When Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president in early January, pundits credited her departure to a successful removal campaign led by conservative activists.
The strategy behind Gay’s ousting wasn’t new, and has been used to advance conservative agendas, influence school curriculum and demonize Black people throughout history. What was different this time was the quick efficacy of the takedown, which, according to some political scientists, historians and lawyers, emboldened conservative activists and could have dangerous implications for the future of education.
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Sustained and coordinated pressure through media coverage helped kick off the campaign against Gay. Critics, mainly conservative activists, used social media and news outlets to claim that she responded inadequately to congressional questioning about antisemitism on campus. Soon thereafter, they levied allegations that she plagiarized some of her work.
Weeks prior to Gay’s resignation, the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo publicized the plan to remove her from office: “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.” In an interview with Politico after Gay vacated her post, Rufo described his successful strategy as a three-pronged approach of “narrative, financial and political pressure”.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, noted the effectiveness of the plan, and warned of what it could portend considering that these actors have “seen the impact that they can have when they are able to marshal pressure from the media, donors and others”.
He pointed to similar strategies employed in the conservative movement to reshape state legislatures, where activists and lobbyists leverage understaffed and under-resourced statehouses by providing them with research and advice for bills in order to sway them. In his book State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez wrote about how the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council drafts and disseminates bills to apply political pressure. “They can have an outsized impact by diagnosing the weak spot in the institution and going after that,” said Hertel-Fernandez. “Just as they did in the case with Harvard.”
I remember reading an article like this. My main take away was that the effectiveness of right-wing attacks rely on centrist and center-left wing media to spread their message.
We’ve ended up in this weird asymmetric media situation where the right doesn’t take anything from the left seriously but the left takes a lot of the right seriously. The left can’t make a persuasive case to the right, but the right can make a persuasive case to the left. And so Christopher Rufo can spread his bullshit while the expertise of scientists in every discipline is rejected out of hand because it has any association with academia.
And what’s the alternative?
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The job of the media is no longer to inform, never forget that. It generates profits, the same as everything else, except most of it is also now owned by billionaires, so even profits take a backseat to whatever whims may cross their minds.
As an ex NPR listener, my ability to understand the power dynamics of news has improved greatly since I stopped listening. Centrism stops you from using your brain, and that’s no accident.
I only read the news, which gives me a chance to remind myself that I hate mainstream media framing.
I get what you are saying, but it gets complicated when print is probably our best resource to understand current events. The propaganda gets preferential treatment. Any counter narrative will get the white glove treatment and might be released months later or shoved under the fold. Without those counter narratives, how do we understand what is happening?
The pro administration stories before the 2003 Iraq war and the antiwar reporting after the invasion are great examples.