In the beginning was the profile of the Nazi next door, an inexplicable decision by the New York Times (11/25/17) to profile a right-wing extremist in the most sympathetic light possible. It was the most outrageous example of an outrageous genre of MSM—and particularly NYT—reporting: the never-ending effort to profile, study, explain, excuse and rationalize Trump voters. Without, of course, referring to them as racists. White men are always news that’s fit to print.
The article was met with howls of protest across Twitter, but among the many apt responses, Bess Kalb’s description (11/25/17) captured my heart and gave me the single most useful phrase of the Trump era: “Nazi-normalizing barf journalism.”
I don’t mean to sound intolerant or coarse, but fuck this Nazi and fuck the gentle, inquisitive tone of this Nazi normalizing barf journalism, and fuck the photographer for not just throwing the camera at this Nazi’s head and laughing. https://t.co/Pxfx2KU9AN
— Bess Kalb (@bessbell) November 25, 2017
Again and again during Trump’s presidency, corporate media have fallen over themselves to find acceptable ways to describe utterly unacceptable behavior, policies and decisions—none more so than the New York Times. In every era, the Times’ center of gravity has been the legitimation of power, and the Trump era is no different. The paper’s obvious disdain for Donald Trump is continually cloaked in rationalizing headlines and descriptions. It’s as if they can’t help themselves—the stability of US institutions is more important than their integrity, and so they must normalize what should never be normalized.
Just three examples:
- “Trump’s Embrace of Racially Charged Past Puts Republicans in Crisis” (8/16/17): This headline refers to Trump’s “very fine people” defense of neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally where James Fields drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one (Heather Heyer) and injuring dozens, many seriously. “Racially charged past” = Confederate monuments celebrating the defense of chattel slavery.
- “Ocasio-Cortez Calls Migrant Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps,’ Eliciting Backlash” (6/18/19): The headline suggests that the veracity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s description is up for debate, when, in fact, it is simply accurate terminology. Indeed, the subsequent rise of #JewsAgainstICE underscored that truth with the particular credibility that Jewish people bring to conversations about ethnic cleansing. The Times chose to cover the moment as a “she said, she said” debate between liberal Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez and Republicans like Liz Cheney.
- After a Green Bay rally (4/27/19) in which Trump called the media “sick people” and the officials he’s forced out of government “scum,” and accused Democrats of supporting infanticide (Vox, 4/29/19), the Times put out a tweet (4/28/19) saying that with the infanticide charge, “Trump revived an inaccurate refrain.”
You get the idea.
All of it is Nazi-normalizing barf journalism. In wrapping human rights abuses, lawbreaking, lies, corruption, cruelty, racism, misogyny and other abhorrent dimensions of the Trump administration in the familiar language and themes of Washington politics, the Times is actively helping stabilize the regime. We read these headlines and think “business as usual” rather than “this is intolerable, I must act.”
The New York Times chose to illustrate its story (10/13/19) about an ultra-violent pro-Trump video with this image….
In a recent example I find particularly troubling, the New York Times (10/13/19) reported on a video meme mashup, shown at a pro-Trump conference at one of Trump’s resorts in early October, showing Trump massacring members of the media and political opponents.
In an era where both hate crimes and domestic terrorism (including mass shootings) are rising at an alarming rate, the celebration of violence in the name of the Trump brand is a disturbing escalation in the normalization of political violence.
Trump has long invited his followers to violence. On the campaign trail, he promised to pay legal costs if his supporters beat up protesters, and advocated for torture “much stronger than waterboarding.” In September, he suggested that whistleblowers should be executed. He has pardoned war criminals and other human rights abusers (e.g., Michael Behenna, Joe Arpaio). Trump also admires and glorifies violent authoritarians, like Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Ergodan, Kim Jong-un and, of course, Vladimir Putin. All this in addition to the violence his policies are wreaking.
There is not a direct line between Trump referring to immigrants as vermin who will “infest our country” and the massacre of immigrants at an El Paso Walmart. Neither the antisemitic conspiracy theory that George Soros was funding migrant “caravans” from Central America, nor Trump’s lie about Middle Easterners infiltrating the caravans, is solely responsible for the murderous attack on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh. Yet if these bigoted tropes did not cause massacres, surely they are part of the environment that has fueled them.
…rather than an image, say, of “Trump” shooting “Black Lives Matter” in the head.
Speaking of antisemitism, Trump’s “fake news” has always been one shade shy of Hitler’s “Lügenpresse” (“lying press”). White supremacists have long referred to the paper of record as the “Jew York Times.” Given Trump’s constant description of the media as “the enemy of the people,” the possibility is ever-present, in this age of mass shootings, that someone will walk into a newsroom and open fire. If I’m honest, it surprises me that this has happened only once since Trump took office.
None of this found its way into the Times’ coverage of the video. Instead, there are denials by lots of people, saying they neither saw nor knew about the video; and then this at the end:
Throughout his 2016 campaign and presidency, Mr. Trump has sought to demonize the news media, partly out of frustration about the coverage of his administration and partly because he likes to have an opponent to target.
This is Nazi-normalizing barf journalism. Poor Trump; he’s just frustrated by the bad press. Responding by labeling journalists liars and enemies of the people is just what most of us would do in the same situation. Plus, he likes having a foil. A reasonable strategy.
I want to know how Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman (the bylined reporters) know that these are Trump’s reasons for demonizing the fourth estate. It’s a pretty definitive sentence, assigning motivation without any source or documentation. (Unlike the following sentence, which has at least anonymous sources: “Mr. Trump has also sought to undermine confidence in the mainstream media, some of his advisers acknowledge privately, to make people doubt the accuracy of less favorable accounts of what goes on in his administration.”)
But more importantly, no, it is not OK for the president of the United States to baldly claim that documented reporting is “fake news”; that media are the enemy; and that journalists are bad people. It is, in fact, extremely dangerous. It undermines one of the most important checks on government power, and, as the video itself attests, it invites violence against journalists. The New York Times should say so.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Great article! One correction: You said “Just two examples:” but you listed three lol
Keep up the great work!
Oh wow nvm looks like you already fixed it!
Now imagine how the corpress would deal with a Sanders presidency, at least in those instances when he actually does something close to what he promises.
“Normalizing” methinks would suddenly be out of vogue.
Yeah its funny how this only seems to work in one direction; white supremacist Trump supporters are merely reasonable middle-class people who feel left behind by coastal elites and blah blah blah… while anti-fascists, black lives matter activists, and progressives are dangerous socialists trying to destroy America. Um, ok.
Honestly, this has been by far the most disconcerting part of the Trump era- not anything Trump or the GOP is doing, but the failure and complicity of the media, Dem leadership, etc. We should expect the GOP to be corrupt racists, because that’s all they’ve been since the time of the southern strategy. But e.g. NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, etc were supposed to be legitimate journalistic outfits, with standards and integrity and ethics… and we’re seeing just how fragile an illusion that actually was. Or maybe I was just naive. Either way, an unpleasant revelation.
Yes. The media owned of, by and for the wealth hoarders, is certainly speaking for the establishment of wealth hoarders.
It’s a disease that rots away humanity of empathy and cooperation.
Agreed. Unfortunately NYT, WaPo and others of a more liberal bent still serve the same masters, but with a different purpose.
Which is to give malcontents a way to blow off just enough frustration and anger and give a glimmering of hope for real change. Which never comes.
The rich have gotten even more obscenely rich and the value of our labor stripped from us while NYT, WaPo, and the rest Just complained and whined quietly about it.
Alas, even this fine author falls prey to occasional, reflexive normalizing. She writes, “…abhorrent dimensions of the Trump administration…”
I have repeatedly beseeched FAIR and other platforms, please establish editorial policy: it’s not the Trump “administration.” It’s the Trump “regime.”
The former term implies a degree of legitimacy and normalcy. The latter, as FAIR points out in commentaries, is used to de-legitimize governments in the public mind. We never hear about the Canadian “regime” or, in Germany, the Merkel “regime.”
As this article itself makes clear, #45 comprises a seismic break from #44 and likely the previous 43. How much corruption must the racist Trump criminal gang perpetrate, how much murder and mayhem must it foment, before we stop calling it a presidential “administration”?
As FAIR has also pointed out, along with cognitive linguist George Lakoff: words matter. Framing matters. Implicit meanings matter.
So please, don’t be complicit. Control the reflex. Unless we’re quoting someone who uses the term, it’s the Trump regime. Always. Thank you!
Huzzah, and kudos on a excellent; and we’ll written article. You explained it all with a amazing flair. You forgot to mention how the television news outlets are complicit as.well..Remember when Milo Y appeared on ABC’s Nightline? And, Alex Jones disastrous appearance on Megyn Kelly’s NBC show? The man hasn’t learned.anything, sadly.
The best way for the media to avoid being smeared as publishing false and misleading information is for them to stop publishing (any) false and misleading information.
Also wouldn’t hurt to be independent, rather than say, owned by the richest person in the world.
Also wouldn’t hurt to, if they must employ “fact-checkers”, have fact-checkers that aren’t funded by say, NATO, the UAE, Bill Kristol, propornot…
“But more importantly, no, it is not OK for the president of the United States to baldly claim that documented reporting is “fake news”; that media are the enemy; and that journalists are bad people.”
I think it’s fine for anyone to claim this (with evidence, not “baldly”), since it’s true in many cases and about many leading journalists, and even entire news outlets.
After the Iraq lead-up debacle and utter failure of most journalists, the onus is on you (MSM which you bizarrely seem to be defending) to stop peddling fake bullshit, not on the populace. As long as a Luke Harding is writing for the Guardian, as long as a John Brennan is a featured guest on CNN, then maybe you should accept that the media in general is (rightfully) going to be viewed as corrupt, lying, bad horseshit. Fix your house before inviting people to see it/bow in deference to it. Or if you do invite people over don’t be upset if they have the gall to point out that its unsound, unreliable, and falling down.
Vitally important points Cando.
I also like reading what the members of VIPS have to say. But mainstream media—-you seem to ignore VIPS, which is made up of former spy people. Somehow, their experience would seem to have more credibility than “wanna be,” star reporters ,” and those major newspapers who want me to pay for their often ridiculous news.
There are two phenomena at work here.. an attempt, over and over and over again to blame the working class for Trumps election, which completely ignores the fact that his actual base were upper middle class from the finance sector and the military and police sectors of govt. not to mention the democratic party that thought it would be fun and easy to run the most hated woman in the world against him .
The other thing is this attempt to get its mind around these people because they are believed to be some (potentially profitable) new demographic, in order to sell things to them
I found the article obtuse and more than a little frantic. Well…strained. The writer needs a rest.
While the author’s comments on the NYT’s (among, perhaps leading, the whole of the U.S. print & visual media) normalization of the egregiously abnormal racism & violence of Trump & his sTrumpettes are well taken, one also wonders if she’s equally outraged at the medias’ normalization of U.S. racist war crimes & atrocities (fomenting coups in Honduras & Ukraine, attempting coups in Nicaragua, Iran, Hong Kong, & Venezuela, using jihadi mercenaries to attack ‘targeted’ governments like Libya & Syria, committing the prime Nuremberg war crime – ‘War of Aggression’ – against Iraq causing over a million deaths & millions of refugees and producing chaos on a global scale). And, as to ‘violent authoritarians (like Putin) I defy you to match whatever violence you believe Putin has committed saving Russia from terminal exploitation by western neoliberal imperialism to that committed by the leadership of that same western neoliberal imperialism (Clinton, Bush, Obama, & Trump in case you weren’t sure who that refers to) in its drive for global domination whatever the cost in lives. Was that in the essay & I just missed it? Nah, didn’t think so. Nonetheless I share her dismay over ‘barf journalism’ in fact, I had to barf before writing this comment.
The Nazi Diaspora is real. It is a multi-generational, well funded international cult that has sympathizers orchestrating from high places. Learn about “Operation Paperclip”, for a start. Learn about the billions in Nazi wealth that was distributed and hidden throughout the world starting 2 years before the end of WW2. Learn about the very real preparations the Nazis did to “continue” long after WW2. ODESSA was a very real thing. Swiss bank accounts, thousands of Nazis dispersed to South America, Egypt, Indonesia, the USA. The majority of Nuremberg convicted Nazi criminals were released a few years after sentencing while hundreds of thousands were never arrested or charged with anything; including the infamously vile Einsatzgruppen death squads! They never repented or gave up their ideology and thus the Nazi Diaspora is real.
Excellent analysis. I do hope that linguistics graduate students are collecting this overwhelming flux of euphemistic headlines and descriptions. The inaccurate description of facts must be studied for the danger it represents. Misrepresentation and misinformation, leading to normalization of social violence, are at the basis of totalitarianism.
Sorry, but the underlying assumptions of this FAIR piece have me puzzled. There seems to be a tacit acceptance of (neo-)liberal “identity politics” and it’s methodologies of “no-platforming”, etc. Those are normative political positions that should not be assumed away (Benz’s article is an example of the so-called “smug” style of liberal commentary). Benz should read Angela Nagle’s excellent book “Kill All Normies” for a deeper perspective. The far right (and alt-right) have real grievances that liberal modernity (and the ruling class) bears responsibility for — even thought he far right’s reactions and proposed “solutions” to those grievances are repugnant and chauvinist. Doug Latimer’s comments hit the real issue on the head though. Where is the sympathetic treatment in the NYT of (materialist) left-leaning people with grievances (perhaps ultimately very similar grievances)? So, what has me puzzled is the theoretical framework Benz is applying. Would it object to “Commie-normalizing barf journalism”? How about “(Neo)liberal-normalizing barf journalism”? Benz is intervening in a CULTURE WAR by make depoliticizing (pseudo-objective) assumptions that favor certain normative political positions.
Ever see the film “Das Boot”, which, you know, humanizes (normalizes?) Nazis? Benz seems deeply committed to the “basket of deplorables” type of thinking that is so entrenched in political liberalism. She engages in the same sort of politics of exclusion (see Domenico Losurdo) as the political right, but merely draws the lines differently, engaging in the valorization of victimhood status (or trying to “out sub-altern” everybody else) rather than the far-right’s usual racism, sexism, etc. But the underlying premise is to exclude universalism.
Hmm, does the following comment from Alenka Zupančič perhaps describe a troubling premise of Benz’s perspectives in this article?: “(Moral) outrage is a particularly unproductive affect, yet it is one that offers considerable libidinal satisfaction. By ‘unproductive’ I mean this: it gives us the satisfaction of feeling morally superior, the feeling that we are in the right and others are in the wrong. Now for this to work, things must not really change. We are much less interested in changing things than in proving, again and again, that we are in the right, or on the right side, the side of the good. Hegel invented a great name for this position: the ‘beautiful soul.’ A ‘beautiful soul’ sees evil and baseness all around it but fails to see to what extent it participates in the perpetuation of that same order of things. The point of course is not that the world isn’t really evil, the point is that we are part of this evil world.” (“Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič” LARB 3/9/18).
“Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America” (2017) by Ted Rall and Harmon Leon. Gonzo journalism or “Nazi-Normalizing Barf Journalism”?