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[City Journal] A Rough First Graft of History
A new book argues that the media’s moral panic about race has distracted Americans from the chasm of class.
Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. By Batya Ungar-Sargon. Encounter Books; 234 pages; $28.99.
As books go, 2020 was meritocracy’s annus horribilis. Daniel Markovits warned of The Meritocracy Trap, while The Tyranny of Merit earned Michael Sandel several book-of-the-year awards. Both books pointed to meritocracy’s potential to legitimize inequality beyond the point of tolerability. They overlooked, however, the media’s role in covering for this deepening inequality. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (2021), Newsweek deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon argues that “the identity culture war has allowed journalists to cast our nation as hopelessly divided along partisan and racial lines as a smoke screen for the actual impenetrable and devastating division that’s happening along class lines.”
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