NOVEMBER 1, 2019
In the beginning was the
profile of the Nazi next door, an inexplicable decision by the New York
Times (11/25/17)
to profile a right-wing extremist in the most sympathetic light possible. It
was the most outrageous example of an outrageous genre of MSM—and particularly
NYT—reporting: the never-ending effort to profile, study, explain, excuse and
rationalize Trump voters. Without, of course, referring to them as racists.
White men are always news that’s fit to print.
The article was met with howls
of protest across Twitter, but among the many apt responses, Bess Kalb’s
description (11/25/17)
captured my heart and gave me the single most useful phrase of the Trump era:
“Nazi-normalizing barf journalism.”
I don't mean to sound
intolerant or coarse, but fuck this Nazi and fuck the gentle, inquisitive tone
of this Nazi normalizing barf journalism, and fuck the photographer for not
just throwing the camera at this Nazi's head and laughing. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nationalist.html?_r=0 …
Again and again during Trump’s
presidency, corporate media have fallen over themselves to find acceptable ways
to describe utterly unacceptable behavior, policies and decisions—none more so
than the New York Times. In every era, the Times’ center of gravity
has been the legitimation of power, and the Trump era is no different. The
paper’s obvious disdain for Donald Trump is continually cloaked in
rationalizing headlines and descriptions. It’s as if they can’t help
themselves—the stability of US institutions is more important than their
integrity, and so they must normalize what should never be normalized.
Just three examples:
“Trump’s Embrace of Racially
Charged Past Puts Republicans in Crisis” (8/16/17):
This headline refers to Trump’s “very fine people” defense of neo-Nazis at the
Charlottesville white supremacist rally where James Fields drove a car into a
crowd of protesters, killing one (Heather Heyer) and injuring dozens, many
seriously. “Racially charged past” = Confederate monuments celebrating the
defense of chattel slavery.
“Ocasio-Cortez Calls Migrant
Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps,’ Eliciting Backlash” (6/18/19):
The headline suggests that the veracity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
description is up for debate, when, in fact, it is simply
accurate terminology. Indeed, the subsequent rise of #JewsAgainstICE
underscored that truth with the particular credibility that Jewish people bring
to conversations about ethnic cleansing. The Times chose to cover the
moment as a “she said, she said” debate between liberal Democrats like
Ocasio-Cortez and Republicans like Liz Cheney.
After a Green Bay rally
(4/27/19) in which Trump called the media “sick people” and the officials he’s
forced out of government “scum,” and accused Democrats of supporting
infanticide (Vox, 4/29/19),
the Times put out a tweet (4/28/19)
saying that with the infanticide charge, “Trump revived an inaccurate refrain.”
You get the idea.
All of it is Nazi-normalizing
barf journalism. In wrapping human rights abuses, lawbreaking, lies,
corruption, cruelty, racism, misogyny and other abhorrent dimensions of the
Trump administration in the familiar language and themes of Washington
politics, the Times is actively helping stabilize the regime. We read
these headlines and think “business as usual” rather than “this is intolerable,
I must act.”
In a recent example I find
particularly troubling, the New York Times (10/13/19)
reported on a video
meme mashup, shown at a pro-Trump conference at one of Trump’s resorts in
early October, showing Trump massacring members of the media and political
opponents.
In an era where both hate
crimes and domestic terrorism (including mass shootings) are rising at an
alarming rate, the celebration of violence in the name of the Trump brand is a
disturbing escalation in the normalization of political violence.
Trump has long invited his
followers to violence. On the campaign trail, he promised to pay legal costs if
his supporters beat up protesters, and advocated for torture “much
stronger than waterboarding.” In September, he suggested that
whistleblowers should be executed. He has pardoned war criminals and other
human rights abusers (e.g., Michael
Behenna, Joe
Arpaio). Trump also admires and glorifies violent authoritarians, like
Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Ergodan, Kim Jong-un and, of course, Vladimir Putin. All
this in addition to the violence his policies are wreaking.
There is not a direct line
between Trump referring to
immigrants as vermin who will “infest our country” and the massacre of
immigrants at an El Paso Walmart. Neither the antisemitic
conspiracy theory that George Soros was funding migrant “caravans”
from Central America, nor Trump’s lie about Middle Easterners infiltrating the
caravans, is solely responsible for the murderous attack on a Jewish synagogue
in Pittsburgh. Yet if these bigoted tropes did not cause massacres,
surely they are part of the environment that has fueled them.
Speaking of antisemitism,
Trump’s “fake news” has always been one shade shy of Hitler’s “Lügenpresse”
(“lying press”). White supremacists have long referred to the paper of record
as the “Jew York Times.” Given Trump’s constant
description of the media as “the enemy of the people,” the possibility
is ever-present, in this age of mass shootings, that someone will walk into a
newsroom and open fire. If I’m honest, it surprises me that this has
happened only
once since Trump took office.
None of this found its way
into the Times’ coverage of the video. Instead, there are denials by lots
of people, saying they neither saw nor knew about the video; and then this at
the end:
Throughout his 2016 campaign
and presidency, Mr. Trump has sought to demonize the news media, partly out of
frustration about the coverage of his administration and partly because he
likes to have an opponent to target.
This is Nazi-normalizing barf
journalism. Poor Trump; he’s just frustrated by the bad press. Responding by
labeling journalists liars and enemies of the people is just what most of us
would do in the same situation. Plus, he likes having a foil. A reasonable
strategy.
I want to know how Michael
Schmidt and Maggie Haberman (the bylined reporters) know that these are Trump’s
reasons for demonizing the fourth estate. It’s a pretty definitive sentence,
assigning motivation without any source or documentation. (Unlike the following
sentence, which has at least anonymous sources: “Mr. Trump has also sought to
undermine confidence in the mainstream media, some of his advisers acknowledge
privately, to make people doubt the accuracy of less favorable accounts of what
goes on in his administration.”)
But more importantly, no, it
is not OK for the president of the United States to baldly claim that
documented reporting is “fake news”; that media are the enemy; and that
journalists are bad people. It is, in fact, extremely dangerous. It undermines
one of the most important checks on government power, and, as the video itself
attests, it invites violence against journalists. The New York Times should
say so.
You can send a message to
the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful
communication is the most effective.
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