Slouching Toward Post-Journalism
&gt; Two weeks after the Cotton controversy, the Times published an essay by Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize–winning black reporter, titled “A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists.” Equating objectivity with “whiteness,” Lowery called for “moral clarity, which will require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms to obfuscate the truth.” The Trump administration and the Republican Party, Lowery urged, should be labeled as what they are: a “refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies.” In the post-Bennet moment of post-journalism, editors at the paper were inclined to agree.<p>Traditional liberals that think it’s just Republican ideas that will be denounced as pernicious “whiteness” are in for a rude surprise. I saw this quite starkly this summer. Liberal city dwellers in Chicago and Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods, but being too afraid to say anything openly. It seems to have passed, but for a spell, near-universal beliefs about the necessity for order in a civil society became something many were too afraid to support for fear of being lumped together with <i>Trump supporters</i>.