Attention to the Unseen

Judd Legum writes: For months, Tucker Carlson has been promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. The concept, which is embraced by white nationalists and neo-Nazis, is that there is a secret plot to “replace” whites with non-white immigrants. It has been cited by mass murderers — in El Paso, New Zealand, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere — to justify violence. Its roots can be traced to a French novel, Le Camp des Saints, the urtext of modern white supremacist discourse. Carlson…

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Margaret Sullivan writes: There’s a simple but powerful idea behind the Philadelphia Inquirer’s recent decision not to use the word “audit” when referring to an effort by the state GOP to investigate the 2020 election: Words matter. The words that a news organization chooses to tell a story make a difference. If a journalist calls something a “lie,” that’s a deliberate choice. So is “racially tinged.” Or “pro-life.” Or “torture.” Such decisions carry weight. They have power. Acknowledging this power…

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Jon Allsop writes: Live by the press conference, die by the press conference. Last year, as the pandemic ravaged his state, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was widely lauded for the way he communicated. Pundits hailed him as authoritative, reassuring, even sexy; national networks carried his press conferences live, and they won a special Emmy award for Cuomo’s “masterful use of television to inform and calm people.” Then, early this year, Cuomo experienced a vicious narrative shift—he was…

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Margaret Sullivan writes: Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy. In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage. Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the…

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Brent Staples writes: Newspapers that championed white supremacy throughout the pre-civil rights South paved the way for lynching by declaring African Americans nonpersons. They embraced the language once used at slave auctions by denying Black citizens the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. and referring to them in news stories as “the negro,” “the negress” or “the nigger.” They depicted Black men as congenital rapists, setting the stage for them to be hanged, shot or burned alive in public squares all…

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Jack Shafer writes: The human appetite for alternative, and usually hair-brained, explanations for why events blossomed the way they did can never be sated. Oh, you can battle a poison fruitcake ideology like QAnon to the point that it can be contained in a 55-gallon drum and sealed. You can repel one nutter idea after another—Obama birtherism, Benghazi, Sandy Hook, the Katrina levee breach, Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11—a new one will pop up to replace it like a target in…

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