The liberal media's self absorbed bubble....

America is changing, and so is the media

Last week, the New York Times op-ed section solicited and published an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) arguing that the US military should be deployed to “restore order to our streets.” The piece set off an internal revolt at the Times, with staffers coordinating pushback across Twitter, and led to the resignation of James Bennet, the editor of the op-ed section, and the reassignment of Jim Dao, the deputy editor.

That same week, Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned after publishing an article by the paper’s architecture critic titled “Buildings Matter, Too.” David Boardman, the chair of the board that controls the Inquirer, said Wischnowski had done “remarkable” work but “leaves behind some decades-old, deep-seated and vitally important issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, issues that were not of his creation but that will likely benefit from a fresh approach.”

One interpretation of these events, favored by frustrated conservatives, is that a generation of young, woke journalists want to see the media remade along activist lines, while an older generation believes it must cover the news without fear and favor, and reflect, at the very least, the full range of views held by those in power.

“The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’” wrote the Times’s Bari Weiss. “One group emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.’”

Another interpretation is that the range of acceptable views isn’t narrowing so much as it’s shifting. Two decades ago, an article like Cotton’s could easily be published, an essay arguing for abolishing prisons or police would languish in the submissions pile, and a slogan like “Black Lives Matter” would be controversial. Today, Black Lives Matter is in the sphere of consensus, abolishing prisons is in legitimate controversy, and there’s a fight to move Cotton’s proposal to deploy troops against US citizens into deviance. The idea space is just as large as it’s been in the past — perhaps larger — but it is in flux, and the fight to define its boundaries is more visible.

Clearly Klein here sides (ever-so-obviously) with the idea that views are "shifting". Klein goes on to talk about millennials as being the largest of the generations, when in fact the largest age group is still over 65 (by a fairly wide margin). He provides the idea that media must be more "sensitive" to offending readers in a time where the competition is so fierce in the ever expanding media. He offers (correctly) that newspapers have increasingly become depended on finding their "niche" in the market, and that they do not want to upset their demographic (which in the case of the NY Times is now younger, liberal, and openly anti-Trump).

Where Klein fails is in the logic that this "shifting" is somehow cut and dried. His opinions about what is "mainstream" and what is "accepted" is part of his own media bubble. While the Black Lives Movement has gained popularity in the past couple of weeks, that popularity is likely temporary and still hovers at around 50% of the public (which is not exactly a consensus). When the emotion runs out and cooler head prevail, all that will be left is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of destruction. That will be the legacy of these riots.  Meanwhile, a much larger portion of the country (almost two thirds according to several polls) actually agreed with the idea of the US military being used to squelch the riots (the subject of Tom Cotton's ed-op).

So this becomes an excuse to justify that the views of Klein and most of the NY Times are now mainstream, simply because they argue that the politics of the country are moving in that direction. While I can appreciate the attempt to get ahead of the curve, the reality is that change has been and still is a very slow moving train, and these sorts of debates do nothing to bring people together and drive the change forward. Moreover, we don't know if the younger generation (like most every generation before them) will change politically when they settle down, buy a house, raise a family, etc. On those accounts, millennial are late to the game. But to bank on the idea that a fairly lazy, short attention span, idealistic, media driven generation will remain exactly as they are, and can lead your revolution to the promise land is likely wishful thinking. These are the same people who took over a six block area of Capital Hill in Seattle only to start to panic when they ran out of food within a couple of days. Apparently they decided to shared their food with the homeless, and ironically the homeless took it all, leaving the "occupiers" confused and without a plan.

The reality is that in a two party system, these things go back and forth. The permanent liberal majority has been talked about since long before I was born, and pretty much every generation has had spokespeople who would demand that they are just the liberal generation to push it forward, at least until they were no longer a liberal generation. The only huge political bandwagons of my generation were conservative, not liberal. Both Nixon and Reagan won well over 40 states and reigned supreme over far left liberal candidates.

But at the end of the day, Klein is at least admitting what has been largely denied by the media. Klien is admitting that there is a bias in the media, that that bias is not only "good" for business, but possibly the only way forward for struggling media outlets. What this would eventually mean, however, is that "news" is no longer going to be "news". Rather it would be openly known as a set of political opinions designed to keep their political "niche" happy. There would be no more suggestion by anyone that because something is written in the NY Times or WaPo, that it comes with some degree of objectivity and legitimacy.

So those are the decisions that the media must make. They can continue to move down the various paths of political "niches" while giving up their claims about objectivity and legitimacy. Or they can attempt to regather the universal acclaim that they once had, when you could count on them to just report on the news, without politicizing and editorializing everything. What they cannot do is to just continue to actually to the former while claiming the latter. That ship has been sailing away quite quickly for some time.