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After enduring a Trumpian-inspired assault of “kike” and “fag” tweets, Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald might have reason to disparage die-hard followers of America’s next president.
Instead, he urged a blue (in two senses of the word) New Haven audience gathered for a post-election reckoning to move beyond dismissive stereotypes.
Eichenwald received thousands of tweets when he began investigating then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s private foundation, he told more than 300 people who gathered Wednesday night at Yale Law School for a symposium featuring leading journalists who covered the election.
“I’m not Jewish and I’m not gay, but was called a kike. I was called a fag, all this stuff because I was reporting on Trump,” Eichenwald said.
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Eichenwald: “What’s driving these people?”
Eichenwald insisted that all of the Trump supporters are not racist, sexist or ignorant. He called it a problem when people like those at Yale Law School categorize the political opposition in that way.
Trump’s supporters are not all stupid, he argued. They have their values. They also harbor anger and resentment having been left behind by both the Democratic and Republican parties. When they say, “I want my country back” that doesn’t necessarily mean racism. Eichenwald argued that for many the phrase refers to the American expectation for their children to live a better life than they do, which they do not see happening.
“When they see things like people at Yale who are running around and screaming about Halloween costumes, while they are driving a truck across the country, not seeing their family and having trouble making the mortgage, and people say they are privileged, that makes a lot of anger,” Eichenwald said. “That’s something folks need to think about. What’s driving these people — the people who are not you?”
He urged liberals to watch Fox News and to read the National Review, and conservatives to watch MSNBC.
Wednesday’s night’s symposium was entitled, “Truth in the Internet Age.”
It was clearly a Hillary Clinton crowd. Most of the audience members’ hands went up when the moderator, former Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, asked “How many of you were disappointed in the election results?”
The panels addressed the blurring of facts and opinion, truth, lies, conspiracies, race, and the lack of civility in the media and with Internet. The reporters did not mince words about President-Elect Trump’s faults. (Eichenwald, for instance, called him a “lunatic.” Others called him a liar.) At the same time, they also spoke of a need to understand the gap that separates people, including Clinton and Trump supporters.
The journalists acknowledged that the media incorrectly predicted the elections because they, too, did not have a good understanding of the American voters.
Eliana Johnson, the Washington editor of the National Review, said data-driven journalism arose in response to the perception of the blurring of facts and opinions in news. However, she noted, both facts and data can be wrong.
“I think the fundamental problem that we’re seeing is that the people whose job it is to understand Americans, whether it is their numbers or their reporting or their giving their opinions, really don’t understand Americans that well,” she said. Johnson said she found it telling that the book Hillbilly Elegy, written by J.D. Vance, gained national attention during this election season. Vance grew up poor with Appalachian roots but graduated from Yale Law School, thus bridged the cultural divide.
WSJ’s Stephens.
Other symposium participants included Politico chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush, Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist and deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens, Scott Carpenter managing director of Jigsaw at Google; Graeme Wood, contributing editor at The Atlantic; and Tanzina Vega, CNN national reporter on race and equality. Yale Vice-President Eileen O’Connor, a former White House bureau chief and Moscow correspondent for CNN and ABC News, organized the event.
Panelist Madeleine Colbert, a writer for the Yale student publication The Politic, said she recently became aware of the need to hear views that opposed her own for robust debate. On Facebook, she “un-friended” a hometown friend who had posted remarks that Colbert found insensitive about Mexicans. She later regretted her actions, and warned against retreating into social media bubbles to hear and see only opinions that reflect the same views.
Shades of Yale, an undergraduate a cappella group, performed to conclude the event. The group was founded in 1988 to sing music of the African Diaspora and the African-American Tradition. The multi-racial group sang “Amen/We Shall Overcome,” a combination of the spiritual “Amen” and the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”