Amber Athey, Washington editor of The Spectator and author of The Snowflakes’ Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media, joins the pod to discuss how the cultural inquisition has hit legacy media from the entry level up. Amber and Inez also chat about how legacy media outlets gatekeep access to the president, as well as Amber’s own multiple attempted cancellations.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people, and with me this week is Amber Athey, who is the Washington editor with The Spectator. Before that, a long time with the caller, The Daily Caller, and she has a new book out, it’s The Snowflakes’ Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media. So welcome, Amber, to High Noon.
Amber Athey:
Thank you so much for having me, it’s great to be here.
Inez Stepman:
So let’s dive right into this. And I think that the thesis of this book is very much generational. It’s essentially warning of a generational turnover that a lot of people in media but also in corporations and basically every institution in American life we’re just not prepared for. So could you maybe give us a short version of that thesis, and we’ll go from there?
Amber Athey:
Definitely. So you’re right that no one was prepared for the onslaught of woke millennials, and there were two sort of prevailing attitudes about what was going to happen to this class of university graduates, who were really resistant to ideas like free speech. They were more predisposed to having radical political ideas. A lot of them were really okay with using violence to get what they wanted.
And the left kind of looked at this and said, ah, no big deal. The right is blowing this up to be another culture war issue, and what’s happening on campuses really isn’t that bad. And then on the right, you had most people saying, as soon as these young millennials hit the real world, they’ll moderate, or maybe they’ll even become conservative, once they see their first paycheck and all of the taxes that are taken out of it. And naturally, that didn’t happen.
Instead, these millennials actually carried their toxic political ideas and their mob rule tactics that they used on campus, into the real world and, as you said, have used them to capture power at major American institutions, whether it’s the media, corporations, Hollywood, some of them have filtered back into academia and they’ve, despite being some of the lowest level people on the totem pole in these institutions, have specialized to the point that they’ve made themselves kind of un-fireable and un-cancellable, because if you dare to go after them, you could be canceled yourself or you would be accused of being racist because you’re taking down the people who are supposedly fighting bigotry. So you have load of mid-level managers across institutions and particularly corporations in the media, telling their managers how to run the show, and the managers were totally unprepared for this and have let it all happen.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, there’s a bit of a generational dynamic with that as well, where most of, as you say, millennials are now just cresting 40, the oldest millennials, right? This is a generation born somewhere between I think the official numbers are like 1981 through what, 97, 98, something like that.
Amber Athey:
I think that’s right.
Inez Stepman:
So you’re at the tail end of that generation, I’m like in the fat part of the bell curve, the millennial bell curve. There is this real sense that though, as you note in this book, there are people who formally don’t hold hierarchical power in these institutions. They aren’t the editor-in-chief. They aren’t the top people who tend to be either young boomers or Gen X-ers at the top of the pyramid because, simply because they’re the ones who are in their fifties, their sixties, at the end and peak of their careers. So why is it that the hierarchy has completely broken down? Because as you say, especially in these liberal institutions like in the media, there has been no, like, dad-puts-his-foot-down energy at all, right, practically. It has been basically to roll over, even though the people causing most of the problems are either straight out of college, at this point they’re zoomers or they’re five, six, seven years, they’re towards the midpoint of…. You’re not entry-level anymore, but you’re not the top dog in the organization.
So I’m asking you in a free market where supposedly the CEO, what the CEO says goes or you get fired, why is it that so many of these managers have refused to put their foot down and actually discipline or fire younger staffers, who simply don’t want to knuckle under to the purpose of journalism in this case?
Amber Athey:
Yeah, I think there’s quite a few things that have disincentivized managers from pushing back. One of those things is that these young boomers and older Gen X-ers don’t really understand the social media marketplace, which is where a lot of these mob rule situations play out. So millennials will pop on Twitter, and they will band together with other woke people and create hashtags and cancellation campaigns against brands or even individual people who are supposed to be in charge, that they think are doing things incorrectly. So for example, when The New York Times staffers went against the paper for publishing an op-ed by Tom Cotton about sending in the National Guard to call riots in the summer of 2020, a bunch of New York Times staffers hopped on Twitter and said in a copy and paste fashion, that The New York Times was putting black staff lives in danger, by publishing this op-ed.
And if you’re someone who’s let’s say 55 years old and you’re in charge of a newsroom, and you see a dozen to 20 people calling you out on Twitter and getting a bunch of retweets, you’re probably going to freak out because you don’t really know what that means. These social media campaigns seem really all-encompassing, when it’s really just a vocal minority of people. And also, most of The New York Times subscribers, I suspect, are probably not hanging around on Twitter all day to see what Taylor Lorenz is tweeting about. But that’s what these managers truly believe. They don’t really understand how these campaigns work and they view a few tweets as basically the end of the world. The second thing that’s happening is that they are a generation, the young baby boomers especially, that grew up believing it was the worst thing in the world to be called a racist.
If you were called a racist when you’re part of the baby boomer generation or older Gen X, that is unfathomable to you, that someone would lobby that accusation against you. It’s kind of life- and career-destroying in a way that it’s maybe not for millennials and Gen Z, because the term has really lost a lot of its power because it’s been used in so many situations where it doesn’t apply. But for older people, that doesn’t really track yet for them, they don’t really get that that term has been devalued, especially if you’re a left-leaning baby boomer, and typically the kind of people who are leading newsrooms in mainstream media outlets, tend to lean left. That is a terrifying thing, that they would be accused of bigotry. They really think that it would basically make them lose all of their social status, all of their professional status.
And then the final thing I think, is that these older newsroom leaders simply don’t understand the power dynamics at play here. They think that appeasing people like this is going to get them in their good graces when actually, it just incentivizes the mob rule even further.
And then one last thing, actually. Legally, businesses in particular are very sensitive about accusations from young staffers that they might be racist or bigoted or transphobic, because there has been an uptick in lawsuits against hostile environments and hostile workplace environments, and in order to prove a hostile workplace environment, it doesn’t have to be one really big racist thing happened to you. You can point to microaggression number one, and then microaggression number two happened in the board meeting the following week, and then this person didn’t hold the door open for me when I went to the bathroom, so they must be racist. And you can basically cherry-pick different incidents that you think prove that you’re in a hostile workplace environment, and those can add up to meeting that very low standard that’s been established by courts in the past. So I think, to some extent, managers are really worried about potential legal action from some of these youngsters.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I’ll get to that in a minute because there’s a huge conversation to be had there about… of course there’s the famous Caldwell book, Age of Enlightenment, of Entitlement, rather. But I actually hope to have law professor Gail Harriet on soon. We’re figuring out when it works for both of us, but I’m really excited to have her on soon to talk about the changes to civil rights law that were made in the nineties, that address exactly what you’re talking about, that allowed people to build these kind of hostile workplace environment lawsuits from, as you say, cherry-picking sort of one subjectively offensive incident from several different people, rather than having to prove some kind of sustained objective harassment from a single person, that was directly ignored by management.
There were certain safeguards before in the law that were taken off in the nineties and not going back to the sixties the way that Caldwell suggests, although I’ve heard that Caldwell himself is actually working on a follow-up about the nineties. So I think he realizes this, and so it’s just not a critique of him, by any means. But do you think there’s something deeper going on here? famously, right, generationally, if we’re trading in generational stereotypes here, the boomers rejected a kind of hierarchy, the nuclear family. This is the children of the sixties and seventies and the cultural revolution. Do you think that that type of liberalism has left them defenseless against what are essentially not only their literal children but their intellectual children as well?
Amber Athey:
Yeah, one of the things that I saw really frequently when I was growing up from other people in my generation was that their parents were really more interested in being their best friend than they were in being their parent. They wanted to be loved and liked by their children, and they didn’t ever want to have to say no to them. And that has led to especially young millennials I think, having a sense of entitlement of not even having the mental wherewithal to deal with anything challenging in life. I know that we pick on millennials a lot for the entitlement and we call them the snowflake generation, we talk about participation trophy culture, but that kind of falls on the parents, right? Because they were the ones who were wanting their kids to be able to coast through life. I think a big part of it too is an overcorrection from maybe what they viewed as overly strict parenting, from the greatest generation, so they didn’t want to repeat maybe that pattern with their own children.
But if you look at the mental health issues that plague the millennial and Gen Z generations, it’s really, really disturbing. They have higher level of depression, they’re more likely to have social anxiety. A lot of them express having deep anxieties about climate change. Many of them don’t have a higher purpose in their life, they feel listless, like there’s no reason for them to even be here. So when they go off to college and they encounter someone saying something that fundamentally opposes their worldview, it really does feel like violence to them. They don’t know how to handle it, and so that’s why you see these responses of people crying that their mental health is at stake, that you’re harming them with your words, that they need safe spaces, trigger warnings. That really is not just a deeply insidious political tactic, but I think it also does stem from just the general psychosis that plagues my generation.
Inez Stepman:
That’s what was going to be my next question, is whether you think that the fragility is sincere, because I’ve definitely heard both sides on this. Folks like John McWhorter for example, cannot possibly bring himself to imagine that this fragility is real, that anyone feels so deeply sort of damaged or unsafe, because of speech or a mean word or whatever. I’m kind of with you, I think it’s real. I think the fragility is completely real, and the inability to deal with opposing views or to deal with any number of harsh realities about life, such as the fact that your sex is your sex, regardless of what you would like it to be like, or your body is your body, regardless of what you would like it to be like. So where do you fall on that spectrum? You kind of hinted at that you think this is a real fragility, from both millennials and from Gen Z under them.
Amber Athey:
Yeah, I dealt with these people a lot when I was at Georgetown for undergrad. I was a very outspoken conservative, which was obviously not popular on campus. And my experience was just that these people are not smart enough to really be able to view this as just a pragmatic political tactic.
I don’t think that they’re playing 40 chess and they’re crying out in pain when someone speaks because they think that it’s an effective way to silence conservatives. That’s part of it, but it’s more intuitive. I don’t think that they’re doing it intentionally. It does stem from this deep-rooted lack of a sense of self and lack of ability to deal with challenges. And the offshoot of that is that they’re offering the wrong solutions for how to fix it, so they actually make the problem worse. So if you’re someone who is really sensitive and has a hard time dealing with things you find objectionable or offensive, every study basically on planet Earth says that exposing yourself to those things can actually make you stronger and give you the toolkit required to get over it, or even maybe change your mind, learn something new, et cetera.
Instead, the millennial response is to shut down, curl up into a ball, scream loudly with your fingers in your ears, so you don’t ever have to face that challenge. If we were to talk about that reaction in response to basically any other phobia, we would say that that was a very unhealthy coping mechanism, but millennials do that repeatedly for speech and don’t see that as a problem.
Inez Stepman:
There’s a sex component to this, right? For example, Heather McDonald has this, with regards to the university, wrote this article, “The Feminization of the American University.” Twitter anon Lomez wrote that essentially the same article for first things about the longhouse, which is a more general concept, and you’ve kind of written it for media, even though not as explicitly. What is the role of women, as opposed to men in this, and why do you think it is mostly women who, and by no means exclusively of course, but you have to be blind not to see that this is predominantly young women, who are behaving this way.
Amber Athey:
Yes, you’ve nailed it. Look at any video of a campus riot, and you will see that it is majority women who are the ones screaming unintelligibly and throwing things and just generally being absolutely crazy. And I think it’s probably due to the long march of feminism, and it sounds crazy, but I’ll explain what I mean. Women are naturally more caregiving, we’re naturally more empathetic, more compassionate, more sensitive. And traditionally women would orient those instincts toward family and children. Well now when you have more women than men going to college, getting married later in life, having fewer children, I think women are orienting those instincts towards political policy now.
And from a political perspective, when you have the left telling an entire generation of people that you are more empathetic and compassionate when you adopt woke policies or when you vote Democrat, look at the way they framed the abortion issue. You hate women, you hate bodily autonomy, you’re trying to kill women if you don’t support abortion. And women are really susceptible to that kind of propaganda because it appeals to their sympathetic nature. So I think when you see those crazy reactions from women on campus, you’re seeing them try to tap into that inner biological instinct to take care of people and protect people, that they don’t even really acknowledge that they have and don’t have anywhere else to put it until they have families.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I think Anna Khachiyan has pointed out that this is decidedly not a matriarchy actually. That’s another word that I hear sort of thrown around, but this is decidedly not a matriarchy, it’s particularly women who are disconnected from men in any variety of ways, that they mostly are unmarried, they don’t have sons. They increasingly, because of the previous… This was my point about this being sort of continuous and defense against the inevitable consequences of sixties liberalism. Oftentimes most family, there are lot more — both young women and young men, and it shows up in different ways — growing up without continuous access to their father under the same roof.
So I guess here, let’s return this conversation to the journalism context. How do you see this dynamic playing out, specifically in newsrooms as opposed to, because we’ve been talking about it in a more generalized way, but there have been some very concrete examples of this dynamic. So The New York Times, you write about how after the Cotton op-ed was published, there was essentially revolt in the newsroom that led to the firing of an editor and a ridiculous note being appended to the Cotton op-ed itself, basically admitting that it should not have been published. You also cite, I think, the episode with the Politico newsletter, which I vaguely remember with…they allowed Ben Shapiro to write the Politico sort of newsletter that went out, and they allowed a whole host of left-wing guests sort of newsletter hosts. But the second they allowed Ben Shapiro, there was a huge revolt inside the newsroom.
Even a while back, and I don’t think this is in your book, but The Wall Street Journal dealt with its own revolt. There were a bunch of young Wall Street Journal reporters who signed some big document about how they needed to be more sensitive and blah, blah, blah. That kind of petered out, and I got the sense that in The Wall Street Journal, they simply just didn’t bow to it. What are the dynamics of these kinds of, because they are kind of labor disputes almost. They almost seem like culturally determined labor disputes from the sort of younger half of the more recent hires, versus their bosses.
Amber Athey:
There seems to be a fundamental tension between the younger hires and their bosses in what journalism actually is. The old guard, which tends to be center-left people, obviously view journalism as a search for the truth, of having underguarding principles of objectivity and striving to be non-biased and presenting both sides of an issue and kind of letting the readers decide. Now, I still think liberal bias seeped into reporting through that because most of the newsrooms just tended to lean left, but this new guard is really different because they don’t even agree on the values of what journalism is supposed to be. They don’t agree with the traditional journalistic ethics. They view journalism as fighting on behalf of the downtrodden, of speaking truth to power, of being a voice for the voiceless. And naturally, the marginalized groups that they want to protect, so to speak, are the democratic base.
So like LGBTQ, advocacy orgs, liberal white women, wine moms, that sort of thing. So that tension has led to a lot of these revolts because you have this young class of reporters who believe that the paper or media outlet that they’re working for, should be a platform for these pet issues, and not really a larger source of general information for the public to consume. It’s just another form of activism for them. And some of the newsroom leaders have pushed back recently, The New York Times, for example, when their staffers signed a letter with GLAAD recently, accusing the paper of transphobia for publishing an op-ed that defended JK Rowling, The New York Times said they weren’t going to tolerate it anymore. At The Washington Post, when Felicia Sonmez went after Dave Weigel for retweeting what she said was a sexist joke. Felicia was ultimately fired for violating the company’s social media policy.
So there seems to be a little bit of a sea change happening, but I still don’t think the newsroom leaders have fully grappled with just how much of an existential threat this is to them, because they don’t understand, I think that the young people, again, have a different view of what journalism is. I think they view the young people as kind of a little misguided and kind of toxic, but they don’t understand that if it were up to the young people in their newsrooms, nothing that they’re doing would exist, none of them would have jobs. Everything about what they’re doing would be fundamentally transformed. And until they grasp that, these one-off incidents of, well, we’re not really going to go that far, is not going to stop the tidal wave of wokeness that is threatening to capture the vast majority of the American media.
Inez Stepman:
This is a question based on, not only on your book, but on my friend Batya Ungar-Sargon, who came on the pod, talk about her book Bad News, on, I don’t want to say a similar topic because it’s related, but sort of two layers of looking at the problem or two different frameworks of looking at the problem. How much of this has to do with the professionalization of journalism, from sort of the gumshoe, anybody could be a journalist, you just had to be willing to piss off people, ask questions, find sources?
A lot of the nuts and bolts of journalism don’t require any special training, other than a basic facility with the English language. So it rather requires things that are not really taught, like persistence and the ability to worm information out of people, the ability to develop relationships with sources. But nevertheless, now we have newsrooms where it’s really rare to have a journalist these days working for a major outlet that hasn’t been to journalism school, or at least been through college, has a four-year degree, and even potentially a master’s in something. So how has that changed journalism and how is that related to the problem that you’re focusing on, which is the cultural transformation?
Amber Athey:
Yeah, that’s one of the biggest drivers of this cultural shift in journalism, because journalism used to be a working-class profession. Like you said, anybody could really put on a journalistic hat and carry around a notepad and do some reporting. And then when the idea of objectivity came along because the papers in America used to be actually offshoots of political parties until basically the early 1900s, the powers that be decided that in order to prove you could be properly objective and adhere to all of these journalistic principles and ethics, you had to get a degree of higher learning and you probably had to go to journalism school, and the major papers in the United States would pretty much only hire people from prestigious universities. Most of the people who are working at The New York Times or The Washington Post are from a very good liberal arts school, and by good, I mean highly ranked, or an Ivy League or Georgetown or something similar.
And so you are basically recruiting a whole crop of reporters that agree on pretty much everything. It’s created this really damaging echo chamber. You have people who are more likely to have parents who worked in white-collar professions, people who are more likely to have grown up in a city, people who are more likely to be liberal, more likely to have a wealthy background, more likely to come from the coast, and you get all of these people into one newsroom that is supposed to be presenting different sides of an issue, and they don’t even know what the other side is, because they don’t interact with anyone who’s like that. That’s why you see so much disdain for Trump voters and rural Americans more generally, from the papers. It’s because they fundamentally can’t understand that kind of lifestyle, because most of them have never lived it.
When I got into journalism, I didn’t have any journalism background whatsoever. I had written a couple of opinion pieces for my local paper, back in Woodsboro, Maryland, but most of what I learned was on-the-job training. And I found that when I’m hiring interns or fellows, the people who are actually the worst, are the ones who have journalism degrees because they’ve been so steeped in this really left-wing orthodoxy, and how you’re supposed to approach news gathering nowadays, which again is more about believing you have a monopoly on truth, if you’re a liberal, essentially, and then taking that into your news gathering. The people that have been most successful and most effective, in terms of what traditionally we believe journalism to be, have been people who come in sort of like unmolded clay and are willing to learn as they go and take feedback from editors.
That’s the way it should be. And one of the things I really loved about the Daily Caller was that they would take on people who were maybe part of the way through their college degree program, and if they did a good job in their summer internship, they would say, “Drop out of school and come work for us. You don’t need to finish.” Or they would hire people straight out of high school because they recognize that this professionalism and credentialing process of journalism has led to this really damaging group think, that has spread across the entire profession and made them susceptible to this invasion of wokeness.
Inez Stepman:
Speaking of gatekeeping and the professionalization of journalism as a whole, let’s talk about who gets to ask the president questions. In some ways the pinnacle of journalism, getting to ask the President of the United States or his direct representatives questions about how power has been wielded that day, that week, that month or under that administration, how do people get selected for the White House Press pool? And I think this will surprise a lot of people who just haven’t been adjacent to journalism.
Amber Athey:
When you’re first getting access to the White House in order to get a hard pass or some other special permission to go on campus, that comes through the administration, whoever’s in charge in the Secret Service. But after that, pretty much every determination of access for reporters is done by the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is this elected group of bureaucrats, who are journalists. And they tend to come naturally from the legacy corporate outlets because they’ve been there longer, they all are friends with each other. So you’ll have reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, McClatchy, Reuters basically running the show. And those are the people who get to determine the seating chart in the briefing room, which is obviously a huge part of who actually gets to ask questions because if you’re in the line of sight of the press secretary or you’re seated in the first couple of rows, you’re basically determined to be a high-value journalist who deserves to ask a question.
The last update to the briefing room seating chart by the WHCA, I think led to a 49-liberal to nine-conservative split, and of those nine conservative outlets, if you take off things like Fox, Fox Business, Wall Street Journal, you basically only have five non-corporate conservative media outlets who have permanent seats in the briefing room, and all of their seats are in the last two rows. Everyone else who’s not on the seating chart has to stand in the aisles or, during COVID, was not allowed in the briefing room at all to get any questions. So they have basically set up an entire system that benefits their friends in the legacy media and punishes everyone else. And the biggest problem is that, in order to break into the system, you have to have a consistent presence at the White House. Well, if you are not getting consistent questions in the briefing room or you’re not getting a good setup spot for arrivals and departures when the president is boarding or de-boarding Marine One, you have no incentive to be at the White House every day because you’re not producing any original news. You can do your job sitting in your office and probably get more done because you have a formal workspace, which you also don’t have at the White House Complex. So you basically have to accept that you’re going to be bad at your job for probably several years, until you can finally get the WHDA to accept you and your outlet into their little club. It’s a very perverse relationship and one that’s not conducive to new outlets being able to get any access whatsoever to the president or his staff on a daily basis, and basically assures that the corporate legacy outlets are the ones who are going to be parroting the party line, back to the press secretary on a daily basis.
Inez Stepman:
What do you think about Press Secretary for DeSantis, Christina Pushaw’s strategy here, because I can see both sides of this, which is, she does not, and when she was governing DeSantis’s press strategy, she does not talk to and does not grant access to legacy media outlets, on the very colorable argument that essentially there’s no way to get a fair shake, that it rewards them, that there’s this kind of feed loop that’s beneficial to the legacy media outlets when Republicans or conservatives go ahead and, for example, leak stories to those outlets, give interviews to those same outlets, that Republican presidents are much more likely to give information or an interview to The New York Times than they are to the Daily Caller, let’s say, or The Spectator or whoever.
So she says, basically, this is a bad strategy, that in fact, part of the strategy of building up independent or conservative media outlets has to involve the principals here, the politicians and those who wield power on behalf of, quote unquote, “the Right” to actually grant that kind of news-making ability to conservative media. On the flip side, of course, there’s the argument that if you get an interview with The New York Times, you are speaking to an audience that is not going to hear anything close to your perspective from anyone else, and that even getting in, that even in a slanted way, even if you’re squashed into the final paragraph, but that’s better than the alternative because those outlets do retain that kind of mainstream legitimacy. Which side of that argument would you fall on, you think?
Amber Athey:
I fall on Christina’s side, just seeing it in person, as a White House reporter, there were so many instances in the Trump administration where I would go in for a background briefing and I would get stuck with some low-level staffer while, across the hall, The New York Times was sitting down with a principal in the administration for the same story, or I would be working on a story and then the statement goes out to The Washington Post, or all of a sudden there’s this huge article with background information from administration officials, to legacy outlets. And inevitably what would happen is someone from the Trump comms team or pretty much any other Republican member on the Hill, for example, come running to conservative and independent media, and they say, “Look at how unfairly they’ve treated us. We gave them this story and they’ve warped it beyond recognition, or they use this part of the interview that was supposed to be off the record, and they printed it, or they went and got all these quotes, to make us look bad from left-wing activist organizations, and now our message is totally garbled.”
And my reaction was always “I’m not your cleanup person,” right? “I’m not here to be the mop in your kitchen, that helps you after you’ve just made the strategic error of going to an outlet that you knew was going to treat you unfairly.” It’s like the old parable about picking up the snake and the snake bites you, and the snake says, “Well, you knew I was a snake when you took me in.”
That’s kind of, I think, what traditionally Republicans have done with the mainstream media, and it drives me crazy because I think Christina’s right about the fact that these people have legitimacy because everyone gives them access. And if you take away their access, then they no longer have this institutional power that they’ve traditionally had. There were other instances in the Trump White House where CNN would publish a Russiagate article, and the next day I saw someone from the comms staff coming out into the briefing room and ushering a member of the CNN team back to upper press, to give them an interview. It was like, you’re just rewarding them for this horribly bad behavior. And I wouldn’t say that I am pro shutting all of them out immediately, but if they prove to you that they are not there for journalistic purposes, if they’re there just to take you down or to only present one viewpoint, then that’s not a journalistic operation anyway. And no, they shouldn’t get access.
Inez Stepman:
So what is sort of the future here? Are we going to see a media that strives to return to a certain kind of objectivity, say of the big three days, or is the way out through? By which I mean, we have this generation of folks in legacy media rooms who see their job as, as you say, primarily to be activists, not to actually do the reporting or uncover the truth, or to present both sides of the American people of a particular story. Is a solution to that, to essentially — because much of conservative media today is opinion. And I’m implicating both you and myself in this. All we do is offer our opinions. Hopefully they’re considered opinions and we’re serious about making sure that the underlying facts are in place, but we are opinion, I’m not a journalist. You were a journalist for quite some time. I think now for The Spectator, you more write opinion, right?
Amber Athey:
It’s a mix of both. It’s sort of the British model.
Inez Stepman:
So there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for the actual objective reporting, gumshoe reporting that is actually necessary, plus you need a huge bureau to be able to do that. So for example, to be able to report on stories about the EU, really only The Wall Street Journal and The Times functionally have the kind of ability to have a reporting bureau like that. So that’s one model. Does there need to be more of that, somehow objectively, and how would that be funded?
And then, on the flip side and sort of the opinion side, it seems like the direction is much more about transparency and integrity rather than objectivity. By which I mean folks like you, like me, like The Spectator, like Krystal and Saagar over Breaking Points, Rising TV, the whole model of a lot of independent media is, yes, I have my perspective, I have my worldview, I’m a conservative, or I’m a liberal, or I’m a disaffected socialist or whatever it is, but I’m going to do my best to give you the news with integrity, but you’re going to know where I come from on this, and I’m not going to hold up a pretense of objectivity that actually covers for how I select stories, what language the newsroom uses, and so on and so forth. Where do you think the future of media actually lies in between, I would say, transparency versus objectivity?
Amber Athey:
Yeah, I think we’re probably headed more towards the transparency side of things, just because of the fact that as we’re dealing with this sort of political divisiveness within journalism, we’re also dealing with the digitization of journalism. So print media is obviously not as standard as it used to be, and the, I guess, popularity of the internet, if you will, and the rise of new technologies has made it easier than ever for smaller, independent and conservative outlets to thrive, for podcasts and YouTube shows and all kinds of new media to do well, and it seems like that is causing people to consume their news from more than just one source.
And so naturally, they’re going to seek out people who are probably in line with them politically, but who they trust and who have a proven track record of also underpinning their opinions with facts. Like I don’t think opinion journalism is reflexively a bad thing, so long as you’re still trying to use underlying journalistic principles to support the things that you’re sharing with people, which I think you and I both try to do.
The problem with this model is that the left doesn’t do that. Liberal media doesn’t admit that they’re liberal. They won’t tell you that they’re progressive or woke or that they’re trying to do anything, which makes it so insidious because you have one side that’s like, yeah, I’m a conservative, but I got three sources on this story, and I have the original documents uploaded to Scripty.
And then you have the other side that’s like, well, I’m just an unbiased journalist, even though I’ve never written anything even functionally nice about a Republican or a conservative in my entire life, and in fact, I actively lie about them. So it’s kind of a difficult situation. I do think that these things tend to correct themselves over time, and we have seen, along with the fracturing of media, kind of a paved road for a middle ground. Barry Weiss has started her new project, The Free Press, which is supposed to be sort of the objective answer to The New York Times and conservative media. There’s other people on Substack who are trying to carve out that lane as well. So maybe we’ll see a little bit of a hybrid model, but I think for the most part, where online media is right now is more similar to how media functioned at the beginning of the American Republic as opposed to how it was in the 1950s.
Inez Stepman:
So you’ve been on the other end of the gun as well, I think. Is it twice? Once was for Kamala Harris thing, once was for some jokes you made at like age 16. You’ve been canceled twice, or attempted to be canceled twice. What was it like going through that, and then what is your advice to the increasing numbers of people who either have or will go through something similar?
Amber Athey:
Yeah, it’s kind of harrowing. The second time was easier because I knew what to expect, I guess. I knew what was coming. The first time was really, really hard. I was very caught off guard by it because, as you mentioned, the tweets that I was canceled for were from when I was in high school, and it was maybe six or seven years after, that they were suddenly being used as this weapon to try to ruin my career and ruin my life, and the backlash was really hardcore, and I wasn’t ready for it, frankly, and it really messed me up.
The second time that I was canceled, I was like, all right, so last time I apologized — which I apologized because I agreed that I didn’t like the things that I said when I was in high school — but I learned that the apology kind of made it worse, because the intent of the cancellation attempt was not to get me to feel bad or for me to try to earn forgiveness. It was just to destroy, destroy, destroy. And the apology basically made me appear weak. And all of the stories in terms of news articles that were written about the incident were not about the tweets themselves, they were about the apology. And that was their news hook that they used to spread this to more and more people, to try to make it even more damaging. So the second time around, I was like, all right, well, I’m certainly not going to apologize. And that time, an apology would’ve been stupid anyway, because there was nothing wrong with what I said, but I —
Inez Stepman:
For the record, it was a joke about Kamala Harris’s brown suit at the State of the Union or something. She had an ugly brown —
Amber Athey:
Yeah, I said —
Inez Stepman:
— made a joke about UPS.
Amber Athey:
Yeah, I said, “Kamala looks like a UPS employee. What can Brown do for you? Nothing good apparently.” Which if you’re, I think over the age of maybe 25, you know the UPS slogan, but it turned out that wasn’t even really why they were coming after me. It was because I opposed the genital mutilation of children and was supporting Jeff Younger in Texas, who lost custody of his kid because he wouldn’t affirm the child as a girl. So they were kind of using the Kamala tweet as this convenient excuse to go after me. And when I looked back at the first cancellation, I was like, oh my God. It was the same thing. It wasn’t actually about my high school tweets. What happened was I was on NRA TV, and I was speaking out against antisemitism from Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and I guess somebody decided that criticizing them was not acceptable, so they sought to use the high school tweets, as proof that I was a hypocrite.
So they’re very dishonest, and the way that they use these things to get rid of people, I’ve found, is there’s usually an ulterior motive. So you have to kind of look at the bigger picture if you’re being canceled and think, okay, why are they coming after me? What is the bigger reason for this? Because it’s not usually just the thing that you said. There’s usually something else motivating it. And if you can get to that, then it makes it a little bit easier to figure out exactly how to maneuver. But it’s also hard because I have a platform. So when I was canceled the second time, I was fired from my radio show at WMAL, and I was able to get media hits on Tucker Carlson, and I was able to go on Inside Edition and all of these mega-platforms and tell my story, and show that what the radio station had done was wrong, and talk about how dishonest the cancellation attempt was.
But if you’re not someone who has that, if you’re just a regular Joe and people are coming after you, you have to make a different calculation. You have to decide what’s worth it to you. You have to decide if you can support your family if you lose your job, you have to decide what is the opportunity that your employer’s giving you? Are they saying, “if you apologize, we’ll keep you on”? You kind of have to be a lot more careful and make these sort of split-second decisions about your livelihood, and that’s really hard. So I’m always reluctant to give advice to people like that, because I was very lucky in my situation that I was able to turn this into something kind of positive for me, and into new opportunities.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I’m very sensitive to that as well when I talk about this subject generally on this podcast and elsewhere, is there is a real privilege involved in being able to speak freely these days and actually have it be tied to your reputation as a quasi, a writer or a public speaker or whatever it is. And most people don’t have that.
I’m very, very cognizant of it, but I do think that Rod Dreher said it best. When I had him on, he said, “Not everything has to be a red line. There’s plenty of room for putting food on the table for your family and making that the first priority. It’s not a condemnation of everyone who doesn’t speak out, but you better figure out what your red line is because, eventually, you’re more than likely going to be asked to cross it.” That’s the direction of our society, so you better think about carefully in advance what things are worth incurring some of those penalties for, because it may not be this particular — it may not be a tweet, or it may not be speaking publicly on one of these issues, but eventually, you are going to be asked to choose between your integrity and the ability to make a living. That’s the direction, unfortunately, that we’re going. So —
Amber Athey:
That’s a really good perspective, and if I could jump in there, one of the things that really bothered me in retrospect about the Kamala tweet and the firing by WMAL was I was grappling with that red line myself because WMAL had a vaccine mandate, and I was really resistant to getting vaccinated. I ended up getting the Johnson and Johnson because I thought it must be better than the two-shot mRNA. I don’t know. And I was really torn about it for several months and, six months later, I was canned over a tweet, and I looked back and I thought, man, I really should have stuck to my guns on that vaccine issue and told them to pound sand because clearly they didn’t value me anyway. So it was a good lesson for me in feeling like if you’re erring on that line, there’s probably a pretty good reason, and to maybe follow your heart on those kind of issues.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, that’s going to be a different calculation for everybody. And I have, as you’ve said too, we have a lot of advantages in being able to speak publicly like this that other people don’t, and we’re both very, very cognizant of that. But I do think that everyone has to think about at what point, what lines they’re willing to cross because, unfortunately, that’s the direction that we’re going.
Amber, thank you so much for coming on High Noon. You can find Amber’s work, Amber Athey, she’s the Washington editor with The Spectator, so you can find her work with The Spectator there. Her new book is The Snowflakes’ Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media and covers much of what we discussed today in more detail about how these, what I would call the cultural inquisition, has hit America’s newsrooms, and how they’ve reacted to that. Amber, thank you so much for coming on.
Amber Athey:
Thank you, Inez.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
