Trapped in a Company Town

Sometimes the dog whistle of racism is an air horn. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the paper. Late last week, Trump’s rants about immigrants polluting the country with “bad genes” were paraphrased by The New York Times as a “long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”

In the article referenced above, the Times was very clearly trying to address the eugenics behind Trump’s rhetoric, but it failed. The reporter neglected to use the word “racist” or “racism” at any point. This tiptoeing approach also hides the larger threat of what it means for a national leader to embrace this language, and the danger to a country in which he remains a leading candidate for the presidency. In the news cycle that followed, only Politico seemed to reflect the full measure of Trump’s clear descent into apocalyptic race-baiting in its headline “We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”

Observers have repeatedly been showing for some time that despite having talented reporters and editors on staff, legacy print outlets seem to struggle with covering Donald Trump. They’ve noted his unfitness for office; they’ve mentioned his problematic statements. But on a day-to-day basis, they stumble over and over to convey what is actually happening. Why can’t legacy media say clearly what he’s doing on a consistent basis?

The joke about Trump goes that dealing with him is like playing chess with a pigeon who knocks the pieces over, shits on the board, and struts around saying he won. But what’s happening now is that our political and legal institutions have let the pigeon sign up for another chess tournament, and too many news outlets are spending an inordinate amount of time analyzing him like any other contender. Meanwhile, he’s undermining trust in reality and aggressively cajoling his fans to hurt people in the audience.

The assumed legitimacy of insiders

Legacy news outlets emerged in an era which assumed the system was working as it should and would be indefinitely capable of doing so. The people running them watched Watergate unfold and take down a criminal president half a century ago, shaping a view of the system “working,” whatever the reality. Today, the press is unequipped to communicate that the system itself might be in jeopardy in America, and even less so to point out that society has long been deeply flawed in ways that make it vulnerable.

Trump and Vance represent two groups that the country tends to elevate: real estate moguls and venture capitalists. Trump was born into that milieu, and Vance was brought there by opportunities he would deny others (not to mention funding from billionaire Peter Thiel). In both cases, they’re now part of a class typically lionized by papers like the Times. They can be investigated if there’s wrongdoing, but the class they belong to is the class that the paper evolved to serve.

Legitimacy automatically attaches to people like them. The paper as an institution is built to service them; it buttresses their credibility. The Republican party, too, retains a kind of status as a functional part of our political system—a status that doesn’t reflect what is actually happening and has happening for some time.

All these systemic issues are baked in. Even when talented reporters try to cover events cleanly, they are working against a million tiny processes and perceptions that dampen their efforts. And it’s hard to rise in such a system without buying into its precepts, or at least reliably deferring to them.

But as Walter Lippmann wrote a century ago, “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”

The paralysis of stationarity

Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe has talked about the challenge of stationarity in dealing with climate change. Humanity is continuing to behave as if there are no costs to failing to address the worsening situation in which we find ourselves.

As she notes, our infrastructure is already insufficient and ill-equipped for the current climate situation, let alone the future. I saw it myself when I reported from the Norwegian Arctic in 2018. It’s not yet too late to make a tremendous difference in the future quality of life on Earth. It is, however, far too late to keep pretending we’re living in a world that is already gone.

Like the fossil fuel companies and financiers abandoning their climate pledges, our media infrastructure seems to be imagining that prior conditions still exist and that prior methods can be used indefinitely. And it isn’t just newspapers.

The myth of the reasonable man

Yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” host Martha Raddatz asked JD Vance repeatedly about disinformation he was spreading. But she got boxed into a corner because—just like the Times only days before—she was unable to show viewers what Vance was doing. She tried to confront him, and he avoided being pinned down by lying consistently and shamelessly.

I’m not faulting Raddatz in any particular way. Within the format of Sunday morning news shows, it’s almost impossible to step outside this ritual encounter to address the choreography that underpins it.

Traditionally, the interviewer strikes the “reasonable person” pose and treats the interviewee as similarly reasonable—just two reasonable people having a discussion, in which the interviewer tries to get the interviewee to address things they might not be comfortable discussing. But if the person being interviewed is not reasonable and has no barriers to the number or scope of their lies, this dynamic can’t work.

What’s required is a radical restructuring of how people like Vance are interviewed. In our current environment, every national GOP figure is not a reasonable person and has no intention of being one. Trump or Vance or Speaker Mike Johnson or Marco Rubio will shamelessly lie about what is happening, in ways that actively misrepresent reality and even risk getting people killed.

The interviewer is stuck in the mode of either indulging them or debating them. But there’s no value in debating someone who’s willing to lie about everything, because there’s no common standard to which they can be held.

The truth is that Americans have effectively been living in a company town in which most systems, including journalism, came into existence to preferentially benefit a narrow spectrum of the public—an owner class—and to further moneyed interests. As pressure has mounted to bend those systems to serve more people, a significant minority of the population is insisting on hewing to old protocols, even after the bosses running our metaphorical company town stripped the factory for parts, cashed out, and moved to Florida.

A sense remains that things ought to be as they were. Not just individuals but institutions tend to continue as if nothing has changed. But when it’s apparent that all those self-perpetuating systems are carrying us toward destruction, be it political or planetary, we have to acknowledge that the world in which we imagined equilibrium had been established is gone.

Journalists and policymakers have to learn how to name what they’re seeing. We have to invent a new language for understanding and explaining what’s happening before our eyes and what it means going forward. If we can’t acknowledge our current reality, we’re doomed to life in a ghost town.

[You can find out more about me and this newsletter in my introductory post.]