“The comedian wants to be a dramatist, the dramatist wants to be a comedian…” the Danish entertainer Jørgen Ryg once joked. “And Jens Otto wants to be a politician!” For younger readers, the reference was to the then–Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag.
In a conversation with John Palpola, Matt Taibbi described how journalists’ understanding of their own role has changed since he entered the profession. Unfortunately, that shift reaches far beyond journalism itself — and threatens our freedom.
“In the United States we assume that citizens are adults and that they can handle truth and information.” But today we are confronted with the opposite assumption: a class that believes it is both its right and its duty to determine what is true and false and to define the terms of public debate. In their view, this is necessary because society has become so complex that only they are capable of understanding it — and therefore it becomes their responsibility to guide the rest of us toward the “correct” choices.
The Anointed Class
The conservative thinker Thomas Sowell called them “the anointed.” The assumption that citizens are adults is not merely about whether they can handle free speech, Taibbi argues; it is what binds Americans together as citizens. A similar idea can be found in the Danish theologian K.E. Løgstrup’s observation that democracy is the ability to disagree peacefully. Democracy is not merely an institution — it is a culture, something we practice together.
For the state, however, even in democracies, the logic is reversed. The state exists in order to govern. Control over what is deemed true or false therefore becomes a tool of governance, even if the original intention is not censorship or tyranny as such, as Jacob Riegel writes in a remarkable essay. Because of this inherent tension, a free press capable of acting as the public’s watchdog over the state — the “fourth estate” — becomes essential. In Denmark and much of Europe, the press has therefore been granted an expanded freedom of expression. That may sound admirable, but such a privilege does not exist in the United States, because logically it would imply that ordinary citizens possess a lesser freedom.
Taibbi explains that journalists traditionally came from working-class backgrounds and saw their role as simply reporting events as they observed them, leaving it to citizens themselves to decide what conclusions to draw. That changed with the Watergate scandal, when President Richard Nixon was exposed for covering up political sabotage against the opposition, and especially with the subsequent film All the President’s Men. Suddenly journalists could shape the destiny of the nation. And that attracted the children of the privileged classes. They failed to grasp the real lesson of the story — the painstaking, methodical work of uncovering information and presenting it humbly to readers.
“Now what they want you to do is to assume this great ideological importance. Have a feeling of certainty about what you are doing. The term they’re using is moral clarity, journalism. So we must be certain what we are telling people. We must be absolutely certain about how we want them to think about things.”
From Watchdog to Political Aristocracy
Taibbi says he does not understand what one actually learns at journalism school, since most practical skills can be learned in a day or two. “What they teach you at journalism school is a series of elite assumptions” — such as who the “correct” sources are — along with all manner of fashionable academic absurdities. The result is ideological conformity, where people are judged by how faithfully they adhere to these elite assumptions.
“The most unethical group of people I have ever worked with in my life have been journalists,” Alan Dershowitz once observed, mentioning respected outlets such as The New Yorker, CBS 60 Minutes, and The New York Times. “And the reason they are so bad is that they come with a purported journalistic integrity and the actual integrity is so much lower.”
This is also what is called “credentialism” — the belief that expertise is automatically valid because someone possesses the correct degree or occupies the right position. “Look, I’m a doctor and I want my sausages!” complains a disgruntled guest in Fawlty Towers. And he was entirely right: Basil Fawlty’s incompetence had cost him his breakfast. But he was right as a guest, not because he was a doctor.
An education is merely a tool that enables you to perform a given task more effectively — unless, perhaps, we are talking about the humanities, where people sometimes seem to become less intelligent. And with any position comes responsibility. Democracy rests on the recognition that there is no objectively “correct” politics. And even if there were, we would not be capable of identifying it with certainty. Instead, representative democracy seeks to create a connection between rulers and the ruled. Power therefore derives from the governed. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain how Denmark could have a prime minister with a degree in African Studies.
Taibbi rejects the idea that journalists should avoid quoting people who supposedly “just lie.” If such people are part of the story, they must be quoted, because it is not the journalist’s task to render judgment — that responsibility belongs to citizens. But that requires trusting that the public consists of adults.
The Twitter Files and the New Censor Class
As one of the central figures behind the Twitter Files — the major revelations showing how tech giants censored and manipulated social media users, often on behalf of the state — Taibbi describes how most journalists and media organisations refused to cover the story. Instead, they subjected him and his colleagues to character assassination because their elite assumptions had been challenged. He also notes that those carrying out censorship for the tech companies generally possessed longer academic educations than the people being censored. A class struggle of a very different kind from the one traditionally championed by the Left.
According to Taibbi, two major events either created or intensified this shift in the self-understanding of journalists — and of the academic class from which many of them now come. In Europe, it was Brexit; in the United States, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president. Both outcomes were regarded as illegitimate by the political elite and were therefore treated as such by the press.
The very concept of the “fourth estate” contains an institutional mindset, especially when accompanied by special privileges such as expanded freedom of expression relative to ordinary citizens. Unsurprisingly, that mindset attracts and nurtures a certain type of person — people who see themselves as protagonists serving a higher necessity. These are what the Polish psychologist Andrew Łobaczewski called “spellbinders” in Political Ponerology: those who, on behalf of power, explain to the rest of us why that power is necessary.
When Journalism Acquires a Mission
We have seen an example of this in Denmark in Isabella Hindkjær, then the newly appointed head of DR’s P3 radio station. Her vision of her role atop the media giant was to use the monopoly platform to advance her own agenda. As she put it: “We’re not just a radio station — we’re television too, and that gives us some pretty cool opportunities.”
“And it’s not because I don’t appreciate the history lecture,” she continued, “but when it comes to democracy, we also have a responsibility at P3 to create a common conversation. We must be a gathering point. Our target audience is young people. We need to bring them together around conversations that also strengthen social cohesion.”
This was to be achieved through “formats designed to engage our target audience” and by “making journalism from the perspective of young people and on their terms.” She wanted “to start conversations where we bring many different actors to the table” so that “P3 can sometimes be the common meeting point where we facilitate necessary, important, and fun conversations across all the differences that define young people today.”
She therefore wanted to “push the boundaries of journalism,” because this was “extremely important when covering large structural and highly complex conditions such as the climate challenges we face.” But critical journalism is investigative by nature and is the precondition for the press functioning as a fourth estate. Once journalism adopts “engagement techniques,” however, it ceases to investigate and instead pursues a predetermined objective, because it assumes it already knows the larger truths. Thus, when Hindkjær says she does not want “to spend a lot of energy seeking out sources that want to question facts and hold them up against something that is scientifically fairly well documented and then claim that balance has been achieved,” her version of “critical journalism” begins to look very much like criticism of dissent itself.
The Spellbinders March On
And this is the problem with the spellbinders’ self-image, grounded as it is in elite assumptions and academic nonsense: most of it is merely an expression of the prevailing zeitgeist. The IPCC — misleadingly referred to as the UN Climate Panel — has already scaled back its apocalyptic scenarios. “It turns out that the most extreme assumptions about the future — the doomsaying predictions embodied in the worst-case scenario known as RCP8.5 — are implausible,” wrote Roger Pielke in The Washington Post, of all places. Even the left-wing outlet Vox has acknowledged this reality. It is reasonable to interpret this downscaling as diplomatic language for the collapse of the supposed “scientific consensus” — a phrase that makes little scientific sense in the first place.
As the zeitgeist shifts, the spellbinders happily march on toward the next grand truth that once again casts them in the starring role. There is no parade of necessity they are unwilling to lead. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left searching for a parking space.
Totalitarian Compassion
These are different times now — times “where words matter,” as Denmark’s Minister for Digital Affairs, Caroline Stage of the Moderates, declared during DR2’s meticulously choreographed Debatten programme on January 16. She was outraged that Mark Zuckerberg had followed Elon Musk in abandoning cooperation with external censorship groups — “moderators,” as they call themselves — that had previously pressured Facebook into policing debate on the platform. “With Facebook’s new policy,” Stage indignantly continued, “it is now, for example, permissible to call women household objects.” She dismissed appeals to “this whole free speech…” argument before being interrupted by the ever-choreographed host Clement Kjersgaard, who had to keep the programme on schedule. But later she openly advocated online censorship:
“I’ve heard that argument that moderation didn’t work. And perhaps it didn’t in some situations. But to say that because something doesn’t work, we should simply capitulate — that strikes me as completely insane logic.”
Speaking of insanity, Stage also delivered a near-perfect illustration of totalitarian compassion.
And then there are the openly vindictive voices, such as Birgitte Kehler Holst, group chair for The Alternative in Copenhagen’s city council — or “group spokesperson,” as the terminology now insists. One might almost think she despises her own parents, judging by the bitter attack she launched against the generation that provided her privileged upbringing. The ideological motive is already embedded in the gender-neutral title itself: we are no longer simply human beings. She insists that her climate ideology — whether people like it or not — must be imposed on the innocent, because nobody may be exempt.
Holst stated that “sustainable, nourishing and tasty food can be combined,” but she also added:
“To be a little sharp and provocative: in the eyes of The Alternative, everyone — including the elderly — must contribute to achieving our climate goals. And, parenthetically speaking, it is precisely that generation which has polluted the most.”
She further declared that “clean water is a human right; meat is not.”
As a result, nursing home residents in Copenhagen are now to receive only 70 grams of beef per week. No such restrictions apply in City Hall’s own cafeteria, where “politicians and civil servants can daily enjoy beef in quantities equivalent to a nursing home resident’s ration for one and a half to two months,” as the Danish taxpayers’ association indignantly observed.
Because they’re worth it.
