As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Twitter, “A closed circle of young, college educated staffers is likely to end up further off-center the more they talk to themselves.” The mainstream media, and staffers’ internal fights spilling onto Twitter, are an important part of how the progressive vanguard talks to itself — and as the media skews ever-leftward, it helps sustain a rarefied bubble where divisive slogans such as “defund the police” can be questioned only with great delicacy, while significantly more popular propositions like “use the military to help police quell riots” cannot be defended at all.

This inevitably affects campaign coverage, and in ways that arguably make it harder for Democrats to pivot away from divisive identity politics. Shor can insist all he wants that Hillary Clinton’s campaign ought to have focused on her higher-polling economic message, but as his critics note, the media paid far more attention to Trump’s problems with immigrants, women and racial minorities, leaving Clinton limited scope to set a different agenda.

The media can probably afford to live in that bubble, even if it means that the public identifies commentators and other journalists as extensions of left-wing political campaigns, rather than neutral arbiters. (Many Republicans already see the media that way, and independents may be starting to.) Outlets depend less and less on advertisers that shun controversy and more on a select group of highly educated, politically engaged subscribers who generally prefer Democrats to Republicans, and may well prefer the linguistic politics of the educated class — “Latinx” instead of “Hispanic,” or “birthing people” instead of “women” — and policies such as defunding the police over putting more cops on the street.