‘You’re a Fascist. Care to Comment?’

By Nate Hochman

Friday, January 27, 2023

 

Some top-notch journalisming from CNN, per Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Bryan Griffin:

The premise in the above request is amazing for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s a textbook example of reductio ad Hitlerum — “Ron DeSantis doesn’t think it’s a good idea for Florida taxpayer dollars to fund Black Queer Studies. You know who else didn’t like Black Queer Studies? That’s right. Fascists.” More to the point, the framing of the inquiry — “according to experts, you’re a fascist; care to comment?” — is another testament to the fact that legacy media outlets such as CNN are primarily activists, not journalists. They already assume to know that Ron DeSantis is Floridian Hitler. (Or Putin: “In a portion of Blake’s email provided to National Review, the CNN writer likens DeSantis’s rejection of the AP African-American studies pilot course to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s efforts to distort Russian history,” Ryan Mills reports). They don’t need to consider other viewpoints or hear another perspective. They just need to send the obligatory request for comment to the target’s office as a matter of ceremonial procedure.

 

In another era, a conclusion as wild as “culturally conservative curricular reforms are fascism” would rightly be viewed as one for the opinion section. That’s no longer the media environment we live in, and Americans know it — public trust in the media has plummeted to record lows: “Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news,” a July 2022 Gallup survey reported. “Both readings are down five percentage points since last year.”

 

Media bias is not, of course, a new phenomenon. The mainstream press has skewed leftward for decades. (“Annoy the media. Re-elect Bush!” was one of the unofficial slogans of George H. W. Bush’s ill-fated 1992 campaign). But the brazen embrace of left-wing activism in newsrooms across the country is the result of a concerted ideological push. Journalists increasingly scoff at the idea of “objectivity” and “balance” favored by old-school editors. The new journalist-as-activist-interpreter conception trades the purported fallacies of “bothsides-ism” and neutrality for what the writer Wesley Lowery approvingly described as “moral clarity.”

 

“Moral clarity” journalism, Lowery wrote in a highly discussed 2020 New York Times op-ed, maintains that newsrooms should prioritize “telling hard truths in this polarized environment” rather than pursuing “the very illusion of fairness.” Ideas of “objective truth,” Lowery argued, have long been “decided almost exclusively be white reporters and their mostly white bosses. . . . The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.” But “no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.” Instead, Lowery urged the media to “abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard,” and instead “focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best one can, based on the given context and available facts.” 

 

“Instead of promising our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias,” Lowery wrote, “a better pledge would be an assurance that we will devote ourselves to accuracy.”

 

The argument here is that false notions of “fairness” or “objectivity” in the context of many issues — race and racism preeminent among them — serve to obscure the truth of a given situation. There are no two sides to an issue like racism, proponents of this approach say. The task of the reporter is to tell the truth — not to give legitimacy to obviously false or immoral opinions for the sake of trying to appear “balanced.”

 

In the context of racism, for example, “journalism informed by an understanding of structural racism is simply good journalism,” a Washington Post reporter wrote in 2020. “Ignoring racism would be subjective.” The issue of “structural racism,” in this view, is so settled a question that the imperative to consult alternative views on the topic is no longer necessitated. This serves as a convenient justification to ignore or preemptively discount the ongoing debates over exactly what such a phenomenon is, how it functions, and the extent to which it permeates contemporary American society.

 

The “moral clarity” approach gives journalists permission to lean into their own biases and ignore potential challenges to their favored political narratives. It also produces absurd press inquiries — such as, for example, “Can you comment on the fact that you’re a fascist?”