Why New York Times is being accused of normalising a Nazi sympathiser
NYT has been criticised because many feel they have tried to “normalise” someone who is essentially a spewer of hate .
The New York Times has faced a lot of flak recently for an article profiling “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland”. The piece describes Tony Hovater, a white nationalist, in close detail as he goes about his life, eating out with his wife, playing with his cats, organising "White Lives Matter" rallies and appearing as a guest on a website called Radio Aryan.
According to the article, Hovater helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, in August, where an alt-right supporter drove into a crowd of rival marchers and killed one person.
The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans, a people who for decades have been abandoned by the system and actively attacked by globalists and traitorous politicians”.
The offence
NYT has been criticised because many feel it has tried to “normalise” someone who is essentially a spewer of hate – approving of Hitler, criticising democracy, believing races are best left separate – by showing how he loves his wife and sports pop culture tattoos.
The point is that the article about the Nazi in the New York Times is a naive attempt to shed light on something that’s already obvious to those who’ve been paying attention. How naive to think this is anything other than the elevation of a hateful near-nobody to a Somebody.
— Sara Benincasa (@SaraJBenincasa) November 26, 2017
In light of the New York Times getting warm and cozy with a Nazi, I immediately thought of this tweet. pic.twitter.com/bpDnrPGHKY
— Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) November 26, 2017
Oh hey so the New York Times wrote a nice little puff piece about a Nazi. I hope y'all are profoundly ashamed, because all I can think of is every single Holocaust survivor I've ever spoken to and the times we've said "never forget".
— Mia Steinberg (@MiaSteinberg) November 25, 2017
As someone who is both a subscriber to the New York Times and a student who has written more than a few papers on the far-right, I'm certainly not a fan of their glossy coverage of Nazi sympathizers. These aren't people who need normalized.
— Justin W. Taylor ???????? (@JustinTaylorBE) November 25, 2017
Dear New York Times,As an Asian-American doctor in the Deep South, a low-key Nazi attacked me in the parking garage. Please don't normalize white supremacy.Sincerely,Eugene Gu, MD
— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) November 25, 2017
Some readers also slammed it for including a link to a webpage that sells swastika armbands, which the NYT removed later.
The defence
As the backlash increased, NYT published an explainer, where they said the “point of the story was not to normalise anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think”.
They also regretted the offence caused, and accepted that things could have been done differently.
“We described Mr. Hovater as a bigot, a Nazi sympathizer who posted images on Facebook of a Nazi-like America full of happy white people and swastikas everywhere. We understand that some readers wanted more pushback, and we hear that loud and clear.”
“We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognise that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story.”
After this, they do offer a more powerful defence: “What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.”
Seeking answers
The writer of the article, Richard Fausset, also wrote another piece, where he said he did not feel his story adequately answered why Hovater chose the path he did.
“Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader. I beat myself up about all of this for a while, until I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect. What I had were quotidian details, though to be honest, I’m not even sure what these add up to.”
What does this mean
America, like the rest of the world, has been in a flux recently, the most notable outcome of which has been the election of Donald Trump as president in November 2016. While it was long accepted that the “decent thing to do” was to support democracy and not badmouth Black people or immigrants publicly, a new group is rising, coming from generations of privilege but feeling disadvantaged, who think they should have the right to speak up for themselves.
A seeming lack of historical awareness, sensitivity and empathy – or deliberate shunning of them – means that the group is unable to see that their grievance, that of "being cheated because the Blacks and immigrants are getting unfair access to the pie", stems from a feeling of entitlement – “America is my country and I have the first right to its prosperity”.
This group, to which Tony Hovater proudly belongs, has become increasingly vocal, unashamed to profess and propagate views long considered anathema in a multi-racial, multi-religious democratic society.
The New York Times is not wrong when it says that such people deserve more scrutiny, not less. However, its article demonstrated where objectivity can go wrong – applying fairness to something fundamentally unfair.
The article lets Hovater control the narrative completely, and does not pick holes in the claims that Hovater and his ilk make to justify their politics – that things have gotten too bad for the Whites, Hitler was an earnest man who was merely committed to his cause, “Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s”, the figures of Holocaust death are overblown, “public discourse has become so toxic that there’s no way to effectively lobby for interests that involve white people”.
All of these statements are riddles with holes for the picking, but NYT lets them slide, effectively giving legitimacy to poisonous, divisive views. Even as it states that Hovater’s “fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say”, it adds in the same breath that Hovater’s “Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother”.
A lot of White people are getting attracted to such views, and a story like this makes it easy for fence-sitters to join in – Hovater is not too bad, he is just like everyone else, a man who, while advocating that a community has greater rights to a country’s resources because of race and violence is an acceptable strategy to achieve this.
More importantly, this non-judgmental recounting of a man discussing neo-Nazism over turkey sandwiches is as horrifying and insensitive to the victims of such politics as it can get.
India is going through something similar. In pursuit of a fanciful Hindu Rashtra, members of the majority community are being told that they are under threat because of rising militant Islam and minority appeasement, and therefore killing a few Muslims is legitimate “self-defence”.
The NYT article essentially shows a man talking of how India belongs to Hindus and the others should be thrown out or killed, while telling us he also watches Kapil Sharma at night and is fond of his nukkad ki chaat.
We are living in dangerous times where divisive ideologies are finding it frighteningly easy to win followers. In this milieu, such objectivity adventurism as The New York Times attempted is both irresponsible and insensitive.