Jonathan Chait on the ‘hack gap’ (watch Ben Collins squirm)

Jonathan Chait is riling up some folks on the left today with an article titled “In Defense of Independent Opinion Journalism.” The headline sounds a bit bland but the subhead is more to the point: “The ‘hack gap’ between right and left has been closing.” The gist of the piece is a critique of an isolated brand of left-wing media that has grown up over the last several years.

I should say up front that Chait’s perspective on this entire topic is as someone firmly on the left. From my perspective, he agrees with most of the left-wing narrative about the evil machinations of right-wing media over the past 30 years. But as is often the case on the left these days, agreeing with 80% of the narrative isn’t enough. If you have anything critical to say about your own side you’re a heretic. And that’s sort of where Chait lands. But he still starts with the 80%:

A couple decades ago, liberals began to see the structural asymmetry in the news media as one of the major problems in American politics. The Republican Party had an unapologetically partisan media apparatus — anchored by Fox News, founded in 1996 — that it used to promote its message. Democrats lacked anything similar. Even worse, the mainstream media had become highly sensitive to charges of liberal bias and habitually treated Republican-promoted narratives, however superficial or farcical, as inherently newsworthy. The conservative media was slavishly partisan, and the “liberal” media was filled with stories about how Al Gore was seen as a pathological liar, or John Kerry an effete flip-flopper.

In my view, all of this is wrong, or at least overstated. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, right wing blogs—all of that only exists because the mainstream media was slavishly partisan to the left. As is ever the case, the left mistakes a reaction to their war on the culture for a culture war, completely overlooking the ways in which their own partisan behavior made it inevitable.

So, moving along, Chait’s point is that the left came to see this as a big problem and there were certain phrases that became a shorthand for it, phrases like the “hack gap.” The hack gap was a way to refer to the idea that the right were all working together to put out identical talking points with no regard for truth, while the left was constrained by nuance.

Again, my own experience is nearly the opposite. A decade ago (more now?) we all learned about Journolist, the semi-secret list of 100 or so left-leaning journalists who had a running discussion going including about how to respond to certain issues. That may have been one of the first but there are apparently many more spaces like this where leftist media types exclude people on the right and talk about their jobs and pitch idea back and forth.

Eventually we get to Chait’s critique that the left has increasingly been closing the ‘hack gap.’

Over time, these critiques have exerted a profound effect on the news media. The mainstream media has moved distinctly to the left, and its once-universal practice of covering every factual debate merely by alternating quotes from opposing parties while treating the truth as unknowable has become rarer.

Progressive opinion journalism has changed even more dramatically. Breaking from the pack to question a shared belief on the left is no longer a prized trait; it is now possible to build a career unswervingly affirming progressive movement stances…

After years complaining why liberals lacked their own version of Fox News, we can now see something like it, cobbled together from websites and cable-news programming…

Where it was once rare to encounter some pseudo-fact circulating among the left, it is now routine to find people believing Michael Brown was shot with his hands up, lab-leak is a debunked conspiracy theory, or that Republicans are routinely banning instruction about racism.

Chait has mentioned Fox News a couple times but Keith Olbermann joined MSNBC in 1997. The idea that the left is only now closing the hack gap is laughable. They have been jamming the hack gap full of people like Olbermann, Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Joy Reid, E. J. Dionne, Elie Mystal, Dana Milbank, Greg Sargent, Paul Waldman, Charles Blow, Michelle Goldberg, Jessica Valenti, Joan Walsh, Brian Beutler and on and on past the ability to count. Slate, Salon, Vox, Daily Kos, Think Progress, Taking Points Memo, the Nation, Democracy Now!, HuffPost, Raw Story, Truthout, The Young Turks, Pod Save America —not everyone at these sites is a hack all the time but the idea that it’s only recently that the left achieved hack parity with the right is just silly.

Michael Brown was shot 9 years ago. And there are still lots of people on the left who believe Sarah Palin had something to do with a mass shooting in Tucson which took place in January 2011. This bubble has been forming for quite a while. Chait goes on to discuss the difference between independent journalism and activism/advocacy. I agree with the distinction, but again that long list of people named above is made up of activist/advocates on the left who have been around for a long time. Chait also takes a well deserved shot at Ben Collins:

National Review, in a fundraising appeal, tells potential donors it has dismissed every report of ethical misconduct by the Supreme Court as meritless. “No more. Not another inch. The architects of these smear campaigns must be stopped,” it insists, before soliciting donations.

The same metaphor, not another inch, popped up in a memo NBC’s Ben Collins submitted to judges of the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism. Collins presented the struggle for truth in martial terms. “The people putting out the truth are under siege in the information war,” he wrote. The ingredients for victory in this war, he argued, are unity and willpower:

Triumphs of the truth are not accidents. They are times the American media — including and especially those outside of the disinformation beat — did not equivocate and did not give an inch to lies and the liars who tell them … But it takes unity, and not capitulation, in these moments. There is no meeting liars halfway, because the truth then becomes one-half lie. We must simply be louder, and clearer, with the truth.

Ben Collins is as hacky as they come. Everything he tweets and writes is absolutely and intentionally one-sided. This has been true for quite a while but is apparently is a shock to some people, including Ben Collins.

Please see what appears to be everyone’s universal response to this, Jon.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

Your critique of him in the piece didn’t make sense. The fact that he used the phrase “do not give an inch” does not make him the same as NRO when the inch he says not to give is reporting the truth and the inch NRO says not to give is defending conservative SCOTUS judges. pic.twitter.com/AfLLbXjGSd

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) July 12, 2023

Shorter Matt Bruenig: But he’s defending the truth. Yes, well, that’s how every partisan sees it, isn’t it. Ben Collins may not have a full and complete grasp of the truth. It’s an idea to consider at least. The idea that Collins is a hack isn’t a shock to everyone.

Ben Collins, in my experience, hates all conservatives (he once called a 2nd-Amendment march a white nationalist rally), and believes they do not deserve freedom of speech. His brief career has been one long effort to promote censorship of anyone two steps or more to his right. https://t.co/sXrmEbUrEI

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) July 12, 2023

These tweets are awesome. I love the idea of Collins, who curries favor with some of the most powerful liberal figures in the country by reporting on them in a very slavish manner, calling *Chait* a country-club, cocktail-party type. https://t.co/zXd7xaAEAI

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 12, 2023