Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy is a 2021 nonfiction book by Batya Ungar-Sargon. Ungar-Sargon argues in the book that race-conscious wokeness provided by print media consumed by upper-class, educated readers has replaced the class-conscious reporting for a wider readership that dominated U.S. media in earlier periods, going back at least to the penny press era when low-cost newspapers were consumed by all classes. The book says that an identity politics based culture war has become the focus of media "catering almost exclusively to the interests of urban, upper-class liberals". Washington Independent Review of Books  called it "the most penetrating analysis" of the state of mainstream media.