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| The novel charts Hitler's childhood from the point of view of his satanic caretaker (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I find this provocative and disturbing. I'm glad someone said it, though I ... better read the article.
At the intersection of novelty and victimhood, we find stories of Nazis going to Panera, their ideas largely stripped of history and context. Much has been said about the “normalization” of such ideas — that by portraying Nazis as average, even sympathetic, people, journalists run the risk of helping to integrate violent ideologies into the mainstream. The thing is that violent, racist ideologies have spent lots of time in the mainstream. They’ve proven very destructive. The imperative of the moment is not just to debate about how to keep them at the margins, but to remember out loud why they belong there.
The danger, then, in an everyday portrait of the white supremacist next door isn’t in the normalization but in the populist ideology that’s buried deep in the narrative. Depictions of ordinary, small, powerless American life have proven an immensely useful political tool at times. These depictions have provided a packaging for executive power, a way to delegitimize war protests, and, of course, a justification for racism. Reducing a white supremacist to the features of his harmless life obscures the horror his ideas can unleash.
What Ezra Klein had to say.
The problem with the Times story isn’t that it’s about a modern-day Nazi. It’s that it doesn’t offer any insight into modern-day Nazis. Readers are, presumably, supposed to respond with shock upon learning that Nazis also bake muffins, own pets, watch sitcoms. But this is an old point, and it can be made with starker examples. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, a painter, a lover of musicals, a talented mimic. It is childish, this late in human history, to be surprised that evil people are also people.
TPM's take.
Specifically at issue for many readers was Fausset’s lack of pushback against, or context for, the beliefs of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist from Ohio. “[I]n person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother,” Fausset wrote of Hovater.
How does this relate to newsroom diversity?
Here.
And Here.
And Here.
Does it relate to the ethics of interviewing and basic reporting? Maybe.
The New York Times published a profile over the weekend of an Ohio man named Tony Hovater, a co-founder of the white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party. The piece, by reporter Richard Fausset, was meant to say something profound about the banality of evil—This man shops for groceries! He has a Twin Peaks tattoo! He has both a wife and cats!—but it came across instead as an exercise in making evil sound banal.
Here's an example of a very different approach to interviewing a controversial figure.
I began to get nervous as the interview day approached. By the time I boarded a plane to Spokane, which is a one-hour flight from Seattle and is near the border with Idaho, a state that's almost 90 percent white, I was half sure that this interview was my worst career decision to date. Initially, I had hoped that my research on Dolezal would reassure me that there was a way to find real value in this conversation, that there would be a way to actually turn this circus into a productive discussion on race in America.
But then I read her book.
By the way, the neo-Nazi loses his job.
The 29-year-old New Carlisle, Ohio resident told The Washington Post that he, his wife and his brother-in-law had all been fired from the restaurant where they all worked, and that he had been forced to relocate due to financial reasons and concerns for his own safety....
Though the Times article did not mention the restaurant — Mr. Hovater had identified himself as a welder by trade — people appalled by his views learned that he worked there and began calling and leaving online messages.
And the piece has defenders.
The entire universe has agreed that The New York Times did a terrible thing a few days ago in running Richard Fausset’s portrait of a young Nazi from the Ohio suburbs named Tony Hovater, but I have to confess that, regardless of the universe and its opinions, I learned something from the piece....
Fausset and his editors at the Times wanted to discover some dramatic cause or origin of young Hovater’s turn toward fascism—a “Rosebud,” as Fausset says—that would presumably be something like an abusive father, or a divorce by his parents, or a drug problem, or some other terrible experience. The search for this sort of thing is a mania of the Times. It is an ideological tic. It is Rosebud-ism. It is the presupposition, based on nothing at all, that someone who turns to extreme and violent ideas must be impelled to do so by some external event, perhaps from long-ago, exactly the way that Citizen Kane’s journey into mogul-hood was distorted by an unhappy event of his childhood. It used to be that, every time a jihadi committed a jihad, the Times (and other papers, too) would go looking for drunk-driving arrests and bad experiences in school and other such matters, in search of the original cause.
But I think that a more typical reality is the one that we see in Fausset’s article. Someone is caught up by ideas—Murray Rothbard’s libertarianism, in this case. And one doctrine leads to the next, not necessarily through any logical connection or inner imperative, but merely because doctrines are intoxicating, and a penchant for intoxications of that sort may drift along from theory to theory, sometimes veering toward ever more exotic and thrilling ones, the way that somebody with a weakness with drugs may advance from marijuana to heroin....
I do not mean to draw too many deductions from Fausset’s piece. I do mean to say: lay off on the poor man! Fausset, I mean. He went to the suburbs of Ohio, and he did what reporters are supposed to do, which is to report. There was not enough of that during the political campaign in 2016. We needed more pieces, not fewer, on Trump voters and the new developments. We needed the reporters to be open-minded, and not judgmental. We have not lacked for attitudinizing during the last couple of years. We have lacked for reporting. Here is a reporter. It is good. Let him go on reporting, without feeling that he has to prove his anti-Nazi credentials every two sentences.
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