The soft bigotry of mainstream media MAGA coddling

Follow the real power behind Trump

Jeffrey Denny

“Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.”

This journalism credo, coined by writer Finley Peter Dunn in 1902, inspires real journalism to serve the little fellers, not the Rockefellers, as Jefferson intended.

Trump and his Reich state media have flipped the script to comfort the comfortable (wealthy whites) and afflict the afflicted (poor nonwhites).

It gets complicated because many whites are poor. They’ve been easy pickins for cynical Republicans ever since Nixon’s racial divide-and-conquer Southern Strategy. They cleverly mine innate bigotry to sucker poor whites into blaming their plight on the minority poor and their Democratic allies. Then along comes Trump to make bigotry great again.

On every front, Trump is MAGA’s own personal Jesus, promising, “I am your justice … I am your retribution” and avenging everything that nasty, ignorant, grumpy MAGA drunk uncles rant about.

But professional journalists in the true Fourth Estate, like The New York Times, awkwardly dance around the ugly truth about MAGAs like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

Which is this: Every horrible thing Trump does, he does for MAGAs. The worse he is, the more they love him. Trump may be their kingdom, power, and glory, but they’re the power behind the throne.

Yet real journalists rarely follow the power and call MAGAs out for goading Trump’s reign of destruction. It’s safer to fulminate over Trump. Why? Thoughts:

MAGAs are fish in a barrel

Serious, intelligent, decent people don’t shoot easy targets, like Trump and MAGAs do. Real journalists don’t want to afflict the clearly afflicted.

The closest journalism gets to holding MAGAs accountable for their addled, irrational, incoherent Fox-fed Trump nonsense is simply letting them talk. MAGAs say the darndest things.

Journalists are woke — meaning respectful

They tend to be college-educated, drawn to the humanities, and trend humanistic. They see MAGAs like the Seinfeld wealthy art collector critiquing the Kramer painting. They sense great vulnerability, adult children crying out for love, innocent orphans in the postmodern world. Their struggle is man’s struggle.

Wokeness sleeps when it comes to MAGAs

Elite-educated, progressive Millennial and Gen Z journalists who are uniquely concerned about marginalized people don’t see poor whites that way — if they see them at all — even if MAGAs are from poor immigrant families in dying factory and farm towns who never enjoyed their white privilege. So their “lived experience” is unknown, dismissed, or tokenized.

Soft bigotry of low expectations

Coined by former President George W. Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, it means holding people down by patronizing them. As in, bless their hearts, they can’t do any better. He was talking about how elites treat poor people of color. Journalists apply it to poor whites.

MAGAs aren’t journalists, and vice versa

The last best MAGA “journalism,” unfortunately, may be from Ivy League Silicon Valley “Hillbilly Elegy” sellout JD Vance. Few working-class MAGAs without college degrees — which 60% of Americans lack — staff the elite media or any real journalism.

The industry itself worries that it’s dominated by the privileged, often from wealthy families and top-tier colleges, and disconnected from non-elites. They observe MAGAs from afar, like primatologists studying apes without living with them. So, thoughtful journalists who don’t know any MAGAs give them a pass.

Journalist and “Poor Teeth” writer Sarah Smarsh, who grew up poor on a Kansas farm, talks about the problem and solution in a 2014 interview with Longreads:

This is why we need more diverse voices in social discourse. Not the usual suspects aiming to give voice to them, but their own voices writing the stories. It’s no longer enough for even the most earnest upper- or middle-class white male reporter to write about marginalized or disadvantaged populations. We need writing from those populations to witness them being all sorts of individual human beings. Access to higher education is the most crucial step toward that goal.

Yes, but colleges need to find and support all marginalized and disadvantaged populations, including poor white kids in MAGA country.

Ignorant Trumpers may worry that college will groom their kids into socialism. Talk about soft bigotry. And heck, every Fox News writer, producer, and star went to college — many are Ivy League elites — and they somehow managed to resist liberal indoctrination.

Fox “personalities” who fool and laugh at MAGAs all the way to their third vacation villas will never hold their cash cow accountable, of course.

To do its Constitutional job, and maybe even save the industry, real journalism must stop coddling and start exposing the people running and ruining the country — the same enemies from within who rioted on J6, hooted hate at Trump rallies, threaten fellow Americans who do their patriotic job holding Trump accountable, and make Trump dance to their malicious tune.

Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.