Luke Ford

Whatever you think of her politics, Batya Ungar-Sargon, like Molly Jong-Fast, is a lovely person with extraordinary levels of empathy. I struggled with chronic fatigue from age 22 to 55 and not many people reacted with empathy. Batya did. I criticized her on Twitter around 2017. She then sent me a DM and she wanted to know about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then I kept criticizing her on Twitter and she blocked me. I might have been a troll (the truth is, I was serving up tweets sent to me by a friend who could not afford to send the tweets himself). That her initial reaction was to engage me on a humane level speaks well of her.

When you watch Batya’s interviews on Youtube, you get a sense of her graciousness and good cheer.

For most of my life, I’ve been in the grips of undiagnosed ADHD and as a result I couldn’t abide by social norms. In the grip of brain chemistry beyond my direct control, I relied on other people to be the better man (examples that come to mind include Jewish Journal of Los Angeles leaders Rob Eshman and David Suissa as well as some of my rabbis). I often knew I was doing this while in the middle of my compulsive trolling. Getting medicated for ADHD in 2023 (adderall) removed 90% of these anti-social instincts.

Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote in this 2021 book:

* [Don] Lemon’s guests were Kirsten Powers, a senior CNN political analyst; Alice Stewart, a CNN commentator playing the supporting role of token Republican; and Stephanie Jones – Rogers, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, whose book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South had been cited in an article on Vox, a liberal opinion site that caters to millennials.
Powers had much to say about Donald Trump’s female supporters. “People will say that they support him for reasons other than his racist language,” she told Lemon. “They’ll say, ‘Well I’m not racist; I just voted for him because I didn’t like Hillary Clinton.’ And I just want to say that that’s not, that doesn’t make you not racist. It actually makes you racist,” Powers explained. “As for why white women do it,” she went on, “I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of ways.”
Professor Jones – Rogers concurred, tying support for Trump to slavery. “So, as a historian, I explore white women’s economic investments in the institution of slavery,” she said. “And what that has led me to understand is that there’s this broader historical context that we need to keep in mind when we’re looking at white women’s voting patterns today, and as we look at their support — their overwhelming support of Donald Trump.” Lemon jumped in to note that just over half of white women had voted for Trump — hardly what would constitute “overwhelming” support. Jones – Rogers clarified: “What I meant by overwhelming was emotionally overwhelming.”
The sole Republican, Alice Stewart, was briefly allowed to respond, and voiced her resentment at being called racist for her vote for Trump, whom she chose for his policies. But Powers interjected: It’s not just Republican women who have a problem with racism but all white women, indeed, all white people . “Every white person benefits from an inherently racist system that is structurally racist, so we are all part of the problem,” Powers said. Jones – Rogers heartily agreed.

* the belief that America is an unrepentant white – supremacist state that confers power and privilege on white people, which it systematically denies to people of color. Those who hold this view believe an interconnected network of racist institutions infects every level of society, culture, and politics, imprisoning us all in a power binary based on race regardless of our economic circumstances. And the solution, according to those who hold this view, is not to reform institutions that still struggle with racism but to transform the consciousness of everyday Americans until we prioritize race over everything else.
This view is known as “antiracism,” or by the shorthand of being “woke,”…

* For a long time, this view was the province of far – left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, by and large through liberal media outlets like the New York Times , NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post , Vox, CNN, the New Republic , and the Atlantic . Once fringe, the idea that America is an unabated white – supremacist country and that the most important thing about a person is the immutable fact of their race is the defining paradigm of today, the one now favored by white liberals to describe our current moment. And it was when white liberals began espousing this woke narrative that it went from being mainstream to being an obsession; and even, most recently, to being an outright moral panic.

* It began around 2011, the year the New York Times erected its online paywall. It was then that articles mentioning “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” or “oppression” started to appear with exponential frequency at the Times , BuzzFeed, Vox, the Washington Post , and NPR, according to sociologists tracking these developments.

* Powers had been the resident liberal at Fox News until CNN poached her in 2016, for a rumored $950,000 yearly salary. But for Powers to traverse the ideological distance from Fox to CNN and take advantage of that nearly million – dollar salary, she had to undergo a woke metamorphosis. In 2015, while still employed by Fox, Powers had written a book called The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech . But in the intervening years, she repented. “I was too dismissive of real concerns by traumatized people and groups who feel marginalized and ignored,” she wrote in a mea culpa in her USA Today column.
Newly reformed as a believer in America as an enduring white – supremacist state, Powers was able to take to CNN and join a Berkeley professor writing for Vox, a left – wing website for highly educated millennials, and another mainstream television host, who were all in total agreement about how racist every white person in America is, especially anyone who voted for Trump…

* Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals.

* …a new breed of reporter — highly educated and socially aspirational — was elevated by JFK, who had worked on the Harvard Crimson , the school’s student newspaper, and treated his fellow Ivy League journalists as kindred spirits, flattering them into being loyal to him. He was so deft at this that reporters would later refer to the presidential candidate as “Jack,” cheering his speeches and singing anti – Nixon songs with Kennedy’s staffers at hotel bars, writes Timothy Crouse in his book about campaign journalism, The Boys on the Bus. 8 “He knew many of them socially, and he was careful to treat them with respect and affection,” Crouse explains. “His Harvard trained advisers spoke in an academic, sophisticated idiom that excluded many of the older reporters but appealed to the new generation.” 9 Their stock in the profession soared.
At the same time, the rise of television meant that there was another better medium for Americans looking for a stenographic account of what had happened on a given day — one that was more immediate, both temporally and sensually. Newspaper owners felt that they could no longer simply tell their readers what had happened; they had to add something, which put a premium on expertise, analysis, and colorful writing. These became staples of newspaper writing and created a demand for reporters with ever more education and expertise, and devalued the work of less educated reporters and editors.
Radio and TV also started to give the news a more national character, breaking down regional barriers by bringing images and newscasters from the major cities into the homes of Americans throughout the nation. What this meant was that influence was concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller, ever more coastal set; the issues that preoccupied editors and producers in New York and Washington were now those that preoccupied the nation at large.
But the thing that really jump – started the status revolution in journalism was the Watergate scandal, and — just as importantly — its treatment in the Hollywood film All the President’s Men . The movie suddenly made journalism seem like a very glamorous endeavor, at its peak a David and Goliath tale where plucky sexpots, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, could bring down the most powerful — and most unpopular — man on the planet. The journalism profession began to draw more ambitious and better educated people than ever before, people who would have otherwise gone into other professions but were drawn to the combination of purpose and fame that journalism now offered.

* Already by 1980, American journalists had tightened into an elite caste, as a survey by three social scientists revealed. S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter found that by that time journalism had undergone a “rapid rise to social prominence.” What was once a source of upward mobility for high school grads had morphed into an elite profession for the highly educated. 17 Surveying a random sample of journalists from America’s leading national media (the New York Times; the Washington Post; the Wall Street Journal; TIME; Newsweek; U.S. News & World Report; and the three commercial TV networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC), the scientists discovered that journalists were in fact one of the best – educated groups in America; 93 percent of those they surveyed had college degrees, and the majority had graduate degrees, too. Just one in five reported having fathers with what the researchers called “low – status jobs.” And their salaries in 1986 put leading journalists solidly in the upper middle class, with those at the top making much, much more and even taking on the status of celebrities. 18
The sociologists also found that in 1980, 90 percent of journalists were prochoice, compared to 31 percent of the public, 19 and 80 percent supported affirmative action for black Americans, compared to 57 percent of the nation. Just 26 percent of journalists had voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election, and 86 percent said they seldom or never went to religious services.

* In 1984, 26 percent of journalists voted for Ronald Reagan; by 2014, just 7 percent of journalists identified as Republican. 26 By 2015, 96 percent of journalists who made donations to a political campaign contributed to Hillary Clinton. 27 When researchers from Arizona State University and Texas A&M University surveyed business journalists from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg News , Associated Press, Forbes, New York Times , Reuters, and Washington Post in 2018, they found that just 4 percent had conservative political views.

* Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt gave this shift the justification it needed: By reporting his invented accusations of communism, reporters were amplifying his charges. The lesson many (liberal) journalists learned from the episode was that it was important not just to report the facts but to interpret them. That this interpretation would inevitably have a liberal bent was not the goal so much as it was a byproduct of their sociological makeup.

* When the Los Angeles Times wanted to compete with the New York Times , hoping to gain national prestige, its top editors knew what they had to do: switch from being conservative to being liberal. As Nick Williams, the editor in chief of the L.A. Times , put it, “Newspaper prestige, not always but usually, is a function of liberal estimation. Most intellectuals are liberal, and editorial prestige depends on what intellectuals judge it to be.”

* A scathing critique of the New York Times ran in Harper’s Magazine in 1977, arguing that the Times ignored what was going on in the Bronx and spent its time on “goldplated goblets and $90 brass candlesticks” because “neither Bergdorf Goodman nor Cartier has anything to say to welfare mothers in the south Bronx.” The obsession with white, well – off, upscale readers, “people of influence and affluence,” meant that newspapers began to expand into the suburbs rather than having anything to do with the working – class residents of their own cities. As the editor in chief of the L.A. Times put it bluntly, “We don’t sell any papers in Watts.” And as is always the case, this question of who newspapers were selling to influenced what they were writing about. Asked why his paper failed at covering communities of color, Otis Chandler, the publisher of the L.A. Times , said, “We couldn’t get the advertising to support that, because the mass black audience and the Chicano audience do not have the purchasing power that our stores require to spend additional money in the Times.”

* To make sure advertisers knew who their readers were — and to signal to readers who their readers were — the media stopped talking about the working class, stopped addressing their issues, and stopped representing their lives. Labor coverage, which used to be robust, was phased out…

* Thus, in the 1960s, two more magazines cropped up specifically for the purpose of promoting class through taste: the New York Review of Books and New York magazine. These publications were explicitly designed to, by turns, stoke and allay the class anxieties of urban college grads living in fear of not knowing what the book of the moment is, or where the right place to eat is, or what wine to order, thereby losing their claim to elite status. And, of course, it was all aspirational: You had to make sure people felt there was somewhere they were still excluded from, so they would buy the next issue.

* Just 29 percent of Limbaugh’s audience and 24 percent of the Fox News audience had graduated from college. Fifty – four percent of daytime talk show listeners had only a high school degree or less.

* Conservative talk radio is the perfect companion for long – haul drives across the floor, or if you’re a car mechanic working under the hoods of cars all day long. Back in the day, factory workers on the Lower East Side would appoint one of their ranks as the reader. The readers would read aloud from Yiddish newspapers, and sometimes poetry and novels, to the millions of Jewish immigrants rolling cigarettes and sewing shirtwaists sixteen hours a day. Today, working – class Americans have talk radio and, increasingly, YouTube and podcasts to keep their minds occupied while they labor at jobs that don’t allow them to sit at a desk scrolling through social media posts of twenty – nine cats having a worse day than they are.

* conservative outlets identified the abandoned working – class masses as a ready – made market. And the mainstream media made it easy. Rush Limbaugh portrayed the media as arrogant lefties, an out – of – touch elite, and his approach worked because, at least in part, it was true. “In effect, Limbaugh was filling the gap that was left when the mainstream media dropped the working – class audience,” writes Martin. “It was a relatively easy turn to make mainstream media the bogeyman; it had, after all, turned its back on the working class in favor of more – upscale citizens.”

* Fox News is not making anyone conservative. It is conservative because it caters to the working class — a working class long abandoned by the liberal press.

* There’s a Talmudic concept of hefker that refers to a thing that’s been abandoned and is no one’s responsibility. It comes up in the discussion of whether you can keep something you find on the ground or if you’re bound to return it to its owner. If the item is clearly hefker — abandoned — the Talmud suggests you can claim it as your own. The media signaled that the working class was hefker…

* There was another equally important way that the Times was successfully imitating Facebook. In 2018, high on the success of the Trump era, the Data Science Group at the Times launched Project Feels, designed to help understand and predict the emotional impact of the paper’s articles. The group asked twelve hundred readers to rate how articles made them feel, giving them a series of options that included boredom, hate, interest, fear, hope, love, and happiness. These readers were young and well educated — the target audience of many advertisers. What they found was perhaps not surprising: Emotions drive engagement. “Across the board, articles that were top in emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not,” the team reported. They then took that information to the Times ’s Advertising and Marketing Services department to perform an ad – effectiveness campaign. Their conclusion? “Readers’ emotional response to articles is useful for predicting advertising engagement.” 34
To monetize the insight, the Data Science Group then created an artificial intelligence machine – learning algorithm to predict which emotions future articles would evoke. The New York Times now sells this insight to advertisers, which can choose from eighteen emotions, seven motivations, and one hundred topics they want the reader to be feeling or thinking about when they encounter an ad. “By identifying connections between content and emotion, we’ve successfully driven ad engagement 6X more effectively than IAB benchmarks,” the Times’s Advertising website proudly declares. 35 “Brands can target ads to specific articles we predict will evoke particular emotions in our readers,” it pitches. “Brands have the opportunity to target ads to articles we predict will motivate our readers to take a particular action.” 36 As of April 2019, Project Feels had generated fifty campaigns, more than thirty million impressions, and strong revenue results. 37 The Project Feels impresarios insist that their insights are produced “without coordination with the newsroom” and that their findings “will never impact our news report or other editorial decisions.” 38 And yet, the Times’s own executive editor, Dean Baquet, admitted that he is deeply involved in the business side of journalism. “I think of myself as primarily the executive editor whose job it is to ensure the quality and the integrity of the report,” he told Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka at Recode’s Code/ Media conference in September of 2015. He went on:
“But I also think of myself as somebody whose job it is to preserve the New York Times which means I do think about advertising, I do think about the New York Times as a business. That does not mean that I drop the wall and sell ads. But it does mean that I think about the whole of the enterprise.”
But the truth is, the business side doesn’t need to control editorial for it to have the intended effect. The emotions driving journalists toward fame are the same ones driving people to share articles on Facebook. Journalists know what kinds of stories do well on social media, and every journalist does their darndest to get their work read as widely as possible. The incentives of journalists are so neatly aligned with those of Project Feels that they almost don’t need to coordinate; a quick glance through the New York Times is proof that, at least when it comes to Trump, there’s a perfect alignment between the two.
But this new emotion – driven, sensationalist approach to journalism at the Times isn’t just a canny appropriation of Face – book’s business model. It’s also a return to the sensationalism of a bygone era — and a complete reversal of where the newspaper once positioned itself on that question. One hundred and fifty years ago, Joseph Pulitzer and, prior to him, Benjamin Day were derided for their sensationalist approach to journalism that sought to directly access the emotions of their poor and working – class readers. The New York Times was founded as a reaction to that sensationalism, seeking a more staid approach to attract a more affluent readership. So it’s more than a little ironic to see the paper embracing the sensationalist approach it once derided, with one important difference: Where Day and Pulitzer appealed to the sensations of the poor and working classes, the Times’s revamped sensationalism today is designed to prick the emotions of the rich.
If you want to know what makes America’s educated liberal elites emotional, you only have to open the New York Times to find out.