Preview

Over the past week, The New York Times offered up Nick Confessore’s (deservedly) much-praised three-part, multimedia investigation into the influence of Tucker Carlson within Fox News, the alt-right, the Republican Party, and the larger media landscape. It tells us much that is worth knowing and usefully puts it all in one place. I highly recommend your taking the time for all three parts: here, here, and here. (There is also a cheat-sheet version here.)

It recalls this three-part, multimedia deep dive from Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, also in the Times back in 2019: here, here, and here (with a cheat sheet here). That one illustrated the global machinations of the Murdoch family. It demonstrated the manner in which its members have poisoned political discourse in countless countries simultaneously, increasing racism, promoting violence, destroying any hopes for saving the planet, and worsening life for the most vulnerable people everywhere, purely because it makes the Murdochs more and more money, when they already have more money than any group of people their size could spend in a dozen lifetimes. These pieces are in some ways more remarkable than the Tucker Carlson series because of the (mostly realized) ambition of their reach. These articles should most definitely be treated as prerequisites for the Carlson pieces, the way English 101 is a prerequisite for English 102.

Aye, but there’s the rub. As I discussed recently regarding the retirement of Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and his replacement by Joseph Kahn, here, the Times does these wonderful, extended pieces of long-form investigation breaking news of crucial national import, and deserves great credit for having done so, as they are hardly money-earners. But once the paper is done promoting them, they tend to fall into a metaphorical black hole. The forgetting is actually crucial to the paper’s understanding of its job, which (not-so-shockingly) is to produce “news,” a word that (savvy readers may have noticed) is composed of the word “new” with just an “s” attached to it.

But while these larger efforts are much appreciated by those willing to invest the considerable time and effort necessary to read them, they are not enough to achieve what really ought to be the journalist’s ultimate ambition, which is to create an informed citizenry, capable of carrying out its democratic responsibilities. For that, the shocking revelations contained in these stories would have to be attached to—or at least re-raised—in every story to which they might be relevant. Times reporters, like most reporters, believe that “bothsidesism” is the only context an article needs. Actually, more than anything, what’s needed is the relevant history—with a strong emphasis on who can be expected to profit from the developments being described.

I first noticed this problem literally 37 years ago, when I read one of those multipart investigations the Times does about Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, or, as it was popularly known, “Star Wars” program. Anyone who slogged through the entire thing—you can find the first part here—could not have helped but conclude that the program was just a gazillion-dollar boondoggle for the Pentagon and its military contractors. It could not possibly have defended the United States in the event of a nuclear attack. This would not have been a shock at the time—my very first MSM publication appeared on the Times op-ed page on this very topic back in July 1985—but neither was this news included in many of the countless stories the Times published when the program came up. Those pieces were often characterized by the mindless bothsidesism that has since become so familiar to all of us, allowing those who profited from the program to spew their propaganda alongside the scientists and physicists able to judge it. Eleventy bazillion wasted dollars later, the program remained “science fiction.”

This treatment has become the norm, alas. And just as there ain’t no cure for love, I don’t imagine there is any cure for journalists who resist contextualizing their reporting with the relevant knowledge necessary to make informed judgments about its meaning and significance. To be fair, given the hysterically dishonest and purposely malevolent interventions of Tucker Carlson and his comrades at Fox (and other Murdoch and alt-right “news” outlets), it’s hard enough even to report what one knows to be true.

I attended a wonderful lecture by Annette Gordon-Reed in celebration of CUNY’s Leon Levy Center for Biography on Wednesday evening, and it got me thinking about what hard (and usually unremunerative) work biographers do. This is one reason that, while I believe The New York Review of Books to be one of the great publications in the history of the English language, I wanted to point out how bizarre I found this long article by Jed Perl. In discussing a 640-page biography of the mid-century art critic Harold Rosenberg by independent scholar Debra Bricker Balken, Perl complains, twice, that the author does not make sufficient use of fictional portrayals of its subject. Balken, he complains, is too “busy nailing down this or that argument or alliance” and “doesn’t make good use of But Not for Love, a novel by Rosenberg’s wife.” Even weirder, he writes, “Balken loses sight of the man whom Bellow, in his magnificent story ‘What Kind of Day Did You Have?, reimagined as Victor Wulpy, ‘a major figure, a world-class intellectual.’ Bellow’s eminent art critic hobnobs with financiers and knows his way around café society.”

Hello? Does Perl understand the meaning of the word “fiction”? He does note that “perhaps there’s an element of hyperbole in Bellow’s fictionalization.” Well, thanks. Alas, I remember rereading Bellow’s 1984 story not that long ago and thinking that Bellow had way overshot the degree of eminence that any art critic in America has ever enjoyed. Rosenberg was not—like Bellow—a Nobel laureate, or a movie star, or even a movie director. Neither was he an artist. He was merely, as Perl points out, an art critic who was “on the faculty of a prestigious university and had a permanent post at one of the country’s most important magazines.” Sorry, but this is not really such a big deal and nowhere near big enough to justify the royal treatment Rosenberg-as-Wulpy enjoys throughout this novella-length short story. It is hardly incidental that the story is told from the perspective of a devoted—and starstruck—housewife with whom the protagonist has been having a longtime affair.

I’ve done quite a bit of reading in the world of Harold Rosenberg for a book I’ve been researching for years on the history of American Jewish culture, and Bellow’s portrait of—once again—his fictional art critic, may or may not have made his story more dramatic, but it was not remotely true to real life. This was a bad habit of late Bellow fiction. His final novel, Ravelstein, which was inspired by the life of Cornell professor and noted Straussian Allan Bloom, also goes overboard in the same direction. It’s almost as if Bellow, facing his own mortality, felt a need to advertise his own historical significance by showing us how important his friends and associates were. He may have believed it himself, but it surely does not constitute biographical evidence. Perl sort of admits this at the end of his review when he notes that Bellow’s story contains “a suggestion that the Rosenberg character is ‘nothing but a promoter.’ That wasn’t Bellow’s view of his friend.” Well, which is it? Shall we take the fiction of Saul Bellow as true-life evidence or not? This issue has long dogged Philip Roth, who, on occasion, has been held responsible for the views of the masturbation-obsessed teenagers he created.

Suffice it to say, I’ve not read the Rosenberg biography in question, but I plan to. When I do, I will judge its veracity by the evidence it presents, as well as by the myriad accounts of the lives that were intertwined with Rosenberg’s during the heyday of the New York intellectuals. If I read something in a novel by someone that is somehow inconsistent with the memoirs and histories of the period, well, that won’t bother me. After all, fiction writers would be called “memoirists” and “historians” if it wasn’t their (literal) business to make shit up.

If, like me, you sleep weird hours and yet feel a need to enjoy some sense of accomplishment for the times you know you are not going back to sleep anytime soon, I recommend reading short stories and essays that won’t take you that long to finish before trying again. It usually works for me. To that end, I recommend What Can We Hope For? by Richard Rorty (to be published May 10) and Old Truths and New Clichés by Isaac Bashevis Singer (to be published on May 17). In addition to being, arguably, the most influential philosopher of the past half-century, Rorty was also an eminently sensible and unapologetic liberal. I was pleased to see the inclusion in this book of an essay I commissioned and edited, “First Projects, Then Principles,” for The Nation back in 1997, but there is a wealth of timeless wisdom in this book. As for Singer, well, who’d have thunk there was more water in that well? Read this delightful memoir recently published in The New Yorker (and included in the book) and you’ll see there’s plenty of writing here to justify whatever time you end up staying awake.