It’s not always easy to sympathize with reporters for the New York Times, because so many of them act like . . . how to put it? . . . like reporters for the New York Times. But there are exceptions, and to their list we may now add the name of Richard Fausset. He writes (especially well) from the Times’s Atlanta bureau, after an adventurous career covering drug cartels in Mexico. Even Atlanta must look good after life with Mexican drug cartels.
Anyway, there’s poor Fausset, minding his own business, having just come back from Ohio, where he profiled a “Nazi sympathizer,” which is to say, in layman’s terms, a Nazi. Another day, another dollar. Suddenly his profile is published and the homey, cloistered world of New York Times readers explodes in outrage. Mostly the readers expressed outrage about Fausset because Fausset didn’t express outrage about the Nazi.
Fausset portrayed the Nazi—no reason to humanize the bastard by printing his name here—in all his ordinariness. His ordinariness, from what I could tell, was the theme of the profile. Fausset painted his picture with pointillist detail, the way good writers do. His tone was flat and controlled, deliberately without affect.
So here’s the Nazi with his bride-to-be, “young and in love,” eating at Applebee’s. His personal manner is “polite and low key,” and his “Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother.” (Hey, Ma, look who I brought home!) He shops at Target. He knows enough about cooking to add chili flakes to the garlic and olive oil when he’s making pasta. He owns some books and apparently reads them. He likes sarcasm and watches Seinfeld and his tattoos are lame.
But the guy is, after all, a Nazi, and as the details pile up Fausset never lets his readers forget it; or at least he’s trying not to let his readers forget it. At times—as when he says that Hitler was pretty “chill” on the whole gay rights thing—the Nazi approaches self-parody, like the Kenneth Mars character who writes “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers. Other times, as when he daydreams about the all-white America that would have followed a German victory in World War II, he is merely revolting. The piece ends with everybody sitting down to a nice bowl of that pasta.
When he filed his profile, Fausset probably thought he’d ticked off all the obligatory boxes. A Times story has to have a lot of what today’s newsfolk like to call “context.” Check: The Anti-Defamation League is brought in to give background on the Traditionalist Worker party, the group of lunatics and buffoons our Nazi belongs to. You need dispassionate disclaimers. Check: Fausset reminds us that the right-wing marchers in Charlottesville adhere to “ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream.” (Which, he might have added, is why they haven’t.) And a sly linkage of extremists to garden-variety conservatives is always welcome. Check: Many of the Nazi’s views “would not seem exotic to most American conservatives.”
What’s not to like? Plenty, according to the “huge amount of feedback” the Times received, “most of it sharply critical,” according to an editor’s note written a day after the original story. You’ve probably noticed that “norms” and “normal” and the uncomely verb “normalize” have lately become indispensable to the political vocabulary of Democrats, because, I suppose, we have a Republican president who is indisputably abnormal. Readers accused Fausset of “normalizing” the Ohio Nazi—which might mean that Fausset made him look less like Trump. Can’t be sure.
The editor’s note offered some examples of the feedback, all of them coming from our modern Chautauqua, Twitter. Here’s the former CNN news reader Soledad O’Brien: “Would be interesting, if instead of normalizing nazis, if the @nyt actually assessed them through the eyes of those they hate: blacks and jews.”
“ ‘How to normalize Nazis 101!’ one reader wrote on Twitter. ‘I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,’ wrote another. ‘Attempting to “normalize” white supremacist groups—should Never have been printed!’ ”
This last one, with its misbegotten capitalization, strange punctuation, and iron-fisted tone, could have come from the pudgy fingers of Trump himself. Sad.
There was also a considerable amount of potty-mouthing from Times readers. The house columnist at Teen Vogue, believe it or not, thought she needed to teach the Times a thing or two about manners. “Let’s make one thing f—ing clear, @nytimes: There is no such thing as a Nazi with good manners.” Roger, Teen Vogue!
From these and other critiques, it became clear that by “normalization” Times readers meant that Fausset fails to rain a sufficient amount of indignation and vituperation upon his Nazi. They took his affectless tone and accumulation of homey detail as indifference at best, endorsement at worst.
“The piece is heavy on banality,” wrote one indignant critic in the Columbia Journalism Review, “but fails to capture the evil that [the Nazi] doesn’t even try to conceal.” But this point is self-canceling, isn’t it? If the piece doesn’t capture the Nazi’s evil, then how did the critic discover that the Nazi wasn’t trying to conceal it? Maybe Fausset has a high enough opinion of his readers to think that some things go without saying.
But he’d be wrong. There’s a trick in journalism called the “to-be-sure paragraph.” It is meant to get the readers off the reporter’s back, letting them know that the reporter is already familiar with the objections that may be forming in their minds. Say you’re writing a story for Times readers about the loveliness of rainbows. “To be sure,” the reporter will write, “the beauty we associate with rainbows often follows violent storms that tend to devastate poor areas while leaving wealthier enclaves relatively untouched.”
Fausset’s real fault is that he didn’t salt his story with to-be-sure paragraphs. “He eats at Applebee’s,” he could have written, then reassured his readers by starting a new paragraph: “To be sure, eating at Applebee’s will do little to alter the fact that this Nazi is a creep.”
“His pasta is delicious.” Then: “To be sure, delicious pasta doesn’t weigh much in the scales of this country’s history of racial injustice . . . ”
Times readers are a needy bunch, craving reassurance at every turn. The reassurance they require is that their beliefs—even those that are shared by pretty much everybody, like anti-fascism—are true and righteous altogether. And they need to be reassured that the writers and editors of their favorite newspaper know this. They want to see it in print.
But these days I wonder: Is the horse pulling the cart or the other way round? For years, critics of the Times, especially on the right, have accused the paper of propagandizing its readers, leading them by the nose to drink deep from the trough of received, vaguely leftish political opinions. But suddenly the situation may be reversed: It’s the readers who are pulling the Times towards them, and when the Times doesn’t comply, they get angry. Very angry. And you don’t want them to get angry.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
