Where It's Always 1895

What’s Happening

Every few years some research group releases a study examining the political leanings of America’s professoriate. The libertarian news-site Reason recently highlighted a study from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE; previously ___ in Education) that found – quelle surprise! – that American universities are even more of an anti-conservative cesspool than it’s been for years.

I wanted to be fair, so I read their mission and history. Harvey Silvergate’s and David French’s names were both familiar to me as smart men but with a definite libertarian ideological bent, and if you need more convincing this study might have a bias problem, just keep in mind their group is founded around the idea that freedom of speech on college campuses is the issue they wanted to organize their activism around. They’re convinced it’s a problem heading in.

The specific conclusions they drew, though, are still interesting, though I think they say more about Americans generally than they do about modern academia. 

What the Study Found

As described in The Reason article:

“The study scored academics' political ideologies based on the voting records of the candidates to which they donated. It found that academics are increasingly donating to far-left politicians like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

“That most university professors prefer left-wing politicians is no new insight—but the near-disappearance of any right-wing counterweight is. The study found that among the donor sample, the interquartile range of opinions—a measure of how much the most moderate 50 percent's views vary—"has essentially shrunk to nothing over time.””

“An analysis of Yale faculty members' political alignment made headlines some months ago when it uncovered that 27 of the 47 undergraduate departments (including American studies and English) didn't have a single registered Republican on faculty. It also found that Yale's history, economics, philosophy, political science, and law faculties included just one Republican each.”

“An exploratory report on "curriculum degradation" at the University of Chicago, for instance, found that since 2012, courses whose titles or descriptions contained a "progressive signal," such as "racism," "equity," or "implicit bias," rose from 12.7 percent of the catalog to 28.3 percent. Meanwhile, the share of those with a "Western canon signal," which includes the Enlightenment and "classical literature," fell slightly from 13.2 percent to 11.9 percent.”

What This Means

Let’s take this one point at a time.

(1) Professors who donate politically tend to donate to politicians like AOC and Bernie. But when’s the last time you’ve donated to a political moderate, as an individual and particularly as a liberal or progressive. Firebrands attract viral attention and pull in donations from all over. More moderate folks just don’t donate as much to politicians, and if they do they’ll do it through the party.

(2) Republicans have all but disappeared from college departments, especially at elite schools. This is not the big flex the authors seem to think. University faculty tend to be pretty sticky, and people who once self-identified as Republicans are probably still there, and probably still relatively consistent in their ideology. But smart, thoughtful people spending a lot of time reading and thinking aren’t comfortable owning what the label “Republican” or even “conservative” means these days. It’s the label that’s shifted, not the faculty.

(3) Course descriptions at elite schools are more likely to use “progressive coded” words, and less likely to tag the historical period they’re based in. Reason thinks this means the courses have gone woke. Maybe; but more likely, based on the trends I saw developing when I left academia (I was a philosophy Ph.D. student and left at the ABD stage in 2014), it’s got at least as much to do with adjuncts needing to fill up a class so it wasn’t cancelled and they lost their check. That was much easier to do if a course seemed topical or relevant to what students already cared about, than if it was marketed as about a certain historical period.

The deeper truth lurking behind the details, I think, isn’t that professors are Antifa or Marxist or anything along those lines; it’s that they’re both high-information and idealistic in the most literal sense. They care about the ideas they study, and they believe in the value of people really consider ideas outside what’s common in the world they’re born into. Of course political pragmatism and moderation operate differently in that space. And even if they don’t think universal healthcare (say) would work, they still see the value in questioning the old paradigms and think through why people find that idea alluring.

The real trick is to still have enough restraint that you can introduce a student to an idea without browbeating them into accepting it. There’s a pedagogical art involved, and some professors and instructors do it better than others. I always told my classes they never had to agree with anyone we studied; they just had to be able to explain why not.

A lot of FIRE’s and Reason’s ideals seem like good ones. I wish I’d had more professors who’d taught the giants of conservatism’s intellectual history. It can be hard sometimes to balance students’ need to feel safe with being challenged, and ideas as intellectual abstractions versus lived realities. At a minimum students should be given space to defend whatever ideas they find convincing. (Professors, too, in the realm of academic research.) And at the risk of descending into snark, having a political conservatism that was intellectually defensible or even cared to be wouldn’t be a bad start, either.

The real problem is with the solution Reason proposes. The Trumpian criticism of universities as biassed is warranted, and public outrage is well-placed, to hear the authors tell it; and the best solution is “strict institutional neutrality positions” (basically, academics as groups should just shut up about controversial and especially political issues) and some sort of DEI for conservative academics. There’s room for improvement, as there always is, but also much better ways to do it than that.

Related Stories

The Fulcrum: “This Year Colleges Raced to Embrace Viewpoint Diversity. That’s a Mistake” (PF)

Reason: “Are Historians Really Apolitical?”

Musical Break

More News about Higher Education

The Atlantic: “Commencement Speeches Are Supposed to Be Boring” (PF)

L.A. Times: “Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM applicants” (PF)

The Conversation: “Trump administration’s lawsuits against Harvard and UCLA have roots in a decades-old fight over civil rights law” (PF)

The Atlantic: “Why College Students Are Booing AI” (PF)

ARC Magazine: “The Quiet Surge of Alternative Micro-Colleges” (PF)

The Atlantic: “Harvard Needs a Cap on A Grades”

The Fulcrum: “Democrats and Republicans Express Bipartisan Concern Regarding Loan Caps for Graduate Nursing Degrees” (PF)

Slate: “The Best Place for a College Student to Truly Learn” (PF)  (Their answer: prison.)

The New Yorker: “Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans” (PF)

The Atlantic: “College Should Be Way More Fun” (PF)

& more news of the K-12 Variety

The New Yorker: “What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?” (PF)

The Atlantic: “The Broken Promises of Ed Tech” (PF)

Salon: “From campuses to classrooms: Turning Point USA’s next frontier” (PF)

The Fulcrum: “Talent Isn’t the Problem. Belonging Is.” (PF)

Daily Nous: “Grieving What AI Has Taken from Learning” (PF)

Mother Jones: “Report: Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is Flunking” (PF)

The Conversation: “The lasting appeal of homeschooling: What motivated families to continue after schools reopened post-pandemic” (PF)

Curmudgucation: “Should We Pay More For The Best Teachers?” (PF)

JSTOR: “Worried About Teens Today? So Were Adults in the 1920s” (PF)

For those of you who “only” know the movies, this is the last of the six chapters covering the hobbits’ journey from Bag End to Bree that Jackson left out. Again, I can hardly blame him: it’s a very different kind of adventure story, and it doesn’t really move the larger plot forward. Frodo & Co. finally left the Shire, got waylaid by a magical (or at least mystical; certainly malign, if you’ll allow me my own bit of Bombadillish alliteration) ancient willow-tree, and spent a day and change in the house of Tom Bombadil learning some equally ancient prehistory (... ish …) and building up their spiritual strength by being surrounded by good if silly songs. 

Now they’ve got to continue on their way. But before they can get back on the road and eventually on to Bree, they’ve got to pass the barrow-downs. In the appendices we learn these are ancient graves, some of which built by the “forefathers of the Edain” (the elf-friends among the Men of Edain; the Numenoreans are descended from one of their tribes). The cairn where the hobbits are held captive is said to house the “last prince of Cardolan,” one of the kingdoms ruled by Argorn’s ancestors. As Tom Bombadil told it (almost in passing), the human remains buried there were essentially reanimated by evil, incorporeal beings: “A shadow came out of dark places ar away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds.” Tolkien doesn’t get more specific, at least not in Lord of the Rings; the Tolkien Gateway speculates those spirits are either “perverted Maiar (Úmaiar) or spirits of Orcs, Avari, or evil Men.”

What matters is they’re almost indefinably evil, and treacherously old. Here, they sort of parallel the Old Man Willow, which Tom told them about in the last chapter: “In [the Old Forest] there lived yet, aging no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice. But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green.” Technically he’s not an ent or huorn like we later meet in Fangorn, though consider the source. Tom Bombadil is nothing if not imprecise, and I’m not a good enough Tolkien scholar to know how much he’d worked out what we read in the “Of Aule and Yavanna” chapter of The Silmarillion.

But assuming we take this description somewhat literally, Old Man Willow is an ancienter-than-ancient literal tree that’s been corrupted by time. Something odd seems to be going on in this corner of the world, whether it’s proximity to Bombadil himself or the effects of Angmar. Things persist longer than they should, they go sour, and they go vicious. Evil is afoot, and it’s not the more political evil of human machinations and power struggles. I don’t want to imply too much of a one-for-one parallel (you know, allegory), but the closest description I’ve got is spiritual warfare.

And just after leaving (or being left by) Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, they get into another remarkably Old Man Willow-ish scrape. They’re making good progress (again: ish) across the open country between the Old Forest and the Road that will take them to Bree. They’re enjoying the sun. They have a big picnic lunch and decide to take a nap. They sleep too long, and are surrounded by a cold, dark fog when at last they try desperately to get past the barrows. They’ve been warned to make it past the territory before dark. And – speaking here as someone who generally dislikes horror as a genre and doesn’t read or watch most of it – we get some of the best written horror that I at least have ever read. This is a bit long, but you all deserve a good taste.

‘Come on! Follow me!’ [Frodo] called back over his shoulder, and he hurried forward. But his hope soon changed to bewilderment and alarm. The dark patches grew darker, but they shrank; and suddenly he saw, towering ominous before him and leaning slightly towards one another like the pillars of a headless door, two huge standing stones. He could not remember having seen any sign of these in the valley, when he looked out from the hill in the morning. He had passed between them almost before he was aware: and even as he did so darkness seemed to fall round him. His pony reared and snorted, and he fell off. When he looked back he found that he was alone: the others had not followed him.

‘Sam!’ he called. ‘Pippin! Merry! Come along! Why don’t you keep up?’

There was no answer. Fear took him, and he ran back past the stones shouting wildly: ‘Sam! Sam! Merry! Pippin!’ The pony bolted into the mist and vanished. From some way off, or so it seemed, he thought he heard a cry: ‘Hoy! Frodo! Hoy!’ It was away eastward, on his left as he stood under the great stones, staring and straining into the gloom. He plunged off in the direction of the call, and found himself going steeply uphill.

As he struggled on he called again, and kept on calling more and more frantically; but he heard no answer for some time, and then it seemed faint and far ahead and high above him. ‘Frodo! Hoy!’ came the thin voices out of the mist: and then a cry that sounded like help, help! often repeated, ending with a last help! that trailed off into a long wail suddenly cut short. He stumbled forward with all the speed he could towards the cries; but the light was now gone, and clinging night had closed about him, so that it was impossible to be sure of any direction. He seemed all the time to be climbing up and up.

Only the change in the level of the ground at his feet told him when he at last came to the top of a ridge or hill. He was weary, sweating and yet chilled. It was wholly dark.

‘Where are you?’ he cried out miserably.

There was no reply. He stood listening. He was suddenly aware that it was getting very cold, and that up here a wind was beginning to blow, an icy wind. A change was coming in the weather. The mist was flowing past him now in shreds and tatters. His breath was smoking, and the darkness was less near and thick. He looked up and saw with surprise that faint stars were appearing overhead amid the strands of hurrying cloud and fog. The wind began to hiss over the grass.

He imagined suddenly that he caught a muffled cry, and he made towards it; and even as he went forward the mist was rolled up and thrust aside, and the starry sky was unveiled. A glance showed him that he was now facing southwards and was on a round hill-top, which he must have climbed from the north. Out of the east the biting wind was blowing. To his right there loomed against the westward stars a dark black shape. A great barrow stood there.

‘Where are you?’ he cried again, both angry and afraid.

‘Here!’ said a voice, deep and cold, that seemed to come out of the ground. ‘I am waiting for you!’

‘No!’ said Frodo; but he did not run away. His knees gave, and he fell on the ground. Nothing happened, and there was no sound. Trembling he looked up, in time to see a tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars. It leaned over him. He thought there were two eyes, very cold though lit with a pale light that seemed to come from some remote distance. Then a grip stronger and colder than iron seized him. The icy touch froze his bones, and he remembered no more.

“Nothing happened, and there was no sound.” – This always struck me as absence as a positive thing. No-sound has existence. Darkness isn’t just the absence of light or sight, it’s an oppressive being, and it’s powerful. This is why I’m personally of the view that the zombifying spirits that took over those Dunedain corpses are powerful, probably minor former-Maiar that served Morgoth and then Sauron after him. They’re more built for immortality than Old Man Willow, maybe, but they’re corrupted, and they’ve bound themselves into some very human bones for way too long. There’s a finitude about them, a physicality, and it’s gone sour af.

Frodo at least is better equipped to face them, though. He’s spent the last two nights having what I can only describe as fortifying dreams, or perhaps visions. The chapter opens with him hearing “a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.” I’ve often heard this described as a vision of Valinor, which it might have been. I wonder if it’s more like an echo of the Great Song that started creation in the Silmarillion, the same song Legolas hears when he comes to Gondor that awakens his sea-longing. Whatever it is, it’s almost from outside time, again almost unaccountably ancient (or timeless) but without the corruption Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wights carry with them.

He’s also been listening to singing quite a lot. It matters that Tom Bombadil is almost constantly slipping in and out of song. In Tolkien, song and dance is a kind of magic, certainly a kind of power and a spiritual power at that. Think of how the Old Forest got riled up when the hobbits started singing even before they met Tom Bombadil, or looking further back how Luthien’s songs broke Sauron’s enchantments when she rescued Beren from him, and lulled even Morgoth to sleep. Frodo seemed best able to follow Bombadil’s half-sung history, and he sometimes (not always, but sometimes) seemed to answer with a more singsong rhythm to his speech. 

The hobbits are captured by the barrow-wights and held in the graves of that last prince of Cardolan, like I said. Merry, Pippin, and Sam are all asleep, or perhaps deathly unconscious, but Frodo wakes up halfway during the night. Again, this is long but is worth quoting a long piece of it. This is one of those chapters where you lose the flavor if you only look at snippets.

As [Frodo] lay there, thinking and getting a hold of himself, he noticed all at once that the darkness was slowly giving way: a pale greenish light was growing round him. It did not at first show him what kind of a place he was in, for the light seemed to be coming out of himself, and from the floor beside him, and had not yet reached the roof or wall. He turned, and there in the cold glow he saw lying beside him Sam, Pippin, and Merry. They were on their backs, and their faces looked deathly pale; and they were clad in white. About them lay many treasures, of gold maybe, though in that light they looked cold and unlovely. On their heads were circlets, gold chains were about their waists, and on their fingers were many rings. Swords lay by their sides, and shields were at their feet. But across their three necks lay one long naked sword.

Suddenly a song began: a cold murmur, rising and falling. The voice seemed far away and immeasurably dreary, sometimes high in the air and thin, sometimes like a low moan from the ground. Out of the formless stream of sad but horrible sounds, strings of words would now and again shape themselves: grim, hard, cold words, heartless and miserable. The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered. Frodo was chilled to the marrow. After a while the song became clearer, and with dread in his heart he perceived that it had changed into an incantation:

Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone: never more to wake on stony bed, never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie, till the dark lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land.

He heard behind his head a creaking and scraping sound. Raising himself on one arm he looked, and saw now in the pale light that they were in a kind of passage which behind them turned a corner. Round the corner a long arm was groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam, who was lying nearest, and towards the hilt of the sword that lay upon him.

At first Frodo felt as if he had indeed been turned into stone by the incantation. Then a wild thought of escape came to him. He wondered if he put on the Ring, whether the Barrow-wight would miss him, and he might find some way out. He thought of himself running free over the grass, grieving for Merry, and Sam, and Pippin, but free and alive himself. Gandalf would admit that there had been nothing else he could do.

But the courage that had been awakened in him was now too strong: he could not leave his friends so easily. He wavered, groping in his pocket, and then fought with himself again; and as he did so the arm crept nearer. Suddenly resolve hardened in him, and he seized a short sword that lay beside him, and kneeling he stooped low over the bodies of his companions. With what strength he had he hewed at the crawling arm near the wrist, and the hand broke off; but at the same moment the sword splintered up to the hilt. There was a shriek and the light vanished. In the dark there was a snarling noise.

Frodo fell forward over Merry, and Merry’s face felt cold. All at once back into his mind, from which it had disappeared with the first coming of the fog, came the memory of the house down under the Hill, and of Tom singing. He remembered the rhyme that Tom had taught them. In a small desperate voice he began: Ho! Tom Bombadil! and with that name his voice seemed to grow strong: it had a full and lively sound, and the dark chamber echoed as if to drum and trumpet.

Frodo sings a song of power Bombadil had taught him, and Bombadil comes back to save them. In a weird way it reminds me of Gandalf using the light to turn the trolls into stone back in The Hobbit, but both Tom B. and the barrow-wight and so much more ancient and other-worldly, the comparison just highlights what a different kind of story this is. 

What most struck me is how Frodo is also something of a vessel for thoughts and impulses not his own. “A wild thought of escape came to him.” “The courage that had been wakened in him.” For all that, though, he’s much more intentional than he was when the other hobbits were first seized by Old Man Willow. Then he just ran down the path and cried out wildly for help because he couldn’t find anything else to do; now, he knows the right songs to sing, and he summons Bombadil. He invokes him, almost in a religious sense. For all that he’s enabled by almost external thoughts and virtues coming upon and into him, he’s the one manning the wheel. To a point; but as much as anyone could expect any mere mortal to manage against a corrupted, arguably timeless spirit.

And it’s about damned time, and a good warm-up for what Frodo more than any of them will be up against. to quote another story entirely:

.... You're in one.

What’s Happening

The new Odyssey movie is coming out, and some of the worst people online have opinions. The internet often has opinions about movies, especially when non-Caucasian people are cast, or not cast. I lived through the hateful posts over Rue’s casting, and Ariel’s in the new live action Little Mermaid. And of course as a longtime Tolkien fan, I know the story of Naz Hamphreys, the British woman of Pakistani descent who was told she couldn’t audition to play a Hobbit (and hobbit) extra because she was too white.

If anything, this Odyssey dust-up hits closer to home, probably because it involves the classics. I’m a medievalist by training, so I understand something of the frustration with people twisting your own special subject into an intellectual pretzel without wanting to understand what the scholarship actually shows. Here, Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythical face that cast a thousand ships. 

What Thomas Williams Wrote

A beautiful movie star is cast in a beloved story. The character is fictional—she isn’t even fully human. Nonetheless, activists and purists insist that the actor is the wrong race.

I’m speaking of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular Japanese manga series. Critics accused the movie’s creators of “whitewashing” the heroine, a cyborg whose physical form is entirely prosthetic and whose race and gender are, in fact, mutable. She’s implanted with the consciousness of a Japanese woman, but her memories have been suppressed and edited. The story is an examination of how unstable identity is, and how untethered it can be from the body. Yet for detractors, the politics of representation—the simple fact that Johansson isn’t Asian—overrode the power of the film’s philosophical inquiry.

Audiences are willing to suspend all manner of disbelief in service of a good story—except, apparently, when it comes to race. Hence the controversy surrounding this year’s most anticipated movie, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. [...] 

Such selective indignation relies on an idiosyncratic reading of Greek myth. In the most famous telling, Helen of Troy is not born but hatched. Zeus appears to Helen’s human mother, Leda, under the guise of a swan. After a sexual encounter, Leda lays eggs. Out comes Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra, also played by Nyong’o). Which is to say, Nolan’s critics seem to be committing themselves to the idea that Zeus—the god of gods; the onetime waterfowl—was “white.” His offspring, therefore, could not possibly be portrayed by someone with dark skin.

What It Means

With respect, Williams’s pointing to details of the Leda myth somewhat misses the point, and the danger. It’s not that Musk and the rest suffer from two little imagination, or that they’ve convinced themselves that Zeus in swan form must have been white; it’s that Helen of Troy was beauty personified, and that the greatest heroes and warriors of western civilization would have gone to war over anything other than alabaster skin.

The irony is, in the classical period, whiteness wasn’t the prestige-point it is for Musk and all the rest. In their known world (so setting aside China, the Americas, and the like), culture and power really did center around the Mediterranean, not just southern Europe (which historically had its own limited claims to whiteness) but also the Near East and northern Africa. A black Ethiopian would likely seem more familiar and as part of the in-group than a pale-skinned Visigoth.

I’m reminded of a favorite lyric from the Avenue Q song, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” (VIDEO):

Gary: Now there was a fine upstanding black man. Princeton: Who? Gary: Jesus Christ. Kate: But, Gary, Jesus was white. Gary: No, Jesus was black. Kate: No, Jesus was white. Gary: No, I’m pretty sure Jesus was black. Princeton: Guys – guys – Jesus was Jewish.

As if that would settle a damn thing.

The reality is, people living in what would become Greece and Italy back in Homer’s time wouldn’t have looked like people in Greece and Italy today, much less like the northern European “white” people they want to connect to that history. As the Vox interview (below) points out, though, this isn’t a one-off impulse. It’s worth thinking about why so many people are drawn to that connection.

Related Stories

The Bulwark: “Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong” (PF)

Vox: “Why the alt-right loves ancient Rome” (PF)

Salon: “The new Helen of Troy is Black — and that’s upsetting racists” (PF)

Salon: ““This is a mythological story”: Nyong’o responds to criticism of Helen of Troy casting” (PF)

New York Times: “A Black Helen of Troy? Fine. A White Obama? Not Yet.” (PF)

In lieu of a musical break

The whole episode is both applicable and good TV on its own terms, if you have the time.

More Stories about Racism, “Reverse Discrimination” and White Supremacy

Anne Applebaum: "What, actually, is European Civilization?"

Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times: “John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist” (PF)

Politico: “AfD, Vox mingle with ex-US Border Patrol chief, white nationalist leader at ‘remigration summit’ “ (PF)

Salon: “Trump’s dog whistles and prosecutions echo Nixon’s racist strategy” (PF)

Forward: “Arkansas whites-only community sued by woman with Jewish ancestry” (PF)

Wired: “Department of Labor Tells Employees to Report Anyone Prioritizing DEI” (PF)

Gothamist: “NY-based Accenture worker alleges he was axed because of his dreadlocks” (PF)

Salon: “Watching Fox News increases belief in “Great Replacement” hokum” (PF)

Slate: “Does John Roberts’ Whites-Only Childhood Home Explain the Supreme Court’s Callais Ruling?” (PF)

Note

I wrote the below last weekend, then fell slightly more than ‘under the weather’ and wasn’t able to post anything for several days. Since then, and since JVL’s worthwhile piece above, the situation with 60 Minutes has gotten even more dramatic. The new 60 Minutes head Nick Bilton held an all-hands meeting Monday, and depending on who you believe, the long-time correspondent Scott Pelley either stood up bravely for his team or threw a performative hissy-fit to call out his new boss in front of their whole team. 

For the record I lean heavily toward the first option. Even if he could have handled things better, it doesn’t seem like journalists of substance like Pelley were long for CBS. As a favorite show of mine put it all those years ago:

Obviously that’s where the drama is so the conversation’s largely moved on. I still think the bigger issue is with corporate vs. independent media. I’ve long thought one of the biggest dangers Americans are dealing with is how so many people get our political “facts” from the unholy combination of unsourced social media posts and AI slop and thought the best thing we could do was read and share professional, well-edited journalism. Journalists are also more threatened both by the administration and angry people online than I’ve ever seen; they need a team that will stand with them. But professional journalism doesn’t mean corporate media, and independent doesn’t have to mean isolated. Even as the 60 Minutes news story has moved on a bit, it’s still worth thinking about what those labels mean.

What’s Going On

CBS’s 60 Minutes, which you’ll probably either think of as either the gold standard of television news programs or that old show your grandparents watch depending on what generation you’re from, is going through some changes. Specifically, Bari Weiss fired several people who had been doing good journalism on the show for years and replaced at least one of them with someone who doesn’t seem to have the requisite skills to do anything like that. If her job is either to produce good news-content or make more money for CBS, this choice seems like a miss. 

If you don’t recognize her, Weiss is most famous as the founder of The Free Press, a very popular Substack publication among conservatives who think they’re underrepresented in mainstream media, particularly people concerned about being “cancelled” on Twitter back when it wasn’t so kneejerk conservative. Before that, she wrote op-eds for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on both politics and cultural issues. (She started, I believe, with book reviews.) She’s not particularly extreme by modern MAGA standards, but she’s still comfortably conservative and definitely comes off as a friendly media voice for those in power who might value that kind of thing.

Last year Paramount (CBS’s parent company) bought Free Press for $150 million and made Bari Weiss head of CBS’s news division. Free Press really was wildly popular, though probably not worth $150mil. But more to the point, Weiss herself didn’t have the management or broadcast experience to manage CBS’s news division well. Her real purpose isn’t vocational or economic: it’s to keep Trump happy. 

And as JVL argues, it’s a good example of the dangers of corporate media.

That’s a term that needs some unpacking. I’ll get to that in a minute.

What JVL Writes

Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties.

But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix.

So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent.

This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper.

It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe.

What’s Going On Contd.

On a slightly different narrative, The Bulwark’s podcaster in chief, Tim Miller, was recently singled out as a potential foreign agent. From the Reason piece:

The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists of treason during the war. Now the administration has found a specific (if extremely tenuous) legal justification for his claims: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

After The Bulwark journalist Tim Miller shared someone else's paraphrase of an Iranian TV news report about the ceasefire negotiations, the official White House Rapid Response account on X commented that Miller is "starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim should register under FARA for being an agent of a foreign country."

FARA is a somewhat obscure (to me) federal law requiring people “conducting political activities ‘at the order, request, or under the direction or control’ of a foreign power to register publicly or face jail time or fines.” If someone’s posting on X saying American elections are full of fraud and the results shouldn’t be trusted, it’s not the worst idea for the government and presumably the rest of us to know if they’re bankrolled by Moscow, Beijing or Tehran. The law also has a long history of misuse, and in any event what Tim’s accused of seems to fall far short of what the law requires. 

Whether Tim broke the law is beyond my expertise, and really beyond what my point here requires. To me, this seems to be about Team Trump wanting to suppress news reports that are critical of our war in Iran, and perhaps inflict a bit of punishment on a news site that’s rightly viewed as an anti-Trump publication. Not because they’re biassed but, to abuse a line from another casualty of Paramount’s recent kowtowing to the administration, reality has a well-known anti-Trump bias.

What matters here is less whether Miller broke the law or not, whether the law is a good one or not, but that he’s been accused, and to be accused requires the resources to defend himself. 

What It Means

My parents were, at one point, journalists and editors in local print journalism. They moved on to communications-heavy jobs in the nonprofit world around the time Gannett was closing a lot of those papers. I don’t think their career move was directly tied to the shrinking profitability of local newspapers (they weren’t fired, and they left several years before their papers closed), but it was close enough in time. 

That meant for much of my middle and high school years, I was surrounded by stories of newspapers trying to work financially as the internet took over. Most of them failed. I’ve since learned the problem was more about falling ad rates as the internet gave companies more places to advertise, not shrinking subscriptions per se, but both problems lead to a similar situation. If news outlets can’t get enough revenue through subscriptions or ads or whatever other source, if you wanted to do serious journalism that rose above Buzzfeed listsicles, one of the best paths was to find some sort of wealthy benefactor who would support them not as a profitable business but out of public interest and perhaps as a way to earn or at least buy a legacy. 

Meaning when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post that seemed like a good thing. A sad necessity, to be sure, but it would give them the resources to do quality journalism. Bezos could afford it.

As JVL points out, that was at least a tryable hypothesis in a world where liberal principles still held. Bezos might want to keep the Post afloat in the same way Andrew Carnegie endowed university chairs and public libraries. He could trust the government would treat his other businesses fairly. With Trump, though, if the Post published something the president took issue with, Trump could deny Amazon tariff exemptions or forbid NASA from partnering with Blue Origins. To the extent it was ever going to work, having a benefactor fund newspapers and their modern equivalent was only ever going to work if their owners could expect fair treatment by the government for all their other businesses.

The Ellisons are in a slightly different situation. Larry Ellison the father owns or is heavily invested in several tech companies, most notably Oracle and Tesla. David Ellison the son is much more concentrated in media companies so would be vulnerable to government interference in different ways. But when he wanted to merge with Paramount he needed the government’s approval, and illiberalism meant the government didn’t just investigate those deals on antitrust grounds. He needed to stay in Trump’s good graces if he wanted those deals to be approved.

So rich businessmen as benefactors who have other unrelated companies they need favorable tax rates or government contracts for? That’s not going to work. And even if that doesn’t apply in a major way, if you need regulatory approval from the government, that’s also not going to work. But Tim Miller’s getting threatened by the White House’s social media accounts points to another non-starter: people reporting the news as solo bloggers are basically standing alone, which makes it harder to tell the truth fearlessly, and easier for those with power to intimidate them one by one.

The solution is to find a way of doing journalism, or more accurately a scale of doing it, that can get enough revenue to pay for its expenses on its own, by people committed to their vision or mission and also “ordinary” enough to have less to lose if they fall out of favor with the government. That means having people willing and able to pay for a subscription, or advertisers willing to support them from their end; but it also means having a small enough scope. At this point in his piece JVL goes into a bit of a sales-pitch for the Bulwark, but the same concerns probably factor in for any independent news site trying to pay their bills. They can’t cover every story, their videos and graphics may not be as nice as they’d prefer, they won’t have people working for them in Tehran or Kyiv. But they make do, and they end up providing something of value.

In the end, it’s about finding the right level of independence. Independent from people whose values don’t line up with or at least support theirs, but not independent as in isolated. And that requires finding enough people willing to actually pay for what they provide. “They” meaning independent journalism generally, not just The Bulwark particularly; though if you know me, I suppose my biases by now are clear. 

I also have a bias, though, for people working together to educate people on what’s happening, and to put important opinions into words. There’s a real value to journalists organizing themselves into groups doing the work together, both for us news-readers and for their own protection in a political landscape that can be quite hostile. If the situation is such it has to look more like the Grey Company of Eregion than the great hosts of Gondor and Rohan as they ride out to the Black Gate, so be it. It still matters that someone’s watching your back.

Related Stories

Slate: “New "60 Minutes" head faces blowback as staffers rebuke changes” (PF)

Salon: “Bari Weiss brings Trumpism to “60 Minutes”” (PF)

New York Magazine: “Bari Weiss Chooses War” (PF)

Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark: "Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need”

Or in rebuttal:

Chris Cilizza: “Why Scott Pelley Isn't the Hero Everyone Thinks He Is ⏱️”

In lieu of a musical break

More Stories about Journalism and Freedom of the Press

Paul Krugman: "Stop Your Chirping!"

Mark Hertling, The Bulwark: "The Scandal at ‘Stars and Stripes’"

Salon: “Axios accused of “market manipulation” with Iran reporting” (PF)

The Conversation: “Chilling effects of Trump’s war on free speech extend far beyond campus walls – and that’s the point” (PF)

Vox: “The FBI investigates a journalist” (PF)

Reason: “Trump Administration's Review of ABC's Broadcast Licenses Looks Like 'Illegal Jawboning'” (PF)

Salon: “Patel promised to come after the media. So far, it’s only been women” (PF)

Deutsche Welle: “World press freedom declines as authoritarianism rises” (PF)

Wired: “The FCC Has a Fast Lane for Complaints About Trump’s Media Critics” (PF)

Salon: “Military’s independent newspaper captured by MAGA” (PF)

And just for funnsies: