The Infernal Triangle: Metaphors Journalists Live By (Part II)

Part I of this essay ended with a Washington-based New York Times reporter smirking. He did so while explaining to author Jeff Sharlet, who logged thousands of reporting miles and hours of deep engagement with the best scholarship on the subject for his book The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, why he was foolish to suggest the Times consider referring to Donald Trump and his supporters as “fascists” and “racists.”

The Times reporter asserted that journalists instead should “just [write] what’s going on,” that to “offer a label” that was “going to be debated” would just “distract from the reporting.”

And besides: “The market has spoken, and they like what we’re doing.” The Times, he repeated several times, still has ten million subscribers, even if “a lot of people have thoughts, and feel ownership over The New York Times because they have been readers and subscribers for many years.”

That claim of the market as the final arbiter of success did not make Jeff Sharlet a happy man.

“The market has spoken?! Tell me about your metaphor! Your defining metaphor. The market spoke in 2016 and made a fascist president. The market spoke in Tennessee today. Was that successful? The Wisconsin state legislature; is that the market speaking?” On that last point, Sharlet was referring to politics being overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans in a fairly even state, via district maps secretly plotted in a law office so that the conspirators could hide behind attorney-client privilege. (The state supreme court finally ordered an end to this earlier this year.)

The Timesman replied with such passion that his voice squeaked: “It is the market speaking!”

His next point he managed to deliver more calmly: “The market spoke in 2010. And they gave the Republicans a majority. Everyone knew in 2010 what the Republicans stood for, and they won.” But to my ears, it landed with a screech.

In the book I’m working on now, I write of how Republicans nationalized that election around the message of the Tea Party movement. Hundreds of articles reported uncritically—“just writing what’s going on”—what adherents said “Tea” stood for, literally: The letters T, E, and A were an acronym for “taxed enough already.” No newspapers, ever, bothered to interject that that made little more sense than the claim, habitually flagged as false in news reports now, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

Obama signed a law in his first month in office cutting taxes on 97 percent of Americans who worked for wages, by an average of $1,200 per family. Obama referred to his “Making Work Pay” tax cut in just about every speech. But thanks to credulous reporting like that in 2010—some of the most egregious coming from the Times—a poll taken a year after it took effect found that over half believed the Obama administration kept taxes the same, about a quarter thought he raised them, and only 12 percent gave the right answer. Interesting, what “everyone knew.”

The very premise of the “market speaking” screeched in Sharlet’s ears. “Everyone knows what the Republicans stood for?! I met a man in Waukesha—he had a Trump flag—who said he hates the Democrats because they made abortion illegal. This is ridiculous … You say you’re doing the reporting—”

Mr. Times, heatedly: “It’s true! No one else is doing the reporting we’re doing. No one has the breadth. No one has the reporters in as many places. I was the last person who was at events in Wisconsin two nights in a row … their people weren’t …”

Cross talk—which ended thus with the Timesman huffing: “You attacked The New York Times! … You came on and said, ‘I need to explain to you why The New York Times doesn’t use the word fascist to refer to people,’ and I explained to you that the reporting is more powerful than any label that you want to put on it. And you came after me.”

He hadn’t. But Sharlet tried a peace offering to cool things down: “For The New York Times to say, ‘We are the arbiters, and the market has spoken, and that we’re the only ones doing an adequate job: None of us have done an adequate job.”

At which the Times reporter heated things up again:

“Hey, if you don’t think The New York Times is doing an adequate job, you don’t have to subscribe to the paper.”

As Sharlet reflected to me when we spoke, “This to me was sort of a jaw-dropping statement, even if you love your paper. I mean, what are you? This is like you’re a paperboy on the steps trying to sell me a subscription, not somebody describing how journalists should work together: ‘You get this piece, I do this piece, we develop a picture of the world.’ Right?”

Apparently not. The Q&A brought worse.

SHARLET WAS ASKED BY HIS BOOKSTORE HOST how he earned the trust of his subjects who tell him the extraordinary things they tell him. He answered, “I treat them with respect.” A word he didn’t use, but might also have, was “humility.” He told of a Wisconsin militia leader who welcomed him into his home, showed off the veritable armory he kept laid out on his pool table, and explained why he had decided not to run him off his property: “He says, ‘You’re a fed, an intruder, or a fool. Fed: shoot. Intruder: shoot. Fool: we’ll see.’ So I aced that test. I’m the fool.”

That seemed rather to take the wind out of the other guy’s sails, when it came to whether Sharlet was a real reporter.

Sharlet continued, “I can’t have a conversation with this person unless I come to him from a place of transparent subjectivity.” The alternate model—“objectivity”—he described as a baleful ideological artifact of the Cold War, when American elites needed the “imagination of a place in the center.”

I love that point. For what this imagination too often ended up creating was platforms from which certain sorts of powerful people could speak the way they wished, downward, uncontested. Which, I think, is part of what does not work about traditional political journalism anymore.

There are good arguments to be made against that perspective. But not the one the guy from the Times Washington bureau made, that the Times’ success in “the market” affirmed the unquestionable wisdom of all of that.

Despite himself, Sharlet mocked:

“The market has spoken! Ten million readers! Tucker Carlson, with his pinky finger”—he trailed off. “We’re not the mainstream anymore. We’re the fringe.”

What the discussion came down to, in the end, was the metaphors. The New York Times, its representative was claiming, doesn’t use them. Doesn’t need them. Nor narrative frames. Nor labels. “Just writing what’s going on” is all: America’s Newspaper of Record as a perfect, unblemished window unto reality itself. Consider what happened when Jenny from Lake County, Illinois, asked for comment about her frustration that the local daily seemed reluctant to report on “white Christian nationalist imagery in Republican campaigns.” She said she was “concerned by our inability to confront extremism.”

The Timesman was instinctively passionate in his defense of the home team. He launched into a detailed response that began, “Well, I think there has been more reporting on white Christian nationalism in The New York Times than anywhere else …”

At that, Sharlet nailed his interlocutor dead to rights.

“White Christian nationalism,” he noted, was not simply “what was going on.” It is a label. One whose accuracy, appropriateness, and heuristic value scholars argue over just as passionately as they do the unmentionable “f-word.” To unthinkingly pass it on, as Mr. Times did, whereas “fascism” must be dismissed: “It’s a little bit,” Sharlet observed, “like the textbooks down in [Florida] about Rosa Parks. ‘One group were not allowed to sit in the front of the bus.’ But we’re not going to say [which group]. The people decide, right?”

Meanwhile, “we’re not naming the thing that’s in front of us.”

Although, actually, he is not quite right. By not naming it “fascism,” when others responsibly name it that, the Times is, effectively, naming it “not fascism.”

All journalists label. All journalists clothe reality in metaphors, and hang their narratives on pre-existing frames. Bad ones—or if we’re being generous, ones following bad institutional rules—are the ones who refuse to acknowledge that. Which means they can’t thoughtfully change their labels, metaphors, and narrative frames—if they refuse to think about them, as a point of pride.

Though in this instance, alas, the market metaphor is appropriate: It will reward them. It always seems to be the journalists who are most smug in the face of those begging them for self-criticism that fortune favors most.

They’re like the character in Molière, who, after asking what this fancy word “prose” meant, was shocked to learn he’d been writing it all his life. In this case, however, a reporter’s chosen metaphor, which he doesn’t seem to recognize as a metaphor, is especially corrosive. For in the “marketplace,” the Chicago school of economics teaches us, plurality is proof of excellence. Outcomes must be read backwards as the unquestioned, unquestionable view of the People themselves. As, in fact, reality—which is quite a problem if you’re writing about a movement where the ticket for entry is denying reality, and whose avant-garde threatens those who dare defy their fantasies, and act according to actual reality, with violence.

Which you might at least consider calling “fascism.”

You may, by now, have wondered something. I checked it out for you: Yes, of course The New York Times uses the word “fascist” to describe present political movements. Just not movements in the U.S. —unthinkingly, one might surmise. That’s a problem we’ll wrestle with in our next column, on how the ideology of American exceptionalism blights this entire discussion.