Two exhibits in today's installment of "I don't know who these guys think their intended audience is, but I don't think this was written for me":
Exhibit no. 1: The front page of the New York Times food section carries an article headlined "Income Inequality And Great Wines." It complains that "Income Inequality Has Erased Your Chance to Drink the Great Wines." The lead example involves how "back in 1994, a bottle of Comte Georges de Vogüé Musigny 1991, a grand cru, retailed for $80 (the equivalent of $141 in 2020, accounting for inflation). Today, that bottle costs about $800."
"It is impossible for most people to pay for these wines," the Times article complains.
The article does not mention that $800 is less than the price of a seven-day home delivery subscription to the Times, which is now $20 a week, or $1,050 a year. Nor does it consider the possibility that a group of people might chip in and share an expensive bottle.
Toward the end, the article concedes, "I am admittedly simplifying a complex issue." It also concedes, "Diminishing access to great wines is certainly not a catastrophe."
Anyway, the whole thing seems slightly off. Whatever has caused the prices of these wines to increase faster than inflation, it isn't "income inequality." It's growth and global trade, which has expanded demand for these wines so that people in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi can buy and drink them.
I don't want to sound too dismissive—$800 is a significant sum, more than I have ever paid for a bottle of wine, and enough to make someone a sustaining subscriber of Smartertimes.com. But the Times routinely covers other even more expensive things—furniture, apartments, apparel, art, college educations—without dwelling on how readers' chance of obtaining them has been "erased."
Exhibit no. 2: The top opinion piece in the print Times is headlined "Why Socialists Should Vote for Biden." It's not a pro-Trump piece explaining that Biden is really pushing a socialist agenda. No, it's an earnest complaint that telling socialists it is okay to sit this one out "has a whiff of bourgeois liberalism to it"—as if that is a bad thing! And as if, in the closing days of the election, socialist New York Times readers are the key swing decisionmaking audience that needs addressing.
Anyway, maybe some significant portion of New York Times readers are socialists sulking about their inability to afford that French wine. That may even be the Times target audience, socialists embittered by not being able to afford the fancy French wine they desperately yearn to drink. For those who do not belong to that demographic, though, reading the paper these days can feel like listening in on someone else's conversation that you weren't meant to hear.