> I think #2 is made worse because it tends to be young journalists writing those stories from places like Brooklyn after having graduated from a journalism masters program at NYU or Columbia. Yeah, they’re going to have lots of student debt, high living costs, and low-ish income, and their reporting is going to reflect that.

That's a very good point. Our perception is significantly influenced by the biases of the people whose jobs are to give us things to attend to. That can inflate the obsessions of those people way out of proportion to their objective size.