It is one of those spring days here when it feels as if the blossoms have arrived over night and the number of tourists has suddenly quadrupled. It was a day like this when I first arrived in New York City, almost thirty years ago. If you’ve ever read accounts of someone who has become addicted to heroin talk about their first experience with that drug, it’s often some version of “it felt like warm honey poured over my head and I never wanted it to stop.” I had a similar feeling the minute I set foot in New York, a warm flush of the skin, a low-hum vibration that feels like a mother’s heartbeat, and an embrace from all this energy that is intoxicating. New York in the spring is a feast for the senses: gorgeous flowers everywhere, people in all their quirky glory (shoutout to the young person doing Sam Smith cosplay on the 6 train today), and the air smells crisper and clearer somehow. And, to think, I might have missed all this because I spent the first half of my life hearing my father only ever saying the name of this city with an antisemitic slur. If I’d listened to him, I would have thought there was nothing for me here, but it is home now, and some days, like today, it is magical.
The skip in my step today may have something to do with some legal proceedings downtown in which a Queens man has been indicted on 34 felony counts after a lifetime of committing crimes in plain sight. As a prison abolitionist, I’m always conflicted when anyone gets entangled in legal system, but for him, well. Perhaps if there is a place for prisons it is for him.
The woman who is trying to position herself as his running mate in 2024 is also in town today, and I’ve written about mean girl MTG before. She tried to speechify but got drowned out by some of my friends blowing whistles at her and thoroughly owned by Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who told her that New York doesn’t need her “hateful rhetoric.” For her part, MTG was comparing the indicted orange fella to both Jesus and Nelson Mandela, and I just want to sing, “one of these things is not like the other,” to her. My guess is that MTG, like me, was probably not allowed to watch Sesame Street growing up, because it taught insidious lessons about sharing, equity and inclusion that could only lead to communism.
Thanks to tv-news-magazine show 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl, MTG also got introduced to millions more people and got elevated to a new level of legitimacy. In my academic writing on the far right, I’ve often struggled with how to articulate precisely the relationship between the ‘extreme’ and the ‘mainstream,’ so I guess I should be grateful (?!?) to Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes for making this so plain: From the Fringe to the Front Row, is how CBS is describing her rise, but they don’t include themselves as actors in that rise. It’s not the first time this same network has elevated fringe characters on the far right. In April, 2021 they did a puff piece on the Oath Keepers, one of the groups involved in the insurrection on Jan.6. And, of course, in 2016, then-CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, infamously said that the network’s coverage of a certain Queens man, “may not be good for America, but it’s sure good for CBS.”
Lesley Stahl, in the interview with MTG, carries the sign (as we might say in academia) of the nice white lady. She presents herself as calm, reasonable and civil, just interested in “getting the facts” and doing journalism. In contrast, MTG gives off an air of toughness, the quintessential mean girl who is in attack-mode, going after Democrats, Big Government, and anyone else she sees as her enemy. While her schtick is popular in her home district, it doesn’t travel well (as evidenced by her reception today in New York), but it would be a mistake to dismiss her appeal.
White, European women have been elected from fascist, far-right political parties in a number of places: Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen of France's National Front, Pia Kjaersgaard of the Danish People's Party, and Siv Jensen of Norway's Progress Party. There’s no reason that couldn’t happen here, and when it does it will be women like Lesley Stahl who helped her get there because they were still playing at both-sides journalism, which is ill-suited for the fascistic times we’re living through.
Bothsideism, also known as the false balance fallacy, is an approach to journalism that insists there are “two sides” to every issue and that “both” sides of any issue should be given equivalent weight in reporting. That’s fine if you live in a democracy, where political actors can debate issues from relatively equal vantage points. But it doesn’t work in a social and political context in which one side is trying to do a genocide so they can establish their white-nationalist-theocratic state. When you engage in bothsideism in that context, it’s like you’re putting your thumb on the scale in favor of the people pushing for the white-ethno-state. It can start with the best of intentions, to do journalism, but it only gives a leg up to the fascists. And, in this instance, it’s Lesley Stahl and CBS who are tilting the scale in their favor. That’s really all it takes to mainstream white supremacist talking points: one sit down interview on 60 Minutes.
This isn’t new. I’ve written about how this worked on television on then-popular daytime talk shows, like Donahue, Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael and Geraldo. It was common practice on those shows to invite neo-Nazis and other avowed white supremacists on the show to “debate” civil rights leaders.
I actually called and interviewed producers for these shows and asked them why they created the shows in this way. They believed that they were ‘doing good,’ by producing these shows because, they told me, by allowing white supremacists to ‘air’ their views, reasonable people will hear them, be repulsed, and the groups will lose their appeal. As Geraldo Rivera put it, “we’re exposing them to the light, and, just like cockroaches, they will run when the light is turned on.” But, it doesn’t work that way.
In my reading of white supremacist publications from the same time that these shows aired suggests that the groups exploit their appearances on these shows to gain a measure of legitimacy. The publications reported receiving hundreds of letters in support of their views after each appearance. And the talkshows, for their part, gain audience shares. The episode of Geraldo in which white supremacists broke his nose was one of the highest rated talk shows ever.
To pull back one level, while I’m concerned about the false equivalence of neo-Nazis debating civil rights leaders and the misguided, self-interested impulse of Lesley Stahl to give MTG air time, what I’m perhaps even more concerned about is what these kinds of appearances do to and for white audiences. Here’s what I wrote in 1997 about the daytime talk shows:
While (white) audiences gain a measure of superiority and distance over the vulgar displays by the panelists, again preempting any examination of their own privilege. And, given the ethic of solving social problems through talk shows….which pervades the shows… hosts, producers, and audiences can tune out feeling they have ‘done something about racism,’ without every interrogating daily practices which reinforce white supremacy. …what is left uninterrogated are the mechanisms of institutionalized white supremacy and the myriad ways individual whites benefit from and perpetuate them. The talk-show presentation of white supremacists, like the scholarly analysis of them as merely an ‘extremist’ social movement or ‘deviants’ (or, ‘trash’ as in the Newsweek cover), precludes any broader investigation of white supremacy.” (White Lies, 1997, pp.24-25)
And, we’re still here.
Or, I guess I’m still here, asking these same questions.
There is something about putting absurd, outlandish characters on the tv-machine that simultaneously elevates them and provides an excuse to feel superior and do nothing for those of us watching. Then all of us — nice, liberal, white ladies and white-raised people of all genders and class backgrounds and political parties — sit at a safe remove, pointing at the clowns on the screen. We mistakenly think that this has nothing to do with us when it very much does.
I’m encouraged by the fact Stahl’s 60 Minutes interview with MTG was a ratings stinker. The ‘worst ratings for the show this season’ - and good job to all of us who didn’t watch. My hope is that this ratings disaster will get somebody’s attention at CBS and they will have to change their business model, and stop pandering to the likes of MTG.
In the meantime, I’m going to get outside and enjoy this glorious spring day in New York City.