“If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should not despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.” - Soren Kierkegaard
After the recent second inauguration of Donald Trump I could not help but put down what I was reading to look for something a bit more ‘relevant’ to read. During this time, I was afflicted with quite a high fever, and while watching Trump’s first night in office, firing off his first wave of executive orders, I could not help but feel a bit “off.” In reaction to this feeling, I grabbed off my shelf a book my mother picked up for me last year while our local library was offloading books: Trump and the Media. The book is a collection of essays from communications and media scholars about the role of journalism in the 2016 election of Donald Trump; so while it may be outdated in a certain sense, it still contains valuable insight that has stood the test of time, and alongside that, it serves as a pertinent example of what will be this review’s main ‘object of critique,’ that being the ‘objectivist’ elitism so customary in liberal journalism. Many essays in this collection are expressive of this notion that people are rational and self-interested beings that make political decisions based on data and facts, neglecting the fact that political decisions go much deeper than that. As Frank DiStefano, in The Next Realignment, puts it:
“Choosing a political party isn't a cold rational decision like choosing the right car insurance company. It’s a powerful statement of personal identity and one of the most deeply emotional decisions people make. A party identity is a primal attachment that connects you to assumptions about the most fundamental aspects of your character. Your choice of party says more about you in the eyes of your neighbors than your profession, where you grew up, or the car you drive. It affects who you date, who you marry, what your employer thinks of you, and how family members treat you when you come home for Thanksgiving. For many people it's an attachment that lasts for life.” 1
Many journalists neglect this fundamental fact, and at times it seems like they have never considered how they, themselves, came to hold their own beliefs. Sure, we may think our first political positions came about by ‘looking at the facts,’ but this is only an illusion—a young person’s first political positions are either inherited from their parents, or they form in reaction to their parents, as an act of rebellion. In both cases ‘facts’ are not the determinant factor, but rather, one’s sense of personal identity, which is inextricably bound to one’s personal values. Politics, in short, is much more existential than is commonly conceived—especially by our journalists.
The first section, titled “Journalism in Question,” discusses the failures of journalism in light of the 2016 election. Every media outlet dedicated to coverage of the election missed the mark, taking for granted that Hillary Clinton would become the next president and that Trump was nothing but an exception—a fluke. In the first article, Why Journalism in the Age of Trump Shouldn’t Surprise Us, Barbie Zelizer argues that “mnemonic cues about enemy formation, consolidated during the Cold War, have undermined coverage of the Trump phenomenon.”2 Her thesis, in my view, overlooks the central issue here: the emergence of a kind-of ‘caste-like’ mentality within journalism, which has led to a growing disconnect between journalists and the general public. Zelizer, in passing, alludes to this ‘caste’ character when she says that this “Cold War mindedness” rests upon “already existent predilections among journalists, securing their widespread conformity by playing to long-held occupational and professional mores and conventions.”3 Though common in all professions, “mores and conventions” in journalism take up quite an elitist tone, which has no doubt contributed to the generalized distrust the American public has developed for journalists and the news media.
Fundamental to this ‘elitism’ is journalism’s claim that it has access to the “facts” and the notion it holds onto, despite all evidence to the contrary, that "facts" dictate people’s political beliefs. The reader is viewed as a neutral receiver of information, waiting to be influenced by journalism’s ‘objective’ truth. It is as if journalists view the public as this passive bloc waiting for the leadership of some harbinger of “facts and logic,” which will finally prompt them to act. Seeing that people have strong opinions with or without the work of the journalist is seen as a departure from ‘normality,’ as kind of ‘unnatural,’ as if everyone is normally without opinions. “Polarization” is demonized as an antagonistic force to journalism, which “cuts to the heart of journalist’s dependence on balance as the key to political coverage.”4 Neglected, also, is the fact that journalists are necessarily ideologists—intellectuals in the ‘Gramscian’ sense. Journalism is not the neutral communication of “facts,” but the intellectual activity of narrative construction of one camp against others—which all lay claim to objectivity, but it seems that liberal journalists are unaware that this claim to objectivity is ideological, not “real.”
The second essay in the book, by Michael X. Delli Carpini, discusses the problem of “alternative facts.” Highlighted is the shift away from traditional media sources and the merging of entertainment and news, the shift to a “multiaxial” and “hyperreal” media environment, and these factors’ role in the emergence of “alternative facts,” “fake news.” The author is clear that these factors are not solely responsible for the rise of the Trump movement, but he also never seems to ask why “fake news” and “alternative facts” have emerged in any way but a ‘technical’ one, that is, he never asks why the people have stopped trusting those ‘arbiters of facts’—journalists—and have shifted their attention to other forms of media for information.
Delli Carpini also claims that “our multiaxial environment” makes it easier “for ideologically committed citizens to hold fast to their prior beliefs regardless of the facts” and “for less politically engaged citizens to be uncertain, dazed, and confused.”5 The author, in true journalistic spirit, falls into the liberal-enlightenment idea that humans are rational actors acting in their best interest, based on factual information, swayed only by facts, and above irrational passions (also, haven't people always been able to purchase the newspaper of their choice?). I refer to this attitude as “journalistic” simply because it is the common sense of liberal American journalism—yet it has been adopted even more faithfully by our “historical materialists” and “Marxists.” Hence, I felt that reviewing this book would be worth the effort: this “journalistic” view needs to be rooted out of anything proclaiming itself to be “Marxist.” Letting it remain would be letting liberalism pass for Marxism for another year, which we cannot afford.
The following essay embodies this worldview we need to root out. In the essay's second paragraph, the authors declare the “central principles of democratic discourse” to be “reason, facticity, and civility”—the article may as well have been written in Virginia in 1780! A large part of their article discusses the “collapse of news gatekeeping” or the ‘hierarchy’ of journalism that existed before the emergence of social media in the early 2010s. The displacement of large newspapers and networks from their previously “quasi-monopolistic” positions is of central concern to the authors. An interesting quote can be found on page 26, all the more interesting considering the fate of Twitter between now and the time this was written:
“...social media platforms have become important gatekeepers as their business calculations affect news choices. Although many have speculated on the specific interests prioritized by corporations, most notably in the cases of Facebook and Twitter, it is clear that news feeds are slanted toward constant personalization of news content based on the preferences and opinions of users and contacts.”
While it may be assumed (at least at the time this was written) that these platforms would show users news content they agree with, more recently, these platforms themselves have become more ideological and propagate their own politics, even at the expense of their “material interests” conceived in the economistic ‘wallet-only’ sense. In my copy of the book, this is the only passage in this essay where the note in the margin is not a snarky comment—the rest of the essay had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. Supposedly, understanding the “consolidation of conservative echo chambers” on the internet and in media is “crucial” to understanding the rise of Trump, but never considered is why those “echo chambers” emerged in the first place—the rise of Trump is reduced to a technical question of the arrangement of media networks; it is posed as a technical-organizational question when it is truly an ethical-political question. The next few pages are littered with citations for the most banal truisms—here is my favorite:
“Twitter privileges discourse that is short and uncomplicated, allows users to publish impulsively, and instantaneously spreads messages (Ott 2017).”
Thanks for the insight Ott!
According to the authors, Trump’s victory in 2016 benefited from “’post-truth’ politics and partisan hostility,” which “signals the consolidation of ‘hyperpartisan publics’ uninterested in fact-based discourse”—as if politics has ever operated on facts! To the authors, “Trump represents the ascendancy of anti-democratic trends in public communication, namely the embrace of factually incorrect beliefs, incivility, and intolerance.”6 Sure, Trump may “represent” these things, but it is no difficult task to imagine our elitist liberal journalist saying the same exact thing about any movement that may emerge that finds itself an inch to the left of Bernie Sanders—hell, journalists were just about calling for affirmative action for CEOs after the ‘Mangione affair!’ At the end, however, one suspects they begin to sense what is going on. They write:
“Communication researchers should not simply criticize these trends. Trump’s election and his presidency force us to rethink the feasibility of facts, reason, and civility as conditions for democratic discourse in the new ecology of public communication.”7
We can definitely rest assured that this is one of those classic academic platitudes and that the journalists and academics will continue, in vain, to reassert the primacy of “facts” and “reason” in public communication, living on the fumes of 18th-century enlightenment rationalism, thinking that humans are neutral, rational actors, who only ‘come into themselves’ and who are only articulated politically upon contact with the “facts” delivered to them by the journalist on a white horse. Thankfully, the next article returns us to Earth.
In Empirical Failures, the author, C.W Anderson, provides us with one of the few (if not the only) essays in the collection that attempts to analyze the disconnect between journalism and the lives of the American people in cultural-political terms, not sheerly technical ones. In the opening lines, he writes that “the elite journalism practiced at top-tier media outlets was better than it has ever been.” Acknowledging that this really didn’t matter in the election Anderson examines the relationship between the American people and journalists, that is, the relationship between the American people and the intellectual strata that has traditionally been responsible for the political interpellation of the American public. He writes:
“...the 2016 election witnessed the clash of a journalistic tribe increasingly driven by commitments to facticity and a nuanced form of objectivity, and a populace increasingly prone to seeing data-driven objectivity as an elitist form of cultural discourse. It is not even that many readers failed to be persuaded by journalistic truth but that they found the aesthetics of that reporting to be alienating and disempowering.”8
The essay is particularly strong in comparison with many of the other essays in the collection because it criticizes the “mediacentric” explanations that many scholars have provided regarding the election and the fact that it locates the source of the disconnect between journalism and the people not in technical matters, but in political ones. The author recognizes that journalism has taken up an increasingly ‘caste’ character, though this is not the term he employs. Anderson writes:
“...in the partisan and polarized American political environment, professional journalistic claims to facticity have become simply another tribal marker—the tribal marker of ‘smartness’—and the quantitative, visually oriented forms of data news serve to alienate certain audience members as much as they convince anyone to think about politics or political claims more skeptically.”9
It can be asked how much this “tribalism” served, in the decades leading up to the 2016 election, to sever the connection between journalists and the American public. Was the MAGA movement a result of the severance of these two groups, a crisis of legitimacy, an interregnum? It is an interesting point of departure for an investigation of American intellectuals after WWII: what is/has been the role of journalism in American politics? And how has the relationship changed between journalists and the American public since WWII? And what did that shift contribute to the emergence of the MAGA movement? How much has the need to be “custodians of fact”10 contributed to the ‘caste’ character of journalism?
Part II of the book is a bit lackluster, but there are a few gems. On page 87, we find an essay titled Facts (Almost) Never Win Over Myths, by Julia Sonnevend, in which she goes against the grain of the rest of the collection to argue that people really have no reason to believe “facts” over myths and that politics is always about myths, hopes, and dreams. In what sounds like a criticism of the rest of Trump and the Media, she writes:
“President Trump’s surprise win in the 2016 elections has triggered a passionate debate over ‘fake news’ as a contributing factor in his electoral success. In the mindset of those making a causal link between fake news and the Trump win, surprise outcomes are linked to nonrationality and a state of misinformation, when rational minds suddenly get lost and leave the safe pathway of facts for the unknown, the mythical, the untrue. In this way of looking at the world, myths are fictions or fairy tales or entertainments, something designed for the weak, the underinformed, the ‘stupid.’ Myths transcend facts and charm the public with foggy imaginings. The solution, thus, appears to be a better form of communication, a more efficient way of information distribution. New technological solutions, journalistic methods, and media systems are discussed to fix the mistake, to find the right way to ‘inform the public.’ Reformers imagine that if only people were confronted with actual ‘facts,’ they would stop believing the ‘myth.’ But why would they?”11
Sonnevend gives the reader (one with any critical sense) a real breath of fresh air—the technical-organizational explanation of Trump’s victory is outright rejected, and the elitist, ‘caste’ notion that myths are for the uninformed and the stupid is condemned with a subtle snarkiness that I deeply appreciate. Sonnevend goes on to show us that just about every effort in politics relies on a sort of myth, or at least an appeal to hopes and dreams, rather than dry facts and appeals to ‘material interests.’ The first example she gives is the Marshall Plan, which is usually conceived as a purely economic plan to rebuild Europe, yet, as Sonnevend demonstrates, the plan was really a “project of hope,” a plan “meant to capture the hearts and souls of Europeans” based on an “extensive communication campaign in Western Europe focused on the prospect of change and belief in the future.” The Marshall Plan, ultimately, “was as much about captured hearts as about well-spent dollars.”12
Another, more timely, example she gives is Brexit. Surely, if people were acting in their best ‘material interests, Britain would have remained in the European Union—but such was not the case. Sonnevend explains:
“...the “Remain” camp provided a toxic combination of fear, anxiety, and countless incomprehensible facts. In contrast, the “Leave” campaign envisioned a mythical “Independence Day,” when a New United Kingdom would emerge from its ashes to be sovereign, influential, and prosperous. Many voters chose this promise over the contradictory current reality of their country.”13
If the assumptions of journalists (and communists) about how people act were true, then why did British people vote to leave the European Union, and why did Latinos with “illegal” families vote for Donald Trump? Britain is living through a lost decade, and Trump voters are having their families ripped apart—surely there is no ‘material’ incentive for these decisions. Yet, we still find liberals and Marxists who believe that humans act based on “material interests!” She concludes her essay:
“The fake news debate reduced voters to failed rational beings, while ignoring the ‘fact’ that we all desire something more from life than reason. Facts, professional experience, and reason suffered a tragic loss in the elections of 2016. But they lost something meaningful: a mythical promise of hope, prosperity, and dignity.”14
I am unsure if the author is grieving “facts, professional experience, and reason” or celebrating the death of that journalistic notion that these things are ‘primary,’ because if the latter is the case, I am there to celebrate as well. The following article by Daniel Kreiss aids in this undertaking. He asserts that people do not vote based on “facts” but based on their social identity, once again running against the grain of his elitist academic colleagues. Kreiss writes:
“...citizens do not rationally weigh policy information in the course of an election. They vote based on their social identities, or how they perceive themselves and others, their partisan identities, and their sense of the groups they believe the two political parties represent.”15
He continues on the next page:
“...journalists, a network of foundation funders, and academics alike generally see the profession of journalism in the narrow and ideal terms of providing quality information to rational, general-interest citizens fulfilling their solemn duty of making informed decisions at the polls. The ideal public is such a deep-rooted myth in the United States that efforts of civil repair following the failures of democracy […] focus on someone or some thing such as media manipulation that leads democratic citizens astray through no fault of their own. The ability of the public to self-govern is never questioned.”16
A lot of these communications and media scholars seem to forget that sometimes the people do elect Nazi deputies to parliament, that sometimes they democratically decide to end their ability to decide democratically. The lessons of the 20th century have not yet registered in many fields, particularly in American liberal journalism, where 18th-century enlightenment idealism seems, once again, to live on unchallenged. Kreiss is quick to point out that the success of Breitbart and Fox News is largely due to their ability to “understand their role in terms of identity, not information.”17 He writes:
“This is not to say that information is not important. It is, especially information that journalists provide about matters that are not already politicized. It is to say that identity comes prior to information. Identity shapes epistemology. People filter their understanding of information through their political and social identities.”18
And he concludes:
“As Fox News and Breitbart have discovered, there is power in the claim of representing and working for particular publics, quite apart from any abstract claims to present the truth.”19
Here is the lesson for communists, that any claim to ‘objectivity’ is a political claim, a practical and propagandistic one. The people do not act in their, or their communities’, best interests—they act based on their self-understanding, whatever that means to them, their ‘objective material interests’ may or may not be a part of it. Communists all too often take the claim to ‘objectivity’ made by the various political groupings at its word, setting out to ‘really’ undertake objective analysis since everyone else seems dishonest in their claim. The point is that everyone is a bit ‘dishonest’ in claiming objectivity, regardless of whether they know it or not. No matter how eloquently strung together, our words never ‘really’ get at the ‘reality’ of what we are talking about. Everything we say, however parallel it runs to what we talk about, is a posit. The liberal journalist who claims to be ‘objective’ thinks they are honestly being objective, but the DNC strategist understands that their objectivity is nothing more than an ideological and propagandistic claim. ‘Generals’ understand that they represent and work “for particular publics,” while ‘soldiers’ make “abstract claims to present the truth.”
Part III of the collection is titled Why Technology Matters. Unsurprisingly, it is the most ‘technical-organizational’ section of the whole book. While some of the essays, such as the first, locate the problem of seeing voters as rationalistic and self-interested creatures, they fail to prescribe anything beyond vague calls for “solidarity”20 and “renewed engagement with the rule of law and the institutions that embody it.”21 Another article essentially blames the format of Twitter for attracting news media’s attention to Donald Trump’s tweets for his victory, alongside the abstract doctrine of ‘populism,’ totally neglecting the ethico-political substance of the MAGA movement. Another begins strongly by identifying that the “unique historical context of the 2016 presidential election,” that is, generalized income inequality—the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash—had far more consequence on the outcome of the election than the “potential harmful effects of social media,”22 but by the end finds itself falling into the idealistic, liberal notion that intolerance is caused by isolation and that the remedy is exposure to other cultures. Anyone who has lived in New York for any length of time will immediately see the defect in this line of thinking.
The final section of the book starts with an essay named Center of the Universe No More in which the origins of that journalistic elitism we have talked about is investigated, though be it in brief. The authors explain:
“During the late twentieth century, most news companies in America were not only arrogant about their economic position as natural information monopolies or oligopolies, but that same attitude of imperviousness influenced the cultural assumptions that journalists developed in the course of their work. They saw themselves not only as public stewards but as uniquely powerful and important ones—possessing even a ‘calling’ that was theirs and theirs alone to fulfill. The same conditions of scarcity, exclusivity, and control in the information market on which the traditional news business model thrived also facilitated an occupational worldview of distinctiveness. Thus, as decades of ethnographic research as shown, journalists in the US developed an occupational persona at odds with outsiders: resistant to change; reluctant to listen to audiences; and reliant on a set of norms, routines, and reporting styles that positioned them ‘above the fray’ relative to others, largely detached from the communities and people they covered.”23
Here the backdrop is set for the emergence of the ‘caste’ character of journalism, which has no doubt contributed to the emergence of the MAGA movement. There is a running notion in Trump and the Media that it is Trump who was responsible for creating general distrust in the media. Still, this understanding seems to me a bit voluntaristic—in that it holds an individual solely responsible for the shifting of social forces. If anything, the MAGA movement is the result of a sort of ‘interregnum’ in which the people have become detached from the intellectual strata that have traditionally interpellated them, leaving the field open for a new cohort of intellectuals to take their place; that is, people along the lines of Milo Yiannapolis, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Nick Fuentes, or Andrew Tate.
The next article in the collection, by Sue Robinson, rather than focusing on ‘echo chambers’ like many of the other essays in the book, looks at how journalism became an echo chamber itself by fetishizing ‘the field’ and attempts to outline ways that its intellectuals can reingratiate themselves with the public that has largely lost trust in them. Unfortunately, however, the author falls back into the sort of rhetoric that one would expect to hear at a local left-wing activist meeting:
“When traditional institutional relationships break down, journalists must turn to the local to connect multiple publics and to remain relevant, rebuild trust, and reinvigorate community.”24
It is not “unfortunate” that a liberal journalism scholar would say this—it is to be expected. The unfortunate part is that communists say the same exact thing and then parade themselves around as if they have something original to say. American communism seems to continually fail to be anything but an extension of American liberalism, not only in its conception of man as ‘homo-economicus’ and its endemic economism, but also in its fetishization of ‘the community’ and ‘local’ organizing. Continuing in this tune, the following article sounds like it could have been written by an American communist the way it really only manages to ask “who profits?” and leave it at that. The author criticizes other analyses by claiming that much of it “overlooks the structural roots” of the problem and then proceeds to fire a few soft shots at “profit imperatives.” Once again, it is unsurprising that a liberal communications scholar would say such a thing. It is only ‘surprising’ that liberalism’s most vehement opponents fail to say anything different.
The next article, Making Journalism Great Again: Trump and the New Rise of New Activism, by Adrienne Russell, embarks on a look at the rise of media activism in the wake of the 2016 election (perhaps most memorably represented by Washington Post’s tag “Democracy Dies in Darkness”... funny how that turned out). The article starts strong and looks in the right direction; however, it falls back into the journalistic fetishization of “facts” and “objectivity,” but one much ‘weaker’ than most of the author’s colleagues. Russell writes:
“The good news is that these failures have fueled reflection among journalists about how they have approached their work, leading to perhaps the most important shift in the culture and practice of news reporting in the last century, where the priority placed on pursuing objectivity is giving way to a form of activism based on conviction that journalism in the United States must reclaim its role as a defender of democracy.”25
This line had me excited for what was to come, giving the impression that the author was veering toward a recognition of the inherently ideological—and partisan—nature of narrative construction. I got my hopes up too soon, for just a few lines later, she declares this activism to be “on behalf of the facts” that it consists of “telling it like it is.” As much as this is believed to be a ‘shift’ for journalism, it is really a return to the same old journalism we all know and (don't exactly) love. The next article says just as much when the author declares in favor of “campaign journalism” that he “is not calling for more partisan reporting” and that “effective campaign journalism has to be firmly rooted in the facts.” He shows off his journalistic disconnect with reality even more just a few paragraphs later:
“Journalists should forge ahead and do their best to tell the truth to the majority, a group that includes many Independents and weak Trump supporters who have not yet closed their minds to factual information that puts the president in a bad light.”26
This line exemplifies the ‘caste’ character of journalism, not so much that it is ‘elitist,’ but rather that it makes clear their disconnect with basic facts about social life. Everyone has made up their mind, and further, it really doesn’t matter if they have or not, because by holding even a simple ethical value they are already integrated into the camp of one party or the other. It is the fact that this is not the case with communism that indicates that communism has not yet become concrete. Imagine a world where a simple declaration that one supports trans rights denotes that person as a communist, regardless of whether they have heard the word “communist” or not. We see this with young people all the time: they may or may not consider themselves Democrats, but by their belief that trans people should be able to exist, they automatically become ‘Democrats.’
The collection's final essay calls for journalists to stand together in the face of attacks by the president upon American journalism and to stand against him. It seems like a call made too late, however. Donald Trump’s attacks on the media signal a larger shift, that is, the solidification of a new power bloc constructed by a new cohort of intellectuals. For journalists to reclaim their former role, they would first have to dislodge the connection between this new intellectual cohort and their audience. Only then would the field be open for them to reclaim their former prestige.
Conclusion
The book was, overall, an interesting read. Though it had me nearly falling asleep here and there, when an essay came up that ran against the grain of that all too common journalistic ‘objectivism,’ it supplied me with the energy to keep going. If anything, the real value of this collection is that it serves as a reference point for the ideologically subservient position American Marxism occupies in relation to American liberalism. With the aid of this book, we can see all the more clearly how what is taken for granted to be “Marxism” by our American Marxists is really nothing more than basic propositions of 18th century enlightenment rationalism wrapped up in Marxist phraseology. “The centrality of the concept of rational argumentation, the essence of man as homo economicus”27 are both affirmed here. The book is also extremely valuable in the context of a study of American intellectuals and their role—which I am currently undertaking, but as of yet have no work planned in relation to it (unless one counts this work). The ‘caste-like,’ and ‘elitist’ character that journalism has developed has no doubt had consequences in the political field, and this has been made quite obvious with the rise of the MAGA movement. It would do well for communists to investigate this development in American political life, for I believe it to have profound political import for the project that communists wish to carry out—all the more so considering how ‘caste-like’ Marxists behave. If I can leave the reader with one thing, all I would say is that “facts” are not enough to fundamentally change a person's values and beliefs—it is more existential than that, much more ‘vital.’
________________________________________
1 - Frank DiStefano, The Next Realignment, p.39
2 - Trump and the Media, p.9
3 - Ibid. p.12
4 - Ibid. p.13
5 - Ibid. p.21
6 - Ibid. p.32
7 - Ibid. p.32
8 - Ibid. p.33
9 - Ibid. p.38-39
10 - Ibid. p.66
11 - Ibid. p.87
12 - Ibid. p.90
13 - Ibid. p.90
14 - Ibid. p.92
15 - Ibid. p.95
16 - Ibid. p.96
17 - Ibid. p.98
18 - Ibid. p.98
19 - Ibid. p.99
20 - Ibid. p.132
21 - Ibid. p.149
22 - Ibid. p.159
23 - Ibid. p.180
24 - Ibid. p.187-188
25 - Ibid. p.203-204
26 - Ibid. p.215
27 - P.K Gandakin, On Marx’s Materialism