AMERICA IS DYING, AND JAMES BENNET'S BLANK-SLATE JOURNALISM ISN'T HELPING

I want to write about the central arguments of James Bennet's novella-length denunciation of "illiberalism" at The New York Times, but I'm distracted by what Bennet regards as a lapsed golden age at the Times.

The Times, in Bennet's view, was great in the early 1990s, when he first worked there. Early in the piece, he praises the paper's publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, for his early work as a reporter "covering the American Midwest as a real place full of three-dimensional people." That's an awfully low bar for excellence, isn't it? To recognize that Midwesterners are people? (The problem with so much Times "heartland" coverage is that the paper's reporters and editors think that's enough and stop there. They think you humanize heartlanders by sentimentalizing them, even if they're Nazis like Tony and Maria Horvater, the subjects of a deservedly criticized 2017 Times story that Bennet, of course, defends.)

Bennet goes on to praise his own education as a Times reporter. See if you can spot what's wrong with this. (Bennet can't.)

Metro was the biggest news desk. New reporters had to do rotations of up to a year there to learn the culture and folkways of the paper.... I was brought on as a probationary reporter, with a year to prove myself, and like other new hires was put through a series of assignments at the low end of the hierarchy....

After joining the permanent staff, I went, again in humbling ignorance, to Detroit, to cover the auto companies’ – and the city’s – struggle to recapture their former glory. And again I had a chance to learn, in this case, everything from how the largest companies in the world were run, to what it was like to work the line or the sales floor, to the struggle and dignity of life in one of America’s most captivating cities....

Bennet praises Sulzberger for venturing out into the wilds of the Midwest and discovering that Midwesterners are flesh-and-blood human beings. Now here he is, sent to the hinterlands himself, specifically the outer boroughs of New York City and its suburbs, and the point of the exercise is not to treat the people who live there as people (though he claims he did some pretty good work), but to "learn the culture and folkways of the paper." What an awesome way to respect the proles -- send the greenest reporter you have to cover them, and say that his real assignment is to learn all the secret Times handshakes. And then an equally ignorant Bennet repeats the process in Detroit.

Bennet is then assigned to a politcal beat:

I began to write about presidential politics two years later, in 1996, and as the most inexperienced member of the team was assigned to cover a long-shot Republican candidate, Pat Buchanan. I packed a bag for a four-day reporting trip and did not return home for six weeks. Buchanan campaigned on an eccentric fusion of social conservatism and statist economic policies, along with coded appeals to racism and antisemitism, that 30 years earlier had elevated George Wallace and 20 years later would be rebranded as Trumpism. He also campaigned with conviction, humour and even joy, a combination I have rarely witnessed. As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

For starters, Buchanan's "fusion of social conservatism and statist economic policies" isn't "eccentric," it's bog-standard fascism (or, in the present day, Orbanism). Beyond that, Bennet, assigned to cover a conservative politician, is gobsmacked to discover that conservatives exist. Maybe a system that asks reporters to learn on the job by writing about subjects they know nothing about would be improved if those young reporters were hired in part for knowledge of the subjects they write about.

Bennet thinks it's best if reporters bring nothing to the table, because then they're blank slates and can learn to see all aspects of a subject. But what if they don't? What if these blank-slate reporters (and their blank-slate editors) miss important points because of their ignorance?

Bennet assails the critics of post-2016 "heartland" coverage in the Times:

It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

I happen to agree that the people in those diners harbor additional grievances besides racism. (They hate white liberals, too.) I also believe that they're not going to be frank about their grievances just because a big-city reporter from a newspaper with a liberal reputation -- a reporter who, like Bennet, is probably a cradle Democrat and an Ivy Leaguer -- asks them to be frank.

What's more, they're probably not going to talk about where they get their ideas. Bennet's essay runs for sixteen thousand words, but the word "Fox" doesn't appear even once; the only allusion to Murdochism in Bennet's essay is a snarky reference to the long-abandoned Fox slogan "fair and balanced," used in reference not to Murdoch but to (in Bennet's view) bad news consumers, many of them liberal, who want their media of choice to reflect their biases.

The people in those diners believe what they believe about the evil nature of liberals and Democrats in large part because the right-wing media -- talk radio, Fox, right-wing websites -- tells them liberals and Democrats are evil. Bennet's blank-slate reporters never grasp this because they come in knowing nothing. Bennet still doesn't know it.

The main thrust of Bennet's piece is that it's bad for reporters and readers to want the Times to take stands. But the people who want an openly liberal Times feel that way because they understand how powerful conservatism is, an awareness that Bennet and his fellow "objectivity" purists don't share. Bennet wants a Times that gives equal weight to left and right arguments -- but the other dominant media organ in America, Fox News, has no such balance of content. If you agree that the Times is one of the two most influential media outlets in the country, then you can see that a balanced Times plus Fox as it's been constituted since its inception adds up to a media elite that's 75% right-wing -- all of Fox and half of the Times.

In the real world, conservatism also dominates, as it has since 1980, except on some social issues. Yes, we have a strong LGBTQ rights movement and an ongoing sexual revolution and legal weed. But apart from that, taxes on the rich are low, inequality is high, and unionized workforces are still rare. We've barely begun dealing with climate change in earnest and might never do so. Black people can still be killed by the cops for a busted taillight. Gun violence is rampant and curbs on firearms are politically unthinkable in most of the country. And the rollback of abortion rights is just beginning.

The principal bad guys of Bennet's essay -- the Times employees who denounced the Tom Cotton op-ed he greenlighted that called for military troops to be deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters -- live in the real world, where the right runs rampant. Bennet doesn't seem to want them to bring this real-world knowledge into the newsroom; he wants reporters who show up with no knowledge, as he did. But maybe the country wouldn't be on fire if the elite media hired more people who could see what was happening because of prior knowledge. Maybe what James Bennet wants for news is precisely what got us into this mess.