Do the media really know how the other half lives? In America this is a never-ending debate as journalists in the bigger newspapers, television reporters and pundits move up the social scale.
What is seen as a widening gap between the media and the people they write for is making editors and publishers worry about the "credibility" of newspapers and how they are losing touch with their readers.
For the American Society of Newspaper Editors this disconnection means constant surveys to see what readers really want as circulations dip and the Internet becomes a rival source of news and features.
Peter Brown, an editor at the Orlando Sentinel in Florida has been doing his own research on his fellow journalists' life-styles for a book not yet published. He sent questionnaires to about 500 journalists and a similar number of residents in five cities and compared their answers.
Then, in another approach, he used the home addresses of 3,400 journalists in 13 news organisations to build up a "profile" of how they live.
Mr Brown used the help of a "precision marketer" called Claritas in Alexandria, Virginia.
"It's a very clear picture of people who live lives differently than their customers," says Mr Brown.
"It doesn't make a difference if the guy who repairs your air conditioner lives the life you do. But journalists' view of the world determines not just how they cover a story, but what stories they cover."
Until about 1965, journalism was seen as an upper-end working class activity where in big cities the reporter was paid about the same as a policeman and tended to live in the same neighbourhoods as the mass of the readers.
But now most journalists have university degrees, are better paid and are moving into upmarket housing.
The leading TV anchor men and women earn millions of dollars a year and are bigger celebrities than most politicians.
Mr Brown refers to the Dayton Daily News which brought in a consultant to re-build its circulation.
She discovered that in industrial Dayton many workers bring lunch packs to work but the paper's food editor insists on articles about salmon, artichokes and asparagus.
"There is a gap," the consultant said later, "between what one could refer to as normal people and journalists."
Mr Brown says that "Journalists are now paid well enough in most markets that their peers are no longer cops or teachers but lawyers and politicians.
"They shake few calloused hands in their off-hours and they don't have enough contact with their audience when they are working. All that gives them a poor feel for the mass of Americans."
His surveys show that journalists are less likely to form families, have children, go to church, do volunteer community service, own homes, put down roots or be the same age as others who live in the communities where they work.
Using a "cluster" name supplied by Claritas, Mr Brown also profiled journalists by where they lived - mostly in neighbourhoods with cluster names such as "money and brains" (two-earner couples, expensive condos or townhouses, few children, their own Jacuzzi and a liking for jazz and sailing); but avoided rural areas labelled "shotguns and pickups" (low real estate prices, families who eat Wheaties, drink whiskey and go to car racing or bowling).
Journalists, unlike huge numbers of middle Americans, are more likely to belong to country clubs, have maids, own a Mercedes, play squash and buy and sell shares, often because they have few or no children, Mr Brown claims.
Journalists are over-represented in neighbourhoods where the residents are twice as likely as other Americans to drink Chablis, rent foreign movies, own an espresso maker and read magazines such as Architectural Digest and Food & Wine.
For Mr Brown the conclusion is that journalists "simply do not share political, religious or monetary values with the general population". A distinguished media commentator, Bill Kovach, curator for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, is equally perturbed.
"More and more journalists are part of the elite, socially and economically, of the country," he told Editor and Publisher magazine.
"That gap between them and the mass of the citizens who rely on them and depend on them makes you nervous."
Lacking a Mercedes, maid and Jacuzzi, but living in a fairly affluent neighbourhood, I believe these fears are exaggerated. There is constant self-analysis in the American media and whole magazines devoted to criticism of newspapers and television in a way not matched in probably any other country.
There is, however, a middle class bias in most coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post because the readership is clearly middle class but the latter paper has won recent prizes for series on police brutality experienced in the poorer areas and on the treatment of poorer people in mental institutions.
What is called the "status revolution" for journalists is now fait accompli in the US as in most European countries, at least for those working for national newspapers and television stations. Reporters with an unconscious bias in favour of "haves" rather than "have nots" can still correct this according to James Fallows, author of Breaking the News - How the media undermine American Democracy.
This can be done by journalists "deliberately exploring" conditions of life they are not familiar with.
Any suggestions?