How They Have Failed

Some too-late journalistic self-reflection ends badly

It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?”

I will start by trying to answer the question for them, The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of incumbent journalism:

You have refused to recognize fascism at the door. You insist on covering authoritarianism as just another side in still-symmetrical American politics.

You do not read history. For God’s sake, reread or read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (or at least listen to the podcast). You fail to cite history for your readers, explaining the context of what is occurring, because you insist on thinking you are writing your “first draft of history.” What hubris.

You think, as is often said, that our problem is disinformation and since you are in the information business, you must be the solution. Arendt teaches instead that “totalitarian government … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” By this, she does not mean the insipid “loneliness epidemic” you and the Surgeon General prattle on about: incels unable to get laid. She means isolating…