I was also surprised by their recent decision to hire John McWhorter as a columnist. If the question is "who will tell these people they don't want to hear?", he's your best candidate. He can take or leave the Times gig, so the length of his tenure there (to say nothing of what he produces for them) may yet surprise people.
He will definitely be not like most times columnists, who basically are indistinguishable from one another in terms of their outlook, and he has definitely never minced words to please the exact same audience your piece is talking about.
Agree and I like McWhorter, but think about what this says: McWhorter is a self-described liberal Democrat who teaches at an Ivy League university. And he's the outsider voice?
I agree that he's probably the most independent and a credit to what they're attempting there. But you'd still like to see someone the average conservative would identify with on a personal level
I am an actual conservative (ducks while some people throw rotten fruit at me), and I follow him and read/listen to his works for the exact same reasons I follow you, Freddie.
I don't have to agree with literally everything someone says to find value in some of the ideas I will be presented with. Some of them are so good, and presented so persuasively, I occasionally change my mind. It's never an all or nothing proposition.
And, in the natural back and forth, sometimes, some of those people change their minds as well. This used to be normal. Perhaps someday, this will be the old-new normal.
If you have good ideas, and have mastered the first chapter of Ars Rhetorica, this happens an awful lot. It's good, and healthy.
RW, your comment reminds me why I LOVE the comment section of Freddie's substack almost as much as I LOVE Freddie's writing (and that's a lot of love). Where else am I going to see a mention of Ars Rhetorica? I assume you mean Aristotle's work here, but maybe a different Greek treatise on rhetoric. Either way, hooray! Oh, and I also think the ideological conformity of the NY Times sucks. McWhorter is probably the most provocative of the crew represented above and I do enjoy reading him. But his tendency to bash Marxism gets me down.
I am indeed referring to Aristotle's treatise, yes - and having even the most basic understanding of logos, ethos and pathos will give most people a better sense of media literacy than people imagine. We live in an age where pathos has never been valued higher, and where logos and ethos have never been more devalued. It's part of why pieces like this one are so interesting, and even vital.
His frequent collaborations with Glenn Loury, who IS an actual right winger, would surely send the Times Slackeratti into a collective conniption fit, which is part of why I was so astonished to see him added to the Times roster.
We could use a Times Kremlinologist to tell us if this is possibly because the Nicole Hanna Jones/Taylor Lorenz faction is losing power..
But don’t we need more “woke critical” voices coming from the left? To keep the “if you’re not pro-CRT then you’re a Trumper” sentiment at bay if nothing else. No?
How long do you think he'll last? I can't imagine 2 years from now he will still be critiquing KenDiangelosim in the NYT, for all the reasons mentioned in this essay.
Not long, and I completely agree with you and Jason Munishi-South - that is part of why I'm so astonished.
My immediate conclusion is that this is, at least partially, due to a culture shift inside the Times, or a "what the hell, roll the dice and see what happens" move, and McWhorter gets ousted in six months because of the same workplace safety-ism bullshit that got so many others at the Times fired.
Agree about McWhorter. He has promise, but I won't be surprised if he gets the Razib Khan treatment and is canned due to innuendo and guilt by association (e.g. a conservative actually talking to other conservatives and publishing in conservative venues): https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/03/new-york-times-drops-razib-khan-204287
Is it possible they would only bring on McWhorter *as* a newsletter writer, though, with this new service? I mean, depending on how this thing functions, it seems like the White Fragility crowd won't risk a frappuccino spit-take upon seeing a McWhorter lede because he just won't appear on their NYT iPad app much like he would if he was in an old-school Opinion section. It's ideological diversity only for those who want it.
Perhaps it's the management tentatively dipping a toe in the water, to test the temperature in order to eventually make a go/no-go decision on exposing McWhorter to the audience that keeps the lights on at the Times.
One thing that makes McWhorter such a breath of fresh air is that he doesn't need racism's continued existence for his self-identity or his career. So he can stab at the roots of that vile and pernicious construct. If some xenos pointed some psionic ray at our planet and forcibly awakened us from the absurd nightmare we call "race" -- don't ask me how that would look, I'm not sure any of us trapped in our shared nightmare can fully imagine a world without it -- McWhorter would happily go back to being a professional linguist. Meanwhile, the likes of Coates, DiAngelo, and Kendi would struggle to find their footing in the aftermath.
Right - and he'd go right back to being a standard-issue liberal in most ways that matter. Which is why I find the claim that he's the exception to be so wrongheaded. The fact that people think he's some flaming conservative just shows how incredibly slanted the NYT default has become.
As the saying goes, in the lands of the cyclops, the two eyed man is king.
John McWhorter is nobody's right wing reactionary for sure, and yet, he is definitely, solidly, in the *out group* from the NYT demographic *in group*, which in that sort of "with us or against us" paradigm they bought into, is tantamount to being an actual, no bullshit, Nazi.
McWhorter stands out because the lines defining our urgent political divide have shifted. It's no longer left-vs-right in the traditional sense separating fiscal and public programs policy, but woke vs unwoke. Though you clearly don't find woke among the right-leaners, tons of left-leaners are among the unwoke, though you'd never know it looking at mainstream media. At this point, the prolifically unwoke leftist pleases the right much more than the milquetoast conservative that doesn't tackle wokeness, or tackles it with "this is your father's conservatism" cringe. Leftist are able to tackle wokeness with insider credibility that is far more effective and therefore appreciated. The unwoke leftists also have the (possibly unintended) effect of reminding us that we can disagree about politics, but agree on our common humanity and not aim to destroy each other, and recognize that solid journalism is important to democracy and having a country at all. This is why unwoke leftists such as McWhorter and yourself please conservatives. It's not imagining that you're going to vote republican. It's just hoping you can redirect the leftist narrative and get your party back to where it's not waging war on white people, because that's unsustainable for the country and dangerous for everyone involved.
Not your main point, but that dramatically undersells Coates. His main thing isn't race, and before he got too famous he was an excellent blogger. I think right now he's writing comics. I don't know if that pays in general (I hear it doesn't), but he's probably making good money at it, unless he's just doing it because he's a dork and always wanted to write comics. He's a talent, and he'd be fine if he couldn't write about this one thing. He has plenty of other stuff to say.
His work at the Village Voice was vital, and there's a lot to like in his Atlantic work. But having hundreds of commenters who constantly told him what a genius he was really didn't help him, IMHO.
I was a member of his commenting community back when he was small-time enough that you could email him and expect a reply. Honestly, I think he did pretty well dismissing the adulation of the commenters, and was pretty successful in fostering an interesting discussion there. And the constant engagement with commenters, many of whom were critical and strongly challenged him, probably helped sharpen his writing, in my opinion.
In my view it was the critical and commercial success, much more than the comments section, that made him less interesting. And in some ways I understand why he had to disengage with readers the way he did. I remember he wrote a blog post about how his "fans" had figured out where he lived and random people would show up at his door to praise him.
It couldn't have been easy. I've praised his prose skills for years, and I don't give false praise about anything, but especially not about that. I bear him no ill will and never have. But as a consumer of writing, and an observer of his politics? Yeah, I liked him more before he became an institution. Take that for what you will.
And the villain in these comics, a literal super-nazi, is based off Jordan Peterson. It's just... ugh. I don't know what happened. He really used to be excellent. He had a chance to do something really cool and wasted it on culture war bullshit.
I mean, not liking Jordan Peterson =/= being all about race. Though, to be fair here, I don't read the comics, I just watch the movies. When the thing about Peterson hit, the stories I read about it mentioned the Red Skull quoting Peterson's ten rules and talking about him seducing people online and radicalizing them. I don't recall any mention of race or whatnot. Have you read them. Is race (in the modern sense) a big part of the storyline?
Anyway, in the absence of someone who's read them, I don't think attacking Peterson would be evidence of being necessarily about race. Peterson, so far as I know, doesn't much come up in that context. He's much more a feminist boogeyman, if I understand correctly.
Just realized I have the same username as the parent commenter. I agree he's not focused solely on race. I'm not sure if he has anything unique or interesting to say anymore. I'd love to be proven wrong eventually.
Fair enough. I happened to run across him on Andrew Sullivan's old page, from whence I discovered his blog and followed his archive all the way back. I haven't really followed his later work, other than reading Between the World and Me.
I'm an old D&D geek who loves history (including the Civil War) and is slowly learning French. TNC's blog was really my wheelhouse. I also was following him before he got big, so I got the new-to-me pleasure of watching an artist I liked get famous.
Whew, that piece was hotter than an August afternoon in Arizona. Believe me, I was just there a week ago.
Question for Freddie and anyone else who wants to chime in. Has this sneering, elitist, woke attitude turned you off of late night comedy too? It has for me. I can't watch John Oliver anymore because I feel like a lot of the humor has been leeched out of his show post- George Floyd.
What, watching an annoying man with a British accent look into the camera and tell you that everyone who disagrees with you is a stupid ape doesn't thrill you? Strange.
Hahaha! Nice. Yes that is the vibe I get from him nowadays. Used to love him, still enjoyed him during the early parts of the Trump era. But then came the lunacy of 2020 and it was all too much for me.
Yes. The entire Daily Show cohort has fallen so far that I'm kinda afraid if I go back I'll realize the Daily Show was trash too. Although I'm also fairly certain you could do a "Colbert criticizes Colbert" with Colbert Report-era Colbert and current-era Colbert, so who knows.
The dynamics were different back then. The culture was more conservative, and the Bush administration was in power, so it felt like these guys were critiquing something important. And they were!
But social liberalism is "cool" now. It's the thing that all the cool kids are doing, and the expectation is you better do it, and do it in our specific way, or you're an outsider. So all these Daily Show guys can do now is hang out in the palace, smugly making fun of the Unenlightened.
The irony of it is that Oliver's whole activist-ish fanbase he's playing to now are the same folks who had every chance to watch the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and they didn't.
The pandemic + Floyd aftermath has been terrible for that show. They used to break it up with stunts and dance numbers, but now it's just (rich, white) John scolding his (rich, white) audience about their privilege. I spotted zero Black writers at the last pre-covid Emmy win (2019) so it's a bit hard to take seriously.
Yes, it definitely has. I stopped watching Oliver post-Trump but pre-Floyd, because it just wasn't that funny anymore. It was all jokes that relied on the audience having homogeneous lockstep opinions, and the joke was usually some version of, "Some people believe other stuff -- haha, gross!" It was cringey in the same way Dubya-era conservative attempts at humor often were.
God damn that was good writing. Oh I adore writing and that piece makes me positively giddy. Stream of consciousness, trippingly off the tongue, that was anguish poetry. Andrew Sullivan’s writing is also poetry, Matt T. as well. Glen G is too bare knuckles for such rhetorical grandiosity.
In a single piece with great sarcasm and castigating blame we have a synopsis of the zeitgeist. No more need to be said. Succinct but scintillating that is the big picture.
"You can understand a lot about media culture by understanding that most of the people within it feel like they’re barely hanging on."
I can't help but draw the parallel to teaching, where the best and brightest forsake the field for better paid jobs in industries like finance and tech. What's left are the mediocre and a handful of martyrs. Like it or not money and job security are factors that people in the real world care about. How can a brain drain not be the inevitable outcome?
To clarify (man, I wish Substack had an edit function) pre-Trump somebody I knew that used to work in the industry told me that the old guard saw the writing on the wall years ago and got out. On average the workers that were left were young enough that low pay and chronic job uncertainty were not fatal disincentives. The problem, according to him, wasn't ideological bias so much as the kids just were not very worldly because they were very young.
The guy who writes the "Financial Samurai" blog wrote that he wondered if the reason that the mass media had missed out on the Asian success story was because all of these cub reporters were struggling financially themselves and were unable to imagine that there were classes of people who were thriving. Youth and inexperience naturally lead people to believe that their personal afflictions are universal. And of course as they grow old enough to actually know better they will be approaching the age where low pay and ever present layoffs simply become intolerable and alternatives in PR firms, government, etc. look more appealing.
I of course agree that the NYT is written to please elites (your sworn enemy Atrios has said for years that they are concerned with documenting the "difficulties of the rich but not quite rich enough"). But Freddie: saying that they are on a "leftward march" isn't really correct is it? Just because they are woke, does not mean they are left, and I would hope to see self identified leftists make that distinction. They weren't exactly friendly to either of Bernie Sanders' presidential runs were they? In fact guess who got to write a long hit piece about the problem of Bernie Bros in February of last year? It was your brave truth teller, the daughter of literal California oligarchs Nellie Bowles.
If Nellie Bowles and Bari Weiss are "diverse viewpoints" then you are constraining your entire political lens to the twitter fights among elites. They are right wing culture warriors, do you really give a shit about this? Bari's chief concern as a columnist was being accusing people like Jeremy Corbyn and Ilhan Omar of being soft on antisemitism and insufficiently Zionist, a job so important that the NYT has a second columnist also devoted to that beat that is still on staff. She didn't even get fired, she quit because playing the victim is central to her entire career of being persecuted for holding viewpoints that both political parties have strongly supported for my entire lifetime.
This feels like a piece that could have written by Nellie or Bari or one of those frauds man, it's disappointing. You know the reason that some people at NYT do woke politics and culture war is the same reason that Nellie and Bari do it, just from the other side: they don't want to talk about actual leftist things. It's not interesting to Nellie and Bari because they have both been incredibly rich for their entire lives and so are all of their friends. The same is true for most of the subscriber base, so it's all just theater. Who gives a shit?
Leftward march is a manner of speaking, probably an inartful one, but anyone who reads me knows I don't think woke=left.
Bowles and Weiss, whose politics I generally abhor, are easily to the left of 80% of the American electorate. Andrew Breitbart was a right wing culture warrior.
Among other things, the New York Times played a material and meaningful role in getting this country into Vietnam and Iraq. That's why I give a shit.
sure, I give a shit about the NYT for the same reason. I don't give a shit whether Bari Weiss or Nellie Bowles work there because on issues of consequence they are right in lockstep with pretty much everyone else in elite media. If anything, they are just flattering a slightly different slice of the NYT readership, instead of the Brooklyn woke liberals she flatters the Connecticut and New Jersey suburbanites that don't have time for BLM and woke politics. Bari has spent a not insignificant amount of time documenting the complaints about wokeness from a Dad at fucking Brearley who I'm pretty sure was connected to a right wing astroturfing campaign or something? I don't even remember the details because again who cares!!!
Maybe Bari and Nellie are to the left of 80% of the electorate, but you wouldn't know it reading their work. Bari's entire career has been baseless allegations of antisemitism against the left and culture war about things which she is perfectly in line with the Republican party and a good slice of Democrats. I'm less familiar with Nellie's work but her Bernie articles and her comments around the NYT union make me skeptical.
I'm sorry but the idea that Bari or Nellie or even Jane Coaston are outside of mainstream elite opinion is fanciful. They literally are the elite. I emphasize again: Nellie Bowles family are one of the richest and most influential families in the Bay Area. You can choose to believe that she got to where she is because of talent, I am not going to bother with that delusion. They have no incentive to challenge the elite consensus on any issues of consequence because they are the elite.
If you base your spectrum of who is a "diverse" viewpoint at the NYT entirely on woke vs antiwoke, then suddenly someone like Bari Weiss is more likely to question the rationale for Iraq or Vietnam than Jamelle Bouie? That's not real politics. That's why I don't care.
On a friendlier note not mentioning Atrios to needle you, I genuinely do respect his views and I give you both the exact same amount of money every month so I don't take sides.
Isn't the NYT way better now than it was last summer though? For a while it just read Salon.com and it seems to have pulled it self back from that. Also 7.8 million subscribers, isn't that too many people to be just the Park Slope crowd?
The "Park Slope crowd" is also in Cambridge and Brookline (MA), Providence (RI), Portland (ME), Greenwich (CT) - and that's just northeast of New York City. Wait until you start going further up and down the Confirmation Bias coasts, east and west.
"The Park Slope Crowd" is really just shorthand for "upper income, mostly white, bourgeois bohmeians who can't ever get enough confirmation bias in their media intake", and believe me, that's a large, and more crucially, lucrative, demographic.
Matt Taibbi nailed this in his new book "Hate, Inc". Outlets like CNN, the Times, MSNBC, et al. clutched their pearls for years at the Fox News formula, but went all in for the exact same reasons Fox did. They simply chased a different market.
Michael Lind and David Shor have both written that the country is dividing into two camps: a multiracial blue collar camp that votes GOP and a multiracial urban professional camp for the Dems. Race is no longer the defining factor. Class is.
Look at that list of writers and ignore the fake diversity of skin color: which one of them doesn't have a college degree? Which one of them comes from a blue collar background? The days of blue collar scribes like Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin are apparently over.
I think you can still do it if you have a college degree (or multiple ones - see Arlie Hochschild https://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschild) and/or came from a privileged background but you do have to make a conscious effort to get out of your bubble.
A while back I was defending Matt Taibbi on Twitter when the criticisms coming at him were: you did not attack Trump hard enough in the lead up to the election and so you were helping a fascist." But when I pointed out something that should be clear to anyone - that it's not the job of journalists to put candidates in power - it was met with confusion (aka personal insults). But it's true. Do people even remember what journalism is supposed to be? I don't think so. I can't read the Times anymore. When I look at the movies on offer of late they are all ideologically inclined. Again, not really the job of artists or good storytellers to be propaganda machines. The Times should have stood behind James Bennett. They should have had more representations from Trump World in their coverage.
My daughter works at a park in NYC where old timers come to read newspapers. Yes, actual newspapers. I didn't tell her anything about which ones to read but she naturally gravitated to the Wall Street Journal because, she said, it was the only one that reported news -- actual news she wanted to know. The Times have been swallowed up by their op-ed section. They do have good reporters there, you are right. But Twitter ruined everything.
Besides the who, there are telling gaps in the listed topics. Politics, economics, "culture," media are multiply represented. What about a dedicated science writer (not even "climate" appears)? Art and music? International news? (Non-woke) culture -- there are vast swaths of U.S. culture that have nothing to do with the culture wars and that the NYT could find good writers to comment on. One day someone with influence is going to realize the potential in simply sidestepping culture war and giving people a window onto the vast array of interesting and important phenomena in the world around them.
The problem is that the off-the-clock speech and behavior of writers covering those other topics is also under constant scrutiny (see: the Donald McNeil firing), so I'm not sure that the NYT can, in fact, find sufficiently orthodox writers to cover non-woke topics.
As a former subscriber to periodicals like the NYTs, New Republic, (and now) even The Economist, I find that to glean the "elite" opinion on any given topic, I need read only one article, and any random writer will do.
Being interchangeable, I find I have saved much on subscriptions, and many hours of re-reading the same things. It leaves more time for far more productive activities.
Very well said. I have arrived at the same place with you, and am letting my subscriptions to New Republic and Harper’s lapse. Please don’t let The Atlantic go fully down this road….
Reading The Real Estate's section "The Hunt" is another good indicator who the paper is written for. "This young couple took their $4,000 budget to Williamsburg" or "a one-bedroom for less than $1 million". Granted, they do have more moderate "hunts" in there but the vast majority are definitely top 10% material.
I think this is good in one sense: Powerful positions in government and academia have been brokered by this process for decades (if not forever). Its not merit, its a popularity contest, its fitting in with the in-crowd. How embarrassing that the gears of our most prized institutions have been laid bare by the socially un-adept younger members that think this is a well-respected way to act.
This is the one of most insightful pieces of media criticism I've read all year. Well done, Freddie.
I was also surprised by their recent decision to hire John McWhorter as a columnist. If the question is "who will tell these people they don't want to hear?", he's your best candidate. He can take or leave the Times gig, so the length of his tenure there (to say nothing of what he produces for them) may yet surprise people.
He will definitely be not like most times columnists, who basically are indistinguishable from one another in terms of their outlook, and he has definitely never minced words to please the exact same audience your piece is talking about.
Agree and I like McWhorter, but think about what this says: McWhorter is a self-described liberal Democrat who teaches at an Ivy League university. And he's the outsider voice?
Baby steps, Freddie - baby steps.
True, but have you read his substack? It's pretty confrontational. I was surprised to see him on the NYT list.
I agree that he's probably the most independent and a credit to what they're attempting there. But you'd still like to see someone the average conservative would identify with on a personal level
Because - here's a radical notion, incidentally - you might actually learn something new from a "literal Republican".
Whoa, dude. Mind blown, right?
"The people in my outgroup are intellectually stunted because I feel they don't, and won't, give sufficient weight to my ideas!"
(On a similar note, do you ever give any weight to theirs, ever?)
"Hell, no, I don't, and won't, entertain or amplify those people"
Ah. Evergreen online discourse.
I am an actual conservative (ducks while some people throw rotten fruit at me), and I follow him and read/listen to his works for the exact same reasons I follow you, Freddie.
I don't have to agree with literally everything someone says to find value in some of the ideas I will be presented with. Some of them are so good, and presented so persuasively, I occasionally change my mind. It's never an all or nothing proposition.
And, in the natural back and forth, sometimes, some of those people change their minds as well. This used to be normal. Perhaps someday, this will be the old-new normal.
If you have good ideas, and have mastered the first chapter of Ars Rhetorica, this happens an awful lot. It's good, and healthy.
RW, your comment reminds me why I LOVE the comment section of Freddie's substack almost as much as I LOVE Freddie's writing (and that's a lot of love). Where else am I going to see a mention of Ars Rhetorica? I assume you mean Aristotle's work here, but maybe a different Greek treatise on rhetoric. Either way, hooray! Oh, and I also think the ideological conformity of the NY Times sucks. McWhorter is probably the most provocative of the crew represented above and I do enjoy reading him. But his tendency to bash Marxism gets me down.
I am indeed referring to Aristotle's treatise, yes - and having even the most basic understanding of logos, ethos and pathos will give most people a better sense of media literacy than people imagine. We live in an age where pathos has never been valued higher, and where logos and ethos have never been more devalued. It's part of why pieces like this one are so interesting, and even vital.
Whatever his credentials or official political labels, McWhorter's actual arguments sure piss off and provoke a lot of liberal academics.
His frequent collaborations with Glenn Loury, who IS an actual right winger, would surely send the Times Slackeratti into a collective conniption fit, which is part of why I was so astonished to see him added to the Times roster.
We could use a Times Kremlinologist to tell us if this is possibly because the Nicole Hanna Jones/Taylor Lorenz faction is losing power..
He despises Diangelo
But don’t we need more “woke critical” voices coming from the left? To keep the “if you’re not pro-CRT then you’re a Trumper” sentiment at bay if nothing else. No?
How long do you think he'll last? I can't imagine 2 years from now he will still be critiquing KenDiangelosim in the NYT, for all the reasons mentioned in this essay.
Not long, and I completely agree with you and Jason Munishi-South - that is part of why I'm so astonished.
My immediate conclusion is that this is, at least partially, due to a culture shift inside the Times, or a "what the hell, roll the dice and see what happens" move, and McWhorter gets ousted in six months because of the same workplace safety-ism bullshit that got so many others at the Times fired.
Agree about McWhorter. He has promise, but I won't be surprised if he gets the Razib Khan treatment and is canned due to innuendo and guilt by association (e.g. a conservative actually talking to other conservatives and publishing in conservative venues): https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/03/new-york-times-drops-razib-khan-204287
Is it possible they would only bring on McWhorter *as* a newsletter writer, though, with this new service? I mean, depending on how this thing functions, it seems like the White Fragility crowd won't risk a frappuccino spit-take upon seeing a McWhorter lede because he just won't appear on their NYT iPad app much like he would if he was in an old-school Opinion section. It's ideological diversity only for those who want it.
Yes - I am wondering the same thing.
Perhaps it's the management tentatively dipping a toe in the water, to test the temperature in order to eventually make a go/no-go decision on exposing McWhorter to the audience that keeps the lights on at the Times.
If you read comments on NYT articles, they trend more towards anti-woke than worke. At least in my highly unscientific reading.
Market research.
One thing that makes McWhorter such a breath of fresh air is that he doesn't need racism's continued existence for his self-identity or his career. So he can stab at the roots of that vile and pernicious construct. If some xenos pointed some psionic ray at our planet and forcibly awakened us from the absurd nightmare we call "race" -- don't ask me how that would look, I'm not sure any of us trapped in our shared nightmare can fully imagine a world without it -- McWhorter would happily go back to being a professional linguist. Meanwhile, the likes of Coates, DiAngelo, and Kendi would struggle to find their footing in the aftermath.
Right - and he'd go right back to being a standard-issue liberal in most ways that matter. Which is why I find the claim that he's the exception to be so wrongheaded. The fact that people think he's some flaming conservative just shows how incredibly slanted the NYT default has become.
As the saying goes, in the lands of the cyclops, the two eyed man is king.
John McWhorter is nobody's right wing reactionary for sure, and yet, he is definitely, solidly, in the *out group* from the NYT demographic *in group*, which in that sort of "with us or against us" paradigm they bought into, is tantamount to being an actual, no bullshit, Nazi.
McWhorter stands out because the lines defining our urgent political divide have shifted. It's no longer left-vs-right in the traditional sense separating fiscal and public programs policy, but woke vs unwoke. Though you clearly don't find woke among the right-leaners, tons of left-leaners are among the unwoke, though you'd never know it looking at mainstream media. At this point, the prolifically unwoke leftist pleases the right much more than the milquetoast conservative that doesn't tackle wokeness, or tackles it with "this is your father's conservatism" cringe. Leftist are able to tackle wokeness with insider credibility that is far more effective and therefore appreciated. The unwoke leftists also have the (possibly unintended) effect of reminding us that we can disagree about politics, but agree on our common humanity and not aim to destroy each other, and recognize that solid journalism is important to democracy and having a country at all. This is why unwoke leftists such as McWhorter and yourself please conservatives. It's not imagining that you're going to vote republican. It's just hoping you can redirect the leftist narrative and get your party back to where it's not waging war on white people, because that's unsustainable for the country and dangerous for everyone involved.
Not your main point, but that dramatically undersells Coates. His main thing isn't race, and before he got too famous he was an excellent blogger. I think right now he's writing comics. I don't know if that pays in general (I hear it doesn't), but he's probably making good money at it, unless he's just doing it because he's a dork and always wanted to write comics. He's a talent, and he'd be fine if he couldn't write about this one thing. He has plenty of other stuff to say.
His work at the Village Voice was vital, and there's a lot to like in his Atlantic work. But having hundreds of commenters who constantly told him what a genius he was really didn't help him, IMHO.
Probably not good for anyone. Also, he may be too big for editors now, which can really sink some writers.
I was a member of his commenting community back when he was small-time enough that you could email him and expect a reply. Honestly, I think he did pretty well dismissing the adulation of the commenters, and was pretty successful in fostering an interesting discussion there. And the constant engagement with commenters, many of whom were critical and strongly challenged him, probably helped sharpen his writing, in my opinion.
In my view it was the critical and commercial success, much more than the comments section, that made him less interesting. And in some ways I understand why he had to disengage with readers the way he did. I remember he wrote a blog post about how his "fans" had figured out where he lived and random people would show up at his door to praise him.
It couldn't have been easy. I've praised his prose skills for years, and I don't give false praise about anything, but especially not about that. I bear him no ill will and never have. But as a consumer of writing, and an observer of his politics? Yeah, I liked him more before he became an institution. Take that for what you will.
And the villain in these comics, a literal super-nazi, is based off Jordan Peterson. It's just... ugh. I don't know what happened. He really used to be excellent. He had a chance to do something really cool and wasted it on culture war bullshit.
I mean, not liking Jordan Peterson =/= being all about race. Though, to be fair here, I don't read the comics, I just watch the movies. When the thing about Peterson hit, the stories I read about it mentioned the Red Skull quoting Peterson's ten rules and talking about him seducing people online and radicalizing them. I don't recall any mention of race or whatnot. Have you read them. Is race (in the modern sense) a big part of the storyline?
Anyway, in the absence of someone who's read them, I don't think attacking Peterson would be evidence of being necessarily about race. Peterson, so far as I know, doesn't much come up in that context. He's much more a feminist boogeyman, if I understand correctly.
Just realized I have the same username as the parent commenter. I agree he's not focused solely on race. I'm not sure if he has anything unique or interesting to say anymore. I'd love to be proven wrong eventually.
Fair enough. I happened to run across him on Andrew Sullivan's old page, from whence I discovered his blog and followed his archive all the way back. I haven't really followed his later work, other than reading Between the World and Me.
I'm an old D&D geek who loves history (including the Civil War) and is slowly learning French. TNC's blog was really my wheelhouse. I also was following him before he got big, so I got the new-to-me pleasure of watching an artist I liked get famous.
Of course, then he stopped blogging. :'(
Jay Kang is also outside the NYT mainstream. A lefty, not a conservative, but more interested in class politics than identity.
Whew, that piece was hotter than an August afternoon in Arizona. Believe me, I was just there a week ago.
Question for Freddie and anyone else who wants to chime in. Has this sneering, elitist, woke attitude turned you off of late night comedy too? It has for me. I can't watch John Oliver anymore because I feel like a lot of the humor has been leeched out of his show post- George Floyd.
What, watching an annoying man with a British accent look into the camera and tell you that everyone who disagrees with you is a stupid ape doesn't thrill you? Strange.
I wish I could mash the heart button a million times for that comment.
Hahaha! Nice. Yes that is the vibe I get from him nowadays. Used to love him, still enjoyed him during the early parts of the Trump era. But then came the lunacy of 2020 and it was all too much for me.
Noblesse oblige has been replaced by a sanctimonious snear.
Yes. The entire Daily Show cohort has fallen so far that I'm kinda afraid if I go back I'll realize the Daily Show was trash too. Although I'm also fairly certain you could do a "Colbert criticizes Colbert" with Colbert Report-era Colbert and current-era Colbert, so who knows.
The dynamics were different back then. The culture was more conservative, and the Bush administration was in power, so it felt like these guys were critiquing something important. And they were!
But social liberalism is "cool" now. It's the thing that all the cool kids are doing, and the expectation is you better do it, and do it in our specific way, or you're an outsider. So all these Daily Show guys can do now is hang out in the palace, smugly making fun of the Unenlightened.
The irony of it is that Oliver's whole activist-ish fanbase he's playing to now are the same folks who had every chance to watch the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and they didn't.
The pandemic + Floyd aftermath has been terrible for that show. They used to break it up with stunts and dance numbers, but now it's just (rich, white) John scolding his (rich, white) audience about their privilege. I spotted zero Black writers at the last pre-covid Emmy win (2019) so it's a bit hard to take seriously.
There's a very good substack written by an ex-Oliver writer that I think a lot of people here would appreciate: https://imightbewrong.substack.com/
It's kinda a glimpse into a parallel universe where the late night comedy world didn't fall into a self-righteous black hole.
Reading some of these and holy shit this substack is incredible. Thank you for showing it to me. I owe you one.
Yes, it definitely has. I stopped watching Oliver post-Trump but pre-Floyd, because it just wasn't that funny anymore. It was all jokes that relied on the audience having homogeneous lockstep opinions, and the joke was usually some version of, "Some people believe other stuff -- haha, gross!" It was cringey in the same way Dubya-era conservative attempts at humor often were.
Indeed. Matt Taibbi pointed out something very similar in a piece last summer.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right
Can’t believe I’m just catching up with that one now, KW. Thank you for sharing it.
Freddie, another piece reminding me why I love your work! Bravo!
God damn that was good writing. Oh I adore writing and that piece makes me positively giddy. Stream of consciousness, trippingly off the tongue, that was anguish poetry. Andrew Sullivan’s writing is also poetry, Matt T. as well. Glen G is too bare knuckles for such rhetorical grandiosity.
In a single piece with great sarcasm and castigating blame we have a synopsis of the zeitgeist. No more need to be said. Succinct but scintillating that is the big picture.
"You can understand a lot about media culture by understanding that most of the people within it feel like they’re barely hanging on."
I can't help but draw the parallel to teaching, where the best and brightest forsake the field for better paid jobs in industries like finance and tech. What's left are the mediocre and a handful of martyrs. Like it or not money and job security are factors that people in the real world care about. How can a brain drain not be the inevitable outcome?
To clarify (man, I wish Substack had an edit function) pre-Trump somebody I knew that used to work in the industry told me that the old guard saw the writing on the wall years ago and got out. On average the workers that were left were young enough that low pay and chronic job uncertainty were not fatal disincentives. The problem, according to him, wasn't ideological bias so much as the kids just were not very worldly because they were very young.
The guy who writes the "Financial Samurai" blog wrote that he wondered if the reason that the mass media had missed out on the Asian success story was because all of these cub reporters were struggling financially themselves and were unable to imagine that there were classes of people who were thriving. Youth and inexperience naturally lead people to believe that their personal afflictions are universal. And of course as they grow old enough to actually know better they will be approaching the age where low pay and ever present layoffs simply become intolerable and alternatives in PR firms, government, etc. look more appealing.
I of course agree that the NYT is written to please elites (your sworn enemy Atrios has said for years that they are concerned with documenting the "difficulties of the rich but not quite rich enough"). But Freddie: saying that they are on a "leftward march" isn't really correct is it? Just because they are woke, does not mean they are left, and I would hope to see self identified leftists make that distinction. They weren't exactly friendly to either of Bernie Sanders' presidential runs were they? In fact guess who got to write a long hit piece about the problem of Bernie Bros in February of last year? It was your brave truth teller, the daughter of literal California oligarchs Nellie Bowles.
If Nellie Bowles and Bari Weiss are "diverse viewpoints" then you are constraining your entire political lens to the twitter fights among elites. They are right wing culture warriors, do you really give a shit about this? Bari's chief concern as a columnist was being accusing people like Jeremy Corbyn and Ilhan Omar of being soft on antisemitism and insufficiently Zionist, a job so important that the NYT has a second columnist also devoted to that beat that is still on staff. She didn't even get fired, she quit because playing the victim is central to her entire career of being persecuted for holding viewpoints that both political parties have strongly supported for my entire lifetime.
This feels like a piece that could have written by Nellie or Bari or one of those frauds man, it's disappointing. You know the reason that some people at NYT do woke politics and culture war is the same reason that Nellie and Bari do it, just from the other side: they don't want to talk about actual leftist things. It's not interesting to Nellie and Bari because they have both been incredibly rich for their entire lives and so are all of their friends. The same is true for most of the subscriber base, so it's all just theater. Who gives a shit?
Leftward march is a manner of speaking, probably an inartful one, but anyone who reads me knows I don't think woke=left.
Bowles and Weiss, whose politics I generally abhor, are easily to the left of 80% of the American electorate. Andrew Breitbart was a right wing culture warrior.
Among other things, the New York Times played a material and meaningful role in getting this country into Vietnam and Iraq. That's why I give a shit.
sure, I give a shit about the NYT for the same reason. I don't give a shit whether Bari Weiss or Nellie Bowles work there because on issues of consequence they are right in lockstep with pretty much everyone else in elite media. If anything, they are just flattering a slightly different slice of the NYT readership, instead of the Brooklyn woke liberals she flatters the Connecticut and New Jersey suburbanites that don't have time for BLM and woke politics. Bari has spent a not insignificant amount of time documenting the complaints about wokeness from a Dad at fucking Brearley who I'm pretty sure was connected to a right wing astroturfing campaign or something? I don't even remember the details because again who cares!!!
Maybe Bari and Nellie are to the left of 80% of the electorate, but you wouldn't know it reading their work. Bari's entire career has been baseless allegations of antisemitism against the left and culture war about things which she is perfectly in line with the Republican party and a good slice of Democrats. I'm less familiar with Nellie's work but her Bernie articles and her comments around the NYT union make me skeptical.
I'm sorry but the idea that Bari or Nellie or even Jane Coaston are outside of mainstream elite opinion is fanciful. They literally are the elite. I emphasize again: Nellie Bowles family are one of the richest and most influential families in the Bay Area. You can choose to believe that she got to where she is because of talent, I am not going to bother with that delusion. They have no incentive to challenge the elite consensus on any issues of consequence because they are the elite.
If you base your spectrum of who is a "diverse" viewpoint at the NYT entirely on woke vs antiwoke, then suddenly someone like Bari Weiss is more likely to question the rationale for Iraq or Vietnam than Jamelle Bouie? That's not real politics. That's why I don't care.
On a friendlier note not mentioning Atrios to needle you, I genuinely do respect his views and I give you both the exact same amount of money every month so I don't take sides.
Does atrios substack?
nah just the same blog he’s always had and he solicits donations periodically.
Isn't the NYT way better now than it was last summer though? For a while it just read Salon.com and it seems to have pulled it self back from that. Also 7.8 million subscribers, isn't that too many people to be just the Park Slope crowd?
The "Park Slope crowd" is also in Cambridge and Brookline (MA), Providence (RI), Portland (ME), Greenwich (CT) - and that's just northeast of New York City. Wait until you start going further up and down the Confirmation Bias coasts, east and west.
And Chicago, and Minneapolis, and ... (truncated)
Not just the coasts either- even a place like Atlanta has its Inman Parks with the exact same leafy, restrictively zoned neighborhoods and BLM signs.
"The Park Slope Crowd" is really just shorthand for "upper income, mostly white, bourgeois bohmeians who can't ever get enough confirmation bias in their media intake", and believe me, that's a large, and more crucially, lucrative, demographic.
Matt Taibbi nailed this in his new book "Hate, Inc". Outlets like CNN, the Times, MSNBC, et al. clutched their pearls for years at the Fox News formula, but went all in for the exact same reasons Fox did. They simply chased a different market.
If McWhorter keeps doing what he has been doing the past couple years he won’t last 6 months at the Times. He has been an absolute hero.
Michael Lind and David Shor have both written that the country is dividing into two camps: a multiracial blue collar camp that votes GOP and a multiracial urban professional camp for the Dems. Race is no longer the defining factor. Class is.
Look at that list of writers and ignore the fake diversity of skin color: which one of them doesn't have a college degree? Which one of them comes from a blue collar background? The days of blue collar scribes like Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin are apparently over.
I think you can still do it if you have a college degree (or multiple ones - see Arlie Hochschild https://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/arlie-r-hochschild) and/or came from a privileged background but you do have to make a conscious effort to get out of your bubble.
A while back I was defending Matt Taibbi on Twitter when the criticisms coming at him were: you did not attack Trump hard enough in the lead up to the election and so you were helping a fascist." But when I pointed out something that should be clear to anyone - that it's not the job of journalists to put candidates in power - it was met with confusion (aka personal insults). But it's true. Do people even remember what journalism is supposed to be? I don't think so. I can't read the Times anymore. When I look at the movies on offer of late they are all ideologically inclined. Again, not really the job of artists or good storytellers to be propaganda machines. The Times should have stood behind James Bennett. They should have had more representations from Trump World in their coverage.
My daughter works at a park in NYC where old timers come to read newspapers. Yes, actual newspapers. I didn't tell her anything about which ones to read but she naturally gravitated to the Wall Street Journal because, she said, it was the only one that reported news -- actual news she wanted to know. The Times have been swallowed up by their op-ed section. They do have good reporters there, you are right. But Twitter ruined everything.
So you're saying dispatches from some diner in west Virginia talking to an ex coal miner aren't cutting it as far as presenting the Other Side? ;)
IMO, Taibbi stopped being a journalist some time ago.
What's your definition of journalist?
Besides the who, there are telling gaps in the listed topics. Politics, economics, "culture," media are multiply represented. What about a dedicated science writer (not even "climate" appears)? Art and music? International news? (Non-woke) culture -- there are vast swaths of U.S. culture that have nothing to do with the culture wars and that the NYT could find good writers to comment on. One day someone with influence is going to realize the potential in simply sidestepping culture war and giving people a window onto the vast array of interesting and important phenomena in the world around them.
The problem is that the off-the-clock speech and behavior of writers covering those other topics is also under constant scrutiny (see: the Donald McNeil firing), so I'm not sure that the NYT can, in fact, find sufficiently orthodox writers to cover non-woke topics.
King shit. Spot on. Freddie at his best.
As a former subscriber to periodicals like the NYTs, New Republic, (and now) even The Economist, I find that to glean the "elite" opinion on any given topic, I need read only one article, and any random writer will do.
Being interchangeable, I find I have saved much on subscriptions, and many hours of re-reading the same things. It leaves more time for far more productive activities.
Very well said. I have arrived at the same place with you, and am letting my subscriptions to New Republic and Harper’s lapse. Please don’t let The Atlantic go fully down this road….
Reading The Real Estate's section "The Hunt" is another good indicator who the paper is written for. "This young couple took their $4,000 budget to Williamsburg" or "a one-bedroom for less than $1 million". Granted, they do have more moderate "hunts" in there but the vast majority are definitely top 10% material.
I think this is good in one sense: Powerful positions in government and academia have been brokered by this process for decades (if not forever). Its not merit, its a popularity contest, its fitting in with the in-crowd. How embarrassing that the gears of our most prized institutions have been laid bare by the socially un-adept younger members that think this is a well-respected way to act.