It's Not ALWAYS a Conspiracy

In a rematch of their 2024 contest, Democratic Rep. Wesley Bell prevailed over former Rep. Cori Bush, whom Bell ousted in his own primary challenge last cycle. While Bell won the 2024 race by approximately 5 points, he's expanded his lead to over 20 this time around.

But I actually want to flag a tertiary point. When looking for a news report on the race and its outcome, I happened to click on the NBC article (for no other reason than it was near the top of the Google results). The story interviews two voters, both of whom supported Bush. Which I found a bit odd, given that Bush, you know, lost (and lost by a wide margin). The broader copy, to my ears, also seemed to center Bush's "theory of the case" (if you will) regarding Bell being "bought" and Israel being the critical issue.

If I were a different sort of person, I'd spin out quite the tale about this -- of media bias and journalistic narratives and a clear ideological agenda keyed against politicians like Bell and in favor of those like Bush. But my actual point is the exact opposite: there is no conspiracy here. Is it probably better practice for NBC to interview voters who support the winning candidate when reporting on said candidate winning their race? Yeah, I think so. But these things happen, and they happen to candidates from all across the political spectrum, and so plucking out one discrete instance of it and saying "See! See! They really are all out to get us!" is not actually a valid move -- whether it's on behalf of a Bell-sort or on behalf of a Bush-sort.

In any event, congratulations to Wesley Bell, Abdul El-Sayed, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, William Lawrence, Jeremy Moss, and all the Democrats who secured their nominations tonight. Let's get out there and win some seats!

Could You Bari a Network?

July 4 seems like a good day to talk about hubris.

You've all read those articles about men and hubris -- the absurd number of men who think they could take a tennis game off Serena Williams or could win a fight against a bear.

I do not share that hubris. But I do have my own version of it. One manifestation is that I honestly believe I could hold my own in an interview with Isaac Chotiner (surely, that's the intellectual equivalent of "win a fight against a bear"). But another that I just realized is that I earnestly think I could successfully Bari a network news program.

Here are the parameters for how I define Bari-ing:

1. You come in with virtually no relevant experience or qualifications aside from being a pundit (check).
2. You remake the news program in line with a particular political ideology.
3. You have the absolute support of the network owners for whatever you do (so if you fail, it won't be simply because you tick off your bosses).

A successful Bari means that the news program is, you know, successful (gains viewers, is influential, etc.). Basically, everything Bari Weiss hasn't done at CBS. (To be honest, I suspect that "Bari" as a verb will inevitably incorporate a tenor of failing at this project. To "Bari" a network is to fail at doing the above in spectacular fashion. One can even slant-rhyme it with "bury". But for purposes of this exercise, we'll associate it with the attempt, not the outcome).

Under this framework, Bari Weiss Bari-ed CBS by trying to turn it into a network Free Press -- alt-center quasi-contrarian sucking up to the powerful.

By contrast, my ideological line would basically be Last Week Tonight without the comedy, and with an especial laser focus on public corruption. Most importantly, though, it wouldn't pull punches. "Supreme Court decimates Voting Rights Act." "White Supremacy Spreads Amongst Trump Administration Officials." "Trump Takes Billions Through Apparent Insider Trading Scheme." No tap dancing around with the rhetoric. Just call it as it is.

Would this work? Would it quench the thirst of American viewers desperate for a news network that doesn't bowdlerize the truth because straightforward descriptions feel "partisan" (someone -- I feel like on Lawyers Guns and Money -- once said something like "the greatest act of partisan media bias is accurately quoting what Republicans say, verbatim")? I dunno. But I earnestly believe it to be so, and that despite lacking any formal qualifications I could make it so, and that's my version of overwhelming male hubris.

Is It Illegal To Call a Conservative Antisemitic?

The title of this post feels like an exasperated cry of a liberal media critic.  One can imagine looking at the contortions journalists go through to avoid calling, say, Thomas Massie antisemitic even after he distinguished "Zionism" from "US Patriotism" and introduced a "Dual Loyalty Disclosure Bill" and shouting "Goodness, is it illegal to call a conservative antisemitic or what?"

But alas, this isn't a purely rhetorical question. Eugene Volokh reported the other day that the ADL has apparently settled a defamation case filed by a conservative activist who claimed that the ADL defamed him by calling him an "extremist" and saying he peddles "antisemitic beliefs" (details of the settlement don't appear public, but apparently the ADL has removed references to this activist from its website).

The ADL's statements are quintessential examples of protected opinion, but the presiding judge, far-right extremist (can I say that?) Reed O'Connor, twisted the law into knots to let the claim survive a motion to dismiss. Presumably reading the writing on the wall (including the fact that any appeals would go up to the equally lawless Fifth Circuit), the ADL elected to settle.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the ADL's right-ward pivot over the past few years -- Noah Shachtman had a fantastic deep dive in New York Magazine, and I too have offered some of my thoughts. But one aspect that can be overlooked is the incredible pressure the ADL came under in recent years to stop calling out conservative antisemitism -- paradoxically, precisely because ideas once contained to the far-right were increasingly being embraced by "mainstream" conservatives, which (in the eternal-victim mindset of the right) proved that the ADL was "biased".

For a long time, this pressure mostly came in the guise of working the refs -- just repeating, over and over and over again, that the ADL was left-wing and biased and in thrall to the Democratic Party and ever so unfair to the conservative movement. One would never know from these critics that the ADL was facing mounting criticism from liberals (not the left, which always has loathed the ADL, but mainstream progressives who've long made up the ADL's base) for being too solicitous towards conservatives. Still, their efforts yielded results. Fox News parrots right-wing talking points about the ADL promoting "Critical Race Theory"; the ADL quickly promises a "thorough review" to placate them. Elon Musk demands the ADL denounce the anti-apartheid chant "Kill the Boer" (as part of his promotion of the "White genocide" conspiracy); the ADL immediately obliges.

But now, the conservative efforts are pushing past propaganda and into concrete legal action to harass anyone who tries to police conservative antisemitism. The abuse of defamation law (surely, the irony is intentional) is one manifestation. The Twitter/X lawsuit against Media Matters for (accurately) reporting that hateful content was appearing on the platform next to advertiser content -- also a Reed O'Connor special -- is another. And at least adjacent to the point is the threat by the Attorney General of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, to investigate AI chatbots for daring to give Donald Trump low marks on antisemitism -- literally arguing it is a form of fraud and misrepresentation to not give Trump his flowers on the subject. Bailey insists that giving Trump a superior grade on antisemitism is a matter of "objective historical facts," even as less than a third of American Jews approve of Trump's handling of antisemitism and more than half think is personally antisemitic.

So the pressure is very, very real -- which is not at all to justify bending to it, but we need to pay heed to what is actually going on. The right is committed to abusing its legal power to decimate any organization -- absolutely including any Jewish organization -- which dares try to call out conservative antisemitism. This can and should be called what it is: a declaration of war on the Jewish community, and an existential threat to our security and well-being.

Finally, one cannot miss the parallel here between the ADL and the American university -- another institution whose reputation for liberalism was not entirely unearned but certainly greatly exaggerated.  There, as here, venerable American institutions were slammed over and over again with complaints about "bias". There, as here, that decades long rhetorical war has now crested into the most flagrant abuses of authoritarian power we've seen in my lifetime. And there, as here, the attempt to appease the fundamentally authoritarian with humiliating acts of supplication will not work -- they will never trust you, they will always demand more, and you will never be a better fascist than the true believers.

Don't Accommodate Conspiracists

The other day, Yair Rosenberg flagged a bill introduced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY, and almost certainly the most openly antisemitic member of Congress in office today), titled the "Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act," which would require all persons running for office to disclose what countries (other than the United States) they hold citizenship in. Nominally targeting dual citizens, the bill, Rosenberg observed, was clearly inspired by various "lists" circulating on neo-Nazi sites which allege that all Jewish members of Congress are dual citizens of (and thus dually-loyal to) Israel. To that, Rosenberg wrote, "Ironically, the bill would debunk one of the very conspiracy theories that inspired it" (since the disclosure list would reveal that no Jewish MoC has Israeli citizenship).

I meant no disrespect to Yair when I replied that the bill would not "debunk" the conspiracy at all. "[T]he nature of these conspiracies immunizes them from debunking." The truth is already out there, and has not accomplished anything -- so offering more "truth" isn't going to serve as remedy. Rather, I said "When you humor conspiracy theorists by suggesting they have 'legitimate' concerns, you only encourage them."

This is a lesson that generalizes. "Voter fraud", for instance, is an essentially non-existent problem in this country. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court endorsed the state's right to impose voter ID laws to tackle the perception of widespread voter fraud -- even though that perception was (by the Court's own admission) not remotely grounded in the objective record. The Court rationalized its decision as enabling the state to generate greater "confidence" in election results in the face of this widespread, albeit objectively false, sentiment that voter fraud was a serious problem.

This, to put it mildly, did not work. Humoring those who harbored lurid and outlandish beliefs about voter fraud did not cause them to develop greater "confidence" in the electoral system; it instead encouraged them to dig in deeper (culminating, of course, in Trump's attempted insurrection following the 2020 election). A second's worth of reflection could have predicted this would be so: their original fears weren't grounded in reality, so obviously a reality-based solution isn't going to assuage them. All it does it suggest they are on the right track. But whatever grievance or paranoia generated their conspiracy to begin with -- most likely "minorities are sometimes winning elections when I don't want them to" -- that isn't effected at all. You cannot indulge.

Or take vaccines. We've gotten, it seems, a column a week lecturing the medical profession that they must figure out ways to "reassure" "vaccine-hesitant" Americans who, while perhaps objectively misinformed, also have "legitimate concerns" that need to be addressed. Again, the notion that more robust studies or in-depth research could "assuage" "concerns" misapprehends how anti-vaccine sentiment works. RFK Jr. does not want to be "reassured" about vaccine safety, he wants to believe that vaccines are dangerous, and will actively resist efforts at appeasement that still end up concluding that vaccines are in fact, safe. The fact that vaccine safety is settled science means that science must be unsettled. That's no doubt why the new NIH head is so enthusiastic about promoting "dissent" -- not from the administration's new orthodoxies about transgender healthcare, of course, but about the utility of vaccination. It's certainly why RFK picked a serial fraudster to lead the new "studies" into the alleged links between vaccines and autism. When you accommodate the cranks, they get crankier.

"Media bias", same thing. And there's a branch of criticism of academia that, I think, falls into this category as well. Here, too, we are regularly regaled with lectures on how, while Trump's assault on academic freedom may be a step too far, universities did maybe bring it on themselves with their stifling group think and endorsement of wacky leftist priorities. I took a sinful amount of pleasure reading Tressie McMillan Cottom positively curb-stomp Bret Stephens as the latter tried to trot out his tired applause lines about the alleged woes of contemporary academia. Actually, there are plenty of robust debates inside our classrooms. Actually, humanities majors do fine in the job market. Actually, the "lowest-quality institutions" extant in academia today are not "Columbia" and "Berkeley", they're predatory for-profit institutions who plunged hundreds of thousands of Americans into crushing debt by falsely promising a "career-ready" education ("colleges not unlike the one that our current dear leader once ran as a purely economic enterprise.").

For academia, too, there are no reforms that are going to satisfy people prone to believe that the academia is compromised of "factories of Maoist cadres", because the actual state of academia bears no relation to their views on it. Accommodating their fantasies won't make them back off, it will just convince them they've been vindicated.

This doesn't mean that there are no steps university stakeholders should take to improve the robustness of discussion and debate on campus, ensure that campus communities of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints feel included and are treated equitably, and so on -- any more than urging that we dismiss anti-vaccine cranks means that we stop caring about medical quality control and safety testing. Rather, the point is we should do these things for ourselves, not for earning elusive and probably chimerical "credibility" from insatiable critics. Chasing their approval is a fool's errand.

WaPo Goes X

In the latest Bezos bulldozer to the Washington Post's credibility, the Amazon.com owner has announced a new party line for the editorial page. Henceforth, he wrote, the editorial page would be dedicated to two views: "personal liberties and free markets." "[V]iewpoints opposing those pillars" will not be published. Bezos argued that while once upon a time it might have been "a service" for a newspaper "to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views[, t]oday, the internet does that job." The decision led to the resignation of the Post's opinion editor and another wave of discontent amongst the paper's rank-and-file.


My initial thought was to wonder exactly which viewpoints opposed to "personal liberties" and "free markets" Bezos thought the WaPo had been publishing. My second thought was to ponder which views contrary to "personal liberty" would actually no longer be published. Vaccine mandates, I assume. I certainly doubt opposition to trans healthcare, or impinging on a woman's right to choose an abortion, will take on verboten status. As for "free markets" -- kleptocratic suckling to government strongmen for fear of legal retaliation: free market, or no? We'll find out soon enough!

Bezos' move is obviously about effectuating another rightwing shift in the paper (the New York Times noted that Bezos' duo echoed the informal motto of the notoriously extreme Wall Street Journal editorial page: "Free Markets, Free People"). The newsroom remains unaffected for now (the Post's own article on Bezos' decision is a good read), but we'll see how long that lasts.

It gives Bezos far too much credit to compare this decision with his other attacks on the Post's independence, but let's go through the motions, because it does demonstrate that there are no actual principles -- journalistic or otherwise -- in play here. Bezos' indefensible defense of his presidential non-endorsement decree was predicated on the idea that the narrowing force of a presidential endorsement would necessarily suggest journalistic bias and damage the paper's credibility -- a demand for wider viewpoints, not narrower ones. The Post's Scholastic Kids Choice-esque new motto, "riveting storytelling for all of America" tries to sound a similar theme: the Post needs to speak to a wider audience by presenting a wider range of views; it cannot remain cloistered as the mouthpiece of a particular bubble. Juxtapose that against his newfound contempt for a "broad-based opinion section", and the contradiction is obvious -- but "contradiction" again assumes there was a principle in play in the first place. There wasn't -- that was obvious before, and it's more obvious now.

As a business move, there's zero chance that any part of Bezos' demolition derby will redound to the Post's benefit. But I don't think he cares, because he's realized that the Post offers him something far more valuable than a business. It offers him a mouthpiece.

The footsteps Bezos is following here are those of Elon Musk and X. As a business, Musk has of course run X into the ground. But if you're a rich as Musk or Bezos is, that loss is a rounding error. What Musk has gained, of course, has been a megaphone to promote and amplify whatever views and ideologies that appeal to his fancies -- in his case, a cavalcade of conspiracy theories and white supremacist MAGA garbage. Even for our most rapacious capitalists, not every investment has to be monetary -- spending money to bend the arc of the entire world's political discourse surely can be viewed as money well spent (and of course, under the right conditions even an objectively cratering business can still gain value if it is seen as a gateway to the autocrats).

So too, it seems, for Bezos and the Washington Post. Are these moves going to gain back the subscribers he lost? Doubtful. It probably will accelerate departures. But the Post's name still has value, and now it gets to be Bezos' own personal Pravda. Whatever that costs, Bezos is clearly willing to pay it.

New Frontiers of Darkness

The Washington Post has unveiled its new slogan to supplement (in practice, supplant) the old "Democracy Dies in Darkness": "Riveting Storytelling for All of America."

I can't tell you how much I hate this.

First of all, even out of context, it sounds both comically corporate and unbearably patronizing. "Riveting storytelling for all of America" sounds like how to market the Scholastic Book Fairs for emerging readers, not one of America's papers of record.

But of course, we must take this slogan in context. And the context is the Post spending the last few months humiliating itself and dynamiting its journalistic credibility by repeated acts of groveling towards the MAGA movement.

And I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but this slogan really encapsulates the media's self-delusion that it is part of the liberal family. Again, recall my thesis here: the media thinks its main audience is liberals, and so it sees its job as to challenge liberals with "alternative perspectives" or "competing views" (as opposed to just telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may). One implication of this is that conservatives are a growth audience (because of course the Post in its prior manifestation couldn't be speaking to them) -- this is what "for all of America" means. We're no longer speaking just to the latte-sipping coastal elites, but to all of America. And lest you think I'm projecting, they're being quite explicit that this is what they mean:

Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has made comments in line with the new mission statement in conversations with Post journalists in recent years, according to two people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Bezos has expressed hopes that The Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, the people said.

Now nominally, recognizing that conservatives are part of the audience could mean that the Post starts committing to telling them things they don't want to hear. For example, they could be informed, in no uncertain terms, how Trump's tariffs will crush working families with spiraling grocery bills. Or they could be told, in clear-eyed fashion, of how Trump's inner circle is proposing increasingly fascistic and lawless abuses of government power. Or they could be shown, without varnish or spin, how the Republican Party has begun to view sexual assault and rape as virtues in its political leaders -- not even a secret to be ashamed of, but as an affirmative basis for support and promotion.

But of course, we all know that is not what Bezos and his cronies have in mind. "Riveting storytelling" suggests that what they want is sensation and soothing -- to reaffirm their (new) readers' priors, never to challenge them with something as dirty and discomforting as the truth. Conservatives can't tolerate hearing that Donald Trump was a grotesquely unsuitable choice for the presidency, and so the Post (even in its editorial endorsements) won't aggravate them. The Post knows that many if not most of Trump's cabinet picks fail the most basic (by the Post's own lights!) criteria of qualification for office in a democratic society -- respecting the outcomes of a democratic process -- and so the Post will just pretend it doesn't matter.

The Scholastic Book Fair analogy is more than snark, for this is of a piece with the broader trend of infantilizing the American right. Conservatives, once again, are being treated as children, and spoiled children as that -- whatever junk keeps their attention, that's what will be provided. 

A once great newspaper, reduced to an entertaining diversion for spoiled, coddled brats. Maybe the slogan isn't so bad after all.

Deepest Darkness

In the latest blow to the Washington Post's dying credibility, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned after management killed a cartoon she was slated to run depicting various tech moguls (including WaPo and Amazon.com owner Jeff Bezos) prostrating themselves before Donald Trump. Telnaes says it is the first time one of her cartoons was killed because of its point of view in her tenure. The official Post line -- that they had already published or planned to publish two columns on the subject, and so Telnaes' cartoon was redundant -- is even more pathetic than the last defense they gave of obvious political interference in the editorial team's work (two whole columns!).

As Dell Cameron writes, what we're seeing now is a pattern of interference, which in turn amply justifies readers assuming the worst in future incidents -- and that sort of skepticism is toxic to a healthy relationship between a newspaper and the public it serves. Cameron suggests that there may need to be a "mutiny" in the Post in order to restore this confidence. I've written before about how these evermore overt acts of right-wing pandering by media leaders could finally disabuse the journalistic community of their illusion that "everyone" (who matters) already knows and agrees with liberal perspectives (so their main goal is not to present the truth but rather to present "the other side" -- i.e., the conservative view). It hasn't happened yet, but the stress has to eventually reach a breaking point.

Right?

The Media is (Really!) Not Part of the Liberal Family

When I think of what I, as a liberal, want the media to do, it's really quite simple: just tell me what's happening -- without varnish, horserace hypothesizing, or "sanewashing". I don't need them to lie to me. I don't need them to confirm my priors. I don't need to have "bad" news hidden from me. I don't need or want a liberal version of Fox News. Just tell me what's going on! 

For example, immediately after the election and Trump's victory, the stock market went way up. It seems the market was happy with Trump's victory (alongside, I'm guessing, general happiness that the outcome was decisive). As a Democrat, that's not pleasant to see -- but still, I didn't need anyone to hide that fact. I didn't need to construct some Potemkin coverage where it didn't happen. I didn't even need some side-eye slant about how it turns out "the elites" seem rather elated at Trump's triumph (I can make that inference on my own). Just tell me the truth. It will suffice.

Now, I fully admit that this "simple" request isn't so simple. Nonetheless, even accounting for its easier-said-than-done character, there's little doubt that the media has been abjectly terrible at this. And while the reasons behind it are myriad, one answer I keep returning to is an argument I made back in 2018: namely, that the media thinks of itself as part of the liberal "family".

It may be counterintuitive why that leads to conservative media bias. But the idea is that, to the extent journalists fundamentally see themselves as liberals talking to liberals, then there isn't much need to report on various dangers and predations of conservatives. "We" already know that. There's nothing new here. If anything, the job of a journalist is to disturb "our" preexisting narratives. And since the "we" and the "our" are all imagined to be liberals, we get an endless stream of apologetics, explainers, and sanewashing of conservative extremism.oooo

But I said in 2018 and I'll say it now: regardless of the personal politics of any particular editor or journalist, the media is not part of the liberal family. They should not presume their only audience is liberals, they should not assume that their job is to give liberals "the other side of the story", because they should not view conservatives (or liberals) as "the other side" to begin with. This is related to something Jamelle Bouie wrote recently: the political media has a bad habit of thinking its job is to play amateur political strategist for Democrats, instead of just trying to accurately report on what's happening in the world. When we're talking about Biden's alleged mental decline or Trump's rambling political speeches, we don't need hypothesizing about how this is playing out in swing states. Just -- tell us what's happening. Report Trump's speech. Report Biden's speech. The audience can decide for itself whether this reality is "good news" or not for Democrats or Republicans.

I admit, there is a small part of me that harbors hope that the surrenderist policy taken by many journalistic "elites" towards Trump -- exemplified by the owners of the Washington Post and LA Times craven non-endorsement decisions -- might disabuse some other members of the legacy journalist community of the naive notion that "everyone" (who counts) already knows how dangerous Trump and his cronies are. The increasingly evident truth that this assessment is not universally-held (obviously it's not!) should, in an ideal world, dissipate the notion that straightforward, accurate recounting of what's going on in Trumpland is in some way preaching to the choir or superfluous repetition of obvious truths. And likewise, it should be obvious right now that the main "bias" the media needs to combat within itself is not a propensity to overtell liberal narratives, it's an instinct to self-censor truths inconvenient to conservatives because it's viewed as gilding the lily.

On this score, the early returns are not good -- the media is already racing to sanewash RFK Jr.'s anti-vaxx positions on the apparent premise that "we all" know why vaccines are healthful, and need to understand the argument for why they're dangerous. The reality, though, is that we don't all know that vaccines are healthful, and lots of people need to be educated on why avoiding or tamping down on vaccines is what's dangerous.

This, ultimately, is what it actually means to speak to an audience of conservatives and liberals alike. It's not about being evermore coddling and accommodating of conservative conspiracism -- that's never going to work. Ultimately, it means remembering that not "everyone" knows and accepts truths inconvenient for contemporary conservatism, and when reality poses facts troublesome to a conservative reader, it is the media's job to report those facts without varnish or sugarcoating. To borrow from Harry Truman: you're not giving your conservative readers hell -- you just telling them the truth, and they're calling it hell.

Going Darker

Jeff Bezos has published a defense of his last-minute decision to override the Washington Post's editorial board and decline to issue a presidential endorsement.

It is not persuasive.

Bezos' core theme is that the media has a trust problem. This problem is not about actual impropriety or bias -- Bezos firmly rejects the notion that the Post is and has been anything but professional in its coverage. Rather, the problem is the appearance of bias. Editorial endorsements, even if they do not actually evince bias on behalf of the paper's news coverage, make people believe that there is. And that's why presidential endorsements need to be axed.

There's much that can be said here, including the fact that this in no way explains why presidential endorsements, alone, have this problematic effect. But I want to focus on a different problem about the concentration on an "appearance" of bias, because this is an area where in many cases the cure will be worse than disease. Where the "appearance" is based on falsehoods or absurdities, as it is here, attempts to "correct" the appearance (a) will never work and (b) will simply make other stakeholders (rightly!) second-guess whether bias is present.

The "voter fraud" panic is a great example of this, because it is also an arena where courts have justified severe limits on voting rights to combat the "appearance" of fraud even in circumstances where there is concededly no evidence of actual fraud. The logic is that the state still has a valid interest in its elections being perceived as legitimate. The problem is that if people are inclined to believe "fraud" is a problem notwithstanding evidence that it essentially doesn't exist, there's no reason to believe that any interventions will disabuse them of their delusions. Why would it -- the whole premise is that the people in question believe things in contradiction to the objective evidence! Meanwhile, the "appearance" justification conveniently overlooks other stakeholders whose faith in free and fair elections starts to decay precisely because they're witnessing a slew of voter suppression measures justified on (admitted!) fantasies. Why doesn't their assessment of "appearances" matter? At least it's based on something that's really happening.

The same is true in the Post's situation. The notion that an opinion page publishing an opinion is reflective of impermissible bias is beyond parody. Nobody actually believes this (including Bezos, as evidenced by the fact that the paper will continue to endorse in every other election). So there's no reason to think that abandoning endorsements will have any effect on those who make irrational and frivolous accusations of bias. Even if you buy Bezos' "logic", the entire problem is by stipulation illogical. And even as this move tries-and-fails to appease the unappeasable, it generates a far more serious "appearance of bias" in its own right. It will appear to many that Bezos is trying to coddle up to Donald Trump. It will appear that the Post's editorial independence is being compromised by the arbitrary whims of its billionaire owner. It will appear that the Post no longer is capable of fearlessly speaking truth even where powerful interests find it awkward or inconvenient.

These appearances are why I and 200,000(!) other subscribers have hit the cancellation button. But of course, what Bezos' choices "appear" to represent to us doesn't matter, just as what spurious "anti-fraud" measures "appear" to represent to minority and marginalized voters doesn't matter. When it comes to avoid the "appearance" of impropriety, invented concoctions by the dominant caste will always trump objective failings endured by the less powerful.

Going Dark

The Washington Post has announced it will not be issuing an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, overruling a decision by the editorial board planning to endorse Vice President Harris. This follows a similar decision by the LA Times, both justified under the auspices of maintaining "neutrality", both actually made at the behest of billionaire owners who have significant financial stakes in staying in the good graces of the once- and potential-future president.

For the Post, it is a stunning abdication of duty and role by an outlet that operated under the mantra "democracy dies in darkness."

(The LA Times case has a slight wrinkle, in that the billionaire owner's daughter suggested in her own tweets that the non-endorsement was actually a commentary on the "genocide" in Gaza. While I suspect the owner's more pecuniary motives were driving the show, I'll just say that it should surprise no one that these "different" politics lead to the exact same place, and are profound exercises in cowardice in the exact same ways).

I remember the week Trump was elected, I was in a pedagogy class where new collegiate instructors were discussing how we should respond to the shocking news in our classroom. On this point, our professor was quite decisive: we had a job to do, and we should respond by doing our jobs. Since we were in a political scientist department, this didn't mean we necessarily ignored the events in the outside world -- politics were part of our ambit, after all. But we were not to pout, or cancel class, or anything of the sort. We had jobs to do, and we should do them.

The Post's choice today is the climax of a broader failure in our mainline news media to simply do its job in the face of shocking news. When Trump initially rose to power, the media's job was to report on him accurately. It instead viewed him as a fun little joke that could spike some ratings and inject some entertainment into the staid and boring world of politics. They saw their job as goosing readership, not informing the public. As the 2016 election approached, they chose to develop a truly unhealthy obsession with the absolute non-scandal of EMAILZ, to the exclusion of virtually every other issue. They saw their job as getting out in front of the candidate who "of course" was going to win, or of carrying out their own personal vendettas against Hillary Clinton.

This time around, we're going through the same thing. It is the media's job to accurately report on the frightening descent of Trump into a mix of babbling incoherence and unapologetic fascism. Instead, we get sanewashing -- express efforts to misreport what Trump actually says and does because rendering the copy accurately would make him look, well, look exactly as he is.

And that brings us to the non-endorsement developments. The media -- or the business "leaders" who own the relevant papers -- no longer sees Trump as a joke. They are scared of him. They know full well that his next term in office will be replete with recrimination against all he deems his enemies, and they do not want to fall on the wrong side of the naughty/nice list. I agree with those who say that the Post's decision is anticipatory compliance, but more than that I agree that it is a terrifying sign of the Putinization of American politics -- a billionaire class that knows the security of its position is entirely at the whim of dictator, and makes sure to cozy up to him lest their portfolios (or other things) start plummeting from great height.

All of this is no more complicated than a simple refusal by the media to do its job, in the most basic form imaginable. Some institutions are, as a matter of role, forbidden from wading into political controversies, but newspaper editorial pages are not one of them. The contention that a newspaper violates some precept of neutrality by having its editorial board issue an endorsement is beneath contempt; editorials are opinions by definition, they necessarily take a point of a view. When the media, in its professional judgment as observers of the political scene, decide that candidate A is a better pick for the position than candidate B, communicating that choice is doing one's job. Where the evidence shows that candidate B would be a disaster for democracy, rule of law, and the very continuation of the American project, all the more so.

Not every newspaper is failing in its job. But some are. The Washington Post was my hometown paper, it is the one I grew up with. It is bitterly disappointing to see it stoop to such a pathetic low.

Pictured: The entirety of the presidential endorsement by the Willamette Week

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXVII: The Wall Street Journal

We're really on a run this week, aren't we?

Savvy media observers know well that the Wall Street Journal can be pretty firmly divided into two components. There are the news sections, which are widely respected and comprised of professional reporters who do rigorous, hard-hitting journalism. And then there's the opinion section, which is the worst hive of scum and villainy in the galaxy.

This post is about the latter. But not the latter's worst work. The opinion page published a column titled "Can America Trust Modi's India?" (a good question!). This displeased Kanwal Sibal, India's foreign secretary. But he's figured out what prompted publication:

WSJ is owned by Soros. Explains the anti- Modi virulence of article. No effort to introduce any balance in it. Strings together a litany of smears. No honesty, only hate.

The WSJ is actually, in fact, owned by Rupert Murdoch. And George Soros' reach is long indeed, if he can direct the editorial choices of Murdoch's outlets. And we might also wonder why, if Soros owns Murdoch's media outlets, he hasn't done a better or more comprehensive job pivoting them towards cosmopolitan paeons to the proletariat revolution (or whatever it is Soros is supposed to be interested in), as opposed to the usual indeed string of MAGA dreck one normal finds?

But the trick is that when people talk about things being "owned by Soros", they're not really talking about percentage of stock or presence on a board. They're not even talking about some comprehensive ability to direct control. "Owned by Soros" means "entity in a public space that does something I don't like." This is why anti-Soros conspiracy theories are inevitably antisemitic in nature. The whole thing doesn't make sense unless it's leveraging belief in some inchoate, shadowy globalist conspiracy that is unbound by rules of reason or logic.

A Great Replacement

Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News. His departure will be mourned by his loved ones, such as neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin and right-wing extremist Ben Shapiro.

The diabolical brilliance of his racist character was that he was able to occupy a grounds between traditional Republicans and actual Nazis, bridging the beliefs of both groups and winning the adoration of both. “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews,” wrote neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin in the Daily Stormer, a white-supremacist publication. Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, marked Carlson’s departure from Fox by calling him “immensely talented and one of the most important voices on the right, and he’s going to continue to be those things no matter what comes next.”

And while I have no doubt Fox will replace him with an ambitious right-wing go-getter who is eager to prove he can be just as racist as Carlson ever was, in this moment it's hard not to feel satisfaction.

Multimedia David: Intersectionality and Mifepristone Edition

A couple of non-blog media appearances for me (in case you haven't had your fill).

Two local Portland news affiliates interviewed me about the Texas anti-abortion decisions. You can watch the clip from the local NBC channel here, or read the story from the local ABC affiliate here. I'm always a bit skittish about doing television segments -- I hate the way I look/sound on TV, and there's always the anxiety over what clip or portion thereof they'll choose to run -- but on the whole I was reasonably pleased with how this went.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago I gave a talk on my "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" article to ENCATE, the European Network for Countering Antisemitism through Education. The talk was recorded; you can watch it here. It is an unexpected but pleasant surprise how resonant that paper has been for European audiences in particular (I fully admit I was thinking almost exclusively about the Anglo-American experience when I wrote it), and I really appreciated getting to speak before this group.

You People, Get a Grip

So quick disclaimer: I have not seen "You People". It did not especially interest me to begin with, and the commentary I've read about it has not (to say the least) altered my initial instincts.

But reading the discourse about "You People", I've noticed a particular type of denunciation which seems to hold several presuppositions as gospel. They are:

1. "You People" is antisemitic;
2. Despite (or because of?) its antisemitism, "You People" is a critical darling; and
3. No other group but the Jews would encounter a situation where a media property that is so hateful is a media darling.

That this last claim is made unironically at the exact same time Dave Chappelle won a Grammy for "The Closer" is absolutely precious. But there's a bigger problem with the syllogism here, which is that "You People" is not at all a "critical darling". It has a flat lousy 42% rating on Rotten Tomato! It is widely seen as a mediocre disappointment!

The "nobody but the Jews is expected to suffer so" is an ever-flowering weed of antisemitism discourse, paradoxically living in largely harmonious coexistence with its opposite ("nobody would ever dare say that about the Jews"). Both positions are obviously wrong, which stops exactly nobody from asserting them with unimpeachable confidence. More interesting is the assumption that "You People" inevitably would be a critical hit; so much so that I saw people simply asserting that it was being lauded as an anti-racism classic in defiance of the actual critical consensus. What is going on here?

My suspicion is that there is a line of thinking amongst some that basically assumes that any film or media property which styles itself as "anti-racist" or "asking the hard questions about discrimination" will, in our supposedly hyper-woke era, automatically be viewed as a work of great significance and power -- and if punches at Jews, so much the better. They have bought in hard to the narrative that "woke" means a complete suspension of critical faculties in favor of blind support for anything that holds itself out as anti-racist; since "You People" fits the mold, of course it will be blindly and fervently supported via this inevitable collapse into groupthink. The complaint that critics will reflexively laud anything calling itself "anti-racist" -- ironically itself a reflex that has (as here) proven itself impervious to empirical refutation (perhaps because its very purpose is to enable the automatic and reflexive suspicion of any media property calling itself "anti-racist" -- it can't ever have earned its praise, if it is being lauded it's simply to fulfill the diktats of political correctness)  -- is paradoxically paired with the complaint that Jews and antisemitism are not included inside this paradigm of blind and uncritical support.

But again -- the whole thing is based on a misnomer. The critical reception of "You People" was not blindly supportive; it was not supportive at all. Whether because of its alleged antisemitism, or its clunkiness, or its heavy-handedness, "You People" was not a highly regarded movie notwithstanding its grand social ambitions. This should (but won't) falsify the notion that critics or commentators simply reflexively praise anything that styles itself as anti-racist -- which in turn should (but won't) make us more willing to consider seriously other "anti-racist" media properties which have gotten plaudits but also are hit with the reflexive dismissiveness that they are naught but contemporary PC pandering.

Who's Afraid of "Jewish" Steve Carrell? (Or, "Us Too-ism")

The JTA headline reads: "Creators of Hulu’s ‘The Patient’ defend casting Steve Carell as Jewish therapist in latest ‘Jewface’ flare-up". I hadn't heard of the story, let alone the "flare-up," so I was curious to see who was making what argument. Unfortunately, the article doesn't actually cite any live human being objecting to Carrell's casting, just a response to an apparently ambient "controversy" (the linked Variety article also doesn't name any specific critics). That said, I know that the "Jewface" controversy isn't completely made up out of thin air. I have seen real people level such concerns before.

Now I'll lay my cards on the table -- I'm not inherently bothered when non-Jewish actors are cast to play Jewish characters. Indeed, to some extent, I feel that some -- not all -- of the "Jewface" controversy is a sort of vulgar "us too-ism" that one sees substitute for genuine Jewish political engagement these days. 

What is "us too-ism"? Some Jews see a given political demand by another minority group (e.g., that Black actors should play Black characters), and then decide that if the powers-that-be don't give similar consideration to a Jewish parallel (Jewish actors playing Jewish characters), then it's proof that "Jews Don't Count" -- full stop. To be clear, it's not that there aren't valid parallels that can be drawn between the political demands of one group and another. But these parallels aren't automatic, and what defines "us too-ism" is that it doesn't pause to ask whether the Jewish community was actually organically bothered by the "exclusion" in the first place. The fact that another group has a demand suffices to make it into a Jewish entitlement as well -- if they're getting this accommodation, then by golly, "us too!" -- even if it never occurred to us to want it until we heard their demand. It's reactive rather than proactive, and often ends up confusing itself (e.g., simultaneously wanting "CRT for Jews" but also blaming "CRT" for why Jews don't count). 

In practice, "us too-ism" often occludes the rich specific history and context which generate organic demands for particular forms of cultural respect (e.g., that actors of X background should portray characters of that background), instead imagining them to stem from some inherent entitlement of "marginalized people" (and Jews are marginalized, so therefore, it fits "us too"). It flattens important points of distinction and differentiation across various social groups that are essential to understanding what actually is oppressing, hurting, or dominating any given group. That two groups are marginalized doesn't mean they're marginalized in the same way, and so it makes sense that a practice which deeply rankles members of marginalized group A doesn't significantly disturb group B. Normatively, it strikes me as self-defeating and self-victimizing to act as if that's a flaw in B's outlook. But at the extreme, "us too-ism" attacks Jews for not being offended by something, as if it is our obligation to feel marginalized by a phenomenon even if it doesn't actually bother us. This strikes me as a tremendously toxic obligation, and one I just refuse to abide by.

All that said, that something doesn't genuinely rankle me doesn't mean it might not do so for others, and I always want to be respectful of persons who do have thought-out arguments for why it is problematic for non-Jews to portray Jewish characters. I've heard these arguments aired more frequently in the context of Jewish actresses being passed over for Jewish parts (even as elsewhere in their careers they're typecast in particular roles because of their Jewishness), and since I'm situated differently vis-à-vis that debate I try to maintain a posture of open receptivity towards those arguments. Certainly, it strikes me as reasonable to care if Jewish actors and (perhaps especially?) actresses are not getting opportunities based on a too-Jewy/non-Jewy enough double bind where stereotypically Jewish features both exclude Jews from certain roles but then are accentuated or exaggerated in non-Jewish actors to Judaize them for the screen (see, e.g., the Bradley Cooper prosthetic nose controversy).

But beyond that, my primary concern is to care about the respectfulness of the representation far more than the personal identity of who is doing the representation. "Respectfulness", itself, is a site for contestation, and people can disagree. I like Rachel Brosnahan's Mrs. Maisel, and find her and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel an endearing portrayal of the sort of New York Jewish life that my parents were raised in. Others disagree, which, fine, but I defy anyone to say Midge Maisel is more offensive than Howard Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory notwithstanding the fact that Simon Helberg is Jewish and Brosnahan isn't.

Basically, there are dimensions of this problem that are internal and external to the work. Externally, the question is whether Jewish actors and actresses face certain exclusions in the industry on account of their Jewishness -- exclusions which no doubt would make it extra-infuriating if they are later passed over for roles where their Jewish character would seem to be an asset. That was certainly the case for Jewish actors historically, the degree to which it continues to be so is an empirical question I don't know enough to register an opinion on. Internally, the question is whether there is something about being Jewish that is necessary to accurately or effectively portraying a given role in a respectful manner. To that, I say "no". Andre Braugher isn't gay, but his portrayal of Raymond Holt was rightly seen as a watershed performance. Stephanie Beatriz is bisexual, and the same was said for her performance as Rosa Diaz. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

But again, this is a subject where I'm happy to hear other opinions. That JTA and Variety couldn't actually name any critics of Carrell's casting can easily make one think that this "flare up" is a media invention. Is it? If anyone wants to come down to register their opposition to Carroll's casting on "Jewface" grounds, I'm glad to lend you my comment section.

When Will Dead and Maimed Women and Girls Become Old News?

It's been less than a month since Roe v. Wade was overturned, and already the consequences are being felt by women and girls around the country whose health and lives are suddenly imperiled. Many of these stories have gotten significant coverage. To name a few:

• The ten-year-old rape victim who was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion because it would have been illegal in Ohio.
• The patient in Texas who was in the process of miscarrying but was placed in mortal peril because doctors could not operate until the fetus stopped registering a heartbeat.
• The Wisconsin woman who was left to bleed out for ten days during a miscarriage because doctors could not be sure treating her would not violate the state's anti-abortion laws.
• The hospitals in Texas who are turning away pregnant patients facing complications because they fear legal liability for providing basic medical care.
• The pharmacists refusing to dispense certain drugs necessary for medical treatment because they think they could also be used to facilitate abortions.
• The decision of the Idaho Republican Party to support banning abortion even in cases necessary to save the life of the mother -- a legal mandate requiring mothers to die.

All of these cases occur fresh in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. All demonstrate, in vivid detail, how the health and safety of women and girls in America has been dramatically imperiled by the Court's imperious decision. Some right-wing commentators have labeled in "suspicious" how many of these stories are emerging so shortly after Dobbs. There is nothing suspicious about it: of course the consequences of banning abortion would manifest immediately after banning abortion. These stories are what will happen in the first month after Dobbs, and the second, and the third, and the twelfth. These stories are the new normal.

Which raises an important question: what happens when they become normal?

These stories are getting coverage now because they're novel. They are breaking reports about the new reality we live under. But in two, three, twelve months, these stories will still be occurring, but they'll no longer be new. Will they still be covered? Or will the media move on?

One can easily imagine in September and October and November newspaper editors deciding that the latest instance of a child rape victim being forced to scurry across state lines, or a miscarrying woman being left to bleed out in a hospital, or a patient denied prescribed medication by an overzealous pharmacist, are yesterday's news. They'll recede into the background, not because they've gone away, but because they're omnipresent.

This isn't an inevitability. News networks don't skip covering crime stories just because "there are muggings every day". One would hope that they'd apply the same logic to women. Every time one of these laws maims or kills or harasses a girl or woman in their community, that should be a story. The drumbeat shouldn't stop, because the story isn't stopping. It should never be "old news" .

We'll see. I'm skeptical. But we'll see.

Good Coverage Takes Time

There has been over the past few days a wave of antisemitic violence that's targeted Jews in the U.S. and around the world, often styled as a "response" to Israeli activities in Gaza. For example, here's an L.A. Times article about several Jews getting jumped in front of a sushi restaurant in the Beverly Grove neighborhood. CBS has a story about a 29-year old Jew brutally beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City's Diamond District. The BBC covered terrifying racial abuse targeting Jews in London. CNN ran a piece about these attacks demonstrating a larger, nationwide trend. I could go on.

In short, it is not good right now. And one thing I've heard from many of my fellow Jews is frustration that these attacks are not appearing to get much coverage or attention, compared to other communities which have been the victims of hateful violence.

Now at one level, this is an unfair charge. I just gave links to coverage in the Los Angeles Times, CBS, BBC, and CNN. It would not have been hard for me to find more. But I'm going to make a perhaps more unpopular take, and simply say the following: news coverage takes time. Good news coverage takes more time. And most issues, affecting most communities, take time to percolate out from those communities and penetrate the broader social (and media) consciousness. 

There's nothing unique about Jews here -- we only notice it because it's our community so of course we hear about it before anyone else does. For example, the Los Angeles attack occurred in a largely Persian Jewish area, and from my time at Berkeley I had several students from that community. So I reached out to check in on them, and wouldn't you know it if they weren't friends with some of the Jews who were injured. Two degrees of separation between me and the victims. It is utterly unsurprising that I was going to hear about this before the national media. It would be wild if the Washington Post scooped me on this. My network and my friend group and my twitter feed mean I start seeing these when they're just reports or viral videos -- well before any national coverage could be expected to come in.

I've talked about this before. Within one's own group, one sees these issues from basically their inception. We know (or know who knows) the individuals involved. We're in the same social media network. We're tied into the local community coverage. And so we see every agonizing hour/day/week where these issues which are huge for us seem to be ignored by the broader public until finally, laboriously, belatedly they scratch their way into the mainstream. Meanwhile, for other groups, we don't have that level of integration and we don't see the process. Our awareness of the issue is essentially coterminous with when it reaches the mainstream media, and we thus mistakenly conclude that the mainstream media covered the issue from the moment it began.

But in reality, that's almost assuredly untrue. The reality there is going to be the same as the reality here -- the issue will be there, known to the community, the talk of the community, infuriating the community, for hours/days/weeks without it ever breaking into the mainstream until finally it does. It's the same dynamic -- the only difference is at what stage you become aware of the process. The Sheikh Jarrah controversy had been live for literally decades before 99.9% of you had ever heard of it, or it got picked up by international media outlets. Ditto issues of police brutality, or #MeToo, or anti-Asian hate crimes. In none of these cases was there no time lag between the issue being one of extensive knowledge and importance within the relevant community and its emergence in prominent mainstream media coverage. 

And I'll go even further still: part of the reason it takes time is because it inevitably takes time (for better or for worse) for a story that affects a particular community to penetrate the particular, rarefied air of the national media. But in addition, it takes time to do good coverage of that story. To verify accounts, to interview sources, to learn about the issue, to contextualize the situation. Good coverage takes more time than retweeting someone else's viral video. And so there's going to be an inevitable gap between when everyone in your Facebook group is talking about a thing that happened in Atlanta and when the Chicago Tribune puts an article about it on its front page. That's just the way it works.

Good coverage takes time. I'm not going to say all the coverage of the hate crimes targeting Jews right now is good. But the fact that we, in the Jewish community, are hearing about it and angsting about it and frightened over it well before most of it is showing up in the media sources our non-Jewish friends read -- well, that's normal.

The Headliners

Here is a current headline up on NBC News: "Despite cease-fire pressure as dozens die in Israeli strikes, Netanyahu pledges 'full force'".

I have no particular problem with this headline. It certainly sets a tone of Israeli aggression in the face of pleas for peace, but that's not necessarily inappropriate in this context. Certainly, it's within the bounds of fair presentation. There is cease-fire pressure, dozens have died in Israeli strikes, and Bibi has nonetheless so far been implacable in continuing the attack.

Why do I mention it? Well, one sees a lot of commentary on social media picking apart western media headlines and claiming proof that they're always biased in a pro-Israel (or anti-Israel) direction. While anyone can play journalism critic, one inherent problem with this genre is that any headline will necessarily be incomplete and fail to paint a comprehensive picture, and so by picking one or two out of the void one can "illustrate" virtually any trend one wants.

On top of that, this genre of commentary has yielded what I think is one of the more obnoxious social media trends I've seen in recent weeks. One sees a headline that says something like this:

Israeli strikes kill six in Gaza as conflict continues.

Followed by someone smarmily saying "let me correct that for you" with this:

Israeli Apartheid Isra-hell strikes massacres kill slaughter six innocent babies in besieged Gaza as conflict genocide continues.

And the thing is -- they're 90% earnest! It's not that there aren't cases where one can't pick at choices of words or framing, but there are folks who think that if a newspaper fails to run the below headline, they're reflecting a pro-Israel bias.

In slightly more modest fashion, one sees this from quite serious people. Consider a tweet from NYU journalism professor, objecting to headlines in the coverage of Israel's strike which destroyed a media building in Gaza. Here's what he says is "the most obvious and clear headline": 

"Israel Destroys Gaza Media Tower"

But here's the Washington Post headline he finds woefully insufficient: 

"Israeli Strike Hits Gaza Media Tower as Violence Intensifies"

That's essentially the same thing! The only substantial difference is "strike" versus "destroy", but in the subheading the first sentence begins "The airstrike destroyed a tower ..." Sure, one can squint and twist to find small differences in connotation between the two, but they're all within the bounds of legitimate journalistic presentation (same as with the NBC headline above). To pull this out as an example of flagrant media bias is baffling to me.

Big Media David: On the JDA and Not Calling Things Antisemitic

I have a new column in Haaretz on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and, in particular, on the need for its backers to actually use it call things antisemitic (not just use it to call things not antisemitic). It is in many ways an expansion on my last post, but for a more popular audience.

I want to be clear though that I don't view the JDA as an enemy. My fondest hope for this column is that it convinces a large cluster of JDA signatories to band together and send a statement to Bristol University of the form: "FYI? David Miller is exactly who we mean when we talk about antisemitism operating under the guise of 'criticism of Israel'." I think that would be a very helpful intervention, and perfectly aligned with the JDA's text. But the thing is, they have to do it -- they can't just say it could be done consistent with the JDA.

Nobody Expects the Muslim Trump Supporter!

There's a fascinating tidbit in a newly released poll about various religious groups' political opinions: Muslims and Jews hold very similar views about the presidency of Donald Trump. Specifically, for both groups his approvals are in the low 30s (30% for Muslims, 34% for Jews).

The poll is a bit dated -- it was apparently conducted in March just before the coronavirus lockdown, so certainly politics have ... evolved since then -- but it still raises a fascinating question: why does one never hear about Muslim Trump supporters? Compared to Jewish Trump supporters, who seemingly have an outsized presence in the media and in the public eye, one virtually never sees Muslim Trump supporters interviewed in the press, or internal debates within the Muslim community about Trump vs. not-Trump aired. (And it's worth noting that, unlike Jews, Muslims have historically been a lean-conservative voting bloc -- it was only after 9/11 and the immense wave of Islamophobia that poured out of the GOP that they shifted to the Democratic camp).

Why the disparity? Here are some hypotheses, which are just spitballs at this point:

• Republicans are less likely to highlight Muslim support than Jewish support, which lowers the salience of their Muslim backing.
• Despite their historically (and consistent) progressive voting patterns, there is a strong narrative that Jews are a politically conservative group (wealthy, White, entrenched and invested in preserving the existing order) which makes people assume that Jews are more conservative than they are.
• The high-profile nature of Donald Trump's anti-Muslim actions (most notably the travel ban) makes it really hard for the media to imagine "Muslims for Trump" as a live phenomenon, whereas the high-profile nature of his (nominally, at least) "pro-Jewish" measures (e.g., the embassy move) makes it seem plausible that he'd garner a non-trivial proportion of Jewish support.
• The major Muslim political organizations are decisively anti-Trump in a way that the major Jewish political organizations are not. Jewish Trump supporters have far more prominent positions within the institutional Jewish community than do their Muslim counterparts.
• The media has less experience delving into the weeds of intra-Muslim communal splits, and so is less likely to pick up on smaller (but still extant) political factions.

Fortunately, I wrote a whole article on the distinctive political status of dissident minorities such as Muslim Trump backers (though I didn't address that example specifically). I'm not saying that it's good that such persons are completely ignored -- I'm curious as to what makes them tick! -- but I do think it's a good thing that our public dialogue does not treat them as if they're equally representative of the Muslim community when they're clearly not.