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?