No quibbles with the column, but the bigger problem with over-hiring from this cohort is the lack of subject matter expertise. They have a lot of ideological commitments, high confidence, and very little knowledge. So they fill in the gaps with their assumptions or repeat the conventional wisdom in their newsroom.
Example: an Army friend was complaining to me the other day about crappy coverage of military topics. I saw an analysis showing that less than 0.5% of NYT staffers have any military background, and those people mostly work on the tech side. So it’s not surprising that they’d make errors of fact and analysis. But why? The military has trained journalists that the NYT could hire from.
And for the love of God, foreign correspondents should speak the language. At a minimum, they should be able to have a basic conversation on the street. If they can’t even communicate, who knows what cultural assumptions or biased filters are showing up in their work. Imagine trying to report on the US without speaking English. But this means more hiring of immigrant kids, Mormons, etc., not Penn grads.
"An industry full of young, educated, urban progressives, ...American journalists are ... left-wing."
As a claim about individual journalists, this seems broadly true, for the demographic reasons you cite.
"The media is on the left...it’s precisely because the media tends to be left-wing that the media tends to focus on ideas that divide Democrats...."
As a claim about an industry, i.e. the media, this seems broadly false. "The media" is not equivalent to a bunch of cub reporters: it is the owners of Sinclair and Fox, as well as the owners of the Wall Street Journal and NYT, all of them much further right than their employees.
The WSJ is a good example: it's reportage has generally been excellent, while it's editorials have generally been laughably bad. It's clear which of these is the journalists and which is the owners. But which is "the media"?
To make the point about journalists that you want to make, references to "the media" obscure more than they clarify.
Your point on RCP 8-5 hits close to home. So many things from EPA and the White House still rely on this model when they write about climate change and no action scenarios.
It’s frustrating. Part of me thinks it’s selection effects (I am an economist. I strive to be accurate and look for data to inform rather than confirm my opinions on lots of stuff.) Lots of people who go into politics and law look to win an argument and thus seek positions that give them the strongest rhetorical positions. I think lots of people take a shortcut and just assert things they find convenient rather than do the hard work of knowing and learning.
It was really interesting to read the comments on the New York Times article yesterday about the “anti-DEI plot.” Nobody was having it, which wouldn’t have been the case so much as a year ago.
At first this must seem tangentially related, but both situations have something to do with a job recruiting only from the demographic of young highly-verbal professionals. (Wordcels instead of shape rotators, that is.)
Now, combining this with the doomerism also cited in this post and the extremely-online-ness of this class of people, and I see storm clouds on the horizon of a Trumplike outpouring of inchoate anger. The only things that give me pause:
1. The average high-ish-achieving woke yuppie has an ideological short circuit, but isn’t immune to facts in quite the way that a 65-year-old Trumper is.
2. The climate doomer stuff is usually just a flippant appeal to nihilism. The revealed preference that would correspond to their stated preferences is ruthless ecoterrorism. They are not doing that.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I ask for your predictions. What will the meltdown of post-woke (and eventually post-Trump) America look like?
Counterpoint: contra Will Stancil it's not because of Twitter bad vibes and lack of attention to the "great" Biden economy people are unhappy.
Liberals over my adult lifetime have succeeded in building the more hyper individualistic, secular, irreligious society they always wanted where people are free from traditional natural attachments such as to family members they don't like, "heteronormativity", to the gender they were "assigned" at birth but now feel uncomfortable with...this kind of society doesn't actually make most people happy.
You could forget the meaninglessness when Obama was president and social media and the possibilities of great "online communities" were still a new and exciting thing or later when joining the anti Trump "resistance" made an otherwise pointless life meaningful and purpose driven.
But in the Biden years ennui has set in. It's all so pointless. Talking about all the wonderful improvements Biden has given on Medicare and the low unemployment rates or hard fought gains in carbon emissions just doesn't scratch where most people... including left wing people... itch. Something is just not right. Something seems missing.
And I will gently suggest the traditional things that make most people happy... getting married, watching your kids grow up are hard to replace with politics and online entertainments. It's a sad world where fewer and fewer people get married and have families. My $.02.
I gotta be honest, this is kind of a strange column to me. I truly don’t know how you can look at absolutely insane amount of coverage (multiple banner headlines on New York Times and absurd number of op-eds) for weeks on end about Claudine Gay and Harvard and conclude that young left wing journalist are setting the agenda at left of center publications.
I say strange because your personal annoyance at young super lefties (will get to that in a second) is overshadowing what I think is a very correct take of yours; the particular incentives of left of center media and right wing media is putting Biden and Democrats at a huge propaganda disadvantage. Right wing media is partisan in a way (most) mainstream media is not which means they exercise message discipline in ways that left of center media doesn’t. But then I think you made what is actually a pretty profound point; there is very particular incentives (especially financial) for left of center news to emphasize issues that divide the Democratic coalition.
Weirdly, you don’t take the next step to tie the incentives that cause left of center media and MSM to focus on issues that divide the Democratic coalition to why so much of young far left media figures seemed to be committed to “doomerism”. Because I think you’re completely correct that doomerism is bad strategy to both win elections and get your preferred policies enacted. Something your old enemy and now frenemy Will Stancil agrees with you on which is why you two are no longer enemies. The doomers are not trying to convince hardcore Fox watchers or Fox News hosts. They are trying to fight with…well you. And it’s clearly not working. But it this fight also stems from the incentives you describe that lead to issues that divide the Democratic coalition being emphasized.
Which brings me lastly to your conflict with young lefty reporters. Because this is clearly what this is about. Reality is I can agree with you that a lot of stories seem to have some unnecessarily lefty bent (more than once I’ve read stories that emphasize how a particular policy is harmful to POC. And my first thought is often “this is like the 5th most important reason this story is a story. Why is this being emphasized”?). But because a lot of these reporters clearly don’t like you personally it’s lead you to overemphasize their power. Because it’s very clear the reporters (and probably most importantly editors) who drive the biggest stories are NOT these reporters, at least not yet. Again, please see that absolute amount of coverage* (and most important it’s slant) the Claudine gay story got.
*The DEI Times story was so revealing. Like Times at its best getting a great scoop. But also no acknowledgment of their role in helping disseminate right wing propagandists. Oh and also, can’t emphasize enough how unsurprising it is that Heather Macdonald appears to be an absolute bigot.
To me since local newspapers are basically dead there has been a big shift in the basic focus of media coverage. The purpose of the local newspaper was to inform people of what's going on in the community. In some cases this would involve uncovering scandals but in other cases this was like covering what's going on with local industry, sports, etc.
Now the bent of like every news outlet seems like it's some version of attempting to speak truth to power. This means basically negative coverage of the US government, the Democratic and Republican parties, the technology and finance industries, etc. etc. All these entities clearly have flaws but if you read like Pro Publica it is constantly skewering the tech industry but does it actually help you understand the tech industry? https://www.propublica.org/topics/technology I don't think any of the pieces here or the collection of them together shows an understanding of the benefits and dilemmas posed by big tech.
I think if you reading a trade publication like The Information which does not shy away from critical coverage of Google gives you a much better picture of what is actually going on and what the stakes are precisely because it is connected and broadly sympathetic to the people in power in the tech industry. You see a lot of analysis of who's in charge of what, what companies are working on and focusing on, etc. etc. So the thesis of the coverage is we will be critical of the tech industry when warranted because it has tremendous potential.
The way political coverage has been trending seems fairly nihilistic by comparison, where speaking truth to power is done just via rampant negativity without a thesis of why people in power are acting the way they are or what citizens should do about it. I think this essentially causes folks to tune out any media they disagree with...
But this is the downside of the media essentially operating by and for donors. People who donate and subscribe to publications essentially for political validation are not really looking for boosterism about their local economy or industry or whatever. They are wanting "impact" journalism even though the very fact that they (partisans/billionaires/people with specific agendas, whatever) are sponsoring it means it will not be all that impactful outside their peer group.
Seems like a core problem of political hobbyism. I’m actually not that interested in the price of insulin except as a specific example of the quite interesting question of how to organize a health care system in big picture terms.
I can get super into something like this when it’s personally effecting me or is part of my job but it’s a lot to expect people to be excited enough to spend time sharing it and risk confrontation with rl people.
We clearly have a segment of people on the left - and many of them seem to have actual power- who are addicted to stirring up messy drama essentially for social media clout. I was listening to the 538 podcast this morning and they were discussing the incredible PITA the New Hampshire Democratic primary has turned into - for entirely self- inflected reasons. For those who blessedly have tuned this drama out- someone at the DNC got it in their heads that it was bad white supremacy something something that the first primary in the country is New Hampshire because it is a virtually all-white state and a place more diverse (like South Carolina or Nevada) should be first instead. So the DNC tried to get New Hampshire to move their primary later, but it turns out that New Hampshire actually has it in their constitution that they have to be first so they wouldn’t / couldn’t do it. So the DNC retaliates by saying that any delegates won in NH won’t count at the convention. The DNC thinks that should be the final nail, but Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson (the only Dems challenging Biden) realize that even if they don’t get delegates, they WILL get media attention if the do well in NH so they still stay in. Belatedly, the Biden campaign realizes this too, but it’s too late to get on the ballot, so now they have to organize a last ditch WRITE-IN campaign for the SITTING PRESIDENT and fly in people like Ro Khanna to campaign for it so he won’t be humiliated.
And all for what? Yes, if non-white voters are being disenfranchised in the Democratic primary system that would be bad and we should fix it. But that’s clearly not the case - recall that it was the largely non-white voters of South Carolina who basically picked Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, over the preferences of the mostly white voters of Iowa and NH. (For the record, I’m glad they did- I don’t think Buttigieg, Sanders or Warren would have beaten Trump in the general). The issue should be power, not which state goes first, and at least in the Democratic primary system, non white voters appear to have plenty of power - and thank God they do!
When it’s all said and done I guess it isn’t that big a deal but Biden has enough real problems he has to deal with - why are we generating additional drama for no reason?
Agree with the points of this column re left-wing vibes... But I think it is worth noting that there IS symmetry in both sides pushing super-negative world views. The entire media industry unfortunately benefits from tales of "omg the world is in danger - tune in tomorrow to see what happens next."
Also I think Ukraine getting attention is better for Biden (unlike student loans). First of all it is the most important issue right now, even if people are "bored". Secondly, aiding Ukraine is pretty popular compared to a lot of left-wing priorities. Thirdly, Ukraine getting more attention is better than Israel-Palestine because it is an issue that mostly unites rather than divides Dems. Finally, and most importantly, the gap between the Dem position and MAGA position is very stark on this issue and it divides Republicans, which is an electoral benefit for Biden. Both lefties and Trump can't defend their anti-Ukraine position coherently, so they look foolish, and anything that makes Trump look like a wimp is a benefit. I kind of wish Biden and Ukraine defenders would emphasize the practical danger that a total Russian victory would bring over the "democracy vs. authoritarian" rhetoric (it would still be bad if Ukraine was the corrupt dictatorship its detractors call it!) but maybe that rhetoric does play better, idk.
This article makes some sense, but I wonder about Matt's theory of effective propaganda.
Matt's theory seems to be more or less about policy:
What the media is doing -- "Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is awesome and will reduce racial inequalities by X% blah blah blah"
What the media should do -- "Biden's plans to reduce drug prices are awesome and will increase life expectancy by X% and lower healthcare costs by Y% blah blah blah"
I'd consider an alternative theory based on the visceral feeling people get from reading news:
What the media is doing -- "You're all terrible white supremacists unless you convert to full-on progressive zealotry. Also, we speak for Joe Biden and the Democratic party. Vote Biden!"
What the media should do -- "America is generally a good country and we like its populace. We believe the Democratic party will be better for the American people. Vote Biden!"
Unfortunately, the Democrats seem hung up on “saving democracy,” rather than focusing on their kitchen table accomplishments, including Medicare, infrastructure projects and student loans. And it doesn’t help when the mainstream media simply echo that nebulous approach.
No quibbles with the column, but the bigger problem with over-hiring from this cohort is the lack of subject matter expertise. They have a lot of ideological commitments, high confidence, and very little knowledge. So they fill in the gaps with their assumptions or repeat the conventional wisdom in their newsroom.
Example: an Army friend was complaining to me the other day about crappy coverage of military topics. I saw an analysis showing that less than 0.5% of NYT staffers have any military background, and those people mostly work on the tech side. So it’s not surprising that they’d make errors of fact and analysis. But why? The military has trained journalists that the NYT could hire from.
And for the love of God, foreign correspondents should speak the language. At a minimum, they should be able to have a basic conversation on the street. If they can’t even communicate, who knows what cultural assumptions or biased filters are showing up in their work. Imagine trying to report on the US without speaking English. But this means more hiring of immigrant kids, Mormons, etc., not Penn grads.
"An industry full of young, educated, urban progressives, ...American journalists are ... left-wing."
As a claim about individual journalists, this seems broadly true, for the demographic reasons you cite.
"The media is on the left...it’s precisely because the media tends to be left-wing that the media tends to focus on ideas that divide Democrats...."
As a claim about an industry, i.e. the media, this seems broadly false. "The media" is not equivalent to a bunch of cub reporters: it is the owners of Sinclair and Fox, as well as the owners of the Wall Street Journal and NYT, all of them much further right than their employees.
The WSJ is a good example: it's reportage has generally been excellent, while it's editorials have generally been laughably bad. It's clear which of these is the journalists and which is the owners. But which is "the media"?
To make the point about journalists that you want to make, references to "the media" obscure more than they clarify.
Your point on RCP 8-5 hits close to home. So many things from EPA and the White House still rely on this model when they write about climate change and no action scenarios.
It’s frustrating. Part of me thinks it’s selection effects (I am an economist. I strive to be accurate and look for data to inform rather than confirm my opinions on lots of stuff.) Lots of people who go into politics and law look to win an argument and thus seek positions that give them the strongest rhetorical positions. I think lots of people take a shortcut and just assert things they find convenient rather than do the hard work of knowing and learning.
It was really interesting to read the comments on the New York Times article yesterday about the “anti-DEI plot.” Nobody was having it, which wouldn’t have been the case so much as a year ago.
At first this must seem tangentially related, but both situations have something to do with a job recruiting only from the demographic of young highly-verbal professionals. (Wordcels instead of shape rotators, that is.)
Now, combining this with the doomerism also cited in this post and the extremely-online-ness of this class of people, and I see storm clouds on the horizon of a Trumplike outpouring of inchoate anger. The only things that give me pause:
1. The average high-ish-achieving woke yuppie has an ideological short circuit, but isn’t immune to facts in quite the way that a 65-year-old Trumper is.
2. The climate doomer stuff is usually just a flippant appeal to nihilism. The revealed preference that would correspond to their stated preferences is ruthless ecoterrorism. They are not doing that.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I ask for your predictions. What will the meltdown of post-woke (and eventually post-Trump) America look like?
Counterpoint: contra Will Stancil it's not because of Twitter bad vibes and lack of attention to the "great" Biden economy people are unhappy.
Liberals over my adult lifetime have succeeded in building the more hyper individualistic, secular, irreligious society they always wanted where people are free from traditional natural attachments such as to family members they don't like, "heteronormativity", to the gender they were "assigned" at birth but now feel uncomfortable with...this kind of society doesn't actually make most people happy.
You could forget the meaninglessness when Obama was president and social media and the possibilities of great "online communities" were still a new and exciting thing or later when joining the anti Trump "resistance" made an otherwise pointless life meaningful and purpose driven.
But in the Biden years ennui has set in. It's all so pointless. Talking about all the wonderful improvements Biden has given on Medicare and the low unemployment rates or hard fought gains in carbon emissions just doesn't scratch where most people... including left wing people... itch. Something is just not right. Something seems missing.
And I will gently suggest the traditional things that make most people happy... getting married, watching your kids grow up are hard to replace with politics and online entertainments. It's a sad world where fewer and fewer people get married and have families. My $.02.
Can you point to one person who supports "the free market idea that if you’re poor you should just get sick and die?"
Because I don't believe anyone who supports open markets in heathcare has ever embraced that position.
I gotta be honest, this is kind of a strange column to me. I truly don’t know how you can look at absolutely insane amount of coverage (multiple banner headlines on New York Times and absurd number of op-eds) for weeks on end about Claudine Gay and Harvard and conclude that young left wing journalist are setting the agenda at left of center publications.
I say strange because your personal annoyance at young super lefties (will get to that in a second) is overshadowing what I think is a very correct take of yours; the particular incentives of left of center media and right wing media is putting Biden and Democrats at a huge propaganda disadvantage. Right wing media is partisan in a way (most) mainstream media is not which means they exercise message discipline in ways that left of center media doesn’t. But then I think you made what is actually a pretty profound point; there is very particular incentives (especially financial) for left of center news to emphasize issues that divide the Democratic coalition.
Weirdly, you don’t take the next step to tie the incentives that cause left of center media and MSM to focus on issues that divide the Democratic coalition to why so much of young far left media figures seemed to be committed to “doomerism”. Because I think you’re completely correct that doomerism is bad strategy to both win elections and get your preferred policies enacted. Something your old enemy and now frenemy Will Stancil agrees with you on which is why you two are no longer enemies. The doomers are not trying to convince hardcore Fox watchers or Fox News hosts. They are trying to fight with…well you. And it’s clearly not working. But it this fight also stems from the incentives you describe that lead to issues that divide the Democratic coalition being emphasized.
Which brings me lastly to your conflict with young lefty reporters. Because this is clearly what this is about. Reality is I can agree with you that a lot of stories seem to have some unnecessarily lefty bent (more than once I’ve read stories that emphasize how a particular policy is harmful to POC. And my first thought is often “this is like the 5th most important reason this story is a story. Why is this being emphasized”?). But because a lot of these reporters clearly don’t like you personally it’s lead you to overemphasize their power. Because it’s very clear the reporters (and probably most importantly editors) who drive the biggest stories are NOT these reporters, at least not yet. Again, please see that absolute amount of coverage* (and most important it’s slant) the Claudine gay story got.
*The DEI Times story was so revealing. Like Times at its best getting a great scoop. But also no acknowledgment of their role in helping disseminate right wing propagandists. Oh and also, can’t emphasize enough how unsurprising it is that Heather Macdonald appears to be an absolute bigot.
To me since local newspapers are basically dead there has been a big shift in the basic focus of media coverage. The purpose of the local newspaper was to inform people of what's going on in the community. In some cases this would involve uncovering scandals but in other cases this was like covering what's going on with local industry, sports, etc.
Now the bent of like every news outlet seems like it's some version of attempting to speak truth to power. This means basically negative coverage of the US government, the Democratic and Republican parties, the technology and finance industries, etc. etc. All these entities clearly have flaws but if you read like Pro Publica it is constantly skewering the tech industry but does it actually help you understand the tech industry? https://www.propublica.org/topics/technology I don't think any of the pieces here or the collection of them together shows an understanding of the benefits and dilemmas posed by big tech.
I think if you reading a trade publication like The Information which does not shy away from critical coverage of Google gives you a much better picture of what is actually going on and what the stakes are precisely because it is connected and broadly sympathetic to the people in power in the tech industry. You see a lot of analysis of who's in charge of what, what companies are working on and focusing on, etc. etc. So the thesis of the coverage is we will be critical of the tech industry when warranted because it has tremendous potential.
The way political coverage has been trending seems fairly nihilistic by comparison, where speaking truth to power is done just via rampant negativity without a thesis of why people in power are acting the way they are or what citizens should do about it. I think this essentially causes folks to tune out any media they disagree with...
But this is the downside of the media essentially operating by and for donors. People who donate and subscribe to publications essentially for political validation are not really looking for boosterism about their local economy or industry or whatever. They are wanting "impact" journalism even though the very fact that they (partisans/billionaires/people with specific agendas, whatever) are sponsoring it means it will not be all that impactful outside their peer group.
Seems like a core problem of political hobbyism. I’m actually not that interested in the price of insulin except as a specific example of the quite interesting question of how to organize a health care system in big picture terms.
I can get super into something like this when it’s personally effecting me or is part of my job but it’s a lot to expect people to be excited enough to spend time sharing it and risk confrontation with rl people.
We clearly have a segment of people on the left - and many of them seem to have actual power- who are addicted to stirring up messy drama essentially for social media clout. I was listening to the 538 podcast this morning and they were discussing the incredible PITA the New Hampshire Democratic primary has turned into - for entirely self- inflected reasons. For those who blessedly have tuned this drama out- someone at the DNC got it in their heads that it was bad white supremacy something something that the first primary in the country is New Hampshire because it is a virtually all-white state and a place more diverse (like South Carolina or Nevada) should be first instead. So the DNC tried to get New Hampshire to move their primary later, but it turns out that New Hampshire actually has it in their constitution that they have to be first so they wouldn’t / couldn’t do it. So the DNC retaliates by saying that any delegates won in NH won’t count at the convention. The DNC thinks that should be the final nail, but Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson (the only Dems challenging Biden) realize that even if they don’t get delegates, they WILL get media attention if the do well in NH so they still stay in. Belatedly, the Biden campaign realizes this too, but it’s too late to get on the ballot, so now they have to organize a last ditch WRITE-IN campaign for the SITTING PRESIDENT and fly in people like Ro Khanna to campaign for it so he won’t be humiliated.
And all for what? Yes, if non-white voters are being disenfranchised in the Democratic primary system that would be bad and we should fix it. But that’s clearly not the case - recall that it was the largely non-white voters of South Carolina who basically picked Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, over the preferences of the mostly white voters of Iowa and NH. (For the record, I’m glad they did- I don’t think Buttigieg, Sanders or Warren would have beaten Trump in the general). The issue should be power, not which state goes first, and at least in the Democratic primary system, non white voters appear to have plenty of power - and thank God they do!
When it’s all said and done I guess it isn’t that big a deal but Biden has enough real problems he has to deal with - why are we generating additional drama for no reason?
Agree with the points of this column re left-wing vibes... But I think it is worth noting that there IS symmetry in both sides pushing super-negative world views. The entire media industry unfortunately benefits from tales of "omg the world is in danger - tune in tomorrow to see what happens next."
Also I think Ukraine getting attention is better for Biden (unlike student loans). First of all it is the most important issue right now, even if people are "bored". Secondly, aiding Ukraine is pretty popular compared to a lot of left-wing priorities. Thirdly, Ukraine getting more attention is better than Israel-Palestine because it is an issue that mostly unites rather than divides Dems. Finally, and most importantly, the gap between the Dem position and MAGA position is very stark on this issue and it divides Republicans, which is an electoral benefit for Biden. Both lefties and Trump can't defend their anti-Ukraine position coherently, so they look foolish, and anything that makes Trump look like a wimp is a benefit. I kind of wish Biden and Ukraine defenders would emphasize the practical danger that a total Russian victory would bring over the "democracy vs. authoritarian" rhetoric (it would still be bad if Ukraine was the corrupt dictatorship its detractors call it!) but maybe that rhetoric does play better, idk.
This article makes some sense, but I wonder about Matt's theory of effective propaganda.
Matt's theory seems to be more or less about policy:
What the media is doing -- "Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is awesome and will reduce racial inequalities by X% blah blah blah"
What the media should do -- "Biden's plans to reduce drug prices are awesome and will increase life expectancy by X% and lower healthcare costs by Y% blah blah blah"
I'd consider an alternative theory based on the visceral feeling people get from reading news:
What the media is doing -- "You're all terrible white supremacists unless you convert to full-on progressive zealotry. Also, we speak for Joe Biden and the Democratic party. Vote Biden!"
What the media should do -- "America is generally a good country and we like its populace. We believe the Democratic party will be better for the American people. Vote Biden!"
Which one is it? I'm torn.
Unfortunately, the Democrats seem hung up on “saving democracy,” rather than focusing on their kitchen table accomplishments, including Medicare, infrastructure projects and student loans. And it doesn’t help when the mainstream media simply echo that nebulous approach.
Second thought of the day:
There is a reason the NYT pitchbot has salience. Matt nails it on the head.
Really interesting column. It denies my preferred interpretation, which is that most journalists are fools. Am I mistaken?