Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

by Batya Ungar-Sargon

“woke,” slang for being awake to what’s called systemic or institutional racism.

the idea that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality, they view race as the most important and inescapable fact of American life, reducing America’s past and present to a binary of white oppressors and black and brown victims.

Which is pure and utter nonsense.

instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America’s elite, members of the news media—along with other highly educated liberals—have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality; the only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix, given that it’s based on something as immutable as your skin color.

Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.

Once working-class warriors, the little guys taking on America’s powerful elites, journalists today are an American elite, a caste that has abandoned the working class and the poor as it rose to the status of American elite. And a moral panic around race has allowed them to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice.”

This perfect alignment of journalistic and corporate interests is one of the great ironies of the woke culture war: It makes individual journalists feel like heroes while making their bosses and shareholders (and themselves) even richer. The identity culture war allowed journalists to cast our nation as hopelessly divided along partisan and racial lines, as a smoke screen for the actual impenetrable and devastating division that is happening along class lines.

It is not a political or racial divide but an economic and cultural one, a giant and ever growing chasm separating the college educated from those they disdain—and who have started to return the favor.

For a culture war to succeed, Frank wrote, it needs to be waged against a problem that can never be solved.

Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals.

Today’s meritocratic elites subscribe to the view that not only wealth but also political power should be the province of the highly educated.

They needed a way to be perpetually on what they saw as the right side of history without having to disrupt what was right for them and their children. A moral panic around race was the perfect solution: It took the guilt that they should have felt around their economic good fortune and political power—which they could have shared with the less fortunate had they cared to—and displaced it onto their whiteness, an immutable characteristic that they could do absolutely nothing to change.

Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites are so white. Instead of asking why working-class people of all races are so underrepresented in the halls of power, white liberals called the working class racist for voting for Trump. Instead of asking why New York City’s public school system is more segregated than Alabama’s, white liberals demanded diversity, equity, and inclusion training in their children’s exorbitantly priced prep schools.

In other words, wokeness provided the perfect ideology for affluent, liberal whites who didn’t truly want systemic change if it meant their children would have to sacrifice their own status, but who still wanted to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice, who still wanted to feel vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends.

and instead of seeing in it a call to arms to create a genuinely equal society, they used it as an excuse to withdraw from the common good and the social contract, rebranding the problem of racism to fit the solution that would most benefit them. In the process, they demonized America itself, deplatforming the working class (of all races) while protecting their own status.

closer look reveals that the real dichotomy is not political at all; it is based on class.

lacuna

“An unfilled space; a gap”

in an age of cultural equality “when the rich drove almost the same cars as everyone else, ate roughly the same food, and watched exactly the same television shows,” for the working-class man, “there seemed to be hardly anyone above him worth envying.”3

To maintain the widest audience possible, publishers and editors put a premium on keeping the news straight, telling readers what happened, and letting them decide for themselves what it meant.

There were also a limited number of FCC licenses, and those licenses were bound by the fairness doctrine, which required outlets to present issues of public importance in a way that was balanced. Altogether, this resulted in a journalism that was deeply committed to the difference between opinion writing and straight news, a journalism produced often by men with little to no education (it was always men back then) whose focus was on the who, what, when, where, and how.

It turns out, that digital media is the perfect tool for elite journalists to use to drill down on their subjects, and for further abandoning the working class in favor of a culture war around identity that benefits the elites.

There is immense pressure to write stories in a way that will make them most likely to be shared on social media and retweeted by bigger names across industries, meaning there is immense pressure to confirm the biases of a publication’s readership.

Not good. Not good at all.

Vox’s explainers are confirmation-bias catnip,

And the site has cast these class-based tastes as information, turning wealth itself into the arbiter of what’s true and what’s false.

What Mutz’s data actually shows is that there is a difference between economic hardship and economic anxiety, as Musa al-Gharbi explains in an essay in the American Sociologist.

The truth is, the reasons voters themselves give for voting for Trump are numerous—and legitimate.

Illegal immigration has been tied to a massive decrease in black, working-class wages, and up to a 10 percent increase in the mass incarceration of black Americans.

And the term “white supremacy,” which used to refer to the very real oppression of American minorities by whites, is now a catchall phrase applied to people who believe in any enforcement of a national border.

If supporting immigration laws is “white nationalism,” that would mean that there are huge amounts of black and Latino Americans white nationalists.

But this particular form of erasure presaged something else, too: The mission creep of racism to the Southern border was one of the early signs that a new definition of “racism”—one once relegated to the academic fringe—had become mainstream in our national discourse. Over the course of the next five years, it would become the defining paradigm of the liberal news media.

Between 2008 and 2015, there were a series of big buyouts at the paper, sometimes leading to hundreds of reporters at a time leaving or retiring. These reductions disproportionately cleared out senior ranks of reporters who had a more traditional view of journalism, in which a big part of the mandate, the meaning, and the fun of being a journalist was exposing yourself and your readers to other cultures and other people, and helping others to understand them.

these reporters were replaced by a younger generation of digital natives, some journalists, some in ancillary digital roles, who were educated at elite institutions and viewed their roles less as understanding their subjects and more as sitting in judgment over those they disagreed with.

While at one time, the older journalists taught the younger ones how to think, after the buyouts this younger generation, armed with their judgments and accusations of racism and sexism, became the ones wielding immense influence over their older colleagues.

“I think it does a poor job of analyzing the range and magnitude of the problems that face us as a society. And I think that it does a more to tear us apart than it does to bring us together.”

I think that he’s right.

the Harvard economist found that when it comes to officer-involved shootings, there are no racial differences between white and black Americans.

This progress is something postmodernists can never recognize. It’s not just that they don’t acknowledge that something can be good but flawed. It’s that they don’t believe in equality at all.

postmodernists believe that history itself is just a revolving door of masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, even abandoning their predecessors’ belief in an ultimate utopian endgame. And in the 1970s, a new group of American scholars applied this same model to thinking about race.

Antiracism is a great displacement exercise, a magic trick that transforms economic guilt into racial guilt, absolving the rich of any role in solving inequality because it’s rooted in the one thing they have no control over—their race. It was the perfect worldview for white liberals, increasingly college educated and affluent, a diffuse intelligentsia employed in creative, knowledge-based, and managerial jobs, convinced of their own superior virtue and desperate to telegraph it. America’s news media stepped in to show them how to keep their rarified status while also feeling like heroes. All it would cost would be a yearly subscription.

The fact that America’s journalists no longer resemble Americans writ large does not mean that they are not setting the agenda for the nation. The power of the press—despite its unpopularity—is still immense.

“Racial essentialism is very reductive and actually oppressive,” Valdary told me. “Ironically, it reduces us as individuals to our immutable characteristics, which is precisely what we were supposed to be fighting against.”

Yes! That’s what we were always supposed to be fighting against.

“Oftentimes, we get into this confused conversation where we make class differences racial differences. We don’t really take into account all the very different kind of textures in black life that exist now.”

“America’s original sin is not slavery,” the elder Steele says in it. “It is simply the use of race as a means to power.”

Damning words from a black man.

Foster put it: “I think conditioning yourself to believe that the whole of the country or the whole of a particular race are at all times and in general disposed to think about you as a racial entity, as opposed to as a human, as an individual, I think that’s probably to your disadvantage.”

“Hard work is racist. That’s what white people say,” Thomas Chatterton Williams told me.

you don’t hear black people say hard work is racist.

There’s a sublimated racism in wokeness, Williams argues. “There’s a way that white liberals can still indulge feelings of superiority, feelings of specialness, as if all evil comes from them,” he said. “They’re special that way, too. They have to help black people because black people are lower. There’s even a kind of straight-up racism;

“Whiteness is not a privilege equally enjoyed by all white Americans.”

And unchecked power is incompatible with democracy.

We all make mistakes, and we are all remain equally created in God’s image.

We must begin to listen to each other again, to make room for what the less fortunate can teach us, about society and about ourselves. The least among us often have the most to teach us. It’s something that’s all but forgotten in American society today. The national liberal news media should lead the way back to a more democratic, more moral, and more equal society. But until it does, we can all start making these our goals right now.