A sneer can often reveal far more about the sneerer than the object of their derision. This week, the leader of the opposition used the platform of prime minister’s questions to highlight the long-standing crisis of Britain’s bus services. What with there being 4.65bn bus journeys a year – two and half times more than train journeys – you might think this would be considered quite important. Instead, Tory MPs howled with contempt, bellowing “Taxi!” The commentariat followed in quick step. “A question about buses. That will win it!” spluttered the Sun. “Corbyn on buses. Jesus wept,” eyerolled the Times’s sketch writer. “Is it PMQs or transport questions?” cackled ITV’s political correspondent. “No 10 will not be able to believe their luck,” mocked the Spectator’s political editor.

These responses are as unsurprising as they are revealing. If you live in London, where politicians and media commentators spend most of their time, you are spoilt for transport choices – trains, an extensive underground network and a regular bus service. That’s because London resisted Thatcher’s deregulation of buses in 1986. Outside the capital, buses are often a rip-off, unreliable and are being slashed away – the number of trips has halved.

According to the Campaign for Better Transport, there has been a £182m cut – that’s 45% – in local authority supported bus services in the last eight years, while 3,347 routes have been altered, reduced or cancelled altogether. In the past year alone, 77 bus routes have been reduced or cancelled in the north-west, along with 44 in Yorkshire and Humber and 45 in the east of England. Bus fares, as Jeremy Corbyn noted, have risen three times faster than wages.

If you’ve never lived outside London, and if you’ve always had a car, it’s difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.

Rail privatisation is widely, and rightly, commented on as a striking example of the utter bankruptcy of market fundamentalism. But the rip-off train fares and poor service are disproportionately endured by the more affluent: in 2015, the highest earners took four times as many rail trips as the lowest earners (though cheaper fares would help to change that). While 61% of Londoners used rail that year, just 40% of Welsh people did. When it comes to buses, those earning less than £25,000 a year make up two-thirds of journeys. If you live in Cornwall, you are not only in the second-poorest region in northern Europe, you also have to shell out £12 for a bus day pass.

Buses may be a joke in the Westminster bubble, but for those outside the capital on modest or low incomes this is a basic bread-and-butter issue that is not being addressed or discussed. We are constantly told that Corbynism is a London metropolitan phenomenon – normally, bizarrely, by metropolitan Londoners in the media – and yet when he raises an issue affecting millions outside the capital, it’s treated as an obscure diversion. Apparently we are supposed to allow Brexit to suck the oxygen out of everything, that everything else must fester by the roadside until it’s all sorted (presumably sometime in the mid-24th century).

‘For those outside the capital on modest or low incomes this is a basic bread-and-butter issue that is not being addressed or discussed.’ Photograph: Alamy

A more self-aware media response would be: hang on, why do we fail to report this national crisis?

Is it maybe, just maybe, that we are nowhere near as representative of the wider population as we should be? According to the Sutton Trustin 2016, over half of Britain’s top journalists are privately educated, compared with 7% of the population. Another government study found that journalism was second only to doctors when it came to hailing from a managerial or professional background. It is one of the most socially exclusive professions in Britain.

It is an obvious point that a profession so dominated by the privileged is going to struggle to understand issues that do not resonate with their lived experiences. Like bus travel outside London. And when such issues are raised, rather than doing their job, they pour scorn at something they do not deem relevant. Until that changes – until we have a national media that is representative of region, class, gender, sexuality, race and religion – then this critical institution will remain out of touch on issues that concern millions of people. The media thought buses were indicative of Corbyn’s own failures. Instead, they merely exposed their own.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist