Sometimes, talking about trivial matters is a good way to kill time. If you are in an elevator and you want to make small talk with a stranger, you could do worse than bringing up the weather to break the silence. So it was that Tish Warren’s most recent column, “We need to talk about the weather,” prompted this one. Warren counsels her readers that we need to rebuild our social trust through trivial conversations that cross racial, political and ideological lines. She writes: “The nation is coming apart. The world is in turmoil. We need to chat about the weather. I mean this sincerely.” When you have a conversation about the weather with your barista, it turns out, you are doing a solid for democracy.
This is nonsense. More importantly, it is dangerous nonsense. If the nation is coming apart and the world is in turmoil, there are probably more important and concrete actions a person can take to prevent mass unrest and civil war. And if not, if the nation is so far gone that some sort of violent conflict and assault on democracy is inevitable, “absurd” does not even begin to describe the advice of this columnist. Warren misses the forest for the trees. Or, if one prefers, she is telling her readers to fiddle while Rome burns.
Based on survey data from the 2016 elections, about eleven million Americans hold views that are consistent with explicitly white nationalist ideology. Meaning, they rated three values highly on a scale from one to five: 1) a strong sense of white identity, 2) a belief in the importance of white solidarity, and 3) a sense of white victimization. Although these numbers are high, nearly triple that number (15%) believe the discredited Q Anon conspiracy. Republicans are significantly more likely to believe in this conspiracy, as well as the belief that a “storm” is coming that “will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” Although a majority of Americans disagree with that last statement, a shocking 20% agree, including nearly three in ten Republicans. Similar numbers agree with the proposition that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country because things have gotten so far off track.
The weather we need to discuss is the Republican belief in that nonexistent storm. So why is Tish Warren telling us to focus on trivial matters?
The Political Economy of Public Discourse
A few years ago, concerned about the growing dismissal of analytical and investigative journalism as “fake news,” I became a New York Times digital subscriber. One of the subscriber benefits includes special newsletters with content that is not (readily) available to non-subscribers, including additional columns. This is how I began reading the columns of Warren, a female priest of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and one of at least three Christian social conservatives tapped to produce content for the Times (the other two being Ross Douthat, a lay Catholic, and Esau McCaulley, another ACNA priest and a professor at the evangelical Wheaton College).
Conservatives concerned about liberal bias are more likely to hold up the New York Times as an extreme example of it than they are to actually read it. The Times and the Washington Post were frequently attacked during the Trump presidency, with President Trump decrying the Times as a “fake newspaper” that was “failing.” In October of 2019, apparently in response to their coverage of impeachment proceedings, he announced plans to cancel both White House subscriptions and renewal of subscriptions across other federal agencies.Despite these attacks, and probably in part because of them, Trump was good for the Times’ business. During the Trump presidency, digital subscriptions skyrocketed, and the Times digital revenue exceeded print revenue for the first time in 2020.
This shift in the Times’ subscription model also raises some questions about its coverage and content. In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which argued that American mass media “ "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.” Essentially, the size of mass media required significant capital investment, and the resulting profit-driven large corporations with the means to use mass media technology to reach large audiences required wealthy owners and advertisers who serve as de facto censors and licensing authorities, even in the absence of the official state censorship you find in authoritarian societies like China or the now-defunct Soviet Union.
If you were a leftist in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Chomsky’s thesis was not only a revelation, it was a kind of new orthodoxy. The yellow journalism of Fox News was the worst example of this recurring bias, but there were plenty of other examples, particularly with international coverage or any stories related to American foreign policy. For example, that era was filled with American coverage of the conflict between Israel and Palestinian factions that suggested something like a war between equals or states, and not the occupation of Palestinian communities that actually existed on the ground. The net effect is that American coverage typically obscures the power differential in the conflict, the substantial support of the United States for the Israeli military and the Israeli state, as represented in weapons sales, votes at the United Nations and other measures.
Perhaps most important to this critique is the function of corporate media operating as a kind of filter to winnow the parameters of American policy debate to an acceptable continuum of left and right that privileges the status quo. Revolutionary or radical critiques of the status quo, particularly those that originate on the left and question the concentration of wealth and political power into a tiny are either ignored or treated as a tiny and insignificant fringe opinion. Of course, this is not always tenable; both the Occupy Movement and the subsequent campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other leftist Democrats have cemented American democratic socialism as a major component of today’s Democratic Party. Still, those advances in left wing representation pale in comparison to the Trump presidency’s political and judicial mainstreaming of xenophobic nativism, racism and religious nationalism beyond anything that was possible before the Republican Party was overtaken by a mass reactionary movement.
In this context, it is important to remember that mass media is still a business. In the case of the New York Times, a family business; the current publisher and chair of the Board of Directors is A.G. Sulzberger, the latest in a long line of Sulzbergers to lead the corporation through the upheavals of multiple generations. His profile on the Times website acknowledges this fact: “A graduate of Brown University, he is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to serve The Times as publisher since the newspaper was purchased by Adolph Ochs in 1896.” He is also described as “[a] key architect of the company’s digital transformation and business strategy” who has “helped grow The Times’s digital subscriber base to more than six million, from 800,000 in 2014, the year he authored the Innovation Report.”
The estimated net worth of the Sulzberger family approaches $100 million, or about $25 million a piece. Beginning in 2020, revenue from about seven million digital subscribers overshadowed print subscription revenue . When it comes to the Board of Directors, the Times is clearly embedded in the American corporate mainstream, with directors connected at high levels of influence to Facebook, GoDaddy, YouTube, Verizon, Ernst & Young, AIG and many other institutions.
It should come as no surprise that the Times had contracts to purchase consumer data from third party sources. By building up a digital subscriber base of about seven million unique users, the Times claims it was able to rely solely on its own subscriber data beginning in 2020 as web browsers began cracking down on the collection of third party data. Additionally, of course, the Times has the ability to share this data with other third parties. In short, the New York Times is now an entity that monetizes data, much like Facebook or Google or similar entities. That data not only includes the information you are aware of, but also your behavior. From the Times Privacy FAQ:
Indirect data collection takes place passively as you interact with our site or apps. Our tracking technologies collect data about your reading behavior, like which articles you read or how often you visit The Times. Third-party advertisers collect behavioral data associated with their ads shown on our site or apps. Additionally, we collect data about readers from sources like privately owned databases and social media platforms.
Of course, data about reading behavior might be more detailed than is suggested here, including metadata: A set of data that describes other data. When a person visits the Times, this might include search terms used in the site’s function, which stories were read, how much time was spent on an article, the ads that were clicked and what objects, links or words on a page were hovered over, which stories were shared and how many times, and so on.
Signs of the Times
In light of these realities concerning what is called “Big Data” (extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions), the Times decision to court Trish Warren and Esau McCaulley should probably be seen as a business decision informed by analytics as much as it was an editorial decision informed by content. It may not matter that Warren and McCaulley are idiosyncratic if their content can effectively be marketed to existing subscribers as well as potential subscribers to Times content. And given the ecosystem involved, it may not be subscriber data associated with the Times per se that is of interest; when a Times column written by Warren or McCaulley is shared on Facebook, what data is ultimately collected by the Times? Does the Times use data like the number of shares to determine the impact of these columnists, and where does that data originate from? And so on.
These individuals reflect a kind of perennial problem for the New York Times and its engagement with that social phenomenon Sarah Palin once called “real America,” namely that the voices they choose to elevate as representatives of American conservatism are so idiosyncratic that their value for the Times readership is close to nonexistent for representation. In other words, Warren, Douthat and McCaulley are not representative of American conservatism generally, much less the social conservatism that they have been tapped to represent. McCaulley may write compelling articles linking the Book of Psalms to black rage, but Wheaton College has about as many black students as my own high school, which was 98% white. And while the Anglican Church is more racially diverse than its Episcopalian cousin, it is still overwhelmingly white (83%).
The trio challenge two kinds of readers: The wider phenomenon of white social conservatives who believe that female priests and social justice for blacks is the bread and butter of radical leftism, and white liberals who are centered in the business districts of major urban areas and believe that all religious social conservatives speak from a place of intellectual ignorance. Only one of those groups has a significant audience in the Times readership, and increasingly they are more fascinated by the novelty of reading someone who can recite the Nicene Creed by heart. In other words, they are a chunk of the Times audience as well as the kind of people who choose the people who write for the Times.
Curation or Context: Public Avatars and Dishonesty
One of my favorite films of the last decade is Ingrid Goes West, released in 2017. The plot seems simple enough: A psychologically troubled young woman moves to Los Angeles in order to meet/befriend/stalk her Instagram idol. As a critique of social media, it pairs very nicely with the 2016 series three premier of Black Mirror, “Nosedive,” which imagines a kind of future dystopia where people use social interactions to rate others on a media platform like Facebook, leading to reputational scoring that affects their socioeconomic status much like credit scores do today. In both cases, social media profiles are monetized distortions of personas that not only present a false, curated view of the person in question, but also affect their own social behavior. Products and services are consumed and rated highly even when they are mediocre or bad, in order to increase one’s online standing or use as a conduit for sales by other companies promoting products and services.
In Ingrid Goes West, the titular character discovers that her social media idol is more image than substance, leading to a downfall of sorts and a twisted solace in how that very downfall opens her up to the social acceptance she craved through her idol. In “Nosedive,” the protagonist, a true believer in the social credit system, discovers how controlling and inhibiting it is as a result of, well, falling off the cliff of social respectability into the freedom of being a social credit outcast. So it would appear that we sense there is some inherent danger in our burgeoning social credit system of today. We have either the confines of a curated personality interacting with other curated personalities and pretending that the Naked Emperor is clothed, or we choose to take off the blinders and forgo the illusion of a marketing that is subtle enough to bleed into the background and disappear from view.
When the public profiles of McCaully and Warren are examined critically, their selection becomes more sensible. As members of the Anglican Church in North America, they have historical connections to the Episcopal Church, which stands as the via media between Protestantism and Catholicism. Unlike the Episcopal Church, however, the ACNA has credibility with social conservatives for its opposition to LGBT identity and relationships, as well as its opposition to abortion. Although the ACNA will not associate with the Episcopal Church because of its support of marital blessings for same-sex couples, it stands shoulder to shoulder with bishops who support not only criminalizing gay sex, but even LGBT identity and advocacy for LGBT rights.
From their articles for the Times, you would believe that both Warren and McCaully supported free and open discourse and frank discussions of issues that divide the country and various communities. McCaully writes extensively about racial justice, and Warren’s forays into the controversial (as with “The limits of ‘my body, my choice’: We can look beyond the limits of personal freedom,” comparing voluntary vaccinations to compulsory pregnancy) rarely disclose her own personal opinions about the matter in question. To find their actual views and commitments on a number of controversial matters, you have to look to their undisclosed associations. Warren is a member of The Pelican Project, whose members “commit to maintaining an embodied, offline Christian community and to membership in a local church that upholds the authority of Scripture, affirms a clear statement of belief, and practices formal, meaningful church discipline and member-oversight.” In the context of the ACNA, this means membership covenants that prohibit non-celibate gay members, for example. Similarly, as a professor at Wheaton College, McCaulley is not free to disagree with the community and faith standards required of all faculty. Indeed, Wheaton made international news when it suspended a faculty member for expressing the view that Muslims and Christians worship the same God on Facebook.
In other words, McCaulley and Warren are associated with authoritarian institutions that require both ideological assent and conformity in lifestyle to socially conservative Protestant standards. Their livelihoods depend on this assent and conformity, a fact that Warren celebrated when contrasting her position as a priest subject to the discipline of a bishop with that of an evangelical social media influencer who announced her support for same-sex marriage. What are we to make of the fact that their socially conservative positions are left implicit and unstated, while their calls for reconsideration of the role of women and racial minorities in socially conservative institutions are expressly stated and shared in their columns?
The question is not one of their affiliation, but disclosure. Neither Warren nor McCaulley have written columns that disclose their beliefs and the beliefs of their church concerning, inter alia, LGBT rights, relationships and identity. In fact, they rarely write about the beliefs and practices of their denomination at all. Instead, their affiliations seem to serve as a signal to readers in the know, that they have a certain set of beliefs about gender and sexuality in particular that render them safe for conservative Christian consumption. There is no risk that they might affirm a theological orthodoxy but deviate from tradition on the question of same-sex relationships , the raison d’etre of the ACNA. This means that their articles can be shared as constructive in conservative Christian circles that police content for heterodoxy in all matters non-heterosexual.
The failure to disclose their affiliations or publish anti-LGBT content also gives them credibility with existing Times subscribers who would object to the inclusion of columnists with authoritarian beliefs and hostility to LGBT identity and rights. McCaulley can defend BLM’s calls for black liberation without discussing its support of LGBT rights or the concept of intersectionality more generally, but his silence on this point will not trouble people who are unfamiliar with the history of the ACNA and its affiliation with extreme homophobia abroad. Gay men, lesbians and transgender people who live in Ghana or Nigeria face mob violence as well as government intolerance and at best the indifference, at worst the hostility, of most Christian institutions. In particular, the African churches that the ACNA is affiliated with, the churches it chooses to affiliate with instead of the Episcopal Church. This is for both McCaulley and Warren a significant, moral choice: They have chosen not only to condemn homosexuality with their disaffiliation from the Episcopal Church, but to embrace the association with “orthodox” bishops who endorse not just Christian tradition on LGBT sexuality, but even state violence against LGBT people.
Like the Instagram profiles selling products or experiences, the columns of Warren and McCaulley are curated presentations. Given their beliefs, backgrounds and choice of religious affiliation and employers, they are like an exhibit that might reasonably be shown in Kentucky’s Creation Museum: A series of paintings depicting the Garden of Eden complete with dinosaurs descending on an expelled Adam and Eve. Instead, a singleframe of Adam biting an apple has been served up to the patrons of the Smithsonian as a representation of the artist’s oeuvre. The sin of the Times is one of omission: A lack of context.
Honesty and Healing the Body Politic
How do we know what we know? And what do we do when we encounter others who disagree? These foundational questions of the human condition motivate great art and inquiry, and are unlikely to be resolved outside of death and/or the end of time, if ever. As with other foundational questions, the answers are less important than how we try to answer them. After all, there are a number of authoritarian traditions and institutions with answers, but we cannot replicate their version of success without abandoning our commitment to modern democracy.
Thus, answering those questions, especially the first, raises another: How much do we care about democracy? Because it is entirely possible that our answers to the first set of questions will destablilize what we think we know about our democratic commitments. In fact, we may discover that we do not value democracy nearly as much as we imagine. Maybe we prefer the stilted interactions that we are forcing on ourselves, the curated illusions of the products delivered to us by our social media gods.
Or is it time to go west and take a dive into honesty, disclosure and maybe, just maybe, something approaching revelation?