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Where Darkness Surrounds Violence
DATA DATA
AUTHOR Brendan Fitzgerald A fter January 6, when pro-Trump insurrectionists and far-right extremists invaded the Capitol, Timothy Snyder, a history professor and the author of On Tyranny, warned of rising domestic terrorism at a time of declining local news. “If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions,” Snyder wrote for the New York Times. “Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.”
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Between 2005 and 2020, right-wing domestic extremists were involved in more than three hundred plots or violent incidents; of those, two hundred–plus occurred after 2015. Over roughly the same period, more than two thousand local newspapers either closed or merged; the number of local TV newsrooms also declined. As local journalism employment has fallen, gains in TV and digital newsrooms have been unable to make up for print losses.
Threats from right-wing extremists can be high in populous counties, where local-news losses are acute; some attacks occur in rural counties that have gone without much local journalism for years. At crisis moments, when national reporters are tasked with covering communities struck by violence, there’s only so much they can learn by scouring online forums. “These movements have a slow creep,” Brandy Zadrozny, who covers extremism and disinformation for NBC News, said. “They often build on years of local grievances. Having reporters who can document with real understanding of a place and community is crucial.”
In the months following the insurrection, law enforcement arrested more than five hundred people in forty-five states for their connection to the event. “If you don’t understand the place where something happens,” Chris Jones, who covers domestic extremism in Appalachia, said, “you’re preventing yourself from being able to understand why it happens.”
2005 2010 2020
Newspapers 8,930
Violent incidents 2005–2009: 36 Violent incidents 2010–2015: 93 Violent incidents 2016–2020: 221
Newspapers 6,736
— CHRIS JONES
VIRGINIA Jones, a Report for America fellow working for a nonprofit news site called 100 Days in Appalachia, tracks domestic extremism in the region. Since the deadly 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, more attacks have taken place across the state and in surrounding parts of Appalachia. “It’s the sort of thing where, if you pay attention, you can start to have a better perspective on it before it spills over to urban centers and other parts of the country,” he said. In Virginia, right-wing extremists have threatened mosques, synagogues, and Black churches. Last year, a self-identified Ku Klux Klan member drove through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters near Richmond. (This year, he was convicted of a series of misdemeanors, including assault.) County with total newspaper circulation drop of 90,000+
County with total newspaper circulation drop of 30,000–59,999
Site of right-wing violence County with total newspaper circulation drop of 60,000–89,999
County with total newspaper circulation drop up to 29,999
58
Number of Florida residents arrested in connection to the insurrection
67
Net loss in local TV newsrooms nationwide since 2007
FLORIDA “Extremism and disinformation go hand in hand,” Zadrozny, of NBC News, said. “You literally can’t have one without the other. You need to keep people misinformed, angry, and afraid enough to see no other options than to hurt their neighbors and try to topple their elected governments.” Since January 6, as domestic extremists have been hit with mass prosecutions, “we’re not seeing the kind of open organizing we saw last year—but they haven’t gone away.” Zadrozny added, “There’s an incredibly important role for local journalists to play.” That may be particularly true in Florida, the state with the highest number of insurrectionrelated arrests. NEW YORK “Much of my reporting on extremism has entailed compiling local news reports, which helps me identify national trends,” Tess Owen, who covers extremism for Vice, said. Owen has written frequently about the Proud Boys, established in New York by Gavin McInnes in 2016 (years after he cofounded Vice). In June, Owen, who is based in Brooklyn, published a digest of Proud Boys actions since the insurrection. By tracking local stories, she said, “I was able to make broad conclusions about the group’s resilience and ability to organize around hyper-local culture war issues and establish coalitions with other far-right movements.”
Graphics are based on an analysis of data provided by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Transnational Threats Project; the Radio Television Digital News Association/Newhouse School at Syracuse University Annual Survey; the Soufan Center’s Mapping Insecurity project; and the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The Transnational Threats Project does not include incidents for which there is no discernible political motive or threat of violence. County-specific circulation numbers have not been weighted by population.
— BRANDY ZADROZNY
TEXAS “The decimation of local news means a lot less coverage of local hate and extremist events,” Heidi Beirich, who cofounded a nonprofit called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said. “It leads to an undercount in general of how much extremist activity is happening across the US.” In recent years, Texas has seen numerous anti-Muslim and anti-government threats, as well as militia activity. Last year, rightwing militia members appeared at Black Lives Matter rallies and protests against pandemicrelated public health measures; this year, they showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas and, according to a journalist in attendance, harassed the press.
County with total newspaper circulation drop of 90,000+ County with total newspaper circulation drop of 60,000–89,999 WASHINGTON “It’s not an easy subject to cover,” Chris Ingalls, an investigative reporter at KING 5, Seattle’s NBC affiliate, said. “It takes some digging, and there just aren’t enough people with shovels.” Since 2019, he’s followed the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group; last year, KING 5 issued him an armed security detail when agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force learned that Atomwaffen members planned to visit his home. (Someone later mailed him a letter that read, “You have been visited by your local Nazis.”) Ingalls believes that domestic extremism has gone under-covered in the Pacific Northwest. “We don’t want to believe that it’s here,” he said, “even though we have these examples.”
County with total newspaper circulation drop of 30,000–59,999 County with total newspaper circulation drop up to 29,999 Site of right-wing violence
The Wall Street Journal’s stubborn conservatism
MURDOCHVILLE
Breaking Right
AUTHOR Adam Piore
ILLUSTRATOR Roland Sarkany L ast December—about a month after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, and a month before rioters staged an insurrection in support of Donald Trump—a firestorm erupted over an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Written by Joseph Epstein, an eighty-three-year-old former lecturer at Northwestern University, the piece was called “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.” In it, Epstein noted that Jill Biden holds a doctorate in education—an EdD—and mocked her for using the honorific that comes with the degree, suggesting that she “forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill” and accept the “larger thrill” of being First Lady. “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter,” he began. “Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” The piece went viral, generating outraged responses from newspaper columnists and social media users around the world. Many called it misogynistic and patronizing; others identified it as shameless trolling.
For Rupert Murdoch—the owner of the Journal, Fox News, and a phalanx of other media properties—the piece may have represented
an appealing opportunity for corporate synergy. Tucker Carlson devoted time to the op-ed, and the uproar, on his show, observing that Biden has “the same degree as Dr. Bill Cosby” and that she is a doctor “in the same sense” as Dr. Pepper. But many reporters at the Journal were upset, having found the piece at once insulting and obstructive; Melissa Korn, who covers higher education, tweeted, “Pieces like that make it harder for me to do my job.” The Journal has long been known for its right-wing editorial page, which is kept separate from the newsroom on the organizational chart. “We’re all used to and accepting of that wall being there,” a staffer told me. Nevertheless, the Epstein column was hard to take. “That one, and a couple of the other ones that they’ve done recently, felt like they really went below the belt.”
The Journal holds a peculiar position in the American press. Murdoch, who acquired the paper along with Dow Jones in 2007 for five billion dollars, is perhaps the most hated executive in media, yet the Journal has managed to maintain a serious news operation, providing a training ground for excellent journalists for decades. The Journal has a distinctly conservative, finance-focused sensibility; it also belongs squarely among the New York media elite. It is not where many reporters aspire to land, however, in large part because its reputation is so tainted by incendiary op-eds. For decades, the Journal newsroom has grumbled about leaps of logic and reckless ideology on the opinion side. During Trump’s presidency, the grumbling grew into a roar.
In July 2020, more than two hundred and eighty newsroom employees signed a letter addressed to Almar Latour, the CEO of Dow Jones & Company and the Journal’s publisher, complaining about a “lack of
fact-checking and transparency” on the editorial page, which they believed was undercutting the paper’s credibility and making it difficult to recruit and retain journalists of color. (See, for instance: “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’ ” by Mike Pence.) “Opinion articles often make assertions that are contradicted by WSJ reporting,” newsroom staffers wrote. “Some of us have been told by sources that they won’t talk to us because they don’t trust that the WSJ is independent of the editorial page; many of us have heard sources and readers complain about the paper’s ‘bias’ as a result of what they’ve read in Opinion.” The letter arrived among a flurry of missives sent by Journal reporters to their corporate bosses around the same time: One condemned a racist op-ed headline, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” Another denounced a column in which Gerard Baker, who previously ran the newsroom, used the killing of Ahmaud Arbery to contort an argument that hate crimes against Black people are less frequent than attacks on whites. A letter sent in the wake of George Floyd’s murder observed that “WSJ’s coverage has focused historically on industries and leadership ranks dominated by white men,” calling for more diversity in the newsroom and demanding that the paper “encourage more muscular reporting about race and social inequities.” When the Jill Biden op-ed made the rounds, the newsroom circulated yet another letter of protest.
“The notorious vetting team of the Wall Street Journal that upholds the standards is so intense—they really question every word—but that same group doesn’t go through the op-eds,” Bradley Hope, an investigative reporter who left recently for a startup, told me. He wasn’t among the newsroom’s vocal dissenters, he said, yet he understood their frustration. “When an author purports to be laying out facts, that’s when it really riles up the staff,” Hope continued. “They’re undergoing this crazy process on one hand, and then there’s this bubble that exists where, in the opinion section, everything can be protected by the fact that it’s ‘an opinion.’ ”
The editorial board’s response to the letters was consistent, and they shared it with readers: “We are not the New York Times,” they wrote, under the headline “These pages won’t wilt under cancel-culture pressure.” The piece declared, “Our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.” Matt Murray, the editor of the Journal, told me that dissent over op-eds was outside of his concern: “We keep a firm separation in the Wall Street Journal between news and opinion,” he said. For Murray and for Latour, the conflict was about more than staff morale; the Journal was in the midst of an ambitious push to double its paying customer base, requiring its leaders to pull off an almost impossibly difficult trick in a divided post-Trump America: appeal to new readers without alienating existing ones. The paper’s audience—just over 3.4 million people, many of them in, or retired from, financial professions—is old; according to internal surveys, half of subscribers are over fifty-eight. Roughly 71 percent are men, and at least 70 percent are white. Among the Journal’s dedicated readers, internal surveys suggest, opinion pieces have long been the most reliable draw.
That is not unknown to Journal employees. But recently, as I spoke with about fifty current and former staffers—most on background, fearing retribution—many expressed frustrations that extended beyond the opinion page. Ultimately, what troubles them is the conservatism of the newspaper as a whole, and how that shapes coverage. Editors modulate the tone of political stories, set limits on subject matter, and insist on catering to the Journal’s traditional audience at the expense of growth. Murray— who is fifty-five, with a broad, boyish face— described an allegiance to the formula that the paper has used for generations: cover the news through the lens of business. “I think it’s important that we continue to maintain a type of news reporting that is very definitely rooted in reportable fact and has an objective tone,” he said. Attracting new readers, he believes, can be achieved through service journalism that helps people navigate financial decisions.
At a moment when just about every other news outlet, it seems, is questioning its conventions and seeking to start a new chapter,
Reporters complain that editors modulate the tone of political stories and set limits on subject matter.
the Journal has dug in its heels. That has obvious implications beyond the opinion page; adhering to old habits, and devising coverage that suits right-wing readers, is at once a business stance and an editorial one, a reflection of how much the content of a newspaper comes from defining its audience. But if the Journal stubbornly refuses to change, in the long term, its influence may fade alongside its geriatric readership.
Founded in 1889 as a four-page afternoon newspaper overflowing with market indexes and stock trends, the Journal was the creation of two young newspapermen—Charles Dow and Edward Jones—who quit their jobs working for a financial-news agency in downtown Manhattan and set up shop behind the soda fountain in the basement of 15 Wall Street. By the time they sold Dow Jones & Company, to Clarence Barron, a bushy-bearded, rotund wire service proprietor in Boston, in 1902, the paper had a circulation of roughly seven thousand; its readers filled the ranks of Wall Street.
In the mid-twentieth century, the paper underwent a reinvention under Barney Kilgore, a product of small-town Indiana who arrived as a cub reporter just before the 1929 market crash and served as editor from 1941 to 1965. Kilgore instructed his reporters to expand their target audience beyond the financial elite to include “the almost infinitely more numerous bank depositors,” according to Richard J. Tofel, a former Journal assistant managing editor and the author of Restless Genius, a Kilgore biography. “Business news embraces everything that relates to making a living,” Kilgore liked to say. “Financial people are nice people and all that, but there aren’t enough of them to make this paper go.” He debuted a feature
