Jim Sleeper: American Journalism in the Coils of 'Ressentiment'

Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University.

The subtitle of William McGowan's Gray Lady Down -- What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means For America - all but insured its dismissal by book-review editors not drawn to anything so Portentous in media criticism.

According to the book's website, McGowan tried to gin up a controversy over the fact that the Times didn't review it, even though Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus supposedly had promised him that it would. No firestorm ensued, because Gray Lady also wasn't reviewed in Rupert Murdoch's Times-loathing Wall Street Journal, or in the Washington Post, or in any other major daily. Or in Bookforum, The New York Review, or any other thoughtful venue.

So McGowan has been haunting the conservative noise machine's studios and websites, hawking his claim that while "The New York Times was once considered the gold standard in American journalism," now "it is generally understood to be a vehicle for politically correct ideologies, tattered liberal pieties, and a repeated victim of journalistic scandal and institutional embarrassment."

Language like that has been ricocheting around the conservative echo chamber for so long now that it almost echoes itself. So why is the decidedly un-conservative, ever-young Washington Monthly publishing a damning review of McGowan's book by yours truly? And why am I writing still more about it here?

Click here and read the review to see how McGowan miscarries his mission to rescue journalism from political correctness by succumbing to an ideological partisanship of his own that trumps his good intentions. Then, if you care about journalism, return here to think further with me about how to distinguish attacks like his from serious criticisms of papers like the Times that do need to be made.

These days, it's hard to tell serious criticisms of mainstream news media from the opportunistic, right-wing ones, because liberals as well as conservatives aren't facing an unpleasant truth:

The Times sometimes contributes to the decay of American public life, not because it's "liberal" or "politically correct," as McGowan charges (although it often is that), but because it's a big media corporation. Even when its journalism is assiduously "green," or gay-friendly, or cosmopolitan, it still serves the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, military-industrial, consumer-marketing juggernaut that's degrading American life and dissolving the republic.

McGowan insists he'd like nothing better than to restore the Times to the civic-republican glory he thinks it reached when the elder Arthur Sulzberger was publisher and A.M. Rosenthal was executive editor in the 1970s. Yet, as I show in the Washington Monthly (and a bit more below), he violates the standards of accuracy, open-mindedness, and civic vision he claims to want to restore.

Like Ahab, McGowan has been pursuing the Gray Lady so long and obsessively, with support from investors and commentators hell-bent on slaying her for their own pecuniary and partisan/ideological reasons, that he's wound up blaming the deterioration of our public sphere more on Times political correctness than on the other, more powerful currents I've mentioned -- of casino financing, corporate welfare, and degraded consumer marketing.

These currents are warping journalism at most news organizations, no matter what political poses they strike in order to ingratiate themselves to their anticipated markets. McGowan's anti-liberalism isn't just a line he picked up from his conservative capitalist paymasters; it's a miscarriage of sincere civic faith that's part of a broader distemper infecting our public life.

II.

One name for the distemper that's sinking this man - ressentiment -- denotes more than just "resentment." The word (in French it's pronounced ruh-sohn-tee-mohn) refers to a syndrome, a public psychopathology, in which gnawing insecurities, envy, and hatreds that had been nursed by many people in private converge and present themselves as noble strengths in scary social eruptions that come on as crusades but diminish their participants even in seeming to make them great.

Ressentiment always seeks "easy" enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for its half-acknowledged weaknesses and frustrations, which usually include exploitation and oppression by powers which the bearers of ressentiment fear to face and reckon with head-on. Their ressentiment warps their assessments of both the hardships and opportunities that lie before them. It shapes the disguises they put on in order to pursue vindication without incurring reproach until there are enough of them to step out together en masse, with a Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin.

Whether ressentiment erupts into in a medieval Catholic Inquisition, a Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunt, a Maoist Cultural Revolution, or nihilist extremes of "people's liberation movements" or political correctness, its most telling symptoms are paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. These gusts of collective passion touch many raw nerves under the ministrations of demagogues and an increasingly surreal journalism that prepares the way for them by brutalizing public discourse.

The legitimate grievances that sometimes goad these movements to a fleeting brilliance curdle in their willful ignorance and cowardice. They collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, on their own myopia and lies. For all McGowan's pretensions to be saving the Times' soul, he, like other bearers of ressentiment, is trying to burn it at the stake. Surreal journalism like his prepares the way for something even worse.

The journalist Michael Tomasky injected some clarity and sanity into this discussino when he took McGowan on in a debate in Brooklyn, sponsored by conservatives and aired on C-Span. Not surprisingly, this debate isn't mentioned or linked on Gray Lady Down's website.

On principle and often in practice, the New York Times stands against ressentiment in public discourse. The best of its journalism disrupts the self-reinforcing ignorance that drives consumers of the New York Post and Fox News and that also drives bottom-lining business jocks who hang on every word of commentary in the Wall Street Journal. No wonder we're witnessing a battle to the death between Murdoch, who owns all three of these media engines, and the Times, with McGowan one of the combatants.

But sometimes an elitist ressentiment does creep into the Times' own news analyses, commentaries and cultural reportage on pseudo-liberations and post-modernist titillations that enrage McGowan and sometimes anger me, too. It's one thing to report on the degradation of sports, entertainment, and public mores, of the spread of gladiatorial fighting, of nihilist and exploitative sex, and worse. It's another thing to ride and tout these trends, as the Times sometimes does.

Striking the right balances can be tricky: In a 1994 New York Daily News column, for example, I warned of danger in Times editorial-page editor Howell Raines's penitential but imperious racial moralism, which converged with the political correctness of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. to distort the paper's coverage. A decade later, Raines, by then executive editor, was forced out largely by the fabrications of a young black reporter, Jayson Blair, whom he'd shielded from others' warnings, very likely dismissing the complainers as racists for voicing their doubts.

A chapter of my Liberal Racism focused on the folly in Sulzberger 's pursing his crusade for "managed diversity" as if it were a profit-center for the paper, corrupting both diversity and journalism. The Times in those days often gave the impression that anything "black" or "gay" was inherently progressive or otherwise beyond reproach. McGowan educes wince-making examples. Some of what passes for black or gay liberation is merely tribal, or elitist, or brutal, or just vapid (and marketable) --a symptom of our public sphere's unraveling rather than a cure.

Barack Obama's leadership in racial politics has been everything I was calling for back then, and his 2008 election, however lucky or fortuitous, was testimony to some kind of public progress on that front. But McGowan is right to charge that the post-Jayson Blair Times threw itself into an "Obamamania" that was sometimes unworthy of Obama's own campaign and that the paper still sometimes coddles black-power poseurs, miscreants and suspect American Muslims, simply because they're black or Muslim.

Too many of McGowan's charges are stretched beyond credibility, though, by his own preconceptions and resentments involving race, sex, and immigration. These sometimes make him more censorious of the people and movements the Times is covering than he is of flaws in the coverage itself.

For example, while he rightly condemns the paper for having been slow to probe the career of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre, he pounces on other such lapses so eagerly that he gets carried away, as when he assails the Times for downplaying some orthodox Muslims' intimidation of a liberal American Imam in New Jersey. The paper did take too long to report that the imam had had to flee halfway across the United States to escape his tormenters, but McGowan adds insult to injury by writing, "The fact that it took months for the story to get into the paper suggests a reluctance to admit that much of the Islamic community is filled with intolerance and violence."

Much of the Islamic community is filled with intolerance and hatred? Would McGowan have written similarly about the Irish-Catholic community of 1880, when a Times editorial declared, "A bad Irish-American boy is about as unwholesome a product as was ever reared in any body politic."? Would he have applauded the paper that time for its readiness "to admit that much of" that community was "filled with intolerance and violence?" Or does he just have a thing about Muslims? Or (as I suggest in the Washington Monthly) about immigrants from India? Or about non-European immigrants in general?...