How the #BrokenTimes covers the fascist oligarchy

Two days to go until the fascist oligarchy comes to power in the United States and this is how our once-greatest newspaper, The New York Times, is covering what could end in the fall of American democracy. To The Times, all the world’s Trump’s stage and they’re merely spectators.

On the socials, I started to criticize today’s coverage, with a stack of lead #BrokenTimes slugs to insert with each complaint. But I was overwhelmed by the cascade of disappointments in this urgent moment — and by my exhaustion at the futility of hoping The Times could be better. That is why I criticize it: in that hope.

Start above. Yes, that story about Trump as impresario examines how he turns his crimes and lies to his favor with his gullible public. The Times wonders at his magic:

But the “gray areas between appearance and perception” is precisely where journalism is needed. Can they not understand that his success is their failure? Where is the self-reflection on their own willful credulity as well as their judgment of the public’s epidemic ignorance? The Times already surrenders to the idea that his second term is “his story” to tell when it should be theirs — or actually the country’s and posterity’s.

And how are we, the people, permitted to tell it? Through polls, damned polls.

I constantly criticize the use of opinion polls, always quoting the late James Carey of Columbia, who taught that polling preempts the public discourse it is intended to measure. In my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I write:

The Times poll provides damnable evidence of the fallibility of the form when set against a Wall Street Journal poll this same day. According to The Times’ rendering of public opinion, America is all in on MAGA fascism, itching for mass deportations to start.

Yet look at The Journal’s poll:

“MAGA Lite,” as in, ‘We voted for Adolf but can we have the Duce now?’ According to The Journal, 70% of Americans “would protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records” and thus do not favor mass deportation. Majorities of respondents also oppose pardoning January 6 rioters, oppose taking Greenland or the Panama Canal by force, oppose making Canada the next state, oppose Musk and his “doge,” oppose ending birthright citizenship, oppose cutting education and health care, and recognize that tariffs will raise prices.

So which is it: Mondo MAGA or MAGA Mini? Neither. Each is an impossibly flawed portrait of the nation’s nuanced thinking. Realizing that, The Times resorts to its favorite haunt: the proverbial diner.

What hubris it is for the paper to think it can, with random quotes selected by its editors, portray “the inner thoughts of a nation.” Then again, when the inner thoughts The Times chooses to present on its home page are such as this, it is more likely just another opportunity to dismiss the views of the nation:

Mind-reading the inner thoughts of the populace is not much more hubristic than journalists thinking they write “the first draft of history” while too often dismissing history’s lessons.

I was most appalled to see how The Times presented the right’s threat to birthright citizenship as merely an “idea” that Trump “wants to redefine.” No! To end birthright citizenship is to end Reconstruction and grant victory to the Confederacy. It is a shocking and abhorrent racist and xenophobic plan that should have journalists shouting warning.

The Times responds not with appropriate historical perspective but instead with the anodyne calm of present-tense journalism: “If Trump follows through on this promise, it would represent a triumph for a certain vision of America.” Of course, The Times does acknowledge that this is a question of equity (read: race). But it ends up bothsidesing the Civil War. “The battle over birthright citizenship will be a fight between these two nationalisms.” This from the newspaper — from its magazine — that gave us the 1619 Project. God help us.

I have been trying to write an essay about what I see as a current crisis of judgment. Journalism is afraid of judging our politicians and even their most noxious policies, not daring to condemn a challenge to the most fundamental pillar of Reconstruction. News organizations are afraid of judging the electorate for their ignorant ideas and perilous, self-destructive choices. Meanwhile, technology companies are ever-more refusing to judge extremist, manipulative speech, both because it’s expensive and because that is the speech of the regime now in power.

But journalists are happy to judge one category of the country and blame them for where we are: the left. The Times invites no one less than “two of the world’s leading thinkers,” Thomas Piketty and Harvard’s Michael Sandel, to examine how “the left went astray.” It is the right that has given us the fascist oligarchy but it’s the left that went astray.

The Times does that one worse: It invites one of the world’s most noxious thinkers, the philosopher-mascot behind the worst of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs — Thiel, Andreessen, Vance — to spew his extreme ideas. It even grants him the prominence of one of its creepy Harry Potter Daily Prophet animated portraits on the home page, Curtis Yarvin drumming his fingers at our doom. Says The Times‘ David Marchese: “Until recently, those ideas felt fringe.” Ideas such as replacing democracy with a dictator-CEO. “But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.” So let’s amplify his ideas further. They’re only ideas, after all.

But fear not, The Times‘ Editorial Board is telling leaders, institutions, and us all to stand up to “Trump’s fear tactics.” I share this without comment.

Elsewhere in The Times‘ opinion section, a member of the Editorial Board asks:

She concludes: “I fear that by the time we get around to talking about oligarchy, it will be too late.” And I want to shout: It has been your job to talk about oligarchy and you’re still wondering when you’ll get around to it?

Meanwhile, pity Nick Kristof, who confesses that he has a hard time writing his annual exercise in Pollyannism.

He proceeds nonetheless to mine glimmers of hope, including this:

Except he does not take the next, basic journalistic step, to then point out the state of literacy in America. According to the National Literacy Institute, 79% of U.S. adults are literate and 21% are illiterate in 2024 and 54% of adults have literacy below the sixth-grade level. The U.S. ranks 36th worldwide in literacy. The lack of education in the United States, the attack by the fascist right on the institutions of education, and the ignorance of too much of the public is what made them vulnerable to the siren call of fascism, Fox, and extremist right propaganda.

How can I complain about The Times without complaining about Ross Douthat? He’s optimistic — about Trump!

But if things go sour, Douthat won’t blame the extremist right. He and his new bestie, Yarvin disciple Andreessen, will blame the left for turning them into extremists, as if oligarchic billionaires have no power, no agency even over their own lives and thoughts:

This from a columnist who blames sexual assault on “social liberalism”:

I’m going to end today’s airing of grievances with an odd, final exhibit: Kevin Roose — alongside the Supreme Court, the Congress, and two presidencies — dismissing the freedom of expression of the 170 million Americans on TikTok.

While confessing that he has spent hours enjoying the creativity of the masses there, he shrugs off the app as “a place to waste time, to numb out, to unplug from reality” and “a kind of cognitive surrender,” accusing it (as he has been known to accuse artificial intelligence) of “starting to rewire my brain — blurring my focus, shortening my attention span, making me less interested in media that isn’t laser-targeted to my precise array of dopamine receptors.” It’s sobering how journalists, like oligarchic billionaires, have so little agency.

What’s worse is that he thinks TikTok’s creators and users are shrugging off TikTok on this apparent evidence….

This is such a key illustration of The Times‘ and its journalists’ inability to empathize with the people they are pledged to serve. So let me tell you about my inner thoughts: I’m exhausted and despair at the triumph of ignorance and hatred, at the apparent futility of protest, and at the failure of the field I have devoted fifty years of my life to — journalism — to defend democracy, enlightenment, education, equity, justice, and free speech for all against the titanic forces of totalitarianism and tyranny.

I criticize The Times more than the rest because it had been our best, and the rest — the #BrokenPost especially now — seem well beyond reform. From The Post:

I am at the point of giving up on the incumbent institutions of mass media, in favor of the tender shoots rising from the ashes to replace them, seeds planted by my students. What you see here today in just one paper’s coverage of this terrifying time is how I have come to this.

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