The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  And the media didn’t stop with mere rhetorical flourishes. The overall narrative—that America was evil, and that its police were systemically racist—led to practical efforts across the country to defund the police, cheered on by the media. Police officers, realizing that even a proper arrest, if effectuated by a white officer against a black suspect, could result in a media-led crusade against them and their departments, stopped proactively policing. As a result, thousands of Americans died in 2020 who simply wouldn’t have died in 2019. As Heather Mac Donald observed in The Wall Street Journal, “The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in American history. . . . .Based on preliminary estimates, at least 2,000 more Americans, most of them black, were killed in 2020 than in 2019.”20

  The media’s desperate attempts to portray the Black Lives Matter movement as both legitimate and nonviolent led them to legitimize both untruth and violence. So when the media—quite properly—expressed outrage at the insanity of the January 6 Capitol invasion, Americans with an attention span longer than that of a guppy could see the hypocrisy and double standard a mile off. The media, it seems, is fine with political violence when it is directed at one side.

  When asked about their perfectly obvious shift from riot-cheerleaders to riot-chastisers, members of the media have reacted with pure outrage. To even compare the media’s tolerance for BLM violence rooted with their rage over January 6 meant that you were engaging in intellectual hypocrisy. Anyone who pointed out the double standard was hit with the charge of “whataboutism,” even though the entire basis for the double standard accusation was condemnation of violence across the board—condemnation in which the media had refused to engage itself.

  CNN’s Lemon, for example, sputtered, “I’m sick of people comparing, you can’t compare what happened this summer to what happened at the Capitol. It’s two different things. One was built on people, on racial justice, on criminal justice, right, on reform, on police not beating up—or treating people of color differently than they do Whites. OK? That was not a lie. Those are facts. Go look at them.”21 Lemon presented no such facts. But his opinion was good enough. After all, Lemon says that he has “evolved” as a journalist:

  Being a person, a black man—let’s put it this way: being an American who happens to be Black, who happens to be gay, from the south, I have a certain lens that I view the world through and that’s not necessarily a bias. That’s my experience . . . if I can’t give my point of view, and speak through the experiences that I have had as a man of color who has lived on this earth for more than 50 years, who happens to have this platform, then when am I going to do it? I’d be derelict in my duty as a journalist and derelict in my duty as an American if I didn’t speak to those issues with honesty. . . . I think, in this moment, journalists realize that we have to step up and we have to call out the lies and the BS and it has nothing to do with objectivity.22

  Lemon’s statement encapsulates the media’s breathtaking dishonesty. On the one hand, media members want to be free to express their politics in their journalism, which would cut directly against their purported objectivity. On the other hand, they want to maintain the patina of objectivity so as to maintain an unearned moral superiority over supposed partisan hacks on the other side. How can today’s pseudo-journalism—or those who engage in JournalismingTM, as I often term it—square this circle? They simply do what Lemon does: they suggest that their opinions are actually reflections of fact, that those who disagree are dishonest, and that objectivity doesn’t require you to listen to other points of view or report on them. Journalists make themselves the story—and if you doubt them, you are anti-truth and anti-journalism.

  This skewing of journalism makes its purveyors, quite literally, Fake News. They pretend to be news outlets but are actually partisan activists. It would be difficult to find a single bylined staffer at The New York Times who voted for Donald Trump. The same holds true at The Washington Post. Certainly, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press—none of them are hotbeds of Republican activity. According to a 2020 report in Business Insider, a survey of political donations from establishment media members found that 90 percent of their donated money went to Democrats (the survey included names from Fox and the New York Post).23 In 2013, a survey of journalists showed that just 7 percent identified as Republican. And by 2016, according to Politico, “more than half of publishing employees worked in counties that Clinton won by 30 points or more,” with just 27 percent of employees working in a red district. As Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty acknowledged, “On such subjects as abortion, gay rights, gun control and environmental regulation, the Times’ news reporting is a pretty good reflection of its region’s dominant predisposition. . . . Something akin to the Times ethos thrives in most major national newsrooms found on the Clinton coasts.” Our JournalismingTM superiors don’t just occupy a bubble. They occupy an isolation tank.24

  Americans aren’t blind. They distrust the media for a reason. Members of the media frequently blame Trump for endemic American mistrust of the fourth estate. They neglect the simple fact that Americans, particularly on the right, had justified trust issues long before Trump ever rose to prominence in politics. In 2013, for example, only about 52 percent of Americans trusted traditional media. Today, that number is 46 percent; only 18 percent of Trump voters trust the media, compared with 57 percent of Biden voters. Six in ten Americans believe “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”25

  They happen to be correct. The only real question is why four in ten Americans still believe in the veracity of a media that openly disdains—and often seeks to target—one entire side of the American political conversation.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF MEDIA OBJECTIVITY

  From the outset, the American press has been a contentious lot, vying for supremacy and arguing passionately about right and wrong. The notion of a political objectivity in journalism would have seemed bizarre to the Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson employed journalist James Callendar to muckrake on behalf of his favored causes and to undermine his enemies.26 For well over a century, newspapers openly identified with political parties. The era of yellow journalism was markedly free of concerns about objectivity. Only in the aftermath of World War I, with America’s intelligentsia falling out of love with democracy itself, did the press begin to conceive of itself as “objective”—as guardian of a unique fact-finding process that could provide audiences with information beyond the realm of political debate.

  Leading the charge for “objectivity” was New Republic editor Walter Lippmann. Lippmann began life as a progressive activist, a political critic of “the old individualism, with its anarchistic laissez-faire,” an advocate of Great Leaders “acting through the collective will of the nation.” Lippmann disdained “Georgia crackers, poverty-stricken negroes, the homeless and helpless of the great cities,” and called for a “governing class.” He fretted about the ability of those who disagreed to peddle dissenting ideas—after all, they might be leading the public astray: “Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation.” The solution to all of this, Lippmann decided, was to curb free expression in favor of “freedom from error, illusion, and misinterpretation.” To this end, Lippmann proposed the notion of journalistic objectivity, explaining that editors were to act as a priestly caste—newspapers were, said Lippmann, “the bible of democracy.”27

  To achieve this objectivity meant shifting the notion of what a journalist was. Instead of the sardonic, chain-smoking, flattened-hat-type working the streets, journalists were now transformed into scientific specialists, inculcated in the latest methods, protected from the heresies of the hoi polloi. Many in the press began to see themselves as a class apart; they viewed the freedom of the press guaranteed by
the Constitution not as a guarantee that government refrain from infringing on Americans’ right to engage in reporting and public debate generally, but as a specific protection for a specific and special group—people who have the title “reporter” next to their bylines, who work for certain prestigious publications.

  Lippmann’s idea of regularizing a journalistic process wasn’t bad, of course: facts do exist, and we should use rational, scientific methods to suss them out. Where Lippmann went wrong was in assuming that journalists wouldn’t use their newfound sense of superiority to re-embrace their bias, while presenting themselves as “objective.”

  And that’s precisely what happened. Establishment institutions declare themselves objective, and thus trustworthy. But in reality, sometimes partisan hacks can print truth, and self-appointed “objective” outlets can print lies; “objective” journalists can lie through omission, favor allies through contextualization, focus on stories most flattering to their own political priors. Bias is simply inseparable from journalism. Some journalists do a better job than others at attempting to remove their own biases from the stories they cover. Virtually all fail—and over the past few years, they have begun to fail more and more dramatically. The establishment media’s slavish sycophancy for Barack Obama, followed by their rabidly rancorous coverage of Donald Trump, followed again by their absurd ass kissing for Joe Biden, has ripped the mask away.

  Lippmann insisted on at least a façade of nonpartisanship, despite his own elitism: “Emphatically [the journalist] ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how good. In his professional activity it is no business of his to care whose ox is gored. . . . As the observer of the signs of change, his value to society depends upon the prophetic discrimination with which he selects those signs.”28 Our New Ruling Class journalists don’t bother. These journalists argue that they are actually better journalists than the forebears who attempted to provide a variety of viewpoints in any controversy. Real journalists, they say, don’t engage in “false balance”—meaning, respect for a side other than their own. Real journalists, they say, bring their own experiences to bear. Real journalists, they say, are crusaders rather than passive observers.

  Real journalists are activists. Real objectivity is allegiance to refracting facts through the prism of leftism.

  The mask is off.

  In 2014, The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery found himself under arrest in a McDonald’s during the Ferguson, Missouri, riots in the aftermath of the shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. He claimed that he had been a victim of police brutality; the police claimed that Lowery had trespassed and refused orders to clear an area from the police.29 Lowery’s perspective on endemic American racism was obvious. Later, he would write about Ferguson that reporting on the details of the shooting itself was irrelevant—instead, the media should have focused on the broader narrative, contextualizing the riots and violence by referring to America’s history of racial discrimination.30

  Lowery was an opinionated fellow, and routinely took to Twitter to disparage his critics. In fact, Lowery’s Twitter habit eventually ended with Washington Post editor Marty Baron threatening to fire him; Lowery had tweeted that the Tea Party was “essentially a hysterical grassroots tantrum about the fact that a black guy was president.” Baron suggested that Lowery ought to work for an advocacy organization or write an opinion column. Lowery eventually quit, complaining, “Should go without saying: reporters of color shouldn’t have their jobs threatened for speaking out about mainstream media failures to properly cover and contextualize issues of race. What’s the point of bringing diverse experiences and voices into a room only to muzzle them?”31 Lowery ended up at CBS News.

  Lowery is now widely viewed as the future of mainstream journalism. In June 2020, Ben Smith of The New York Times observed, “Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ ‘core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity,’ as he told me, has been winning in a series of battles, many around how to cover race . . . The shift in mainstream American media—driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives—now feels irreversible.” Lowery believes that the “American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”32

  Of course, moral clarity is generally a matter of opinion. When you maintain that your opinion is fact, and then declare yourself an objective news source rooted in that opinion, you are a liar. And our media are, all too often, liars.

  THE MEDIA’S WOKE INTERNAL RENORMALIZATION

  The religious wokeness that infuses our newsrooms is enforced daily. It turns out that “moral clarity” often looks a lot like the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects it. But at this point, everybody should.

  The battles in America’s newsrooms these days aren’t between conservatives and liberals. As we’ve seen, there are no conservatives at most establishment media outlets. The battle is truly between authoritarian leftists and liberals—between people who may largely agree on policy preferences, but who disagree on whether robust discussion should be allowed. The authoritarian Left argues no. The liberals argue yes. Increasingly, the authoritarian leftists are successfully wishing the liberals into the cornfield—or at least intimidating them into dropping any pretense at bipartisanship. The authoritarian Left is only tangentially interested in canceling individual conservatives who occasionally write for liberal outlets. Their true goal is to browbeat liberals into preemptively canceling conservatives, thus establishing a total monopoly, assimilating liberals into the woke Borg or extirpating them.

  That’s what New York Times op-ed editor James Bennet found out the hard way when he had the temerity to green-light a column from sitting senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). Cotton’s column, written in the midst of the BLM riots, suggested that President Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and use the National Guard to quell violence if state and local officials failed to do so. Not only was this a plausible argument—the argument would later be used by those on the Left to call for more federal presence in Washington, D.C., following the January 6 riots—but at the time, Cotton’s comments were considered not merely foolhardy, but dangerous. Dangerous, as we know, is one of the predicates used by political opponents to stymie dissent: if your words pose a “danger” to me, they must be banned.

  That’s precisely what New York Times staffers claimed: that because of Cotton’s op-ed, they were now under existential threat. This made no sense, given that Times staffers presumably weren’t engaged in rioting. But the mere idea that law enforcement ought to crack down on violent activity was enough to send these woke staffers into spasms of apoplexy. Staff writers including Jenna Wortham, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Kwame Opam tweeted the same message: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Reporter Astead Herndon messaged out support for coworkers, “particularly the black ones.” Columnist Charlie Warzel tweeted, “I feel compelled to say that I disagree with every word in that Tom Cotton op-ed and it does not reflect my values.” The company’s Slack channel blew up with staffers whining over their discomfort.

  Initially, Bennet defended the move. He tweeted that while many opinion writers and the editorial board had defended the protests and “crusaded for years against the underlying, systemic cruelties that led to these protests,” the newspaper “owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy.”33 Within three days, Bennet resigned, with publisher A. G. Sulzberger blaming a “significant breakdown in our editing process,” without noting any actual problems with the Cotton piece. Bennet didn’t leave without a Maoist struggle session—he apologized to the staff. The newspaper added an editorial note to the Cotton piece suggesting that it carried a “needlessly harsh tone”34—a bizarre accusation coming from a newspaper that rout
inely prints the vile, vitriolic, woke word vomit of columnists ranging from Paul Krugman to Charles Blow to Jamelle Bouie. This was a full authoritarian leftist defenestration: revolutionary aggression against the powers that be; top-down censorship; and a sense of moral superiority.

  Bennet’s ouster was merely the latest shot in the ongoing war to oust traditional liberals from positions of power—or to cow them into silence. In March 2018, The Atlantic hired iconoclastic National Review columnist Kevin Williamson. When Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, hired Williamson, he informed Williamson that he’d stand by him—he even defended Williamson publicly by stating that he would not judge people by their “worst tweets, or assertions, in isolation.” That stance lasted just a few days. Goldberg backtracked after staffers told Goldberg they felt threatened by Williamson’s pro-life viewpoint, expressed in jocular fashion on a podcast. “[T]he language used in the podcast was callous and violent,” said Goldberg. “I have come to the conclusion that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways.”35 Goldberg, the supposed liberal, became yet another tool of the authoritarian Left, unwilling to challenge their dominance, even at the risk of editorial self-castration.