How The New York Times Helps Normalize Racist Conspiracy Theorists

The paper goes above and beyond to portray Trump's America as completely normal.

by Ben Cohen

The power of the Right wing disinformation machine in America is difficult to articulate to those who live outside of the country. Citizens from other Western democracies have a hard time believing that Fox News is real, or that Tucker Carlson is taken seriously in the business.

When I moved to the US in the late 90’s I too assumed Fox was a parody channel, that it was all an act and that Americans were in on the joke. I remember watching “Hannity and Colmes” on Fox for the first time and believing it was a parody of a news show — a sort of WWE entertainment skit to get people interested in politics. I came from the land of the BBC, and this was, well, completely bonkers.

Over two decades later, I now accept the clown show for what it is: a reality for almost half of the country.

We know the effect 20 years of Fox News had on America: the rise of Donald Trump and a White Nationalist movement mired in violent conspiracy theories. The effect on the rest of society has been no less damaging, but more subtle and potentially farther reaching than we might think.

The Fox Effect

It is helpful to think about Fox News as if it were a highly disruptive technology. Built off of the back of Right Wing hate radio stations, the network ripped up the rules of news media back in the mid 90’s, turning journalism into a bloodsport.

Designed explicitly by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch to whip up racial resentment amongst the aging white population in America, Fox changed the news industry for good. The news was no longer a noble business speaking truth to power, it was a unique opportunity to terrify 65 year old Mid Westerners while selling them lawn fertilizer. Furthermore, the network became a political power unto itself — an agenda setting propaganda machine that has the ability make or break Republican candidates. As Tim Dickinson noted in Rolling Stone:

The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result [of Ailes is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W. Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing U.S. senators.

Fast forward to 2016, and the network managed to transform a racist, fake billionaire with a long history of sexual assault into a bonafide presidential candidate.

The effect Fox News has on the media in America isn’t just limited to conservative audiences and politicians. The network has also dragged CNN into the mud where the once respected network now operates as a partisan, personality driven caricature of a news outlet. MSNBC has also followed the Fox business model and centered its programming on partisan personalities in an effort to compete in the ratings wars. This isn’t to equate CNN and MSNBC with Fox (Fox propagates conspiracy theories and fascistic propaganda whereas CNN and MSNBC are still tethered to objective reality), but to describe the toxic effect “news as entertainment” has wrought on the industry. Politics has been treated by the MSM as a spectator sport for the past three decades — a never ending Red vs Blue extravaganza that sucks more and more attention into a never ending whirlpool of hate and fear.

When the networks aren’t trying to out-alpha each other with increasingly bombastic hosts, they engage in graphics and data crunching warfare. The network with the best visual gimmicks and nerdiest poll analysts stand to win the election coverage ratings contest — a highly lucrative prize worth hundreds of millions in ad money.

The legacy media also has to play into this game, converting their websites into graphic rich mazes of data in order to keep readers tuned in. Their news reporting has also changed, but in a less obvious way.

How to influence The New York Times

The effect of turning politics into a spectator sport has had a curious effect on the practice of journalism in America. When the news media goes all in on the Red vs Blue death match spectacle, there is a knock on effect in the rest of the industry. Slowly but surely, a “both sides” narrative has emerged that treats the opposing factions of America’s political spectrum as equal. What was once an adherence to the rules of objective journalism is now a deadly formula for false equivalence. As veteran reporter Geneva Overholser explains in NeimanLab:

The New York Times, the exemplar, has shown itself eminently capable of changing in accord with the times. Its pages are filled with the faces and voices of people previously excluded from the sanctum. It adopted the gender-neutral singular pronoun “they” well before most of the nation. Its investigative and enterprise work rises to today’s unprecedented challenges. But in day-to-day political reporting, the Times is hopelessly stuck in the past. Its proud allegiance to presenting “both sides” in a time of political breakdown renders it a handmaiden to the degradation of truth.

The Times isn’t playing the same game Fox News is, but they are still operating in a landscape irreversibly damaged by Roger Ailes. That means when the Times reports on Trump’s America, they go out of their way to present a world filled with racists and conspiracy theorists as just one equal side of the never ending culture war.

In a truly stunning piece about an incredibly nasty battle over mask mandates and vaccines in Enid, Oklahoma, Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise unwittingly illustrates just how crazy this has become.

Tavernise’s piece follows two sides of the ugly spat between residents of Enid, mostly centered around Jonathan Waddell, an elected city official (who is African American), and a racist, anti-mask, anti vaxx, homophobic, religious fundamentalist women named Melissa Crabtree (who is a white).

Tavernise asks at the beginning of her piece: “In Enid, Okla., pandemic politics prompted a fundamental question: What does it mean to be an American? Whose version of the country will prevail?”

The story pits Waddell, a responsible city official who voted for a mask mandate due to spiraling Covid numbers, and Crabtree, a homeschooling Evangelical fundamentalist who set up an anti-mask organization because she believed masks and vaccines are part of a liberal conspiracy theory.

Those two versions of the country appear to be one based on compassion, equality, and a belief in facts, and the other on racism, conspiracy theories, and a denial of scientific evidence. Tavernise treats Crabtree’s narrative as if it had equal merit to Waddells, sugarcoating her casual homophobia and racism and treating her with great delicacy. Writes Tavernise:

She [Crabtree] said a man in her church comes to Sunday services dressed in women’s clothing. When she was shopping this fall, a cashier at T.J. Maxx who checked her out looked like a man but, as she saw it, had feminine mannerisms.

“I wanted to shake him and say, ‘You can be the man you are!’” she said. “‘It’s OK to use your strong voice.’”…..

Teachers and administrators in Enid’s school system have worked hard to integrate growing numbers of immigrant children. But everyone else interviewed in Enid, including Ms. Crabtree, who is white, expressed surprise when told of the scale of this change. Immigrants tend to live in certain parts of town and work in certain jobs, like at the meat plant, and do not yet have high-profile positions of power.

Still, she could feel that change overall was accelerating, and that was making her feel like she was losing her country, like it was becoming something she did not recognize.

“I truly think that what we are doing is pulling our republic apart at the seams,” she said.

This vision of America, where effeminate men are told to man up and non-white people are “pulling our republic apart”, is apparently just one totally normal side of the culture war. Tavernise’s sympathetic treatment of Crabtree gives the reader the impression that her version of reality isn’t so crazy, that she has an opinion that must be listened to and taken seriously.

Reality vs non-reality

The media’s insistence that Trump’s America is a mirror opposite of the Democratic Left is creating an incredibly dangerous paradigm. We know that masks work, that vaccines work, that homosexuality has a biological basis, that white Americans are immigrants and that there is no evidence for Christian fundamentalism. These are not issues that need to be debated anymore. But when outlets like the Times go to great lengths to sympathize with people like Crabtree, it helps reinforce the idea that the Fox News bubble millions of people exist in has a genuine basis in reality. We then have to keep revisiting pointless arguments that can never be won.

When the Times plays into this nonsense, Fox News wins. Their conspiracy filled fantasy world becomes a reality for the rest of us. We have to contend with this alternate universe because it has power — so much power that responsible media outlets continue deferring to it.

In Tavernise’s story, Waddell ends up being ostracized by his community and subjected to threats of violence. Crabtree on the other hand, just feels aggrieved.

But both sides of course.

Try the premium version of The Banter free for 3 months!: