The shift to an organized industry also has political implications—and not just because journalists are becoming more active through their union work. In the larger scheme of things, unionized media workers are starting to see the world and themselves in a new light. Journalism, like other creative-but-poor industries, is predicated on the idea that its practitioners are just lucky to be doing what they love; they’ve long been conditioned to believe that there’s something inherently prestigious, even noble, about this type of white-collar work. But as media jobs become more precarious, undermined by the same monopoly forces affecting workers in other parts of the economy, media workers are increasingly seeing themselves as workers first. This is what Marxist-minded leftists have long termed class consciousness, and that consciousness is spreading, within legacy and digital media brands alike. [...] To reclaim the foundations of a free press in America, media workers need to get serious about dismantling tech monopolies and implementing policies that would reverse our new Gilded Age. It seems to be no coincidence that countries that operate the freest press regimes, such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland, also have comparatively low income-inequality. The Jonah Perettis of the world think that they can solve the media crisis in isolation, without acknowledging that they are integral to and have benefited from the system that gave rise to this crisis in the first place. [...] What’s more, union activism can help bridge the yawning power dynamic that now separates tech monopolies from the flailing media sector. Tech companies will have to feel threatened if they’re going to implement reforms and meet media companies more than halfway—and the companies themselves clearly pose no threat at all. The way the media business works now is that Facebook and Google and Apple News reap the bulk of the profits produced by the labor of journalists—either by leapfrogging the ownership structure entirely or enlisting short-sighted owners, who mostly compete with one another, to give away their content for a pittance.

All in all, the creative landscape is starting to look more toxic than it's been in our lifetimes: Artists with million-dollar checks in their pockets are telling other artists that they shouldn't expect to get paid; publications are telling writers that they shouldn't expect to get paid, either; and meanwhile everyone wonders why we can't get more diversity in the creative ranks. One obvious way to reverse media's glut of wealthy white people would be to stop making it so few others but wealthy white people can afford to get into media. But in the age of dramatic newsroom layoffs and folding publications, nobody wants to hear that. So we trudge on, forgetting what a luxury it is to do what you want to do for a living rather than what you have to do to survive.