Episode 195: David Leonhardt and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine
Added 2024-01-24 16:26:06 +0000 UTC"Make sense of the day’s news and ideas," urges The Morning, a daily New York Times newsletter. "Get smarter, faster on news and information that matters to you," Axios assures its readership. "This is how the news should sound," The New York Times again declares, via its podcast The Daily.
Over the last ten years, roughly speaking, we’ve seen the proliferation of the daily digest-style newsletter and podcast at legacy and new media organizations. Inspired, at least loosely, by the so-called explanatory journalism of Vox and similar outlets that arose in the mid-2010s, publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns of the news that allegedly matters most, delivered to the inboxes of upwardly mobile, dinner-party-hosting, perennially on-the-go professionals - or at least those who want to think of themselves as such.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with accessibility in news media—quite the opposite, in fact. But, for corporate “explanatory” news models, it’s worth asking who makes the decisions about which news is the “most important,” and about how that news is framed. How do seemingly benign, even folksy promises to “make sense of the news” mask the ideology of corporate media institutions? And what are the dangers of shepherding audiences into a center-right political consensus that issues complaints like “campus speech is vexing” and “the left is less welcoming than the right”?
On this episode, we examine the rise and hegemony of centrist micro-news platforms–from Axios’s trademarked "Smart Brevity" to The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s newsletter The Morning and The Daily podcast–looking at how they package left-punching, pathologically incurious, glib news nuggets served up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning liberals.
Our guest is writer Jacob Bacharach.
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Guest
Jacob Bacharach (@jakebackpack) is a novelist and essayist whose writing has appeared in The New Republic and The Outline, The New York Times and New York Magazine, The Baffler and Jacobin. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which is A Cool Customer: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
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Show Notes
Why Is David Leonhardt So Happy?
Jacob Bacharach | March 15, 2022 | The New Republic
David Leonhardt’s Centrist Nostalgia Won’t Save Democracy
Jeet Heer | September 23, 2022 | The Nation
Sam Adler-Bell | February 24, 2022 | New York Magazine
Three Ways Our Media is Militarizing the Civilian Population in Gaza
Adam Johnson | November 3, 2023 | The Real News Network
There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID
Steven W. Thrasher | February 10, 2022 | Scientific American
Katelyn Jetelina | June 9, 2022 | Your Local Epidemiologist
What’s Really Going on With COVID and Race?
Shannon Palus | June 17, 2022 | Slate
The NYT’s polarizing pandemic pundit
Joanne Kenen | January 27, 2022 | Politico
Host of 'The Daily' Clouds 'N.Y. Times' Effort To Restore Trust After 'Caliphate'
David Folkenflik | December 24, 2020 | NPR Morning Edition
A Propaganda Model [Excerpt]
Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky | 1988 | Manufacturing Consent
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Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can find transcripts of past episodes and News Briefs here.
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Credits
Senior Producer: Florence Barrau-Adams
Producer: Julianne Tveten
Production Assistant: Trendel Lightburn
Newsletter: Marco Cartolano
Transcription: Mahnoor Imran
Music: Grandaddy
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Comments
This one was especially satisfying / infuriating because I have a (depressingly young) work colleague who has cited Leonhardt as his go-to pundit, a data-driven balls-and-strikes type, not one of those extremists on "either side", etc. Previously I couldn't have picked him out of a lineup of neoliberal Status Quo Warrior hacks, but after cursory investigation it made so much sense why this guy I know has such a morally stunted and intellectually childish worldview and is so wrong about a specific constellation of issues. Now I have to fight the overwhelming urge to send him this episode, despite my better judgment telling me to avoid talking "politics" at work. Thanks a bunch.
Isadore Nabi
2024-01-31 02:05:58 +0000 UTCWow. File with Pete Buttigieg's dad being a Gramsci scholar. Incidentally, as a Seattleite I endorse your username and pfp. Seattle is dying, for precisely the opposite of the reasons the Seattle Is Dying Industrial Complex claims.
Isadore Nabi
2024-01-31 01:55:00 +0000 UTCThe funniest part about David Leonhardt is that his dad was a Maoist! Which is not to say anything about Bob Leonhardt who seemed very cool, but damn, sometimes the apple falls really far from the tree. http://www.plp.org/challenge/2016/4/22/bob-leonhardt-communist-thinker-and-fighter.html
Seattle Sucks
2024-01-27 00:57:57 +0000 UTC
