Notes on the Media Landscape

On the Left/Right Divide

There’s something a bit odd about my résumé. Right towards the top, in a single line, is Compact, UnHerd, and Quillette — and, since I’m not actually conservative, I get self-conscious every time I send my résumé out: I assume always that whoever is reading it has arrived at their own conclusion.

So what’s going on? Why do I write fairly regularly for right-of-center outlets and have never cracked The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, etc, even if they are closer to my voting patterns and political affinities? The most obvious answer is that the liberal magazines are harder to break into — they’re more prestigious, the competition is tougher, etc. When people break into something like The Atlantic or The New York Times Magazine, it’s often through some really in-depth reported piece.

But recently, as I’ve been getting to understand the media business better, it’s occurred to me that the way you break into liberal as opposed to conservative media tends to be completely different, and those differences create, basically, dramatically divergent mentalities, almost regardless of political affiliation, between the different spheres.

To break into conservative media, in my experience, you basically just need to pitch. (I think one of the magazines reached out to me on Substack.) The editing experience has been pleasant and the ethos is to reward gumption.

In liberal media, it’s very different. The sensation is of threading the eye of the needle, and in the ways I’ve experienced liberal institutions this happens in a few ways. One is of doing everything right — going to the right schools, then connecting to the right residencies and grants and fellowships. Anytime I see a novel, for instance, published within the liberal mainstream, the author’s résumé looks like a bureaucrat’s, and the acknowledgments section tends to be long, respectful if not reverential, and is (very often) the most interesting part of the whole book. Then there are the circles that rise together. New York City often seemed to be made up entirely of that, young people hanging out with one another, building friendships that would eventually be converted into professional tokens — and, once someone broke in, they might just be willing to put in a word for their old friends. And then there are the anointed. The major publications do this surprisingly often — choose somebody right out of school and just elevate them to a kind of lifetime peerage at the heart of the institution. Michiko Kakutani was this, to the consternation of everybody else in the literary world. The discussion about Madeline Cash right now is an interesting way of tackling this tendency by the literary establishment to anoint. “This kind of coverage doesn’t just happen,” writes Freddie deBoer of the rapturous media-wide praise for Cash’s début novel.

The other point about the liberal world is the valorization of applications. The abiding belief is that everything should be done by application — this is how schools do it, and any liberal institution I’ve worked with has made a point of pride of asking for open applications regardless of how the position is ultimately filled. And that results in the deeply weird experience of dealing with applications — since applications aren’t so much about the work in question as working around it. In my long unhappy experience of submitting work on Submittable, there’s just this constant self-questioning of why any of this is necessary. Why the long obeisance to the organization you are submitting work to? Why the explanation for why you are the right fit for whatever you are applying to? Why can’t they just read the submitted work that tends to be buried as an attachment somewhere near the bottom of the application? And that’s all before the applications — as everybody has noticed over the past decade — became these identitarian tests, with all the boxes available to check out your identatarian markers and which clearly are meant to be a way for the evaluator to shortcircuit the process of dealing with the content. The other issue with applications is the sense of a massive self-deception with them. I suspect it’s very rare that any organization hires by application. I’ve never seen it happen. The last time I got into anything through application was as a high school student applying to Yale. I remember being in an office once where two of the fairly senior HR types were musing about their hiring process to one another. “You have to have arrived. I don’t know how else to put it,” one said to the other. Meaning that the hiring really was being done through a known circle, but that everybody in the known circle was expected to be packed with the requisite credentials. What there wasn’t really was any chance of just walking the door on talent or idiosyncrasy or moxie. And that tends to be the hidden scandal of the liberal institutions — the way that they are at pains to show their openness, and to have some involved application process to prove it, even as the openness is often a pretense. The fact that The New Yorker still keeps an open submissions inbox for short stories, and promises to read everything, but — as Naomi Kanakia points out — hasn’t published an unsolicited short story in three decades, is perfectly illustrative of how this works.

What I think is really going on is that the liberal and conservative institutions have very different pedigrees. Some of the more prominent liberal institutions in the country — The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, the major universities — come from the 19th century, but a large number originate in the New Deal era and in an emergent understanding at that time of the role of institutions in the country. In 1922, Walter Lippmann called for the creation of a “specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.” In 1928, Edward Bernays described a burgeoning profession that understands “the anatomy of society” and can deeply influence the public through persuasive techniques. All of that seemed a bit wishful until it did actually seem to be created with the New Dealers and the ‘administrative state’ — a whole new world of pollsters, lobbyists, think tanks, and journals dedicated to applying scientific methods to social questions. Those institutions were dyed from birth in the liberal politics of the ‘30s, and then again in the politics of the ‘60s. And, meanwhile, the universities, which at one point were deeply conservative, went the other way and produced an enormous liberal infrastructure that didn’t necessarily have direct political power or access to all that much money but very successfully shaped the contours of polite opinion. To a great extent, that outlook also got frozen in time — the Baby Boomers tended to create their opinions in the maelstrom of the ‘60s, then hold to those opinions and then hold onto their jobs for a very long time. The leadership of the Democratic Party, and the major news outlets, are still very often rooted in the sensibility of a particular time — and then those institutions set up bureaucracies that give the impression of meritocracy but in practice tend to keep an existing guild very much intact.

That’s in contrast to right-of-center media. Basically, the old conservative institutions all collapsed — the Main Street newspapers disappeared, the universities swung left. And the result has been that the right-of-center media ecosystem has had to start again from scratch. Usually what that’s meant is just money from some donor or other. Not enough time has gone by to develop an entrenched bureaucracy. Few of them have ‘house styles’ in the way that The New Yorker and New York Times are insane about their house styles. And the ethos for someone trying to break in is more about just about getting through to the decision-makers and then having some broad ideological alignment with them.

This disjunction in approach is actually a big issue. The liberal magazines have been around so long, and have such vertical control, that they can’t change direction. And not only that but they cast such a shadow that it’s difficult for other publications to show up in the same space. That’s part of the reason why a new liberal publication, like my employer Persuasion, is so important. But a great deal of what’s happening in public space is about dynamics like these — it’s not necessarily differences in ideology as much as it is style and structure. The liberal institutions all find themselves constantly on the defensive — for one thing, defending themselves, and then more distantly defending the Lippmanesque administrative state. The right-of-center ends up with youth, flexibility, and originality on its side — able to talk more openly and to be far more experimental in style and tone. Liberalism is going to keep falling behind until it can shed that defensive posture and start to build fresh institutions from the ground up.