Enidigm
1897
Was there ever more a guy’s look that said “Denver”?
Hmmm, I can’t answer until someone tells me where Ron Burgundy was from.
jpinard
1899
The owners of that station, Salem Media Group claim to be a Christian broadcaster. What a joke.
It’s quite illuminating to read this piece about Dean Baquet and imagine that he’s speaking in 1939.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/18/new-york-times-editor-says-trump-has-put-his-reporters-lives-at-risk?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
During his tenure the New York Times has also faced criticism from the left for refusing to call Hitler racist or anti-Semitic, a decision that Baquet defended on the grounds that he was “not in a position to know whether he [makes comments] because he is a racist”.
Baquet said his job was “to cover the world with tremendous curiosity” rather than act as the opposition to the Fuhrer – despite calls from many readers and some of his own staff to take a more directly critical approach to Hitler.
Asked whether Hitler was an anti-Semite, Baquet said: “I don’t know. I think Hitler says anti-Semitic things. I think that’s a little bit different. I’m not in his head enough to know whether he says them because he wants to stoke his base.”
Many outlets, including the Guardian, have branded Hitler’s invasion of Poland as aggression. Baquet, who does not have responsibility for the outlet’s comment section, also said there was “no question Adolf Hitler has trouble with Poland” but declined to brand him an aggressor.
Tom Tomorrow fairly on-point today
Menzo
1902
That is alarmingly accurate. Meanwhile, Republicans decry that same show for not spending more time focusing on Crowdstrike.
KevinC
1903
That last panel in particular. A perfect example of that was Chuck Todd’s “if the Republicans win these gubernatorial elections, Democrats will have the impeachment proceedings to thank” tweet.
Not “If Republicans lose some of these races, they’ll have Trump’s corruption to thank”. No, it’ll be the fault of the Democrats and their whole constitutional duty thing that’s at fault. Those inept Dems, always in disarray. It infuriates me, especially with what’s going on today. We’re not arguing about tax policy, we’re talking about a President who is going to be impeached for bribery.
The Guardian piece on Dean Baquet is interesting for a number of reasons:
- It’s not just GOP House members that are retiring at the end of the Trump era: Baquet is stepping down in two years.
- Baquet pretty much sums how white privilege works in this quote: "The way I see it is, our job is to cover the world with tremendous curiosity. And with a desire to understand the people who voted for Donald Trump and why they voted for Donald Trump. I think some of our readers want us to dismiss some of those people. I think that’s not empathetic coverage.” Empathetic coverage? Isn’t a news organization supposed to provide accurate coverage? When covering the government overthrow in Bolivia or riots in Hong Kong, does the Times boast of its empathetic coverage? Yet when it comes to Trump voters, the editor-in-chief of the country’s most influential newspaper has no qualms about proclaiming that empathetic coverage is an explicit goal. Gee, I wonder why?
- Baquet also has no qualms in admitting that setting back newspaper coverage of racism by 50 years in an explicit goal of his: “I will tell you the most powerful writing I’ve ever seen about race, as a black man who grew up in the south, did not use the word ‘racist’. It quoted people saying what they had to say, and described the world they live in. And you made your own judgment. And the judgment was pretty clear. And I think that’s the way to write about Donald Trump and everybody else. It’s just to let them talk.” He’s said this multiple times. Here’s the thing though. He’d like you (and probably himself) to believe those articles were written that way back then because everyone recognizes and understands the exquisite subtlety of the writing. But in fact they were written in that indirect way because the writers knew perfectly well their editors would kill any story that explicitly mentioned the word “racism.” Just like Dean Baquet. Because God forbid we should actually discuss racism directly in this country.
- As a side note, this is pretty funny: " [Baquet has] also overseen an expansion of the outlet’s European operation, despite some cultural missteps such as when it suggested that the London food scene had until recently consisted of ‘porridge and boiled mutton.’" After the recent incident when a NYT editor was demoted for proclaiming that immigrants weren’t Real Midwesterners and black people (including John Lewis!) weren’t Real Southerners, that pretty much confirms that the NYT’s “tremendously curious” view of the world is, in fact, this.
I understand you overall point and agree with it, but from a semantic point-of-view there is a huge difference between empathetic coverage and sympathetic coverage. A reporter should always strive to understand the feelings and attitudes of those that they cover (being empathetic) so that they can accurately report on the facts, but should avoid allowing too much sympathy for one side or the other to bias how those facts are presented.
Nesrie
1907
No.
We don’t need empathetic coverage for Nazis, white supremacy, the KKK, you know the people that slaughter hundreds to millions of people because they decided they weren’t human enough to be allowed to live.
The problem with Baquet and the NYT seems to be that they conflate understanding those voters and providing empathetic coverage with giving those voters a disproportionate platform for voicing their reprehensible views while refraining from any criticism of those views.
Nesrie
1909
Explain this to me though: why does anyone need to be empathetic with Nazis?
Maybe one doesn’t need to, but all humans are still human, and it’s usually not satisfying when doing a deep-dive into a subject to just write people off (whether they be Nazis, slaveholders, or anyone else) as inhuman monsters. It also inhibits understanding of how such things happened in the first place.
William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich amounts to a massive moral denunciation of the regime whose existence it chronicles; but whether through storyteller’s instinct or something else, Shirer invites a certain amount of… I don’t know if “empathy” is exactly the right word, but some kind of understanding, even of the Nazi leaders, even of the individuals who set in motion the greatest atrocities in history. The effect is not to lessen the moral authority of the work but, in my opinion, to enrich it.
Nesrie
1911
It’s not.
For some reason this approach seems to be confusing empathy with factual coverage. You can certainly deep dive into horrific situations and into the leaderships of horrific and inhumane regimens, but you do NOT have to empathize with them to do that. You can be fully aware that these people are gassing millions of people to death, that these slave holders are treating other human beings like livestock and discarded them just as easily, torturing them throughout their entire lives and not empathize with that position while still covering the story.
Just to be clear, empathy is not just understanding… it’s sharing too.
Among other things, how do you even square I want to understand why some people voted for X with I refuse to say that X is an awful thing? If X is not an awful thing, where does the desire to understand even come from? If it is an awful thing, don’t you have the same obligation to say so as you do to understand why people voted for it?
Nesrie
1913
You can understand someone and not share their abhorrent views. Understanding and empathy are not the same thing. So yeah, find out why and how but if at some point someone is empathizing with these unthinkable positions, they’re not only not pointing out how awful they are… they’re no longer reporting but joining in.
Sharpe
1914
I think there’s a difference between intellectually understanding the emotions of a group (which I consider worthwhile even if merely from a “know your enemy” POV) versus “empathy” which means vicariously experiencing the emotions of that group. I feel like empathy, although distinct from sympathy, is in fact pretty dangerous when you are talking about racist or otherwise hateful or oppressive beliefs and emotions.
I guess I’m splitting a hair, but I do try to understand the thought processes of groups I oppose, but I don’t want to feel their emotions, either in empathy or in sympathy.
There’s a counter argument that you can’t really understand the emotions without empathy but I have to say, there may be some prices for knowledge I’m not willing to pay.
Sharpe
1915
This a better, shorter and clearer way to express what I was trying to get it in my post. Well said.
Totally agree. I’m just saying that, even if one accepts Baquet’s framing, it doesn’t make sense.
