This article was co-produced with Press Watch, a new website that monitors and critiques American political coverage. Please consider supporting Press Watch by making a donation. That the nation under Donald Trump is politically polarized — with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other — has become a cliché of American political journalism. As it happens, the plurality of Americans actually identify as independents (38 percent, according to Gallup), rather than Democrats (31 percent) or Republicans (30 percent). So the cliché is not technically accurate.Advertisement: But the bigger problem is that there are more interesting, significant and enlightening ways to examine the rifts in our political culture. (Read my primer on how the old labels don’t properly capture today’s political divisions.) Arguably, the most elemental political divide these days is between people who still believe in facts, and people who don’t. Elite media figures acknowledge that the two sides don’t share basic facts anymore. But they’re too timid to say which side’s “facts” are facts and which side’s are fantasy. They certainly can’t bring themselves to say how we got there — or more specifically, how the Republican Party drove us there over the last decade or more, culminating in Trumpism. Advertisement: So you have NBC’s Chuck Todd lamenting over the fact that “Democrats are trying to have a conversation about what the president did. And Republicans are having a completely different conversation. As — we couldn't even agree on the same set of facts.” New York University professor Jay Rosen tweeted about what was missing: Sometimes these elite reporters even lend their own voice to arguments they know are spurious, as former Obama speechwriter and podcast host Jon Favreau tweeted:Advertisement: But wait! There’s more! There’s another, maybe even more important political divide explored in a marvelous and thought-provoking manifesto from Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones. New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet made a snotty comment about Mother Jones the other day as he argued that being “the leaders of the resistance to Donald Trump” would be “an untenable, nonjournalistic, immoral position for the New York Times.”Advertisement: Bauerlein, for her part, slammed the Times for being so invested in “being seen as neutral arbiters of political discourse” that they overreact to “being characterized otherwise” and “end up missing important stories — or overdoing it on not-so-important ones as a result.” But this, to me, is the biggest takeaway: And even if journalists aren’t willing to take sides in this divide, they sure could address it more directly in their work. Advertisement: Yet more divides There’s one divide the elite media accentuates: the one between old white folks sitting in diners, whose political views are apparently endlessly fascinating to journalists at major news outlets, and pretty much everyone else, whose view
Press Watch: Yes, America is divided. But how, and why? And who benefits?
This article was co-produced with Press Watch, a new website that monitors and critiques American political coverage. Please consider supporting Press Watch by making a donation. That the nation under Donald Trump is politically polarized — with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other — has become a cliché of American political journalism. As it happens, the plurality of Americans actually identify as independents (38 percent, according to Gallup), rather than Democrats (31 percent) or Republicans (30 percent). So the cliché is not technically accurate.Advertisement: But the bigger problem is that there are more interesting, significant and enlightening ways to examine the rifts in our political culture. (Read my primer on how the old labels don’t properly capture today’s political divisions.) Arguably, the most elemental political divide these days is between people who still believe in facts, and people who don’t. Elite media figures acknowledge that the two sides don’t share basic facts anymore. But they’re too timid to say which side’s “facts” are facts and which side’s are fantasy. They certainly can’t bring themselves to say how we got there — or more specifically, how the Republican Party drove us there over the last decade or more, culminating in Trumpism. Advertisement: So you have NBC’s Chuck Todd lamenting over the fact that “Democrats are trying to have a conversation about what the president did. And Republicans are having a completely different conversation. As — we couldn't even agree on the same set of facts.” New York University professor Jay Rosen tweeted about what was missing: Sometimes these elite reporters even lend their own voice to arguments they know are spurious, as former Obama speechwriter and podcast host Jon Favreau tweeted:Advertisement: But wait! There’s more! There’s another, maybe even more important political divide explored in a marvelous and thought-provoking manifesto from Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones. New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet made a snotty comment about Mother Jones the other day as he argued that being “the leaders of the resistance to Donald Trump” would be “an untenable, nonjournalistic, immoral position for the New York Times.”Advertisement: Bauerlein, for her part, slammed the Times for being so invested in “being seen as neutral arbiters of political discourse” that they overreact to “being characterized otherwise” and “end up missing important stories — or overdoing it on not-so-important ones as a result.” But this, to me, is the biggest takeaway: And even if journalists aren’t willing to take sides in this divide, they sure could address it more directly in their work. Advertisement: Yet more divides There’s one divide the elite media accentuates: the one between old white folks sitting in diners, whose political views are apparently endlessly fascinating to journalists at major news outlets, and pretty much everyone else, whose view
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