Bad News Quotes

“Newspaper prestige, not always but usually, is a function of liberal estimation. Most intellectuals are liberal, and editorial prestige depends on what intellectuals judge it to be.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“This is class warfare by elites on the working class, in which the elites try to hide the way they have benefited from skyrocketing inequality by portraying themselves as more virtuous than those on the other side of the tracks, and thus more worthy of their good fortune. Call it COVID Calvinism: you aren’t simply lucky that your job allowed you to stay home or could never possibly be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English; you are more virtuous, and therefore justified in perpetuating the yawning gulf between yourself and the workers. You then use allegations of racism or sexism or transphobia to hide the class divide from which you are benefiting. Woke politics, in other words, is a smokescreen that obscures the realities of class.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“It is debate—tolerating the views of those we disagree with, engaging them in the terrifying, unpredictable process of trying to convince them of our opinions—that is the necessary foundation of a democracy. And yet, the Left today is allergic to debate, enforcing its values and views through a moral panic and calling any who dissent racist or transphobic or misogynistic.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“the woke moral panic mainstreamed by the liberal news media had actually been underway for at least five years before Trump appeared on the scene. It began around 2011, the year the New York Times erected its online paywall. It was then that articles mentioning “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” or “oppression” started to appear with exponential frequency at the Times, BuzzFeed, Vox, the Washington Post, and NPR, according to sociologists tracking these developments.9 And as we will see throughout this book, this radical shift to the left on issues of identity was rooted in a longer-term trend in the media that has much more to do with class than it does with politics or race.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals. I believe that many of them truly do wish to live in a more equitable society, but today’s liberal elites are also governed by a competing commitment: their belief in meritocracy, or the fiction that their status was earned by their intelligence and talents. Today’s meritocratic elites subscribe to the view that not only wealth but also political power should be the province of the highly educated. Still, liberals see themselves as compassionate and progressive. And perhaps unconsciously, they sought a way to reconcile the inequality that their meritocratic status produces with the compassionate emotions they feel toward the less fortunate. 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.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“Slowly, I started to understand that this was the signature move of the progressive movement: mistaking its economic privilege for virtue and then forcing the working class to pay for it”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy