It’s not a word we use in the New York Times

Here’s a brief passage from an astonishing two-part Rick Perlstein essay, focused on how the metaphors journalists live by can very well become those they end up dying by, if we, to quote Gen. Turgidson, should end up getting our hair mussed in what Jeff Sharlet calls our ongoing slow-motion civil war.

It’s an exchange between Sharlet and a New York Times reporter, at a bookstore in northern Wisconsin:

The exchange began when Sharlet explained how he came to write The Undertow, and what he was trying to do with it. He explained that he spent many years, as a lefty writer, hearing people say, “Oh, this is fascist,” and he responded, “No, that isn’t fascist.” But in this case, he couldn’t abide by such a conclusion. “This is the real deal. There’s a real fascist movement. And I don’t think we have on the table all the storytelling tools we need to counter it. So the reporting is not just letting us know what’s going on, but … thinking about how we tell stories about what’s happening in the world, and how we can do so in a way that can resist what I call the undertow of fascism leading us to a darker and darker place.”

He did not add what anyone who had read The Undertow would already know, that this was a conclusion he had arrived at after hundreds of conversations, witnessing dozens of political and church services, and logging thousands of miles on the road.

But his New York Times interlocutor made plain that he had not read the book under discussion. He was especially smug in the first utterance he offered to the audience: “Yeah, I don’t know if I would use that word”—his eyebrows arched disapprovingly—“it’s not a word we use in The New York Times.”

Then he practically giggled.

Yes, the Times reporter allowed, “in the last couple of years especially, we have seen a good swath of the country sort of embrace anti-democratic ideals.” That “what we have is really a lot of the country that sees political power as, you know, as worth whatever it takes to acquire and hold onto it.”

It happened to be the day the Tennessee Three were silenced, where two Black lawmakers were expelled from the state legislature for participating in a protest against gun violence. The Times reporter cited that as an example as part of his beat: “democracy on the knife’s edge.” He characterized this work as “just writing what’s going on.”

The bookstore host asked Sharlet to share more about the kind of storytelling he did for the book. He began a characteristically thoughtful answer, then found himself gravitating back to his original point.

Which is my point, too: The habitual ways of doing journalism no longer make sense. That the American way of politics has passed a watershed. That change is what Sharlet’s work struggles to characterize, as a desperate imperative—the way “these folks are changing the aesthetic of American politics.”

He gave as an example an infamous interview Lesley Stahl did on 60 Minutes with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. It had been characterized largely by Stahl’s frustration in attempting to fact-check her in real time, and many viewers’ frustration that she wasn’t doing it right, or enough, or adequately; the way Stahl arched her eyebrows in the face of the most fantastical, hateful lies, for example.

Quite brilliantly, Sharlet explained how this made his point about the inadequacy of political journalism’s inherited storytelling frames.

“[Greene], I would say, is the congressman from the fascist party. And I actually would like to speak a little bit more about that term, because I think it’s important.” He noted Stahl’s consternation as a function of the brokenness of the very cosmos in which her career—a great one, he stressed—was built. According to the old rules, a respected gatekeeper from a marquee journalistic institution grills a “rising star,” as a sort of ritual vetting to which the politician cannot but defer. “But Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t a ‘rising star.’ Those old frames don’t work anymore,” Sharlet explained. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is not trying to join the cosmos that Lesley Stahl and much of American journalism is set up to cover.” She inhabited an entirely separate one: a fascist one, which the likes of Stahl have no idea how to comprehend. “Fascism is a dream politics. It’s a mythology. You can’t fact-check myth. You can’t arch an eyebrow and make it go away.”

Sharlet didn’t elaborate. But his book does: Within Greene’s cosmos, the likes of Stahl are what stands in the way of Trump’s deliverance of all true Americans to a supposedly perfect prelapsarian past. It is a story as told on the T-shirts abundantly visible at Trump rallies: “Journalist. Rope. Tree. Some Assembly Required.”

You will not be surprised to learn that the New York Times has no hesitation at all about using the world “fascism” . . . to describe what’s going on in other countries.

Perlstein’s point is that the whole trope of “objective journalism” is a pernicious myth. Journalism, like all other writing, requires making choices, conscious or unconscious, about what frames, what terms, what metaphors, what narratives most accurately describe what the Times’ reporter characterized as merely relaying to the innocent reader “what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Donald Trump is a fascist, and Donald Trump completely controls the Republican party. Let’s see if our elite journalists can figure out what that means about the Republican party, and our oh so exceptional nation, where we just don’t use certain words in the Newspaper of Record, because the journalist’s job is to avoid drawing conclusions.

What the discussion came down to, in the end, was the metaphors. The New York Times, its representative was claiming, doesn’t use them. Doesn’t need them. Nor narrative frames. Nor labels. “Just writing what’s going on” is all: America’s Newspaper of Record as a perfect, unblemished window unto reality itself. Consider what happened when Jenny from Lake County, Illinois, asked for comment about her frustration that the local daily seemed reluctant to report on “white Christian nationalist imagery in Republican campaigns.” She said she was “concerned by our inability to confront extremism.”

The Timesman was instinctively passionate in his defense of the home team. He launched into a detailed response that began, “Well, I think there has been more reporting on white Christian nationalism in The New York Times than anywhere else …”

At that, Sharlet nailed his interlocutor dead to rights.

“White Christian nationalism,” he noted, was not simply “what was going on.” It is a label. One whose accuracy, appropriateness, and heuristic value scholars argue over just as passionately as they do the unmentionable “f-word.” To unthinkingly pass it on, as Mr. Times did, whereas “fascism” must be dismissed: “It’s a little bit,” Sharlet observed, “like the textbooks down in [Florida] about Rosa Parks. ‘One group were not allowed to sit in the front of the bus.’ But we’re not going to say [which group]. The people decide, right?”

Meanwhile, “we’re not naming the thing that’s in front of us.”

Although, actually, he is not quite right. By not naming it “fascism,” when others responsibly name it that, the Times is, effectively, naming it “not fascism.”