In an editorial published one month after Donald Trump’s surprise election win in 2016, the New York Times lamented the “breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts.” Waxing nostalgic for the days when everyone, on the Left and the Right, would tune in every night to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the news on CBS, the New York Times editorial cast Trump as a fabulist immune to facts. Without people like Cronkite, or a president and other politicians who “care about the truth,” media organizations “that report fact without regard for partisanship, and citizens who think for themselves, will need to light the way,” the New York Times concluded.

There is a deep irony in the New York Times trying to reclaim Adolph Ochs’s goal of providing the news “without fear or favor” at a time when 91% of New York Times readers identify as Democrats. Moreover, the New York Times played a significant role, perhaps unintentionally, in the breakdown of the Cronkite consensus era and the compartmentalization of the news into left and right. A closer look reveals that the real dichotomy is not political at all — it is based on class.