Donald Trump and the Media's Quest for a Goldilocks Conservative

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At a company-wide town hall-style event in early April, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, and his star writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates engaged in some candid public soul searching about how it is the venerable magazine, founded by abolitionists over 150 years ago, had hired (very briefly) a writer who advocated state-sanctioned hanging of women who abort pregnancies, and compared a small black child he encountered on a reporting trip to “a three-fifths scale Snoop Dogg” who gestured like a “primate.”

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The weeks in between have been as revealing about the nature of that movement as any since Trump announced his candidacy. Conservatives spent much of spring championing EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the most corrupt cabinet official in modern history, and a man Kevin Williamson, the fired Atlantic columnist, praised as a “true believer, who’s “serious about this rule-of-law stuff,” because Pruitt is a friend of industry and a climate-science denier. They are currently fretting that the coal baron Don Blankenship, a viciously racist felon who cost 29 of his miners their lives, will win the GOP Senate primary in West Virginia—not because the Republican Party objects to nominating bigoted criminals to run for high office, per se, but because they worry Blankenship is likely to lose in the general election. Perhaps the central objective of the movement at the moment is to discredit the FBI and the Department of Justice so that Trump’s supporters don’t abandon him and the GOP if and when Special Counsel Robert Mueller concludes Trump obstructed justice, or conspired with Russian intelligence to subvert the 2016 election, or laundered money, or multiple of the above.

Not every conservative supports every facet of this agenda, of course, including Williamson, whose one big ideological heresy as a conservative is his opposition to Trump. But every facet of it flows from the same wellspring of right-wing contempt for modern culture, and for sources of neutral authority (science, law, journalism) that get in the way of conservative objectives.

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And yet all this stretching and compromising to represent more viewpoints, and present an olive branch to Republicans, has largely served to advance the careers of NeverTrump conservatives who represent a minuscule fraction of the American right, and buy no good will. To truly mirror the full range of American political ideas, publications like The Atlantic or the Times would have to hire genuinely pro-Trump writers, who would excuse away or deflect from Trump’s racism and dishonesty and contempt for competing institutions with propaganda.

This hasn’t happened precisely because all the key decision makers understand Trumpism is beneath the best standards of opinion journalism. During and after the election, CNN hired a slate of pro-Trump commentators to appease Trump, and succeeded only in debasing itself. But Trumpism is the political style of the overwhelming majority of conservatives in the country. Most journalists have not reckoned with what that means for their industry, which is committed to values like empiricism and reason, but also to demonstrating neutrality toward America’s mainstream ideological movements. To the mission of the vocation, but also to accommodating people and ideas that are fundamentally hostile to that mission. Yet clearly one commitment or the other has to give.

At one point in their conversation, Coates and Goldberg appear to reach agreement that The Atlantic can avoid more Williamson-style fiascos by recommitting to basics. “If we publish kick-ass stories, very little of this will actually matter,” Coates said, leading to a brief discursion about the importance of reporting as a method: Reporting makes opinion journalism more persuasive and enduring by weeding out bad assumptions and other nonsense.

They’re correct about this, but they never grapple with why: Why is it that holding writers to strict standards of empiricism, logical rigor, and broad-based information-seeking will clear out the Williamson-style landmines editors like Goldberg have stepped on? Why do conservatives run either too hot, or too cold, but never just right? The answer is there. It may be the single most important thing to know about American politics today, and Donald Trump made it plain for all to see. But few journalists can bring themselves to say it out loud.

more: https://crooked.com/article/donald-trump-unmasking-america/