How America’s Media Establishment Failed at its Most Crucial Task — and Left the American Mind Broken
Aug 6, 2019
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Twitter erupted today in a firestorm over what the New York Times’s would later itself describe as a “bad headline.”The problem, though, is that it wasn’t just a bad headline. It would have been one thing if the NYT had done a stellar job of covering America’s recent travails. But it hasn’t. The “bad headline” is a point in a trend in a larger megatrend, and that is the catastrophic failure of American media and the public sphere to grapple with collapse.
The New York Times — which I’ll use as an example — has done an abysmal job in every way imaginable at its first real task, which we can describe in many ways: defending democracy, telling the truth, acquainting people with reality.
Am I the only one who remembers how the New York Times spent all of election season attacking Hillary over…emails? While, at the very same time, warning not of the dangers of Trumpism — but chiding, taunting, mocking, minimizing, and ignoring those who warned of them?
What happened after that? Well, after Trump was elected, the NYT wrote sympathetic profile after profile of…literal Nazis. Trump administration figures. Not once — not once — so far as I know did it acknowledge the reality that America was now having a textbook authoritarian-fascist collapse.
Where is it today? There’s the columnist who thinks climate change is a hoax — and has a platform to spread his delusion. There’s the one who thinks the liberals are to blame for white supremacism. There’s the one who justifies rape culture and thinks women are lesser beings. There’s the one who thinks lightweight Canadian style social democracy is communism. What the? Is this the discourse of an intelligent society? Or is it the one of a failed institution — that resembles a dim-witted frat-party?
Let me put that even more clearly. So there are the bad guys, led by the worst among them — a demagogue, who uses every single tactic and strategy in the literal fascist book (Mein Kampf, which he admits he’s a fan of). That’s the Prez, in case you didn’t know. He dehumanizes and demonizes vulnerable groups as animals and vermin — immigrants, refugees, the disabled. He mocks survivors of violent assault. He shrugs at the idea he himself may be a predator. He uses the language of misogny and bigotry and racism on a daily basis. He builds concentration camps. He puts kids in cages. Do I need to go on?
And there is the America media. They cover this, sure — and sometimes they cover it well. But they fail at a deeper level — a more crucial one. They are perpetually, constantly, chronically in shock. Forever surprised. Who would do such terrible things?!
But the answer is obvious, isn’t it? Who puts kids in camps in cages? Who sneers and grins at the idea of assaulting women? Who describes entire groups as vermin and animals? Fascists and authoritarians do, my friends. Who else does? Do mere “white nationalists” do these things? Isn’t there a distinction to be made between the racial nationalist writing a tract for his three friends — and one controlling an entire government? What else do we call an organized, violent system of racial supremacism and hate that controls the institutions of the state? Now, you don’t have to go out and start shouting it. I just want you to understand the point.
The establishment failed — and still fails — to tell the story of authoritarian-fascist collapse. Which always goes like this. A stagnant economy, a sinking middle class, despair, ruin, pessimism. Bang! Demagogues who blame fresh and growing poverty on a society’s weakest — it’s immigrants, refugees, foreigners, etc, anyone different. Bigotry, misogyny, supremacism, all the forms of hatred re-emerge. They grow in violence — among those who feel entitled, but abandoned. Soon enough, these regressive factions seize political power — and begin in earnest the project of reshaping a society wholesale for the “pure” and the “true.” This sequence — which happened in Weimar Germany, in Islamic countries, which is happening now in China, too — is classical. And yet not once so far as I know has the American media establishment told the story — not even at this late date. So who can blame Americans for not knowing any of it really?
The American media appears totally unable to think at the level of systems, structures, and movements. It can only think in terms of individuals — hence, “the President is a racist”, not “there is a neo fascist movement in America, which has assumed power, and is reshaping society, politics, and culture in its image. All this has roots in economic stagnation.” The President is a racist, sure — but that is hardly all he is. I know many casual racists. But they wouldn’t, given power, put kids in camps in cages. “A racist President” is a completely and utterly inadequate description of what happened to America’s politics — it falls short on every score. It elides, minimizes, denies, and ignores the deeper problems at work in America. Trump wouldn’t be much without the coterie of advisors that surrounds him. But most of them are literal and avowed supremacists and self-described fascists. Nor without a party and infrastructure that aids and abets institutionalized racism to the point of kids in camps.
And yet the America media refuses to call all this what “it” is — just as it so long refused to acknowledge warnings of “it happening here”. What the? What is “it”, precisely? Well, if I say to you the four words: it is happening here, if you’re a vaguely intelligent and reasonable and educated person, you’ll probably agree. But “it” means something very specific. It refers to a very brief but crucial and terrible time in history. The time of fascist-authoritarian implosion. Now, Americans appear incapable of saying those words — so by all means, say “white supremacist President” or “white nationalist GOP.” It’s close enough, I guess — a step in the right direction.
But see the point, too. You and I and everybody else with a working soul, heart, and mind knew — on some level — the day that the bad guys were “elected”, that all this was coming. Maybe we knew intuitively, and our minds worked fiercely to deny it. Maybe we felt it as a shudder — and we “joked” about it, to cope. But nobody was kidding, way back in 2015 and 16 when we used to kid about camps and torture and hate and violence. It was just a way of coping with an unbearable knowledge — knowing what was coming.
Now consider this. If you and I and everyone else with a working mind, soul, and heart knew what was about to happen to America — why didn’t the entire establishment American media? Why did the entire American media establishment chide, taunt, mock, and ignore all the warnings? What the? But why bother warning a society of an impending fascist collapse — or at least a brush with one — when the thinkers at your paper, the columnists, are busy denying everything from climate change to the ill effects of inequality to the existence of misogyny?
Still, do you remember those days? I do. Endless op-eds by platitudinous American professors and pundits saying: “Duhhh — He’s Not Mussolini!!” “You Can’t Call it Fascism!!” “There are No Nazis Here!!” Meanwhile, the reporting wings of those very same outlets were doing sympathetic profilesofneighborhood Nazis. Meanwhile, the op-ed pages literally hired the most discredited and surreally wrong extreme right wing “thinkers” that they could find. And meanwhile, the bad guys were beginning to put kids in cages. What the? How twisted is all that? What the, as Beto said, actual fuck?
The result of the American media establishment’s catastrophic failure has been a kind of collective breakdown in the American public mind. A kind of national collective delusion, a nation that’s living in a fairy tale — a country that’s not having a fascist collapse, even though it has camps, a demagogue, mass racial violence, and casual hate and bigotry are now perfectly normal. But because the American media establishment didn’t take warnings of fascist-authoritarianism seriously — but in fact marginalized all those who issued such warnings — Americans are still reluctant, afraid, hesitant to use the lexicon of social collapse. To think, speak, and see in the terms of genuine and real social collapse. Hence, an entire country is now living inside one giant delusion, a society rapidly turning fascist…but which has no fascism…a contradiction which is utterly baffling to the entire rest of the world.
The average American today won’t say “fascism”, “concentration camp”, “authoritarian” — he’s unsure. Should I say that? Can I say that? Think that? See that? Jake Tapper doesn’t. The NYT doesn’t. Aren’t they the smart ones? Shouldn’t I model myself after them? And so off he goes. Timid, meek — powerless to grapple with the bad guys. He doesn’t say the words he should say — but why should he? Not a single one of his leaders has ever said them. Not when the rhetorical hate began, not when dehumanization became policy, not when kids were put in cages, not when the terrorism erupted. Nope, say the Jakes and Ezras and Chrises — the good guys. There’s no fascism here! Aren’t they the smart ones, wonders our friend?
Ah, my friends. They are not the smart ones. They didn’t see any of this coming. Instead, Jake Tapper still puts literal Nazis on CNN. Chris Hayes is surprised and oh so shocked day after day — as if he’s never once read a book about the Holocaust. The NYT writes “bad headlines” and publishes op-eds that revolt and amuse an entire world by now. And yet none of that connects the dots. There is a trend here, which is a megatrend. The American establishment failed catastrophically. They aren’t smart — they’re mostly mediocre yet “elite” white dudes who are spiritual frat bros with all the other ones, so a kind of groupthink set in, just like a frat imagines a party will never end in disaster. But this one did.
What did the American media establishment fail at? At seeing the most significant event in modern American history coming. The rise of American fascist-authoritarianism. At allowing themselves to see it. At leaving their little bubble of white-dude groupthink, mediocrity, and utter delusion. And therefore American establishment media failed at doing the most important and vital job it had in living memory, probably. Protecting democracy from that collapse. Telling the truth about it. Reciting the history of it. Educating Americans about it. Understanding it, explaining it…anticipating it, predicting it…warning of it, defusing it, stopping it, to the extent it could have been. (In fact, the American media establishment did precisely the opposite job. When it should have warned, it laughed and minimized. Whom it should have scorned, it lionized. What it should have said still goes unsaid.)
I’m glad that Americans can finally…finally…at this late date…say “white supremacism” and “white nationalism” and so forth. But even these are glaring understatements. American is having a textbook fascist-authoritarian collapse, replete with mass violence, camps, and demagogue. It’s not just “white supremacism” when they occupy high office, write policy, control government, and inspire massacres. It’s something much darker and more sinister still.
The only word that I know for that — and that history has — is fascism. Americans still can’t say it — while their society explodes in violence and despair, while the words looks on, baffled, wondering, “don’t they know what fascism is? What’s wrong with them?”…and that is the greatest proof of all of the American media establishment’s catastrophic failure. To think, to see, to say, to hear. To stand up for what it should have stood for, to whom it should have stood up to.
The American media establishment failed at the most important job it ever had, at least in our lifetimes. And there it is, still failing its way into bankruptcy, decline, irrelevance, and futility. Perhaps there is a lesson there, for those who can see.
UmairAugust 2019
