Kristof and Riley debate proves underwhelming

On Second thought: How journalism can recover from flawed coverage of the 2016 election

Pop Quiz: Identify the following quotation:
“Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic.”
A) Friedrich Nietzsche on the BibleB) Richard Nixon on the Vietnam WarC) Jon Stewart on the 2016 ElectionD) You on the Moulton vs. Thorne Debate
Read on for the answer.
It’s a strange, strange time to be a young journalist. Frankly, it’s probably strange to engage in any number of professions at this point in our country’s history, but boy, is it a strange time to be a young journalist.
At 11 p.m. on Election Night, staring numbly at the talking heads pontificating with all their might on the screen before me, I remembered a bit of text from David Brooks’ recent book, “A Road to Character.” In it, Brooks writes, “I’m paid to be a narcissistic blow-hard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am.”
In a letter from 1956, C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend: “That journalists can be saved is a doctrine, if not contrary, yet certainly above, reason.”
Even before then, the always pithy Oscar Wilde wrote: “There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”
I could go on. My point is that journalism has never been immune from public scorn or even from the scorn of fellow journalists. Media-bashing isn’t new.
But if you’re still wondering, the answer to the above pop quiz is B, Richard Nixon on the Vietnam War. Gotcha. Hopefully the answer was fairly obvious, but it says something about the current state of American journalism if you even had to think twice about it, which, if you’re under the age of 35, you probably did.
So disdain for the media isn’t new, but it certainly has changed. Even before these dreaded 18 months of torturous babble disguised as an election got underway, journalism of all types was in a precarious cultural position. Just look at it now.
Perhaps Lewis is right and journalists’ souls are beyond salvation, but what about their profession? If every doctor you consulted told you that that little spot on your back was positively, surely, absolutely nothing to worry about and then you developed skin cancer three months later, you’d probably never go back to those doctors. Even if, after your skin cancer diagnosis, your doctors sent you a deeply apologetic letter telling you that your case alone had spurned them from their ignorant ways and that they were back on the path to medical integrity, you would still look elsewhere the next time you discovered a little brown spot on your back.
So why not do the same to the existing media? In the wake of this massive abnegation of responsibility, is there any hope for the future of news media?
I sincerely hope so. Perhaps the current generation of professional pundits have no hope of recovery, their cultural and intellectual authority having been thrown out along with your Hillary 2016 yard sign. But I am cautiously optimistic about the prospects of the next generation.
If the next generation of political reporters and pundits hopes to regain the trust of even a sliver of the public, we would do well to learn from this current catastrophe.
First, we should follow Brooks in being more upfront about our fallibility. Certainty—even the appearance of certainty—should be avoided at all costs. Pundits should reaffirm their commitment to complicating, not simplifying, political problems.
Next, we should learn our lesson about the limits of data and polling in reporting. Yes, data is important, and polls do offer some insight into the mind of the electorate. But we must learn that even numbers can lie and mislead. We ought to temper our zeal for polling with a sense of the variousness and unpredictability of the human mind. Talking to 20 living, breathing, human beings is sometimes more illuminating than viewing a graph of 30,000 data points.
Lastly, the next generation of journalists and pundits—against the grain of so much reporting today—must inject some empathy back into public discourse. Journalists must recommit to understanding and fairly representing the positions of those all across the political spectrum, and pundits on both sides must redraw the playing field so as not to pit the enlightened and the “woke” against the willfully ignorant and the superstitious.
As Oscar Wilde wrote elsewhere: “In America the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.” Perhaps there will come a day when we should let our understanding of journalism die, but today is not that day. With any luck, these four years will pass. We cannot let responsible journalism pass with them.

On Second thought: Students' political homogeneity results in lack of action and smug attitudes

“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action,” declared our new commander in chief from the north end of the Capitol on January 20. This action-over-talk motif appears to be a favorite of President Trump, who, in his first week in office, has wasted no time in introducing a flurry of executive orders and then making a point of flaunting them on Twitter and in his speeches.
At first glance, Trump’s attack on “empty talk” is just another iteration of the age-old truism, found in numerous forms like “walk the walk, don’t talk the talk” or “actions speak louder than words.” Unreflectively, we all accept this prescription, holding others to their word and, with any luck, embodying truism ourselves.
Yet, this directive has taken on particular political force in the mouth of President Trump. It has struck an unusually resonant chord in the hearts and minds of American voters. Yes, politicians and pundits persistently peddle in platitudes; this much is not new. And as a disclaimer, I have absolutely no taste for our new president, as both an elected official and as a man. Nevertheless, it would do us well to take a moment to consider why some of these clichés assume greater force at particular moments in our nation’s history.
I would conjecture that the ascendency of the talk-is-cheap rhetoric is in part a reaction to a rather strong tendency in contemporary liberalism towards what Emmett Rensin bluntly labeled as “smug” in his strikingly prophetic piece “The smug style in American liberalism,” published on Vox on April 21, 2016.
Rensin’s piece is worth a read all the way through, so consider this my recommendation. But in short, Rensin argues that between 1964 and 1980, demographic shifts within the American Democratic Party—shifts away from the working class and towards the academic and coastal elite—have brought about a change in liberalism’s “intellectual center of gravity.” Unable to comprehend why the white working class so rapidly abandoned the Democratic Party—which, after all, was its ultimate champion—liberals cultivated “the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all,” but rather sheer stupidity.
“Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt,” Rensin writes. He rather aptly compares this dynamic to that of two recently separated lovers in the aftermath of a particularly nasty break-up.
The essence of this culture of contempt is “a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason,” and its primary symptom is knowing: “Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better.” The Democratic Party, in its own eyes, abides by “a politics that insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions, only charts.”
Of course, when we know that we just know better than those misguided, unknowing hordes, we are wont to try to convince them of their wrongness—to plainly reason out, with no ideological spin whatsoever, why they are misguided. When they refuse to yield, they only cement their own stupidity.
I believe in the power of persuasion, and I believe that ideas matter. I would be a fool to write this column if I didn’t. Likewise, I shudder at the rise of “alternative facts,” and the prospect of a “post-factual world” seems like a terrible, terrible nightmare. Nevertheless, I am not enamored by the very-real smugness that pervades so much of liberal politics, even here (or, perhaps, especially here) on our campus.
The issue with smugness, aside from being intuitively repulsive, is that it makes us complacent. We content ourselves with knowing the facts, and tweeting about them, while doing little to realize our goals. There is a curious strand of gnosticism at play here, by means of which simply having superior knowledge lifts us above the fray of culpability and blame. So rather than enacting our ideal of virtue or descending into the political arena to work towards a solution, we sit back and virtue signal, waiting for the masses to finally come to their senses and “get woke.” Trump’s brand of action-without-thought populism is in part a reaction to this very attitude. Elite universities, especially rural liberal arts colleges like our own, are uniquely susceptible to the gravitational pull of smugness. Surrounded largely by like-minded students and isolated from national politics in any real sense, we spend four years immersed in ideas. This is a beautiful thing, and one of the most compelling and attractive aspects of our schooling. At the same time, it positions us to become terrifically smug.
“The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing,” Rensin writes, and the knowing creeps up every so often at Bowdoin: when we know that Bowdoin needs to actively recruit more socioeconomic diversity, when we know that the College must divest from fossil fuels or when we know that “conservatism” is just a codeword for backward intolerance. The issue isn’t with having convictions but with thinking those convictions absolve you from action. A culture of gratitude might make us complacent, but a culture of knowing makes us contemptible.
Rensin acknowledges that liberalism was the “American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life,” and this is still true. But if liberalism in America is to continue to thrive in the 21st century, it must be rescued from its smuggest tendencies. To counter Trump’s doing-without-knowing, we must move beyond knowing-without-doing. So, having put down your copy of the Orient, do you feel acutely the injustice of the school’s socioeconomic homogeneity? Excellent, because I think the admissions office is seeking summer interns.

On Second thought

Kristof and Riley debate proves underwhelming

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Ian Ward

Columnist

December 9, 2016

Well, you can’t fault them for trying.

And we must commend President Clayton Rose and the council of faculty, staff and students for organizing Monday night’s event, “Up For Discussion,” which brought Nicholas Kristof and Jason Riley to campus to discuss free speech and political correctness in higher education. Between this event and talks this fall by Dr. Noam Chomsky and Dinesh D’Souza, Bowdoin has clearly taken a step in the right direction towards ensuring that a wide range of political views get airtime on campus. This development, coupled with the absence of teeth-gnashing in response to any one speaker, warrants praise in itself.

Nevertheless, Monday’s discussion fell flat. And I was not alone in leaving Pickard Theater feeling, at best, underwhelmed. The discussion, moderated by Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies Connie Y. Chiang, had the potential to turn fiery, yet it was anything but. On point after point, Kristof and Riley, rather than squaring off, simply agreed with one another. Hardly Lincoln-Douglas.

From trigger warnings to ideological diversity, Kristof and Riley, though at times disagreeing on the specifics, generally arrived at a consensus: inclusion must come second to academic seriousness; college campuses desperately need greater ideological diversity; discomfort is not sufficient grounds for silencing speech.

So, what went wrong? Kristof and Riley certainly disagree on something. Kristof, just this year, published a seven-part series in The New York Times called “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” chronicling white Americans’ racial naiveté and its damaging effects on the African-American population. As for Riley, in his most recent work, “Please Stop Helping Us,” he blamed liberal economic policies for holding back the black population while simultaneously chastising that population for its lack of moral integrity, and claiming things like, “Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it.”

For all their disagreements, how did Kristof and Riley remain so harmonious? To begin, the terms of the debate were poorly articulated. Political correctness, thus termed, has very few fervent supporters because the term itself has become derisive. Those who defend the practices and attitudes called politically correct defend them not as politically correct but rather as inclusive. Asking a proponent of safe spaces to defend political correctness is like asking a defender of income redistribution to defend state-sponsored theft. When thus framed, both disputants were able to skirt the issue. If asked to defend inclusion, neither would have gotten off so easy.

Secondly, by framing the debate between an avowed liberal and an outspoken conservative as between “political correctness and free speech,” the event coordinators insinuated that the cause of political correctness would be defended by the liberal, while that of free speech by the conservative. This division in itself is misleading; those charged with so-called political correctness tend to fall on the left, but political correctness is not necessarily an inherently liberal issue. And while some of the more vocal defenders of free speech fall on the right, freedom of speech is a truly bipartisan issue.

Yet more detrimentally, the whole debate relied on a flawed premise. To frame a debate as between political correctness and free speech assumes a degree of antagonism between the two. This could not be further from the truth. Certainly there are high-profile cases where the two come into conflict on college campuses. But arguably these instances are misapplications of both ideals. When a college chooses to disinvite a speaker or to implement Orwellian speech codes on the basis of inclusion, it is in fact electing to exclude persons or viewpoints. Some may claim that these measures are part of social justice work, but they in fact undermine the very end that social justice aims to promote: the protection of fundamental civil rights for all. The derisive tone behind the term, is fueled in part by an awareness of this contradiction. Conversely, when a proponent of free speech decries protests of a speaker as hostile to free speech rather than challenging those protests on substantive grounds, he undermines the principle underlying freedom of expression, that unfettered debate is the most reliable path to important truths.

The two principles, far from being opposed, are mutually supportive: proponents of inclusivity rely intimately on the freedom of expression for minority views to be heard; good-faith proponents of free speech defend that right for the very purpose of uplifting marginalized populations. As the American Civil Liberties Union writes on its website, “the defense of freedom of speech is most necessary when the message is one most people find repulsive. Constitutional rights must apply to even the most unpopular groups if they’re going to be preserved for everyone.” The protection of every citizen’s fundamental civil rights: this is true social justice work.

An ongoing lawsuit at the University of Kentucky illustrates how true social justice work and free-speech in practice go hand in hand. In August, the university, citing privacy concerns, filed a lawsuit against the student newspaper over documents obtained by the paper regarding an alleged sexual assault by a former professor. The paper is challenging the suit. Here, as is true in the abstract, the protection of free expression and the protection of marginalized populations—in this case, victims of sexual assault—are working in concert.

Now, there were certainly other issues with the debate at Bowdoin. Kristof, while leaning to the left, remains a vocal critic of the intellectual hegemony of academia. So while Kristof and Riley disagree on a great many things, campus politics appears not to be one. Additionally, neither disputant appeared to have taken the time to familiarize themselves with the specifics of the debate at Bowdoin, which has centered around the tequila and gangster parties. Lastly, Professor Chiang’s method of questioning seemed to manifest the very tendency towards tentativeness in racial discussions that both disputants openly criticized.

So by all means, keep the discussion flowing. But next time, let’s make sure it has somewhere to go.

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