See no evil

Yesterday ABC News posted a headline that read “54 shot over weekend in Chicago as governor rejects Trump’s threat to send in National Guard.” On “This Week,” Martha Raddatz interviewed Maryland Governor Wes Moore about President Trump sending troops to DC. When he tried to explain that the National Guard had no experience with local policing, she referenced an “87% reduction in carjackings.” Both stories adopted the talking points of the Trump administration wholesale.

Meanwhile the New York Times had a much less convoluted story that was more refreshing in its honesty. The headline read “Crime Festers in Republican States While Their Troops Patrol Washington.” The piece, by David Chen, noted that “Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics.” Chen pointed out that Nashville also reports a higher rate of violent crime than Washington (not that the reverse being true would justify occupation regardless). 

Some of what I’m seeing these days looks familiar. When I used to teach martial arts and self defense all over DC, I designed programs for both adults and children. Teaching self defense to kids is both simpler and more complicated than working with adults. Some of the kids I taught in pre-K settings were just three or four years old.

At that age, and for a few years afterward, kids’ brains aren’t generally capable of abstract thinking. They can’t consistently connect one concrete situation on the ground to a bigger, more general idea that has its own implications. You can walk them through one example, but give them another concrete situation related to it, and their brain just won’t tend to draw-big picture ideas from it without clear prompting.

Today I want to address situations in which journalists and public intellectuals revert to that pre-K state and miss the forest for the trees. Since appealing to government authorities alone is unlikely to work in our current deluded national framework (they, with a few key exceptions, are failing us), it’s critical for us to speak up ourselves about what’s happening. We have to hold those reporting on the current crisis to account for what so many ought to know is happening, even as they act as if they do not see.

Spot the con

When I taught those self defense classes to kids, we covered a few physical techniques, because they were fun and gave the students confidence. But we spent the majority of time on verbal skills. Getting them to recognize someone else’s subtle behaviors as off when their brains just weren’t yet optimized for doing that kind of meta interpretation was a real challenge.

The way I handled it was to incorporate role plays, which are pretty standard in teaching any group—but to use them in a new way. First, I coached the kids through some specific age-appropriate scenarios in which a peer or an adult (usually played by me as a teacher, a coach, or a neighbor) was doing something squirrelly, such as asking them to keep a private secret just for the two of us. They had already learned some responses in class—often involving leaving, yelling, or telling someone.

At that point, I would take it up a notch by empowering the group. In my head, I thought of it as “spot the con,” but with the kids, I specifically instructed the audience to watch for the moment when I tried to trick the kid who was doing the role play with me.

They could often see that I was trying to fool their classmate well before the child doing the scenario could. This was in part because I was pressuring the kid directly in subtle ways, which messed with their ability to think. But it was also because something about their collective brainpower at times allowed them to transcend their individual limits. I wanted to harness their insights and also to teach them to support one other.

I encouraged them to be a Greek chorus, though I didn’t call it that. I said that whenever they noticed I was trying to get the student in the scenario to do or agree to something that was wrong or dangerous, they could call out, “It’s a trick!”

They loved coaching their classmates into outsmarting me. I couldn’t accelerate their brains into working in an abstract mode. But I could help them start to recognize the set of concrete behaviors they could observe: specific words, tone of voice, and body language that people use when they’re trying to fool you.

Willful blindness

In the case of that NYT story from Monday, which notes that states sending National Guard troops to DC have higher crime rates, David Chen is getting closer to spotting the con and revealing how the federal government is trying to trick the public. At the very least, he’s revealing how the Trump administration is actively misrepresenting what’s happening on the ground.

In the examples from Martha Raddatz and Bill Hutchinson, however, the reporters involved are acting as if they have no ability to understand what’s happening or report on it beyond the framework the Trump administration has handed them.

In the Raddatz interview, she talks about how the National Guard members are backing up local law enforcement. Governor Moore responds, “They’re picking up trash.” She acknowledges what he’s saying is true, but then cites the reduction in carjacking mentioned by the mayor. She seems unwilling to look at why and to what ends the National Guard was sent to the city or to acknowledge that the the District’s crime rate is lower than those places that are helping Trump subvert District authorities.

There’s a long history around the world of journalists and public figures doing this kind of deflection. I want to take a look at a few examples from different times and places, as sometimes it’s easier to see what’s going on from a distance.

The shame of Maxim Gorky

Before the Gulag came into formal existence, the Soviet Union ran several years of concentration camps for political and class opponents that set the stage for the nationwide system. Most famous among them was the camp network on the Solovetsky Islands known as Solovki, where several key principles and methods of the Gulag were first developed and road-tested.

Though the sub-Arctic outpost of Solovki had long been the site of an isolated monastery, the Soviet era brought forced labor, torture, and executions to its chapels and grounds. Despite a massive PR campaign in the 1920s, rumors continued to appear in Russia and abroad about the camp—rumors the government tried to quell.

Eventually, they lured perhaps the most celebrated Soviet writer of the day, Maxim Gorky, who was living in exile in Italy, into returning to Russia and reporting on the great achievements of the Party. Once he crossed the border, without warning, his plans to see industrial sites were derailed. Instead, he was sent by ferry north to Solovki.

When detainees there learned that Gorky was coming, they were beside themselves with joy. “Gorky will spot everything, find out everything,” one detainee would later describe their thinking. “He’s been around, you can’t fool him.”

But the Soviets hid many of the telltale signs of their worst crimes before Gorky’s arrival. He went to the sick bay and a labor camp, then visited the children’s colony. There, Gorky stopped to talk to a boy privately. They spoke alone for forty minutes or more. The author emerged from the room weeping.

But when Gorky’s story on his trip came out, the part on Solovki was only a small piece of what he wrote. The truth of what was really happening there was missing. In a devastating betrayal, Gorky concluded instead that “camps such as Solovki were absolutely necessary.”

A spiritual cousin to Gorky, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty famously won a Pulitzer in 1932 for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s achievements, managing to ignore or downplay everything from the birth of the Soviet Gulag to the deliberate starvation of Ukraine, Uncle Joe’s mass execution of political enemies, and show trials eliminating more of his opponents. Duranty’s rationalizations for the paper, missing widespread atrocities again and again, were typically summed up in observations such as “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

Killing the truth

More than a decade later, on May 16, 1948, the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk was discovered when his body was pulled out of Salonika Bay in Greece. I won’t dive into the details of the Greek Civil War for this post, but in brief, it was a conflict between the rightist government and Communist insurgents. The government blamed Polk’s death on the Communist guerrillas he was been said to have been planning to meet with. But Polk had recently written critically about the ruling party, infuriating them. Initial responses from U.S. journalists were highly suspicious of the Greek government’s account.

The Overseas Writers Association, a group of foreign correspondents, banded together to investigate the murder of their friend. But it was a dicey moment in both international and domestic politics to criticize even a corrupt U.S. ally under threat from Communist forces. What followed was both extraordinary and depressingly familiar. The committee of journalists invited Walter Lippmann to head up the investigation. Lippmann had previously been critical of some U.S. foreign entanglements and was a trusted news figure.

In Kathryn McGarr’s book City of Newsmen, she lays out how, as far as we know, the group Lippmann led never openly lied or committed a direct coverup, but nevertheless became a critical part of a whitewashing process through their failures to do the job. They chose General William Donovan as their independent investigator for the project, though he had been the founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the C.I.A. They knew him well enough to be suspicious of him, and yet they let him become their key source of information and provider of all records and documents for their consideration.

In the end, the committee published a 76-page pamphlet laying out the findings, which was a both-sides kind of document that resolutely refused to draw obvious conclusions—particularly that the man tried and convicted for the murder couldn’t have done the crime.

“Committee members did not trust the devious Donovan, and they were not stupid,” McGarr wrote. “They simply could not write or act independently when they had agreed to be part of a group.”

Today’s false frames

While there’s no formal club of journalists today investigating the murder of one of their own, the same principles are in play now. Just as with Maxim Gorky at Solovki, we see self-interest overriding the facts on the ground. As with Duranty, we see how the arrogance of those whose status relies on being insiders might lead them to parrot government talking points without applying rigorous analysis.

And readers still get just enough good coverage—sometimes from the very same publications—to make it clear that whole outlets haven’t forgotten how to report critically. Legacy news organizations have just caved to a power consensus at an institutional level, as with the overseas writers and the death of George Polk. They might be able to write a 76-page report addressing what’s happening, and even include some trenchant facts. But in the end, in the aggregate, they will manage to say little to nothing.

Individual reporters are still pushing good stories through. Long into an ongoing process, we learned today through the Boston Globe that the Department of Justice attorney who accused Harvard of “wanton indifference to antisemitism” admired Mein Kampf and wrote a college paper from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.

Just as crime exists on the streets of DC, antisemitism exists in America. But it is not necessary to accept the Trump administration’s transparent lies pretending its wrecking-ball approach to governance has any goal of combating either of those problems. And far too many news outlets have fallen into this trap.

We see the same pattern with coverage of AI, particularly LLMs. Those who promote their contributions seem to be ignoring the dangers and death toll. They’ve somehow already forgotten that the most useful information everyday users find through AI has simply been skimmed from human-generated sources that are far more accurate and reliable. People who style themselves contrarians or truth-tellers show themselves to be the most gullible cheerleaders, though they posture as the only reasonable adults in the room.

We see it even more dramatically in the coverage of Gaza. Publications in the U.S. are in many cases still unwilling to acknowledge that whatever mission the Israeli government began with when responding to the Hamas massacre of its citizens in October 2023, it has descended into nearly two years of unspeakable atrocities. It has obliterated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of noncombatant women and children, erased cultural heritage, and fired directly on the people it’s has been actively starving. The refusal of much of the press to name what is taking place, or to do so only after it can no longer be denied, is beyond the level of Gorky’s betrayal.

Democracy? What democracy?

Similar problems can be seen in equivocating coverage of how Trump is inflicting low-grade terror on Americans by using federal agents to harass, kidnap, and detain people nationwide. But this seemingly willful blindness extends to so many other arenas. It’s afflicting the field of journalism on a widespread basis, even as some individual reporters working at legacy outlets push back on it.

In an interview published by Status on Monday, Ben Smith of Semafor spoke to Oliver Darcy, who asked, “You’ve been covering politics your entire life. I’m curious, in this current moment: Do you think democracy is under threat here in the U.S.?”

Smith made a strange response. He said, “One thing you do see so clearly on the media beat is the way in which institutions struggle to survive this radically transparent, decentralized information environment. I guess I see the political moment primarily in the story of attempts to destroy or maintain or rebuild institutions, rather than in more abstract terms.”

Smith’s answer is fascinating for two reasons. What interests him is not democracy, but what institutions will survive in the current information environment. He wants to be a power broker communicating with other power brokers, and to understand how institutions will survive, without necessarily being attached to democratic ideals.

The second part of what’s fascinating is that (perhaps inadvertently), he lays out exactly what’s required for him to keep that role: he has to refrain from abstract thinking, from connecting the larger dots. Never mind that concepts like “current information environment” and “attempts to rebuild institutions” are themselves abstractions. He will pick and choose the abstractions he can avoid pondering too deeply.

Just like Gorky, just like the overseas writers group in the wake of George Polk’s death, to continue as a player in the world he’s helped create, Smith has to refuse to acknowledge what he understands to be reality on some intuitive level. To be a reasonable man, an important man in this bright new future, he has to not ask the difficult questions, he has to embrace the convoluted task of avoiding any direct attention to what’s happening right before his eyes.

In pre-kindergartners, this is excusable. But in a press corps or among our public intellectuals, it’s monstrous. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that Smith has openly described what he’s doing.

A path forward

Given this myopic approach to events by our public intellectuals and journalists, what are we to do? In the wake of the shameful report on George Polk’s death, independent journalist I.F. Stone called out the travesty, writing, “Some day perhaps the truth will be known, and these men will blush for their role in its unfolding.”

In his footsteps, we can condemn the journalists and publications that are helping to derail democracy. But we can also actively support others at independent outlets like Bolts, Law Dork, Balls & Strikes, the Handbasket, and L.A. Taco. We can reward them by subscribing.

Meanwhile, we have to continue to force coverage of events by supporting those communities currently under attack. People in the streets are important, and continuing to express public dissent by gathering together will remain critical going forward. In the last week, over 1,000 events took place around the country highlighting government abuses and putting workers before billionaires.

Don’t forget that Vietnam, too, was misleadingly covered in much of the press for a long time under an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to give the leadership the benefit of the doubt. Now, as then, independent journalists and everyday people can sear awareness of the truth into the public consciousness.

Today, we’re seeing the President of the United States sending troops under false pretexts to areas that don’t want them there. We’re now months into masked men sweeping people off the streets with little or no accountability nationwide. The national crisis is already a local one, and it’s expanding a little more every day, even as some people continue to act as if nothing odd is going on.

Remember that Trump followers and the politically disengaged likely aren’t seeing any real coverage of what’s happening. The more you can bring it to the streets of your town, to school board meetings, to city council chambers, the more actual events will take hold in people’s minds. Wherever the government is dismantling protections—which is nearly everywhere these days—is an ideal place to act.

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