During an interview on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday, Howie Carr gave his perspective on the changing landscape of the news industry. He noted that in the past, the industry was primarily made up of working-class reporters who started at local news sources and worked their way up to larger media platforms.
“I mean, the, you know, newspapers in the old days, it was a sort of a working-class, blue-collar trade,” Howie Carr explained. “And after Watergate, it just the sort of the upper classes, the elites, the legacy started moving into it, and it’s totally different now,” he said.
Carr says the industry is mainly controlled by a small group of privileged individuals who often defer to those in positions of power.
Howie Carr discussed his new memoir, Paper Boy – Read All About It. The memoir covers Carr’s journey in journalism, radio, and television. Boyle recognized Carr’s influence as a conservative figure in Massachusetts for many years and asked him to share his observations on the changes in the newspaper industry throughout his career.
“As I say in the book, there used to be a farm system. You know, I started at the Winston-Salem Journal, worked my way up back to Massachusetts, and Tom Wicker, who worked for The New York Times, he came out of the Winston-Salem Journal too and worked his way up, but now, Matt, as you know, I mean, there is no farm system. If there’s a farm system, it’s, you know, you work as an aide to a coat holder on Capitol Hill to the Democrats,” stated Carr.
Carr highlighted the past work of CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC News’s Chuck Todd, and ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos for Democrat politicians.
“Jake Tapper, you know, he worked for Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law, and she was married to a corrupt congressman, and she was a congresswoman,” Carr said, referring to Marjorie Margolies.
“Or you have seen Chuck Todd, who worked for stolen valor Tom Harkin, a senator, or Stephanopoulos, who ran the bimbo eruptions unit for the Clinton campaign in ’92. I mean, that’s the farm system now… It’s not just the internet that’s destroyed newspapers,” he added.
According to Carr, modern-day reporters act more like obedient pets, following the orders of those in authority instead of questioning their actions. As the author of The Brothers Bulger, he has always aimed to serve the working-class audience, including the people he encountered on his train rides and at bars.
“And, you know, it’s like one-man bands now. It’s guerrilla journalism is what it is, and it’s really unfortunate,” he added.
