The New York Times quickly came under fire from its own liberal audience Sunday for an article profiling a neo-Nazi in New Carlisle, Ohio, near Dayton. It wasn’t a puff piece – the headline was “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” on page A-16 – but Times reporter Richard Fausset did call the subject, Tony Hovater, “the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key.” One photo showed Hovater shopping in a Safeway.
By lunchtime, the “Reader Center” of the Times had posted a reaction piece headlined “Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond.” Marc Lacey offered a big “We Hear You” response:
“How to normalize Nazis 101!” one reader wrote on Twitter. “I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,” wrote another. “Attempting to ‘normalize’ white supremacist groups – should Never have been printed!”
Our reporter and his editors agonized over the tone and content of the article. The point of the story was not to normalize 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.
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.
Here’s a snippet of the Fausset article, to give you a flavor:
There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”
… He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show Twin Peaks. He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big Seinfeld fan.
Conservatives would argue that liberal newspapers love to over-indulge in fear of some metasizing “far right” organizing in the hinterlands. Hovater founded a fascist party, and the Times turned to Marilyn Mayo at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, to estimate his Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most. Is that really newsworthy? The Times could have avoided all this trouble if it wasn't trying so hard to highlight a tiny minority.
Conservatives might find it amusing (if not surprising) that the debate over the worth of this article was all based on the reactions from the left, so the Times knows who its “base” audience is:
Some readers did see value in the piece. Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and a winner of the National Magazine Award, tweeted: “People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that.”
But far more were outraged by the article. “You know who had nice manners?” Bess Kalb, a writer for [ABC's] Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. “The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis.”
One can understand the Kimmel writer's point: Manners are overrated, and Kimmel doesn't specialize in them. The Times was polite in only running her @BessBell tweets that weren't stuffed with F-bombs. Like this one: "I don't mean to sound intolerant or coarse, but fuck this Nazi and fuck the gentle, inquisitive tone of this Nazi normalizing barf journalism, and fuck the photographer for not just throwing the camera at this Nazi's head and laughing."
And: "Fuck the Nazi's house and fuck the Nazi's name and fuck the Nazi's faux intellectual books and fuck this editor for not replacing this awful headline with 'White Male Inferiority Complex Incarnate Who Advocates for Murderous Racial Cleansing Buys Groceries, Too!'"
Back to Lacey, letting a Washington Post editor slam its competitor:
Others urged us to focus our journalism less on those pushing hate and more on those on the receiving end of that hate. “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies?” asked Karen Attiah, an editor at The Washington Post. “Why not a piece about the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in Charlottesville? Follow-ups on those who were injured? Or how PoC [people of color] are coping?”
Maybe Lacey was too slammed for time to rebut this with: did you honestly think the Times didn't report on Heather Heyer's mother? Lacey concluded: “We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. 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.”
