There's a class war, all right. Guess who's winning.

COMMENTARY | July 10, 2012
 
Noted journalist Phil Meyer calls on reporters to follow the example of Barlett and Steele and see the patterns, the underlying structures that created and are perpetuating so much inequality.

By Philip Meyer
pmeyer@email.unc.edu

“Class warfare,” expressed as an epithet, keeps coming up in the election campaign as though it were something novel and dangerous. In reality, it is older than the republic.

And for the past four decades, the upper class has been getting the upper hand. Has anybody noticed?

Two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters did, and they put a spotlight on the class war two decades ago with a series in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1992, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele compiled their reports into a best-selling book, America: What Went Wrong.