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Metaphors Journalists Live By (Part I)

One of the reasons political journalism is so ill-equipped for this
moment in America is because of its stubborn adherence to outdated
frames.

In my first column for the

**Prospect**
,
I set down a harsh marker: I said that the conceptual tools, metaphors,
habits, and technologies that make up what we understand as "political
journalism" in America are thoroughly unequal to the task of making
sense of what, in America in 2024, politics is
.

Bold words. Except, honestly, I have little idea what journalists and
the editors who send them out in the field should

**do**with them. Which is why, in the months to come, I'll be asking a
host of brilliant journalists, scholars, media watchdogs-and maybe
even some politicians-to help all of us think through what a
journalism adequate to understanding American politics right now might
look like.

If you have suggestions, hit me up at [email protected]
. But I couldn't think of anyone
better to start with than Jeff Sharlet, who in his latest book The
Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

and elsewhere
wrestles
with a reluctant but carefully considered conclusion drawn from intimate
conversations with ordinary people around the country: A significant
portion of Donald Trump's base are

**fascist**. That means they won't stop until democracy in America is
gone for good, no matter what it takes.

How, I began by asking, can the likes of Dan Balz at The Washington Post
and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times make sense of

**that**? Wend your way to the end with me, and you'll learn something
about how ill-prepared our vaunted Newspaper of Record is for the
attempt. How stubborn they remain in making sense of a nation, as it
heads into an election where the most salient question to answer may
well end up being not how many people will

**vote**for Donald Trump, but how many are willing to take up arms for
him.

When I asked Sharlet an open-ended question about how journalism can do
better, he chose an unlikely way to begin: events in Africa 30 years
ago. He was working as an intern at The Nation.

****"This was in 1994, before the Rwandan genocide, which most people
don't realize began in the neighboring county of Burundi, where Hutus
were killing Tutsis."

He knew little about the region, but enough to recognize that the

**Times**'

****reporting on it was suspect. As he put it in a

**Nation**piece that year, it "reduced a nuanced political and social
conflict to irrational (and by implication unsolvable) ethnic
differences." He recognized, in other words, a

**trope**. He could recognize it because that was also the way
journalists were framing the simultaneous conflict in Bosnia and
Herzegovina:

**Ah, these uncivilized foreigners and their ancient ethnic grievances,
what can you do?**Writing like that, he concluded, served to point
readers

**away from**,

****not toward, what was actually happening: a "calculated struggle for
land and power."

A surprising subject helped him draw the conclusion. He was, just then,
studying the films of John Ford and reading a classic book that analyzed
them, Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America
.
He thinks it's the kind of book all journalists ought to read. I
agree. Slotkin's great subject is how Western films sedimented a quite
nearly fictional understanding of the real-life violence that "settled"
the American "frontier" into the subconscious of generations of
Americans. We came to project this frame onto conflicts in

**every** exotic realm, at the expense of realities-calculated
struggles for land and power-right under our noses.

He was particularly alarmed by a New York Times piece

that quoted an anguished representative of the community suffering the
massacre who all but begged the media to dig into the calculations
behind those struggling for land and power. "The situation is very
complex," Burundi's communications minister said. "You don't have
cowboys on one side and Indians on the other. It is not a moral problem,
it is a political one."

That same piece, however, precisely reduced the conflict to the "cycle
of ethnic violence" trope.

[link removed]

In journalism, metaphors matter profoundly
. Labels matter
profoundly. Narrative frames matter profoundly. They matter most
precisely when they function

**unthinkingly**. That is when they soothe us into not bothering to

**look**. "Cycles of ethnic violence" is like cowboys fighting Indians:
natural, inevitable, unchangeable. In fact, in the case of East Africa,
the "ethnic groups" themselves were virtual colonial inventions.
Freezing the region's tribes of farmers ("Hutu") and herders ("Tutsi")
into rigid racial identities was Europe's divide-and-conquer strategy.
And by unreflectively

**reproducing** those distinctions-

**cowboys fight Indians,**

**what can you do?**-American journalists could not but have
influenced the world's non-response to the violence as it shaded into
outright genocide.

It was from there that our conversation finally wended its way to
2023-and from Africa to the frozen reaches of northern Wisconsin.

He had received an invitation from a bookstore to discuss his new book
alongside a Washington-based reporter from The New York Times. He
related to me a story of how frustrating that conversation turned out to
be. Later, I watched the recording myself. It was astonishing.

Sharlet doesn't want me to name the

**Times**reporter. "We look for villains," he warned. "We look for bad
apples. The way Maggie Haberman has become the receptacle for All Bad
Things. If we're going to get biblical: The problem is the vine, not
the fruit. By their fruits ye shall know them. The bad apple who's
thriving is obviously serving a function for that publication. What's
true for the David Broders and Maggie Habermans is even more true for
[this guy], who is not a star, just a yeoman worker, doing his job, and
most of the time doing his job solidly."

He also urged me to convey that he is not against

****The New York Times.

He made the point even more aggressively on the recording, telling the
assembled: "If you don't subscribe to The New York Times already,
subscribe now. Give them more resources. There are things only they can
do. But they can't do it all, and they're not doing enough."

The reporter disagreed. He said, literally, that they

**do** do it all-so passionately that he almost shouted it. Then he
said that if you disagree, he didn't want to

**hear** about it. It was thoroughly astonishing.

The exchange began when Sharlet explained how he came to write

**The Undertow**, and what he was trying to do with it. He explained
that he spent many years, as a lefty writer, hearing people say, "Oh,
this is fascist," and he responded, "No, that isn't fascist." But in
this case, he couldn't abide by such a conclusion. "This is the real
deal. There's a real fascist movement. And I don't think we have on
the table all the storytelling tools we need to counter it. So the
reporting is not just letting us know what's going on, but ...
thinking about how we tell stories about what's happening in the
world, and how we can do so in a way that can resist what I call the
undertow of fascism leading us to a darker and darker place."

He did not add what anyone who had read

**The Undertow**would already know, that this was a conclusion he had
arrived at after hundreds of conversations, witnessing dozens of
political and church services, and logging thousands of miles on the
road.

But his

**New York Times**interlocutor made plain that he had

**not**read the book under discussion. He was especially smug in the
first utterance he offered to the audience: "Yeah, I don't know if I
would use that word"-his eyebrows arched disapprovingly-"it's not
a word we use in The New York Times."

Then he practically giggled.

Yes, the

**Times**reporter allowed, "in the last couple of years especially, we
have seen a good swath of the country sort of embrace anti-democratic
ideals." That "what we have is really a lot of the country that sees
political power as, you know, as worth whatever it takes to acquire and
hold onto it."

It happened to be the day the Tennessee Three were silenced
,
where two Black lawmakers were expelled from the state legislature for
participating in a protest against gun violence. The

**Times**reporter cited that as an example as part of his beat:
"democracy on the knife's edge." He characterized this work as "just
writing what's going on."

The bookstore host asked Sharlet to share more about the kind of
storytelling he did for the book. He began a characteristically
thoughtful answer, then found himself gravitating back to his original
point.

[link removed]

Which is my point, too: The habitual ways of doing journalism no longer
make sense. That the American way of politics has passed a watershed.
That change is what Sharlet's work struggles to characterize, as a
desperate imperative-the way "these folks are changing the

**aesthetic**of American politics."

He gave as an example an infamous interview Lesley Stahl did on

**60 Minutes**with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. It had been
characterized largely by Stahl's frustration in attempting to
fact-check her in real time, and many viewers' frustration that she
wasn't doing it right, or enough, or adequately; the way Stahl arched
her eyebrows in the face of the most fantastical, hateful lies, for
example.

Quite brilliantly, Sharlet explained how this made his

****point about the inadequacy of political journalism's inherited
storytelling frames.

"[Greene], I would say, is the congressman from the fascist party. And I
actually would like to speak a little bit more about that term, because
I think it's important." He noted Stahl's consternation as a
function of the brokenness of the very cosmos in which her career-a
great one, he stressed-was built. According to the old rules, a
respected gatekeeper from a marquee journalistic institution grills a
"rising star," as a sort of ritual vetting to which the politician
cannot but defer. "But Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't a 'rising'
star.' Those old frames

**don't work**anymore," Sharlet explained. "Marjorie Taylor Greene is
not trying to join the cosmos that Lesley Stahl and much of American
journalism is set up to cover." She inhabited an entirely separate one:
a fascist one, which the likes of Stahl have no idea how to comprehend.
"Fascism is a

**dream politics**. It's a

**mythology**. You can't fact-check myth. You can't arch an eyebrow
and make it go away."

Sharlet didn't elaborate. But his book does: Within

**Greene**'s cosmos, the likes of Stahl are what

**stands in the way**of Trump's deliverance of all

**true**Americans to a supposedly perfect prelapsarian past. It is a
story as told on the T-shirts abundantly visible at Trump rallies:
"Journalist. Rope. Tree. Some Assembly Required."

The theocrats he wrote about in his first book,

**The Family**(2008), he explained, were not fascists. But Trump-with
his "cult of personality, and the

**celebration** of violence"-brought a different

****political cosmos into being. He cited the scholarship of Robert
Paxton

and Jason Stanley
,
to no flicker of interest or recognition from his interlocutor. Sharlet
then directed a question to him-"with love and affection for The New
York Times and the dilemma that you're in: What is the argument
against calling that 'fascism'?"

At which his interlocutor doubled down on the smug.

"For the same reason we don't call Trump 'racist.' It's more
powerful to say what something is than to offer a label on it that is
going to be debated, you know, and distract from the reporting that goes
into it."

Sharlet: "Who is debating Trump's racism right now?"

Mr.

**Times**: "You can

**say** something is 'racist.' You can say something is a racist
thing. But putting a label on someone is distorting from the reporting
that we do. And the reporting is much harder. And much more powerful
than the

**writing**"

**-**what he implied was the only thing Sharlet did, perhaps in an
armchair in a book-lined study, smoking a pipe, mongering

**labels**.

****"And people are welcome to label things however they want, but
there's frankly nobody else doing the reporting that we do."

Sharlet: "I'm going to disagree with you there."

Which was when the things that came out of the

**Times**man's mouth started getting ugly and weird. His
counterargument: "That's what ten million people are subscribing to
The New York Times for ... And not to like sound too high and mighty,
but the market has spoken, and they like what we're doing."

He smirked.

Come back tomorrow as I, and Jeff Sharlet, try to pick our jaws up from
the floor in reaction to that comment.

To be continued ...

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

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