The Banality of Journalism
How we find ourselves perpetuating systems and upholding power.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Ruben wrote an excellent piece this week tying together various FBI failures surrounding Donald Trump.
Failures? Should I use the word “failures”? Maybe tacit support. Should I use the word “tacit”?
To recap, the news from this week is that top FBI investigators were reluctant to serve a search warrant on Mar-A-Lago in the summer of 2022, even though the National Archives was fairly certain there were still documents there, and in-house video showed employees moving boxes out of the storeroom to other areas of the compound. But Trump’s attorneys had assured the feds in June that there were no more documents to be found. That was enough for at least two top FBI investigators to want to wash their hands of the whole thing.
The reasoning, according to this raft of reporters from the Washington Post: FBI agents “worried taking aggressive steps investigating Trump could blemish or even end their careers.”
That’s some Mafia-style internalized intimidation right there.
This week, I’ve also been reading the CCSD police contract, which oddly* enshrines restorative justice - and secrecy - for police. So it’s nigh on impossible for anyone to see previous complaints against officers. I believe this is against public records law. But when it’s enshrined in a contract, you now have contract law competing with the first amendment. And that can be a long and messy process to untangle.
For fun this week, I’ve been reading Kathleen Belew’s “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” which is kinda tedious in its detail but also really instructive about how white power was mixed with post-Vietnam militarism and has bled into today’s policing.
And I’ve come to the realization that these kinds of stories are essentially the same story.
It’s about power. It’s about power and upholding the status quo.
It’s about working in systems where power and control are the default, and where people, if they are not careful, lose themselves.
The take-down of a kid by a CCSD cop is related to the willful ignorance of FBI intelligence before January 6 is related to a former FBI intelligence officer possibly interfering in the 2016 election is related to FBI agents not wanting to issue a search warrant on Mar-A-Lago is related to fellow cops standing by and doing nothing while George Floyd was murdered is related to cops in an entirely different city falsifying an affidavit for a search warrant on Breonna Taylor is related to the utter depravity of the special operations team in Memphis glorying in beating Tyre Nichols to death, which, oddly, evokes stories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
I would venture to say that every family member and friend of any of the soldiers or agents or cops who committed these egregious acts think they are good people. They are worthy of love. But at some point in the group power dynamic, you lose your moral compass. And that’s when things go wrong.
This, of course, is the point of Hannah Arendt’s “The Banality of Evil,” the subtitle for her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which I’m sure Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will at some point ban, if he already hasn’t. People in corrupt systems have to fight to not become corrupt themselves. And sometimes they lose those fights.
When Tyre Nichols was so brutally murdered, the first reaction of the white, male journalism class was, “The cops are Black. So it’s not racist.”
So, do we also say that the Holocaust was not about racial purity directed at the extermination of (mostly) Jews because some Jewish people acted as kapos and harmed their brethren to curry favor with their Nazi captors? Do we also say that Black slaves who were put in oversight positions were not themselves victims of the brutality of slavery? Do we say that in Africa, warring tribes would often take slaves, so it was OK for Europeans to do so for colonial capitalism?
Corrupt systems breed corrupt behavior. Policing isn’t inherently corrupt - though the entire idea of police in the U.S. did grow out of slave catchers. Good people go into the systems. Sometimes they do good. Sometimes they are corrupted. If they’re lucky, they get out with their dignity intact.
So too it is with journalists, who allow ethical chips to form for a coveted byline, or who don’t want to be humiliated in a frat house atmosphere which characterized many daily newspapers when they were powerful (read: in existence), or who just don’t want to stick out. You may have started out wanting to hold truth to power, but when a well-placed source starts “confiding” in you, it’s easy to believe that you are important, and that the source isn’t just stoking your ego to get the coverage they want.
So of course something like the beating of Tyre Nichols comes to the fore, and journalists report on it by talking to police about how they can reform. It’s all part of the system. It’s all part of the game we play with powerful government entities.
Which means we don’t ask the questions that need to be asked. Instead of saying, “The Memphis cops were Black, so racism isn’t a thing here,” ask “What are the values in our system of policing that are allowing these men to torture someone for running away, and then have trouble - as shown on the videos - coming down from the adrenaline high?” I don’t think any of those cops individually would have done to Tyre Nichols what they did as a group. What is it that allows this to happen? And how can we stop it?
There was a book that came out in the early 1990s called “Our Guys,” by Bernard Lefkowitz. It detailed the gang-rape of a mentally disabled teen girl by members of the local high school baseball team in Glen Ridge, New Jersey - where, coincidentally, Tom Cruise is from. Many of the teens who raped the girl, or who had watched her be raped, had known her since kindergarten. Lefkowitz explores how the group dynamic, the power of their position as star athletes, and their views of sex as dehumanizing, allowed these teens to do something they would never do individually. Some had regret and remorse. Some had families who were horrified. Most of the town, though, blamed the girl.
Are all boys who play baseball rapists? Of course not. Do people become cops so they can beat the crap out of Black people? Probably not. But does the inherent misogyny and racism that informs who we are if we want to succeed in society - and especially in positions of power - create and support systems where people feel superior and need to keep those they see as inferior in line? Absolutely.
That’s where journalism comes in. When we say that journalism is about holding truth to power, often we’re talking about finding financial corruption among those who hold the purse strings. We don’t talk about moral corruption and how systems of power allow people to harm those they’re supposed to be serving. We need to do that. We need to call out the underlying sexism, racism and other power imbalances that inform these systems. We need to call out the banality that allows evil to happen.
And that’s where I take issue with journalists who look to police internal reports or do interviews with officers to “explore” how police might reform. Because the rot that allows this to happen doesn’t come from within one organization. Journalism needs to highlight and talk about the larger issues. The problem is, most just can’t see them. Because those larger issues affect journalism, too.
I have oft supposed that when NBC political director Chuck Todd started out, he was working with a Black woman who is no longer in journalism. Because she would have approached stories from her lens - which is not a white, male, status quo lens. It’s a lens that, as an outsider to the system, understands that it IS a system. Todd, clearly, is a “go along to get along” guy. And he rose quickly. More astonishingly, he rose without actually being related to anyone who was already a Washington insider. Which, I think, explains his obsequiousness.
I want to hear from that woman, in her non-obsequiousness, who felt the burden of the system she was asked to uphold, and got out with her dignity. She may not exist vis a vis Todd, but I know too many women who fit that description vis a vis the journalism Todd represents. Their voices need to be heard.
*Oddly only because CCSD police seem not to care about restorative justice for students.
