How the Media Misses The Big Story

Jim Burroway

July 26th, 2016

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, is  not just a keen observer of the power of religion over public life, but also of the power of power over individual people. On Sunday, New York magazine posted Nick Tabor’s interview with Sharlet asking why the media has had so much trouble “figuring out how to handle Donald Trump.” Part of the problem, Sharlet says, is that the media has consistently dismissed the fringe as fringe, even though if we’re talking about an apparently extreme ten percent “fringe,” it’s still 30 million people:

It’s the idea of the journalist measuring a story’s importance by the scale of the stage on which it occurs, rather than by the depth of meaning it reveals. So we take an issue and say, “What does this mean for America?” There’s all sorts of interesting stories that maybe don’t mean anything for America, but they mean a great deal for how we understand how people make sense of their lives, right?

He gives an example:

I can think of big magazine stories about megachurches that I knew that remade them over in the image of a Republican voter. “I know that church. That’s a spiritual-war church; that’s their main concern. I know that they do tons of exorcisms every week, which is deliverance ministry. I know that they talk all the time about demons and the problems of demons. And that’s who they are.” And somewhere, someone made the assumption, “I don’t want to make them look stupid, so I won’t put that in.” That that’s being respectful. And there was a moment where the New York Times declared that we need to be more respectful. Yes, we do, and you respect that by not thinking that they want to be seen like you.

…If you think, “I don’t want to impose a story that those guys are insane, so I’m going to bend over to the opposite direction so that I can be fair.” Well, now you’ve erased the possibility that what you think of as wacky and serious coexist. That the deliverance ministry and the strategic political thinking coexist, and always have.

The whole piece is a really smart analysis of why the media consistently misunderstands and underestimates both the left and the right.

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