But are its findings really evidence of widespread racism in the US? Hardly. In fact, you need only look at the behaviour of Americans — at the number of interracial marriages or police shootings of minorities, for example — to see that racism has almost never been so absent.

Take interracial marriages. In 1958, 94% of whites opposed it — yet just 10% do today. Similarly, the long-running General Social Survey found that in the 1970s nearly 60% of white Americans agreed with the statement that blacks shouldn’t “push themselves where they’re not wanted”. In 2002, that figure fell to 20% — and the question was discontinued.

It’s much the same story with police shootings of African-Americans. Despite the charged rhetoric of the past year, which culminated in calls for entire police forces to be disbanded, such shootings are 60-80% lower than they were in the 1960s.

So why is there such a misunderstanding between the American public and the reality of US race relations? The answer, I suspect, reflects a media-driven moral panic — one that is rooted in the racialisation of identity-obsessed progressive politics.

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Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

Indeed, the “rise” of racism in America since 2014 is a social construct that reflects perception rather than daily life. This is largely a result of what Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described in 1973 as the “availability heuristic” — the idea that vivid images rather than statistical reality tends to shape people’s perceptions. For instance, people routinely overestimate vivid phenomena, from crime to the share of Muslims in their country, because these stories make the news. Crime in America may have fallen every year before 2019 — but when asked about it by Gallup, most people in all but two years said crime had risen over the past year.

So too with race. In some ways, this is to be expected. Whenever events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots or the killing of George Floyd make the news, people — shocked by what they are seeing — inevitably perceive race relations to be worse than they are. What is distinctive today, however, is the sustained determination of major progressive news outlets like the New York Times or CNN to centre racism as a dominant theme in American society.

As UnHerd has previously noted, citing ground-breaking research by Zach Goldberg of Georgia State University, the use of the term “racism” and similar terms in mainstream news outlets took off around 2015, (which can be seen here).

What caused this spike? Goldberg cites social media and the new partisan clickbait business model in online journalism as the catalysts. Then, during the campaign for the 2016 US election, Donald Trump energised the enterprise. As the New York Times‘ Ben Smith recounted last year: “Heated Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like “racially charged. The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using “racist” and “lie” more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump’s behaviour.” Certainly, many of these outlets swiftly retired all objectivity and standards in favour of this new partisan model.

One reason for this was the media’s desire to tap into a mythic script of a white officer killing a black suspect. Indeed, Goldberg’s study of the 2015-20 Washington Post police killings database reveals that black police shooting victims received nine times the media coverage of white victims. As Coleman Hughes has observed, when footage emerged in 2016 showing Tony Timpa, a white suspect, being suffocated as a Dallas officer placed his knee on his neck, the media looked the other way while the officers walked free.

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The battle between the two Americas

By Joel Kotkin

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

The narrative of police racism is exacerbated by party politics. A young black man is around ten times as likely to die in a car accident than from a police bullet, but only 10% of African-American Democrats and 20% white liberals get this question right — while more than 70% white Trump voters do. While there are some who are undecided, Figure 2 (below) shows that 95% of blacks and 70% of whites who believe “all white Republicans are racist” agree with the statement.

The impact of such warped perceptions cannot be overstated. But rather than trying to correct untruths, the American Left has leaned into these corrosive myths. Witness Elizabeth Warren tweeting that Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, despite the fact that the officer had been cleared by a federal grand jury of wrongdoing. Or, in the wake of the Chauvin verdict, Joe Biden reinforcing the irresponsible fiction that black people in America live in fear of their lives from police bullets:

We must do more on police violence, so they don’t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don’t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.

No doubt Biden was well-meaning, but he was, in effect, propagating a conspiracy; it was similar to telling an anti-vaxxer that their fears are well-placed and it is up to pharmaceutical companies to eliminate every last side effect before we can expect them to trust a jab.

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By Douglas Murray

Of course, Black Americans have had a historically uneasy relationship with the police, but that is no excuse for the blend of romanticism and virtue-signalling that seems to have gripped today's progressives.

While Democratic politicians and the media rightly held Trump to account for violating liberal democratic norms, such as claiming the election was stolen or encouraging the Capitol rioters, they were strangely silent when Biden said he was "praying for the right verdict" in the Chauvin trial and Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters told a crowd in front of the courthouse to "get more confrontational" and let the judge "know that we mean business", Meanwhile, media interest in the record-setting $2 billion in damage caused by the riots following George Floyd's death — which struck a disproportionate number of minority-owned businesses — was minimal.

It was a disturbing reflection of the distorted, racialised reality they now inhabit. Just don't expect them to take responsibility for it.

In perhaps the surest sign of their newfound primacy, they have been not just authorised, but encouraged to participate in the ongoing protest actions. To clarify: these journalists haven’t merely been given the green-light to attend the gatherings as sympathetic observers, or even to frame their coverage in a positive light. Rather, they have been offered explicit institutional support to actively participate as protesters. (Some of these authorisations have been made public, while others have not.)

This represents quite a revolution in the prevailing mindset of mainstream media culture. Though it has exploded recently, its origins can be traced to 2016, when the rise of Donald Trump caused much of the political and media class to abandon a whole slew of reporting “norms” which had previously guided their conduct. Angered and traumatised by Trump, they adopted a radically new set of principles that would have been completely unrecognisable across the profession just a few years earlier.

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The truth about 'Obamagate'

By Michael tracey

Whereas in the past, journalists who challenged the establishment media’s hoary allegiance to outmoded notions of “objectivity” were in the beleaguered minority, today they are fully in the mainstream, and conventional ideas about “objectivity” are being jettisoned Left and Right. This trend is especially pronounced among the rising generation of journalists in their twenties and thirties, although older colleagues are also increasingly susceptible.

This is not altogether a bad thing: pure “objectivity” was never a viable standard in the first place, often leading to skewed editorial choices, misplaced reporting priorities, phony “false equivalence”, and poor writing. However, since 2016 there has clearly been a dramatic overcorrection: what’s also being jettisoned is any remaining fidelity to what one might call impartiality. The lack of impartiality among journalists today helps explain why the media ecosystem they inhabit has been so integral in spawning the successive waves of moral panic that have engulfed US politics and culture over the past four years.

Just because something is a moral panic doesn’t mean its proximate causes are wholly fictitious. Take several instances that have arisen since the election of Trump, all with different features, and affecting different sectors of society, but all part of the same hysterical trajectory: #MeToo, “Nazi” alarmism and Russiagate. Sexual harassment and violence obviously exist, and sometimes go unreported; there really were a small band of “alt-right” instigators who gathered online and in person, inspired at least in part by Trump’s political success; and it is true that “Russian bots” probably do exist on social media to some negligible degree.

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Even so, all three of these phenomena took on straightforward qualities of moral panic, namely: wildly exaggerated claims with little or no connection to the facts at hand, prophecies of terrifying apocalyptic threats, public shaming rituals, thinly-veiled political and interpersonal score-settling, relentless policing of private beliefs and attitudes, and an all-encompassing, irrational, accusatory frenzy.

Likewise, it’s certainly true that black Americans are often subject to overzealous law enforcement practices, and in some cases wrongfully killed by the police — with the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis being the latest egregious example. But the subsequent quest by hypermoralising journalists and activists to impose their will on media institutions, often by employing the tactics of what one might call “emotional terrorism”, has nothing to do with George Floyd. Rather, it has everything to do with their desire for power. It just so happens that invoking the rhetoric of racial and ideological grievance is an especially effective strategy for bludgeoning liberal-Left media institutions into submission.

With the concept of “journalism” having been expanded beyond recognition to include all forms of “content-producing” activity on the internet, the sentiments of younger “journalists” have fused almost totally with the sentiments of pop cultural and corporate activists in the same peer group. Among this cohort, there is widespread adherence to the principle expounded by the actor Rachel Zegler — who while herself not technically in “media,” might as well be, given her online content-production style: “RACISM ISN’T A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT,” she recently proclaimed. (Needless to say, there are certainly “differences of opinion” around the definition of “racism”.)

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It's your fault newspapers don't tell the truth

By Douglas Murray

Zegler’s attitude was distilled more crisply into a media context by E. Alex Jung, a senior writer at New York magazine, who declared: “The entire journalistic frame of ‘objectivity’ and political neutrality is structured around white supremacy.” Adhering to this mindset allows these journalists, and increasingly their employers, to deny that engaging in outright public protest activity is “political”, thus giving them licence to do essentially whatever they please without it being seen as an ethical breach.

As the panic rages, one media institution after another has capitulated to the demands of the more aggressive of these activists/journalists, who tend to be younger and inordinately effusive on social media. Indeed, a life suffused by social media — which incentivises elaborate public expressions of personal identity — is all they’ve ever known. (Many also seem to have gone stir-crazy from the still-ongoing lockdowns in the cities they tend to populate — such as New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.)

We are now left with an ascendant class of media activists who earnestly espouse the view, for example, that newspaper op-eds constitute literal “violence” — putting them and their loved ones in “danger”. Even avowedly progressive media outlets are currently being accused of “institutional racism” — as though the editors are plantation owners and prison wardens, as opposed to extremely sensitive, accommodating (and, frankly, paranoid) Left-liberals.

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We don't deserve our wretched media class

By Graeme Archer

If one delves into the background of this rising class of journalists, one frequently finds a CV replete with elite credentials and prestige. An instructive example is the Intercept journalist Akela Lacy, who attended the Baldwin School, one of the most prestigious private schools in the Philadelphia area, followed by an undergraduate tenure at the College of William and Mary, one of the most renowned higher education institutions in the entire country. But even with this impressive elite preparation, Lacy was reduced to sheer emotional exhaustion earlier this month after a disagreement with a colleague. “I’m so fucking tired,” she proclaimed in a dramatic Twitter tirade.

The reason Lacy was so very “tired” was because fellow Intercept staff member Lee Fang, one of the most accomplished journalists in online Left-wing media, had the audacity to interview some non-white people in communities afflicted by the recent riots, who offered observations that did not align with the prevailing liberal-Left activist media consensus on the subject. For this, Lacy condemned Fang as a “racist”.

Apart from their shared institutional affiliation, Lacy in practice has little to do with Fang; they work on opposite sides of the country. Yet a colleague propounding viewpoints and reportage that she finds disagreeable is apparently sufficient to affect her on such a visceral level that it would prompt a sensational online outburst. Compounding the pathetic nature of the incident, it was Fang who was ultimately coerced into apologising to Lacy, with his job hanging in the balance. And his Intercept colleagues, petrified of drawing “racism” accusations themselves, refused to come to his public defence.

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Having travelled to several of the cities that were afflicted with riots, I can confirm that black Americans on the sidewalk or stoop commonly express roughly the same sentiments as those who were interviewed by Fang — opposition to rioting and qualified concerns about the logic of the protests. That Lacy emerged as the victor in the confrontation shows just how warped the dynamics of US media culture have become. The power of those who use such tactics is being is being entrenched, and they are displacing those who exhibit even the most mild scepticism of their identity-centric activist worldview. In all likelihood, there is no turning back.

The new class of emotionally unstable journalists will dictate the culture and direction of the institutions for which they work. Self-censorship will accelerate, as those who fear for their job security will simply opt to say nothing rather than incur the risk of deviating ever-so-slightly from this new ideological consensus.

Whether you like it or not (I, for one, do not) those who occupy prominent media positions comprise a significant portion of the taste-making class of the US. Their influence on culture and politics is substantial. Hence, this isn’t just a “media story” — it’s a story about the epistemological rupture in the US polity that was provoked by the events of 2016, and ever since has grown more extreme. In isolation, these moral panics and collective mental breakdowns can be difficult to make sense of. But when you see them through the prism of America’s current status as a rapidly declining hegemonic power, it all becomes much more intelligible.

Rather than unleashing an era of liberal democratic orthodoxy, as many predicted, the end of the Cold War produced a world where grand narratives ceased to exist. The disappearance of these narratives has led to an erosion in the value of truth and objectivity.

This is one of the arguments put forward in This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a new book by the journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev. As Pomerantsev writes:

“If the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?”

Many articles have been written about how the internet has encouraged us to create our own ‘filter bubbles’. However Pomerantsev’s book delves much deeper than similar accounts. It is not merely ‘information abundance’ that is screwing with our politics. The root of the current crisis also rests in our loss of faith in the future and, with it, the Enlightenment notion of objective truth.

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Yet while the Enlightenment ‘killed’ the possibility of belief in a deity, religious faith persisted under avowedly secular guises. During the 20th century communism partially filled the void left by the retreat of religion. The materialist conception of history held out an answer to every question just as the Gospels once had.

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Don’t believe what those idiots are telling you about echo chambers

By Peter Franklin

In time the communist God failed, and the future was viewed as one of liberal progress, an ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama termed it. Yet the global financial crash – and arguably the Iraq war with it – destroyed faith in this narrative too.

If the 20th century was the age of ideology, it has been replaced by an era of subjectivity and competing truths. A few on the extreme fringes still cling to grand narratives – the Islamic State for example – but most big ideas have slipped away. Today we each shape our own narrative. We choose what is true based on our own solipsistic inclinations. The result is a hyper-individualised political climate where concepts such as objectivity and impartiality have passed out of fashion.

The proliferation of information produced by the internet has made it easier to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Conspiracy theories increasingly fill the void where ideology – and certainty about the future – used to be. When there are so many competing truths that few individuals have the time to adequately parse, we are inclined to accept the narrative (however far-fetched) that chimes with our emotional predispositions.

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The triumph of contemporary identity politics has helped to turbocharge this notion that feelings are more important than facts. The ethos of the Sixties trumpeted “feelings as an antidote to corporate and bureaucratic rationality”, as Pomerantsev puts it. Objectivity is merely subjectivity in disguise, according to the purveyors of this identitarian creed.

Of course, this great transformation in our politics would not be possible without the highly specific model of laissez-faire capitalism that triumphed 40 years ago. It is within this framework that identity has become a marketable commodity. We each choose our own ‘truth’ – our sacred cause to rally behind – just as we choose from ten different brands of soda in the supermarket.

This “future-less present” arrived first in Russia in the 1990s. During this chaotic decade, people behaved according to rules they made up for themselves. “The image of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged,” writes Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Vladimir Putin’s early spin-doctors. “Everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”

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It isn’t hard to see how this personalised, identity-specific (and highly subjective) notion of reality has ignited increasing political polarisation across the developed world. Individuals are no longer the vehicles through which political ideas are transmitted. Instead, ideas are interwoven with identity. To disagree is increasingly a personal affront – a ‘microaggression’ – rather than a mere argument over competing visions of the future.

Social media amplifies this trend by encouraging individuals to stake out extreme positions in order to stay relevant and boost their personal brand. As Pomerantsev writes, “Social media is a sort of major-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

A highly subjective version of reality has been adopted by states too. In the contemporary era states make up their own rules and “murder people and indeed whole peoples according to their own ‘sovereign’ logic,” Pomerantsev writes, drawing on the work of the Russian historian of the Holocaust Mikhail Gefter. We can see this logic play out everywhere from Syria to China to Myanmar.

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By Douglas Murray

The success of political leaders such as Trump, Erdoğan and Orbán rests on the “anarchic liberation” from constraint they provide to their followers. That crude rejection of civility is comparable to the “suicidal escape from reality” Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Yet unlike the tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, authoritarian governments no longer strive for omnipotence. Instead they pretend there is no objective reality, only competing visions.

In depicting one man’s struggle against a totalitarian state, George Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Unlike Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, the danger we face is not centralisation. We are slipping into a world not of a single truth set down by an infallible one-party state, but of an infinite number of truths that are impossible for the ordinary citizen to navigate.

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To counter this, we must become better as individuals at distinguishing between information that is accurate and information that merely confirms our biases.

But ‘the West’ – for want of a better term – must also rediscover a sense of purpose if it is to combat the threat of disinformation. Liberal democracies are more amenable places to live than societies that have come before and are likely to come after. We live longer, are freer, and however mediocre the current political crop of political leaders are, we do at least have a realistic chance of removing them.

This is not mere propaganda, to paraphrase the title of Pomerantsev’s brilliant and unsettling book. The threat to democracy may have changed since Orwell’s time but it is nevertheless real. Freedom is still the freedom to point out that objective reality exists – regardless of how you or I or Vladimir Putin may feel about it.

One involved Andrew Neil interrogating an American Right-wing commentator called Ben Shapiro; the other pitted Andrew Marr against Nigel Farage. In the normal way of things these interviews would have passed unnoticed simply because political interviews are routine, two-a-penny – once over, are quickly forgotten. These two stimulated much wider comment largely, I think, because the golden rule was broken, something which seems to be happening more frequently. Of which, more later.

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Andrew Neil’s interview with Ben Shapiro started calmly enough although Shapiro, a rather brittle personality, seemed uneasy faced with the gravitas of the much older Neil. But a point came when the discussion turned to abortion. Shapiro is a down-the-line pro-Life advocate; he opposes abortion on moral grounds under almost all circumstances. Andrew Neil cited legislation restricting abortion in some states and asserted that such laws “…would take us back to the dark ages.” Shapiro bridled at this and came back on the offensive. “Are you a comment journalist or an objective journalist?” he asked.

From that point onward the interview deteriorated; Neil confronted Shapiro on a ‘confirm or deny’ basis with some old quotes; Shapiro rather lost his cool, at one point saying “…who are you anyway? I’ve never heard of you”. At another point Shapiro accused Neil of being “Left-wing” to which Neil responded “you’ve no idea how ridiculous that sounds”. Eventually Shapiro terminated the interview.

In the ensuing media debate most people scored it as a win for Neil; in fact Shapiro himself tweeted that Neil had “destroyed” him. But I wonder. It’s true that Shapiro allowed himself to be riled – never a good look on a medium where keeping cool gives you the upper hand. But Andrew Neil surely revealed himself by his “dark ages” remark. It was Robin Day – the pre-eminent political interviewer of his day – who once said that “every question contains a comment” and Neil’s question certainly did that. No viewer could have been left in much doubt about where he stands on the abortion issue.

The truth is that Neil is one of the last true Thatcherites in matters economic and a thorough going social liberal. In America social conservatism is the defining characteristic of the Right and Neil’s mix of attitudes (pretty common among British Right-wingers) confused Shapiro’s political compass. So did Andrew Neil ‘win’ the encounter? Shapiro came across as prickly and thin-skinned but Neil also advertised his own beliefs; both were losers in my view.

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On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

The Andrew Marr interview with Nigel Farage showed up another kind of failing – the interview which is over-produced. Big set-piece political interviews on TV are carefully prepared; the interviewer comes into the encounter armed with a brief (the work, usually, of some bright, junior producer.) The brief gives the interviewer everything they need to know, including instances of past indiscretions or old quotes which might embarrass the politician. A plan of attack is worked out by the production team – but as with grand military strategies that fall to pieces on first contact with the battlefield, the interviewer has to be nimble enough to change the plan if it’s not working. Last Sunday, Andrew Marr demonstrated why this is such a necessary skill.

Marr had worked his way through the interview until he got to a point (certainly pre-planned) where he hauled out a series of old quotes to confront Farage. Marr clearly felt these were all embarrassing gaffes (although Farage dealt with them easily enough) but it was clear Farage understood the game plan – and wasn’t having any of it. So he went on the attack, accusing Marr of ignoring the real issue at hand, which, he said, was the question of democratic accountability.

And he had a point: after all, the forthcoming Euro election – surely the phoniest ever held in Britain – is not about choosing a governing party. However well Farage does, he’s not on the brink of becoming Prime Minister, so taxing him with questions about his attitude towards the NHS seemed somewhat irrelevant.

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By James Bloodworth

An important component of every interviewer’s professional shtick is keeping any personal antagonisms well in the background; the last thing any inquisitor wants is for the audience to sense that ‘this time it’s personal’. But last Sunday Marr certainly gave the impression that he has a real dislike of Farage. It was an interesting clash of style: Marr, the cerebral, cool, liberal up against Farage, the garagiste and beery populist. Unfortunately for him, Marr came out of the encounter looking like a football manager who couldn’t adapt to the opposition’s surprise tactics.

Do these two instances tell us anything more generally about the current state of political interviewing? The Andrew Neil interview with Ben Shapiro highlighted the uniform social liberalism of our media world. Some operators are a little bit more to the Right (think Iain Dale or Nick Robinson) and some to the Left ( think James O’Brien and Jon Snow) but they are all social liberals. So much for diversity.

As for the interview with Farage, it demonstrated something we pretty much knew already, which is that Andrew Marr is a wholehearted Europhile. One got a sense of how much Marr really dislikes Farage, a feeling Farage reciprocates in full measure, so the encounter was unusually heated.

The art of political interviewing is constantly adapting and it is my sense that experienced interviewees are increasingly willing to take on their inquisitors. I am surprised that more do not do so, because it can be an effective tactic. The journalist asking the questions is always vulnerable if they are challenged about their own politics, because they all have their own political prejudices. This means a canny and self-confident interviewee can wrong-foot them with a well-judged counter-attack.

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Will Brexit bother the Six Nations?

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There’s another thing to bear in mind: I claimed that these two instances showed what happens when things ‘go wrong’ but this is, of course, merely a figure of speech. Interviews that ‘go wrong’ are very often the ones that are most watched and get pick-up in the print media (like this article). The political interview is an important staple of our democratic process – but it is also a kind of entertainment. There isn’t an editor in TV-land who really regrets the car-crash interview if it brings a spike in the viewing figures.

My guess is that the most-watched interview of the past several years was the one between Jordan Peterson – the apostle of positive masculinity – and Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News. That too was labelled a ‘car-crash’, with Newman being cast in the role of idiot woman behind the wheel. The interview became an internet sensation – the last time I looked it had registered more than 15 million views – and I’d bet good money that Channel 4 doesn’t regret that, though what Newman herself thinks about it might be another matter.

The true significance of most of these ‘car-crashes’ is the way the audience’s attention is directed away from the interviewee and towards the interviewer. Political interviews are supposed to put the subject on the spot; when they go wrong they reverse the focus and tell us more about the journalist asking the questions. That is uncomfortable for the journalist, but gives the rest of us an insight into what lies behind the dogma of ‘impartiality’.