In August 2006, I was deeply involved in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case. It hadn’t taken long to realize that the entire case was built by a prosecutor who was willing to do whatever necessary to take the case to trial to win an election (in large part to be able to pay off his campaign debts and earn another $15,000 a year in pension pay) and mollify the local political radicals. Whether any of the charges were true seemed to be an afterthought, as people were expected to believe them no matter what the evidence might have been.
(The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, recently went on a podcast and admitted that she fabricated the entire story. While a few conservative outlets reported it, the mainstream media, including the New York Times, which had aggressively promoted the case, ignored Mangum’s admission.)
As a criminal case, nothing pointed to guilt, as the forensic evidence, the timelines, and medical examinations of the alleged victim were strong enough to ensure an acquittal in all but Stalin’s infamous Show Trials. Yet, as I checked the New York Times the morning of August 25, 2006, there was an article claiming that the prosecution’s evidence was much stronger than most people had admitted and that the players’ defense team had been cherry-picking the evidence.
Given what we knew about the evidence at that time, the NYT’s article was stunning. Here was the self-proclaimed “Newspaper of Record” claiming that, in the final analysis, the kind of evidence that the newspaper historically had championed as proof of innocence suddenly didn’t matter. After the case totally fell apart (as it should have all along) the NYT patted itself on the back for its truly atrocious coverage. That also is not surprising. After all, the newspaper even managed to get Peter Neufeld—founder of the Innocence Project—to insinuate that the lack of DNA evidence in the lacrosse case was irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of the accused.
Fast forward to the aftermath of the recent presidential election, in which the legacy news media almost unanimously had declared Democrat Kamala Harris leading in the polls, something that was a surprise to the Harris campaign itself. The internal polling by her campaign always showed her either behind or briefly tied with Donald Trump.
Given the politics driving the modern media these days, the results are not surprising. The Harris campaign had every reason to see things as they really were, given her supporters were trying to help her win. The external polling, on the other hand, was led by modern media types who have been living at best in a fantasy world for much of their lives. People who live their entire lives in bubbles should not be expected to provide anything insightful about those who operate in the real world.
The connection between these two situations is modern American higher education, which has influenced journalism for many years and, in the process, has taken a profession made up of hard-nosed realists and turned them into something unrecognizable to anyone who understands basic logic. In the days of Henry Hazlitt and H.L. Mencken, journalists tended to be, at best, high school graduates who had writing skills and a nose for news. Long before there were journalism schools on college campuses, there were newspapers staffed by people who knew something about the underside of life and who were scornful of the fantasy worlds created by elite minds.
Today’s “journalists”—and especially those at entities like the New York Times—are much more likely to be products of higher education, and, in the case of the NYT, graduates from among the most elite institutions in the country like Yale, Harvard, or Duke. Moreover, the vast majority of these writers are likely to be ideologically concentrated on the left and live and work in so-called blue enclaves like New York City and the West Coast where the online journalism flourishes:
The online media, liberated from printing presses and local ad bases, has been free to form clusters, piggyback-style, on the industries and government that it covers. New York is home to most business coverage because of the size of the business and banking community there. Likewise, national political reporting has concentrated in Washington and grown apace with the federal government. Entertainment and cultural reporting has bunched in New York and Los Angeles, where those businesses are strong.
The result?…you don’t need to be a Republican campaign strategist to grasp just how far the “media bubble” has drifted from the average American experience. Newspaper jobs are far more evenly scattered across the country, including the deep red parts. But as those vanish, it’s internet jobs that are driving whatever growth there is in media—and those fall almost entirely in places that are dense, blue and right in the bubble.
Today’s elite journalists overwhelmingly hold political and social views that are reflective of what is happening in higher education, and it hardly is a new phenomenon. In the Duke case, members of the Duke faculty rushed to judgment, declaring the players to be guilty and calling on the university to make huge changes in how it governed campus culture. Unfortunately, much of the media coverage of that case differed little from the Duke faculty response.
Anyone who has spent much time in the academic world knows that most campuses are home to leftist narratives: Capitalism is oppressive and creates poverty; women are always oppressed; America is a hopelessly racist country built on the backs of black slaves; a state-run economy would be more just than private enterprise; if the state controlled healthcare, then we could have unlimited, free medical coverage; and so on.
For a long time, people believed that college campuses were bubbles that held to leftist narratives, but that they would be contained there. However, that clearly has not been the case, especially as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement has migrated from higher education to the corporate world, and, of course, government.
How it infected the business world should be no surprise. As one who taught in MBA programs for more than 20 years, the anti-business ethos has long been a staple of the academic business curriculum. Students in MBA programs have been taught for decades that businesses need to answer to “stakeholders,” which really has meant little more than trying to appeal to anti-business activists. Budding entrepreneurs are taught that seeking after profits is the pursuit of greed and that their efforts should be turned toward social goals.
Not surprisingly, people who disagree are pushing back against the poisonous ideologies coming from higher education. And—not surprisingly—those in higher education who have been permitted to run amok see this pushback as a national emergency. The American Association of University Professors, in responding to changes in state colleges and universities in Florida (which came about as a result of pushback against DEI), had this hysterical statement:
In December, the AAUP released the final report of the Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida. Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System provides an in-depth review of a pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis. The report reaffirms and expands on the findings of the committee’s May 2023 preliminary report, chief among them that academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities face an ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history, which, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with dire implications for the entire country. (emphasis mine)
(In reading this statement, one is reminded of Otter’s infamous speech before the Faber College Student Court in the movie “Animal House.”)
One doubts seriously that the United States of America faces dire implications because Marxist professors are not given full control of higher education in Florida—or anywhere else. For that matter, as one who has been in higher education for more than 30 years, the bubble that is much of that world is not something we wish to export to our general society, and when those advocates succeed, we get disasters like the Duke Lacrosse Case or “journalism” that is little more than political propaganda in which advocates try to turn reality upside down.
Lest one think I exaggerate about the hysteria that the left has created on college campuses, this account from Brown University should remind us of the idiocy that has become the American university. When libertarian Wendy McElroy participated in a debate at Brown on the subject of sexual assault, university officials responded, according to the New York Times, by setting up a “safe space” for those traumatized by McElroy’s presence at Brown:
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.
Brown, of course, is attended by some of the most privileged young people in the world and it is ridiculous to claim that the presence of a libertarian blogger (who has written for this page) places the lives of young women there in peril. But that is the world that not only exists at Brown and other elite colleges and universities, but also in many of our other institutions such as government, business, and the non-profits that seem to be gaining in influence.
There is nothing wrong with pushing back against hard-left agendas and the upside-down world leftist advocates wish to impose upon the rest of us. One hopes we can reverse some of the worst excesses before leftists in higher education are able to corrupt what is left of our body politic.
