coverage. Fox News would have covered it in a completely reasonable way and the other news stations would have followed suit. In fact, there would have been a huge backlash against anyone who didn’t. They would have rightly been criticized for fomenting fear. But when a Democrat is in the White House, nothing is off the table. We should be very concerned that the mainstream media allow the Overton Window to be set by conservative media.

A couple of statistics that really struck me had to do with experts. First, only 3% of economic segments in the first half of 2014 featured an economist. Now, when you consider the state of the economics profession, maybe that isn’t so bad. I suspect that a good deal of that 3% was made up with Arthur Laffer. Just the same, it shows the media really aren’t interested in expertise — they figure economics is simple and everyone has valid opinions on it. They just want some politician on the two arbitrary “sides” of the issue and that’s that.

The other statistic is of much greater concern: on education segments during 2014, only 9% included educators. As with the economist, the media seem to think that teaching is simple. Why talk to teachers about education? After all, everybody knows that teachers just care about working as little as possible and taking home those big ol’ pay checks! Am I right?! But unlike economists who are to a large extent incompetent apologists for the power elite, teachers actually do know something about education. But the power elite would prefer to leave them out of the conversation. And the mainstream media are more than willing to oblige.

There are are lot more factoids in the article. The ones that I mentioned are just the ones that stood out to me. But there is much of interest. I suspect that next year, Media Matters will be able to write the same article with a minimum of editing.

It is Sunday, and so Thomas Frank has an article that is well worth reading, Chain Restaurants Are Killing Us: Billionaire Bankers, Minimum-Wage Toilers and the Nasty Truth About Fast-Food Nation. He focused on workers and the corporate elite because none of the franchise owners would talk to him. But he asked, “I wonder how many chain-store bosses can truthfully say they make an ‘honest living.'” I think I have a little insight into that.

Do franchise owners work hard? In my experience, yes. But they don’t work harder than their employees. They will, of course, sometimes get behind the counter or in the kitchen and kick a little ass — like they are the best workers around. But this kind of work represents the exception: maybe a couple of hours a week at most. Their primary function is as “manager.” I put the scare quotes on there because the truth of the matter is that the corporations don’t allow much in terms of management. The franchises are meant to be idiot proof — and that is as true for the worker at the register as it is for the owner managing the place. And this is generally only at the start of the franchise. The whole idea is for the owner to leave the whole thing to others who are less well paid.

The main thing is that the franchise owners get paid far more for whatever it is that they do. Of course, the idea in a capitalism is that people ought to be paid just for owning something. I’m not against this idea in theory. In practice, in the United States, it’s a travesty. It is why we hear this lie about the entrepreneur — the woman who “took a chance.” But that’s not what I consider an entrepreneur. This definition of entrepreneur just highlights the fact that business success is mostly a matter of luck. Borrow a bunch of money, start a business, go bankrupt. Repeat that process until you don’t go bankrupt. I’m all for bankruptcy laws — and I think it should be a lot easier for individuals to go bankrupt — but there is no denying that it is a form of socialism. In fact, for the right class of people, business is all about socialism: using the common resources to help you make it big.

So what we really see in the comparison of franchise owners versus franchise workers is which ones have the opportunities to buy a franchise. Is it the case that a minimum wage worker would ever make enough money that she too could take the risk and buy a McDonald’s franchise with $750,000 in non-borrowed cash? Where is the equality of opportunity there? So of course this isn’t about the brave entrepreneur who is willing to take risks. Everyone takes risks every day. I love this quote from Melissa Harris-Perry:

I come back to this idea again and again that conservatives (and many “liberals”) are deluded in thinking that if outcomes are dictated by the “free” market, they are “natural” — and therefore correct. The truth is that there aren’t any markets that are free. Markets themselves are communal constructs. The idea that I’ve been grappling with the last couple of year is how it makes any kind of sense that the nature of a society should dictate the rewards. For example, before movies, actors had to work every day — often multiple performances per day. The most successful ones became rich. But they were nowhere near as rich as the most successful actors today who might only work a month out of the year. The difference has nothing to do with the actor; it is entirely due to the technology that the actors had no part in creating. The same thing can be said about every other industry. Just look at the effects container ships have had on the narrowing of manufacturing industries.

The bottom line to all of this is that capitalism is not a just way to allocate resources. And even if it were, those with the most resources would use them to tilt the playing field in their favor. Instead of the government molding capitalism to work better, it has been molded to work worse. There are programs to mitigate the worst poverty, because the power elite know that starving children with bare feet begging in the streets causes a backlash that they can’t control. But other than this, the government mostly works to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. And the richer one is, the bigger the handouts.

Afterword

If you click over to the Melissa Harris-Perry video, you will hear Monica Mehta claim that 5% of the people pay 40% of the taxes. I’m pretty sure that would be 40% of the federal income taxes — a common conservative deception. But regardless, the number means nothing, given that the 5% makes a whole lot more than 5% of the income. People like Mehta disgust me.

See also: I Was a Middle Class Food Stamp Kid