Let’s Talk About How We Want the Media to Talk About Nazis
The New York Times infuriated many of its readers this weekend by profiling a white nationalist — otherwise known as a “Nazi,” certainly by liberals — in a manner that struck those readers as accommodating, even supportive, of what the paper termed this “Nazi next door.”
Maybe it’s my years in the media, but I skipped over the article when I saw the headline, because the banality of evil is a concept that Hannah Arendt broached not long after I was born and has been a commonplace meme ever since; ho-hum. But I learned of it soon after it was posted online, when my daughter’s social media accounts started going crazy. All her millennial friends were furious that the Times would profile this guy not as evil but as banal.
Naturally, this has turned into a frenzy of “You’re doing it wrong” responses by people who do not write for the New York Times and won’t be asked to any time soon.
What this shows is that there is no audience anymore for the legacy media’s idea of objectivity. Look at the suggestions for how reporters and editors “should have” added “context” — as if we need context to know that Nazis are bad. “But you’re normalizing it!” these people cry, perhaps failing to notice that this is exactly the charge the right aims at the media when it comes to LGBT(sorry, no Q) issues.
But there’s a huge audience for outrage, a currency the Times doesn’t traffic in. The editors attempted to explain the point of approaching the subject as the story did; readers don’t care. The writer chipped in, too. Forget it. “You made him seem normal! This makes Nazism seem appealing!” As always, the concern isn’t how the reader himself was fooled, because he wasn’t. The problem is how others, not as smart as the reader, will be fooled.
I spent a lot of years as an editor. Perhaps the best advice I ever gave a writer involved a story about a group of people who were victims of injustice. The reporter was angry about it, and it came through in the story. Get rid of the emotion, I advised. If you provide the anger, the reader won’t — she’ll just read it and move on. If you want to move people, make it dry and objective. Your absence of anger will make it easier for the reader to provide her own.
In short, the story was supposed to make you angry, but not at the newspaper. The newspaper is trying to warn you — the guy at the next table at Applebee’s might have a swastika tattoo. You might take issue with the value of such a message, but to insist that the paper use the profile to condemn Nazism is to demand that the “liberal media” act as such — as propagandists.
Seriously, if you don’t trust people to make up their own minds on Nazism, why do you trust them with the vote?
I unfortunately heard about the controversy before I read the article.
I agree with Alby 100%. What’s the reporter suppose to do, go yell at the guy or write in a news article that he didn’t like him.
The guy is who he is and it’s important for people to know it.
When I was still writing obits for TNJ, reporter David Preston was assigned a Christmas-in-prison story. He got all sorts of warm and heartwarming (some heartbreaking) quotes from prisoners, and right after the warm, fuzzy words came “said Schlabotnik, who is serving 20 years for armed robbery and manslaughter.” There is an effective way to do what the critics wanted, and this article doesn’t quite pull it off.
But to claim that this will somehow make white nationalism appealing to the masses says more about one’s opinion of the masses than about this article’s supposed effect on credulous readers.
Here’s the take of Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who sides with those saying the story should have been spiked but does so without throwing a conniption.
This is happening. “Regular” Joe Schomoes from Ohio are Nazis. Let’s not hide it or pretend they are something they aren’t. They get married & shop for groceries at the supermarket. No one “humanized” him. He was human already.
Now let’s crush him & everything he believes in.
Strap in for the fight & stop fucking crying. We have a lot of work to do and complaining ever time you get your feelings hurt will not help us.
Because I don’t follow the Nazi movement that closely, I learned a good bit from the story, regardless of its slant.
I had never heard this guy’s name, so it’s good to know it; I’ll keep an eye out for it from here on out.
I learned that his “party” has about 1,000 members, which reinforced my belief that these rallies around the country are drawing people who treat this like the Grateful Dead — they’ll travel hundreds of miles, and the crowd in Tennessee was largely made up of the same people as the one in Virginia.
Most of all, I learned that he and the Ms. are thinking of starting a family, at which point I suspect he’ll have much less time and money to indulge this inanity. He’ll end up buying a Rottweiler and naming it Rommel.
They have taken to flash-mobbing their marches because if they announce them they are outnumbered 100 to 1 by regular people in a wide variety of flavors. As long as we keep that up, they cannot gain an audience.
The article was maybe just a hair too subtle with its sarcasm. The notion that a 25 year old welder yearns for a true meritocracy to elevate him to his deserved station in life I find hilarious.
Welders make good money, so I have no idea what he’s on about. The fact that he lives in a nearly all-white suburb probably has a lot to do with it. Studies have repeatedly shown that the most racist whites are those who have little contact with other races.