While the unpaid internship is finally facing scrutiny from courts and government commissions, simply eliminating those positions doesn’t solve the problem of privilege. Further, reliance on a privileged class threatens both the publishing industry and society as a whole:
Media organizations, like all organizations and especially prestige ones, are rife with pernicious attitudes and biases that go undetected by those who hold them. This is hegemony in action, of course, though media people might defensively blame the business: when you’re tasked with putting together a big, exhausting, collaborative project every month or week, you’re more likely to fall back on familiar cues when deciding who to bring on board—cues, like schooling, that are inevitably bound up with class. This does a great deal of harm, intended or not.
