Are You In Gringrich's "Media Elite?" It Depends On Your Alternative Energy Views

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Bashing the  “media elite” has become a standard theme in former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s campaign speeches.
But just who is the media elite? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Karen Langley asked Gingrich for a definition when the Republican presidential hopeful campaigned in Cumberland County this weekend.
His definition, you may be surprised to learn, has a lot to do with alternative energy proposals:

“I’ll give you a real simple test,” Gingrich said. “Do you automatically assume that Obama’s right? Chris Matthews wake up every morning saying I wonder what wonderful thing Obama’s going to say today. So if you wake up skeptical and wondering –”
He returned to an example from his speech this afternoon, when he made fun of President Obama for saying the country could replace some of its imported oil with gasoline and diesel derived from algae.
“If you think that’s weird, you’re not in the elite media,” he said. “If you think, gosh, that would be wonderful, if only we could have algae, then you’re probably in the elite media. I’ll let you define yourself.”

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