Witnessing a crisis from the middle of the road
Back when Jim Hightower said that there was “nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos” — feel free to insert your own, region-appropriate road kill — he was explaining his politics, not enumerating a census of the mid-asphalt region.
Hightower, now a writer and populist activist, was quoted to that effect when he was Texas agriculture commissioner in the 1980s, but recent events, and really recent events, brought his blunt viewpoint to mind, to ponder.
Because, Jim, in 2025, dead armadillos can find a lot of company in the middle of the road (I’m betting you know this). Journalists present “both sides,” stacking facts against falsehoods in the name of balance. Public officials call for both sides to “lower the temperature” when one side brings guns to a whistle fight, to borrow the metaphor of Rebecca Good, widow of Renee Nicole Good.
. . .
While I was thinking about Hightower, Margaret Sullivan’s mind turned to an Irish writer — always a fine choice:
There’s a line from a Yeats poem that keeps going through my head.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
I thought about it all weekend when I examined the media coverage of the latest horror in Minneapolis, the shocking killing by federal agents of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti.
The right-wing media — led by Fox News, as always — was immediately spilling out its propaganda with, yes, passionate intensity. The reality-based press proceeded with an overabundance of caution and, at times, the willingness to hand a megaphone to liars.
Media critic Dan Froomkin builds on Sullivan’s point:
If you were watching the news coverage in real time, like I was, you could see the lies working. Some news organizations simply resorted to stenography. Some contrasted the administration account with the videos, but left it at that.
It was particularly fascinating to watch the New York Times, where you could see bursts of bold, direct, honest coverage of what reporters had seen with their own eyes. And then you could sense a countervailing tide, presumably directed by more senior leaders, of coverage mired in both-sidesism and weasel words, carefully measured so as to not “take sides” even when one side was the truth and the other was lies.
Sullivan offered an example, and quoted a former Times reporter on that very point:
Meanwhile at 1 p.m. on Sunday, here was a major headline at the top of the New York Times site, as part of its live updates. “State Seeks Access to Evidence as Federal Officials Blame Shooting Victim.”
The headline magnified the statements of federal officials, even as the Times knew better because its journalists had done their own detailed analysis.
The former (celebrated) New York Times Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse, wrote to me about it, seeing this an example of the “both sides” travesty that treats lies and truth as equally deserving of attention.
“What’s sad,” Greenhouse wrote, “is that the Times reporting has been superb and precisely to the point, a fact that’s obscured by the headline.” She pointed out a Washington Post headline at the same time of day, praising it for being much more direct: “Federal agents secured gun from Minnesota man before fatal shooting, videos show.”
. . .
The combination of crowd-sourcing — everyone has a video camera — and dogged journalism has shifted the debate about both immigration enforcement and the future of our democracy. Gut-wrenching events have forced more journalists to reconcile obvious facts with obvious lies.
Those facts are part of a bigger picture: The people of Minnesota and now Maine have had rights suspended and violence inflicted on people who display their support for their neighbors, for their community. It’s not a natural disaster, or a one-day scandal; it’s federal policy. These are choices.
Covering those choices from the middle of the road may be more comfortable, but every story, every headline that obscures that context is doing readers — and democracy — a disservice.