As I have noted in several other posts (e.g. here and here), a second Trump presidency would represent a setback for the energy transition because of Republicans’ turn away from green energy and toward fossil fuels. If opinion polls are to be believed, a strong majority of voters oppose Republicans’ plans to repeal policies facilitating renewable energy investment and environmental protection. (Moderate Republicans worry about those plans too.)
But voters ought to be at least as worried about GOP plans to do more lasting damage to the capacity to govern: that is, to the civil service and other expertise-based institutions.* Executive branch experts are the stewards of popular regulatory programs; their mission is to make those programs work for people.
If the GOP wins in November it will not be primarily because of the Trump campaign’s energy and environmental policies. Rather, it will be a testament to conservative media’s ability to shape the picture of Democrats that swing voters see in their minds eye — a picture dominated by urban and intellectual elites and a rigid, doctrinaire social progressivism.
To date, cultural- and right-populist conservatives exercise more influence within the Republican party than cultural– and left-populist progressives exercise within the Democratic Party. But that doesn’t seem to slow the ability of right-wing media to caricature the left. And traditional media outlets have struggled with the rise of MAGA misinformation in public discourse. In the words of one presidential rhetoric expert, Donald Trump’s rhetorical style was unique among presidents in that it “makes no attempt to lay out a case, requires constant lies, and … is fundamentally negative.” If your social media and other communities insist that those lies are truths, then false belief can persist.
Chapter 4 of Climate of Contempt contains a section describing how traditional media outlets, already facing existential threats from new media, changed in response to Donald Trump’s political ascent:
The danger to foundational democratic values posed by the (first?) Trump presidency elicited changes in the journalistic practices of mainstream news outlets, changes that fed charges of left bias by conservatives. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such outlets altered their editorial practices to become more openly oppositional to Trump, reasoning that much of the public must have been misunderstanding the nature of the threat he posed to the rule of law, the peaceful resolution of pluralistic conflict, and other liberal-democratic values and institutions. In the words of the Times media editor Jim Rutenberg, “You have to throw out the textbook American journalism . . . if you view a Trump presidency as something dangerous.” But many Republican voters interpreted this change in editorial policy as a confirmation of their suspicions that mainstream media could not be trusted. [citations omitted]
MAGA media personality Steve Bannon, currently serving time in a federal prison, famously once advised that populist conservatives ought to focus on breaking public trust in the media by “flooding the zone with shit.” The ability of misinformation, bots, press releases, and advocacy journalism to compete with traditional journalism makes that goal infinitely easier to achieve. In that context “throwing out textbook American journalism” looks like an avoidable own-goal.
Consider three items that arrived in my news feed on the same week earlier this year: (a) a Cook Political Report podcast (subscription required) about the partisan ”diploma divide,” (b) a Politico story about black voters in Milwaukee who opposed Joe Biden (and why), and (c) a Fox News story about comedian/host Bill Maher complaining about the world view of NPR president Katherine Maher (no relation). Diving into all three stories illustrates Democrats’ messaging problem.
The Cook Political Report uses the term “diploma divide“ as shorthand for the changing alignment of the parties along educational lines, with Democrats dominating among better educated voters and Republicans among the less well-educated. Right wing media aims to convince moderate and swing voters that those elitist Democrats are in the thrall of the progressive identity politics they picked up during their college years at elite universities. Since only 6% of the electorate identifies as progressive — or 16% if you include what Pew Research calls the “outsider left” — that is smart messaging strategically. It is also misleading. Only 12% of Democrats identify as progressive (28% if you include the outsiders).
In a world in which most voters decide based upon a party label and many are coming to resent what they see as a “rigged system,“ portraying Democrats as “out of touch, well educated, hyper-progressive, urban elites” is smart strategically. The Politico story reported that GOP messaging was resonating better than Democratic messaging with black Milwaukeeans, though those voters seemed to be gravitating toward Robert Kennedy’s candidacy more than Trump’s. (This was before Kennedy’s bizarre “bear cub confession.”)
The article about Bill Maher recounted his fairly trivial complaints about language used in the tweets by the NPR president, but it referenced a more significant conflict at NPR. Last April,veteran editor Uri Berliner published an essay charging the organization with abandoning its journalistic principles. He resigned shortly thereafter.
Before briefly discussing Berliner’s essay, full disclosure: I am a regular NPR listener who sees NPR as relatively objective and (consistent with media bias ratings) as only slightly left of center. And I appreciate their longtime practice of calling out their own errors. Nevertheless, Berliner’s essay claims that the Trump era and the George Floyd murder have brought top-down bias into its reporting, at least with respect to politically-charged identity-based topics.**
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. …
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Berliner goes on to cite as examples NPR’s coverage of the Steele Dossier, the pandemic, and Hunter Biden. He traces the injection of bias to NPR management’s conscious decision after the Floyd murder to be proponents of social change.
Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” [then CEO of NPR John] Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”
Berliner tees up a division within the Democratic Party, one right wing media is extremely adept at exploiting. Berliner describes himself as “Sarah Lawrence–educated, … raised by a lesbian peace activist mother [who] drive[s] a Subaru” and who “eagerly” voted “against Trump” twice. He is among that majority of Democrats who do not identify as progressive, and who have questions about progressive social justice doctrine and the wisdom of letting advocacy influence the educational function of reporting. If you have read this far, you may want to read the Berliner essay in full.
Yes, most right-leaning outlets engage in less of this kind of self-criticism, and more blatant propaganda. But that doesn’t stop them from exploiting bias on the left. The beliefs of the MAGA right can be false or hypocritical, and dangerous to democracy at the same time. (Consider VP nominee J.D. Vance’s endorsement of the book Unhumans.)
Algorithms censor our online news in ideologically selective ways, and more and more of us process the news socially within insulated, ideologically homogenous online bubbles — all of which makes it more and more difficult to discuss the issues Berliner’s essay raises. As I note in chapter 4 of my book, we have been trained to dismiss uncomfortable news peremptorily. So, within left-leaning bubbles Berliner’s arguments can be dismissed because his essay appears in The Free Press, an outlet associated with conservative opinion writer Bari Weiss. For others, it is enough that it “repeats GOP talking points.” Or that Berliner is a white male Boomer. And so on.
There are ways to talk about these issues that allow for respectful critical thinking, exploration and learning. Just as Berliner outlines a real problem for NPR’s journalistic credibility, so was NPR management reacting to a real problem facing the news business in these bitterly divided times. We can acknowledge and discuss both these things. Indeed, we have to be able to do that sort of thing if we want peaceful progress.
Meanwhile, we can also acknowledge that the numbers don’t lie. Moderate Republicans have become marginalized on policy within their party in ways that moderate Democrats have not. As long as the GOP voters reward a national party that is increasingly hostile to environmental regulation, protecting climate progress implies the need for Democrats to win more elections. That means defending the national party brand against the caricatures that have become a staple of right wing media, and protecting traditional journalism, like the kind for which NPR has long been known. That is a delicate dance, but opinion leaders should work harder to do the steps. — David Spence
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*What is it about attending Yale University that provokes such thoroughly elaborated criticism of academia from its graduates. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was a best-seller. VP candidate and ideological cameleon J.D. Vance warns that “professors are the enemy.” And more recently Rob Henderson’s work featured in the New York Times is critical of liberal cultural orthodoxy in academia. Never having attended Yale I can’t answer the question. There are ways to discuss changing socio-cultural norms and the need to treat everyone with respect, ways that don’t alienate the discussants. They involve being more curious and less judgmental Apparently, there are parts of Yale that are not doing that very well.
**NPR is not alone in grappling with “advocacy vs. objectivity” questions. The NY Times has devoted a lot of coverage this year to retrenchment around DEI policies and rethinking anti-racism. Reasonable people disagree about advocacy journalism, and my book goes into that debate in some detail. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Berliner is journalist and academic Steven Thrasher, whose Literary Hub column is entitled “Journalism as a Front of War.”
