Isaac Schorr here again, filling in for Jim Geraghty, who will be back next week. Happy Friday to one and all! On the menu today: The New York Times’s commitment to mediocrity on its commentary side.
A Case Study in the New York Times‘s Boring Sameness
National Review hosts a podcast — The Editors — in which a panel, usually comprising four of this magazine’s heavy hitters, talks about the issues of the day.
Now, National Review is an explicitly conservative publication; there’s no hiding the ball on that front. But if you listen, you’ll find that every episode of The Editors includes plenty of debate, and not just over what Democrats are doing wrong, but over first principles and how to solve specific problems.
Now consider the New York Times, which presents itself as something very different: A newspaper representing all of the United States and the varying perspectives in it. Its news side, while flawed, at least feigns an interest in upholding this façade while also doing some very valuable work. Its opinion side, on the other hand, is separated from your average college paper’s op-ed page only by branding.
No singular work is more illustrative of this point than an “Opinion Round Table” published by the Times and focused on “How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American Politics” and including the perspectives of Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Ezra Klein, Jane Coaston, and Jamelle Bouie. It’s a masterwork of lazy fan service. Here’s the round table’s raison d’être:
Lawmakers in Ohio this week proposed legislation that would restrict discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, borrowing from Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. It’s the latest in a raft of culture-war legislation in Republican statehouses aimed against abortion, transgender rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and critical race theory.
Note that there’s no explanation of what makes any of these positions “fringe.” Also note that only one actual piece of legislation is name-checked — by a pejorative progressive nickname, not the bill’s title, of course — and that the legislation is immensely popular when voters read its actual provisions, rather than some slanted paraphrase of them. Sixty-one percent of Americans, and 55 percent of Democrats, who read the bill’s text expressed approval of it in one recent poll.
And now on to the substance of the piece, which is really just a series of unearned claims.
Klein says that “these are brutal pieces of legislation that will hurt a lot of very just ordinary kids who need some help.” (Which pieces of legislation, specifically? How are they brutal?)And he argues that they represent “the mainstreaming of QAnon.” (How so? Does he know exactly what QAnon is? Can he conceive of any non-conspiracist motivations that the bill’s supporters might have?)
Bouie submits that the central problem Democrats face is that that “there doesn’t seem to be an inclination to really just swing — to make what may sound like outlandish accusations, but that push strongly against the messaging and the rhetoric coming from the Republican Party.” Did Bouie forget that the Democratic president of the United States called a relatively modest Republican election-reform bill “Jim Crow on steroids”? Did he forget that he that that same Democratic president argued that anyone who disagreed with that characterization was on the side of George Wallace and Bull Connor? Did he forget that that same Democratic president accused Republican governors of “Neanderthal thinking” for lifting Covid restrictions?
Coaston says that conservatives are the ones misrepresenting the Florida bill, dismissing the idea that it has anything to do with sexual education: “There’s no mention of sex education or sexual activity in that bill. It mentions sexual orientation and gender identity. But the idea is that if you simply do not ever let people know that there is such thing as gay or trans people, then people will not be gay or trans.” These claims are a little bit more complicated, and perhaps could have led to an interesting discussion if everyone involved was not so myopically invested in the “Why Is the GOP so Evil?” theme.
The argument that sexual orientation and gender identity are topics entirely disconnected from sexual education seems dubious. Sexual orientation relates to who humans are attracted to, while gender identity oftentimes starts a conversation that ends with hormonal and surgical intervention. Maybe there’s a case to be made that these topics are unrelated to sexual education, but Coaston doesn’t actually make it.
There might be a kernel of truth to her other contention, however. Most conservatives, I think, do believe that there is a social-contagion aspect to the transgender issue. I wrote about this earlier this week:
Those who support heavy-handed school instruction on gender theory — and continued involvement in engaging students with questions about its applicability to themselves — believe these lessons would constitute a process of enlightenment. One that would merely lift the veil for some students who were always this way but just didn’t know it. They think that gender dysphoria is a physical condition caused by a male body hosting a female brain or vice versa. . . .
On the other end of the spectrum are those who hold that gender dysphoria is a psychological phenomenon in which people who are wholly male or wholly female and yet are under the misimpression that they have the opposite brain, or were meant to be the opposite of what they are. An additional component of this understanding of transgenderism is that it’s suggestible, or has a “social contagion” aspect to it. In other words, if you tell kids struggling with mental-health issues that perhaps it’s because they were born with a gender identity opposite their sex, and point to others who have reached the same conclusion, they may very well just accept that as the answer to their problems.
To suggest that social suggestibility could be playing a role in the skyrocketing numbers of young girls’ expressing their desire to become males, for example, is not of course to say that gay and transgender people would not exist without these topics’ being discussed in the public square. It’s only to say that people, and especially young people, are susceptible to being influenced on all manner of issues, especially when the arguments they’re hearing come from people in positions of authority — such as teachers — and are presented as truth. And that issues pertaining to gender identity are just too weighty to be left in the hands of third-grade instructors.
In producing pieces of commentary this vacuous, the Times may be giving most of its readers exactly what they wants, but it’s depriving them of the honest, interesting, and diverse conversations that they deserve.
ADDENDUM: Check out Jack Butler’s “Note to Mark Zuckerberg: Being Compared to Sauron Is Not a Compliment,” a product of both Jack’s love for Tolkien and his skepticism of the Metaverse.