Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

"Batya Ungar-Sargon has demonstrated that the press has fundamentally misdiagnosed the sources of tension in American political life, which are based more on class than race. As the industry has become more aristocratic, it has shed its egalitarian mission statement, devotingxa0itself instead to reinforcing the assumptions of its educated, affluent readership. As a result, the news media is increasingly disconnected from the nation it pretends to serve and is cedingxa0working-class politics to the American right. Ungar-Sargon’s insightful book is an impassioned plea not for objectivity in reporting but for a partiality that benefits the greatest number, evenxa0at the expense of a few egos in American newsrooms."xa0―Noah Rothman, associate editor at Commentary magazine, MSNBC/NBC News contributor,xa0and author of Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America “ Bad News is a book that every single journalist and aspiring journalist in the country needs to read. The fact that modern journalism has transformed itself to an upper class profession isxa0blindingly obvious to outsiders, but not well understood within the profession itself. The belief that it's up to journalists to lead public opinion in particular directions and lead them away fromxa0u2028inconvenient facts is nothing less than a disaster for democracy. It undermines trust and credibility and destroys the likelihood of our citizens having 'shared facts.' Modern news media needs to earn the trust of the public back, and the first step is taking the hardxa0u2028medicine in this important book.”―Greg Lukianoff, CEO of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and co-author, Unlearning Liberty, co-author, Coddling of the American Mind “Journalism, at its best, provides a necessary check against powerful interests.xa0 But what happens when journalists themselves become part of a powerful, elite class, disconnected from the interests of the working class of the country? Batya Ungar-Sargon’s timely book paintsxa0a disillusioning picture of the state of 21st century journalism, where dispassionate reporting too often takes a back seat to narrative-driven progressive activism.xa0 It offers a clarion call forxa0 the most important kind of diversity within newsrooms – an ideological diversity that’s increasingly absent from our country’s leading institutions. If you care about the future of journalism, Bad News is both a wake-up call to the growing threat and a guidebook for how toxa0build back better.”―Josh Kraushaar, politics editor, National Journal “If you really want to understand the contradictions and complexities of the present moral panic, Batya Ungar-Sargon is an extraordinarily incisive guide to the country we share and the journalism that attempts not just to capture but also to shape it. This is a must-read for anyone concerned about the fragmented state of American media and the perpetual culture (read: class) wars that so powerfully undermine it.”―Thomas Chatterton Williams, contributing writer, New York Times magazine, and columnist, Harper’s “In the growing chorus of voices speaking up against ideological conformity in the media and the zombie activism that goes along with it, Batya Ungar-Sargon’s call for sanity and intellectual integrity is full-throated and essential. In Bad News, she peels back the layers of a media apparatus that has incentivized the distortion of reality and pitted our brains against our emotions. In so doing, she offers concrete explanations for a cultural crisis that, for most people, is constantly felt on a visceral level but nearly impossible to understand. Readers will come away with a better understanding. From there, they might feel better, too.”― Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars “This book is like a flash of lightning, giving sudden illumination to one of the main causes of our current cultural dysfunction. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here, or how we get out.”xa0― Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern School of Business”This lively, provocative, and eye-opening book shows that the cultural symbols of class constitute a forceful engine in American life, even as the prevailing pundit machine tries to remove it from view."― Nancy Isenberg, author of bestselling White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America “In Bad News , Batya Ungar-Sargon provides a timely and entertaining account of how class rivalries as well as political conflicts have shaped and sometimes warped the news industry, from the age of yellow journalism to today’s woke media.”--Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. There’s a view that’s taken hold of America’s national news media. It’s not a new one; it’s long been a staple among academics and activists. But increasingly, it has made its way out of the hallowed hallways of sociology and ethnic studies departments and seeped into America’s mainstream via our leading national news media outlets. It’s the belief that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state that confers power and privilege on white people, which it systematically denies to people of color. Those who hold this view believe an interconnected network of racist institutions infects every level of society, culture, and politics, imprisoning us all in a power binary based on race regardless of our economic circumstances. And the solution, according to those who hold this view, is not to reform institutions that still struggle with racism but to transform the consciousness of everyday Americans until we prioritize race over everything else. This view is known as “antiracism,” or by the shorthand of being “woke,” slang for being awake to what’s called systemic or institutional racism. And though many in this ideological camp pay lip service to the idea that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality, they view race as the most important and inescapable fact of American life, reducing America’s past and present to a binary of white oppressors and black and brown victims. For a long time, this view was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, by and large through liberal media outlets like the New York Times , NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post , Vox, CNN, the New Republic , and the Atlantic . Once fringe, the idea that America is an unabated white-supremacist country and that the most important thing about a person is the immutable fact of their race is the defining paradigm of today, the one now favored by white liberals to describe our current moment. And it was when white liberals began espousing this woke narrative that it went from being mainstream to being an obsession; and even, most recently, to being an outright moral panic. The obsessive enthusiasm for wokeness among white liberals created a feedback loop with their media outlets that was then reinforced through a new and staggering uniformity of views across once distinct publications and news channels, showing up in ubiquitous television segments like Don Lemon’s, and articles like “Is the White Church Inherently Racist?” and “The Housewives of White Supremacy” and “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs” and “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror,” 8 the bread and butter of the New York Times and the Washington Post . Where did this obsession come from? The election of Donald Trump is often given the credit for the national liberal news media’s newly woke outlook: Trump was so extreme in his disregard of liberal mores, so willing to offend with comments that were sometimes casually racist—comments that were amplified and justified throughout conservative and right-wing news outlets—that America’s liberal camp, including the liberal media, swung hard to the left. This is true: The mainstream media certainly molded itself around Trump, whose presidency was a major gift to MSNBC and CNN and the New York Times —outlets that were facing a bleak outlook are now thriving thanks to the ratings and clicks that the Trump stories generated. But the woke moral panic mainstreamed by the liberal news media had actually been underway for at least five years before Trump appeared on the scene. It began around 2011, the year the New York Times erected its online paywall. It was then that articles mentioning “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” or “oppression” started to appear with exponential frequency at the Times , BuzzFeed, Vox, the Washington Post , and NPR, according to sociologists tracking these developments. And as we will see throughout this book, this radical shift to the left on issues of identity was rooted in a longer-term trend in the media that has much more to do with class than it does with politics or race. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek . Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward , the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times , the Washington Post , Foreign Policy , Newsweek , the New York Review of Books Daily , and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more