New adventures in Cletus-hunting
So yes, the graphic fronting this piece is not a joke. The esteemed Washington Post, where "democracy dies in darkness", has decided to devote an entire reporter from Texas to, as Mr. Graff said, report on why white Bubbas hate President Joe Biden and continue to love Donald Trump.
The "Trump movement"—which involves evacuation of bowels—may have been a new phenomenon back in 2016. But the reason "in this Ohio diner" is such a cliché is because it was worn into the ground by reporters from the Papers of Record traversing the diners and truck stops of Red America to understand this curious new tribe. Of course, this tribe wasn't "new". It had always been there. But it had finally found in Trump a man after their own hearts: someone as stupid and full of hate as they were. The true question is what made them so hateful. And no, it wasn't "economic anxiety". It was decades of right-wing propaganda targeted at them, propaganda which inflamed already-held positions. Now that is the story: how first right-wing talk radio, and then Fox News, and now all the Fox News knockoffs existed only to fuel anger and despair, and how this was a danger to the survival of a democratic republic. But the media hardly ever went into that pool, because of course the likes of Fox News were part of the confraternity, and were not to be admonished lest the First Amendment be traduced.
However, that's not all. The Post also had this job ad tweet:
Huzzah! We're finally being paid attention!
But let's pause for a moment. With the media's track record, do we actually think that the Post, or any other of the media jewels, will give equal weight to liberal issues and lives as to the conservative ones they love to splash on their front pages in anthropological, voyeuristic glee? (And make no mistake: there is a huge element of "Look at the natives, aren't they odd?" when reporters go on Cletus safaris. They both disdain these people, and yet use them for clicks and revenue.) And, most importantly, will the Post and others interview the people who voted for Pres. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris? For Governor Gavin Newsom? For Senators Alex Padilla and Diane Feinstein? In other words, the dreaded "establishment"? Or will they go to hipster coffee houses in Los Feliz or Silverlake to interview "disappointed" Bernie Sanders supporters kvetching about how badly the Democratic Party is failing them on everything? Forgive me if I'm being churlish and cynical, but the media have not bathed themselves in glory for the past few decades. Trying so hard to prove it's not "liberal", the "liberal" media has gone out of its way to scupper that notion with a ridiculous ideology of "balance". It prints what conservatives say, what liberals say, and treat them both the same, even if the liberal is talking about ensuring that gays have equal rights, while the conservative talks about executing them in the city center.
There is a huge divide in this country, and it would behoove the media to address the root causes of that divide. There are great stories out there to be told about propaganda and brainwashing, about insular cultures which foster fear and hatred. But that requires work. That requires living in those communities, and seeing what they see, rather than airdropping in from New York City or Washington, DC to write a quick report. It's a story which is decades in the making. But it's the kind of story our journals of record no longer write. In our social media age, it's all about the clicks, about instant gratification. Investigative journalism is as much on life support as the ad revenue for the likes of the Post and the New York Times.
What is lacking in our media is any sense of context. Take inflation. Its spike is a worldwide phenomenon, brought about by the pandemic. The United Kingdom, too, is going through its worst bout of inflation since the 1980s. I read a fair amount of British media, and no one, from the conservative The Telegraph to the leftist The Guardian is blaming Prime Minister Boris Johnson for it. It is a global issue, exacerbated now by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But here in the US, it's a given that inflation is all Joe Biden's fault. No context. And there won't be context for the Post's reporting on conservative Texans. There won't be context about why they believe what they do, why they think how they think. It will be another Cletus safari, full of color and strangeness. But it will shed no light. It will, in fact, die in darkness.
I'd like to be proven wrong. I'd like to think that these initiatives from the Post herald a new seriousness about getting to root causes. But come on. Do any of you think it will be anything but a farce? I fear that Texan right-wingers will be presented as noble, "real" Americans, and California liberals as fed up with the Democratic establishment. Because that's what's come before. And there's no reason to think it will be any different this time.