The age of grievance, p.14
The Age of Grievance, page 14
In 2012, after a big story by Jason Horowitz in the Washington Post about Mitt Romney’s high-school bullying of an effeminate classmate, I got booked and then unbooked to discuss it on an MSBNC panel. The booker came to me because I’m a gay man who’d written many columns spotlighting antigay discrimination and advocating for gay rights; the booker dismissed me after I said, in a preinterview, that I was loath to condemn Romney unconditionally because the incident had occurred more than forty-five years earlier, in a much less enlightened world, and many of us behaved, as children, in immature and terrible ways that have no bearing on who we became as adults. That assessment, apparently, wasn’t on brand. And I, as a result, wasn’t on air.
Pundits are now legion, our written wares are among the most conspicuous and popular features of the news landscape, and, as I wrote in the Times in June 2021, when I went from a full-time to a part-time role there in order to join the faculty at Duke, “Too many columns are less sober analyses than snarky stand-up acts or primal screams. The stand-up and the screams sell.” I wasn’t making my job change because of that, but the change—and a column in which I was informing readers of it—seemed to me a logical moment to take stock, to reflect. I wrote:
I worried, and continue to worry, about the degree to which I and other journalists—opinion writers, especially—have contributed to the dynamics we decry: the toxic tenor of American discourse, the furious pitch of American politics, the volume and vitriol of it all.
I worry, too, about how frequently we shove ambivalence and ambiguity aside. Ambivalence and ambiguity aren’t necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events we don’t yet understand, with outcomes we can’t predict.
But they don’t make for bold sentences or tidy talking points. So we pundits are merchants of certitude in a world where much is in doubt and many questions don’t have one right answer. As such, we may be encouraging arrogance and unyieldingness in our readers, viewers, and listeners. And those attributes need no encouragement in America today.
That’s hardly the only manner in which the media contributes to a climate of grievance, raising a temperature that’s better lowered. Another way, also connected to how much the vast real estate of cable television and the infinite territory of the internet have stiffened the competition for attention, is the negativity and melodrama of so much of today’s journalism, which puts considerably greater emphasis on problems than on solutions, amplifies conflict while shrugging at conciliation (the little bit of it that exists), and takes a five-alarm-fire approach to minor blazes as well as raging infernos. In a crowded marketplace, in a jangled world, five-alarm fires seem to generate the most discussion and garner the most clicks, so our breathlessness can be attributed as much to consumers—without whom we lack the revenue to provide any news, sunny or stormy—as to us. Which came first: the doomscrolling or the doom? Regardless, they’re intertwined at this point, each rewarding and ramping up the other.
Of course, a certain degree of alarmism is in keeping with our mission. It has always been our way. It’s necessary: you have to name the problems before you can present solutions, and the noble function of watchdogs—which good journalists are—is to bark at signs of incoming danger. But how consistently? How loudly?
Amanda Ripley, the author of the 2021 book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, wrote an essay for the Washington Post in 2022 in which she confessed sheepishly that she, a journalist, had been avoiding the news. She found that when she stayed on top of it, the way she felt she was supposed to, “I was just marinating in despair.” She couldn’t take it anymore.
“I tried to toughen up,” she recounted. “I gave myself stern lectures: ‘This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!’ ” I’m usually not a fan of that many exclamation points, but every one of Ripley’s was wisely deployed, because that’s how the news has been coming at us since 2016, in an indiscriminately exclamatory fashion. Ripley provided some evidence of that. “New data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world,” she wrote. “About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news.”
“If so many of us feel poisoned by our products,” she asked, “might there be something wrong with them?” She noted that therapists were treating patients for what they called “headline stress disorder.” And she quoted something that Krista Tippett, the creator and host of the popular On Being podcast and the author of the 2016 book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, once said about the ceaseless blasts of joyless updates coming at us in more ways through more devices than ever before: “I don’t actually think we are equipped, even physiologically or mentally, to be delivered catastrophic and confusing news and pictures, 24/7. We are analog creatures in a digital world.”
As it happens, one of the other best and most haunting laments I’ve read on the debilitating, addling effect of all the bad news hurled at us also appeared in the Post’s Opinions section, written in the early spring of 2023 by the columnist David Von Drehle, who likewise built his essay around an admission: he’d been staring at a cardinal on a tree outside his window, and his “heart swelled” at the beauty of it, but then he worried that he shouldn’t feel that way, what with all that he’d been told about the crises that birds face courtesy of human rapaciousness and heedlessness.
“To know this, and to see a bird outside the kitchen window, should darken my mood, should it not?” Von Drehle wrote. “A look at one bird—even a plump, handsome fellow feeding unconcernedly on the block of seeds and suet I keep dangling from a tree limb through winter—ought to make me think of all birds, right?” He should be remembering the “threatened and dying birds” throughout “the ravaged globe,” he added, half in sarcasm, and should also be reflecting on climate change, assaults on democracy, assaults on free speech, the insidious impact of social media, the insidious impact of inequality, the national debt, drug overdoses. The length of his list underscored the magnitude of our negativity.
“The news calls us to think constantly on a very large scale about problems to which no individual holds the key,” he wrote. “And to feel jejune if we slip from that lofty, arid plane to delight in something here and now. The starry sky itself could contain the asteroid that will kill us all.”
On a gorgeous day a little more than two months after I read Von Drehle’s column, I was walking in the woods with a friend and neighbor who’s one of the least easily ruffled, most adaptable people I know when she announced that she was going to have to stop watching NBC’s Today show. Not some purposely somber newscast, not some prime-time shout-fest, but the kind of morning television program that was designed to be a somewhat soothing, somewhat energizing, mostly pleasant get-the-day-going mix of entertainment-world buzz, human-interest stories, sports updates, yummy recipes, book recommendations, and yes, important news, definitely some important news, but not too much and not too glum. What was turning my friend and neighbor away? Al Roker and the weather.
Lately, she said, Roker had been paying special attention to extreme weather events around the globe and would often quantify how many millions of people were being displaced, distressed, or diminished by the stubborn drought, the record heat, the fires, the floods. He was doing so, she understood, to raise awareness of climate change, and that suited her politics. But it didn’t complement her morning tea. Couldn’t she wake up fully first? “And what am I supposed to do with that?” she asked me. She’d already installed solar panels on her roof. She’d decided that her next car would be fully electric or at least a hybrid. Roker’s reporting wasn’t giving her fresh ideas for bolder action. It was making her feel defeated.
We need hope, Von Drehle pointed out in his essay. We need “a sense of agency,” Ripley wrote in hers, adding: “Feeling like you and your fellow humans can do something—even something small—is how we convert anger into action, frustration into invention. The self-efficacy is essential to any functioning democracy.” But most of the news streaming at us—screaming at us—doesn’t provide that feeling. One response is to tune out, as Ripley had found herself doing for a while, and as some 40 percent of Americans, according to the Reuters Institute, were doing. Another, overlapping reaction is to become numb. A third is to live in a state of permanent agitation. To marinate in the despair that Ripley felt before she tuned out. To stay in the clutch of an anger that’s never converted into action, because the means for that transformation is never specified. To make friends with frustration and not make the acquaintance of invention. And that absence of self-efficacy is antithetical to any functioning democracy.
* * *
Fox News stands out from other major news operations in many ways, including the magnitude of recklessness that led to its $787.5 million settlement of the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit. But one of its boldest distinctions is a mood and outlook even bleaker than the modern journalistic norm. The America it describes is disintegrating so rapidly that there soon won’t be any hope of reversing the process. It communicates those dire circumstances with a signature disgust.
I’m not sure I’ve beheld any television figure who radiates the peculiarly manic disdain that Jeanine Pirro, a longtime fixture in the Fox News daytime lineup, does; Cecily Strong’s martini-swilling impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live is much too benign (and a criminal insult to martinis). And watching the nighttime trinity of Tucker Carlson at eight o’clock Eastern (until he was yanked in April 2023), Sean Hannity at nine, and Laura Ingraham at ten was like being served a triple-decker Apocalypse Burger with patties that hadn’t all been cooked to precisely the same temperature. Hannity was medium. Ingraham was medium-rare to rare—more savage, messier. Carlson was just about raw. And the meal certainly wasn’t garnished with the kind of constructive, hopeful counsel for which Ripley rightly yearns. Not unless you considered the urging of extra contempt for liberals, extra resentment of immigrants and minorities, and extra firearms for all to be an inspiring and unifying agenda.
The trinity’s obsession with immigrants and minorities—Carlson’s obsession in particular—points to another distinguishing feature of major news organizations today that’s additional grist for grievance, extending well beyond Fox News and right-wing media but not in incarnations of such monumental nastiness and rank bigotry: more and more reporting and commentary mirror or even upsize identity politics in their implicit and explicit categorization of Americans into discrete groups suffering their own indignities, facing their own threats, pressing their own agendas, fending for themselves. More and more provide Americans who are already inclined to feel wounded with an inventory and analysis of their wounds.
On his Fox News show, which ran from November 2016 to April 2023, Carlson performed a version of that so hyperbolic and histrionic that it achieved the aspect of burlesque; the one or two times a month when I forced myself to watch him, I kept waiting for him to break out in laughter, to fess up that he was doing some new-millennium homage to Archie Bunker in All in the Family. But, no, he was selling hate straight up, to a point where many major advertisers fled the show and never returned. He had “constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news—and also, by some measures, the most successful,” Nicholas Confessore wrote in a three-part series about Carlson in the Times in 2022 that reflected Carlson’s undisputed crown as the king of cable news, whose nightly average of more than 4.3 million viewers in the second quarter of 2020 made Tucker Carlson Tonight the highest-rated cable news show in history.
The Times series was titled “American Nationalist.” The headline atop the first part was “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.” And Confessore explained: “Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege—by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain.” In America according to Tucker Carlson, those cultural elites were doing more than just silencing the audience to whom Carlson appealed. They were working hard—by deliberately failing to police the southwestern border of the United States, by cheerleading for more permissive immigration policies, and by pushing amnesty and citizenship for people who’d entered the country illegally—to make sure that longstanding, pale-skinned Americans were physically outnumbered by newer, darker-skinned ones who’d be loyal to the Democratic Party.
That specter is known as “replacement theory,” and while Carlson didn’t use those exact words or sketch out the whole conspiracy in detail, he routinely presented pieces of it. He got the gist across, as when he told viewers in April 2021 that Democrats were importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the less obedient ones already here. Confessore’s three-part series documented more than four hundred episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight during which, in Confessore’s words, Carlson “amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration.” Carlson would continue to amplify that notion after Fox exiled him. In November 2023, he assailed Jewish donors who were protesting university officials’ tepid response to Hamas’s invasion of Israel the previous month; those donors, he complained, had done nothing over the past decade as faculty and students on the left were “calling for white genocide.”
And Carlson was by no means whistling in the wind. An Associated Press poll released in May 2022 showed that about one in three American adults believed that there was an ongoing effort “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” According to the poll, that belief was especially popular with the audiences of right-wing media outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. It had unequivocally taken root with violent extremists: the shooters involved in the massacres of the Jewish people in that Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, of the Mexican people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, and of the Black people in a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022 made references, either in their interviews with law enforcement officials or in remarks or writing before they opened fire, to their fury at the prospect of immigrants and nonwhite people taking over the United States.
There are phrases for the thought structure that Carlson was (and still is) pitching, and for the type of pitchman that he embodies. That those descriptors appear prominently in Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start signals their dangerousness. What she describes as “ethnic nationalism” is exactly what Carlson promoted on Tucker Carlson Tonight. And the role he played was that of an “ethnic entrepreneur.” Ethnic nationalism and ethnic entrepreneurship, Walter explained, splinter a country with particular efficiency.
“Countries that factionalize have political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than ideology,” she wrote, an observation with special relevance given Fox News’ mammoth sway over Republican politics, reflected in the composition of the network’s audience, 93 percent of whom identified as Republicans or indicated an affinity for the Republican Party in a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center. (The same survey found that 95 percent of viewers who relied on MSNBC for their television news belonged to or sympathized with the Democratic Party.) “The citizens of the former Yugoslavia could have organized themselves around their political beliefs—they could have coalesced around communism, as Tito had encouraged, or liberalism, or corporatism,” Walter observed, homing in on the region of the world where, in the early 1990s, the Bosnian War raged and there were horrific incidents of “ethnic cleansing.” “Instead, leaders chose to activate ethnic and religious identities.”
“Ethnic nationalism, and its expression through factions, doesn’t take hold in a country on its own,” she further explained. “For a society to fracture along identity lines, you need mouthpieces—people who are willing to make discriminatory appeals and pursue discriminatory policies in the name of a particular group. They are usually people who are seeking political office or trying to stay in office. They provoke and harness feelings of fear as a way to lock in the constituencies that will support their scramble for power. Experts have a term for these individuals, ethnic entrepreneurs.” Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and then of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which is what Serbia became) from 1997 to 2000, perfectly fit the bill. Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Narendra Modi in India inhabit this role to varying degrees. So, to an extent, does Trump, and it’s no accident that despite the emergence in mid-2023 of text messages in which Carlson confessed to despising him, the two have played public kissy-face for many years now. They’re peacocks of an ethnic nationalist feather. And they’re ethnic entrepreneurs by Walter’s definition; they “make the fight expressly about their group’s position and status in society.”
