Jelani Cobb
speaker
79 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jelani Cobb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, David, I heard this in the past few weeks from people who are themselves very highly placed in the news business.
It's not encouraging. It seems like a dereliction of duty. It's still true. I think that also there's another part of this, like the parallel to this is, you know, there are many people who feel like they don't want to watch the news or listen to the news. There are journalists who wonder what the point is. And I've had those conversations, too. Like, is anyone listening to us?
Does anyone care if we point out things that are outrageous or disgusting? But don't they need to – I'm sorry, but don't they need to buck up and stand up too? Sure. But I think that we have to at least begin by acknowledging that we have this particular problem. Morale is not great.
And we have people who think that they've done their job to the best of their ability and it hasn't really made the difference that they hoped it might make. The thing that I point out when I'm talking with my students is we should never allow young or emerging journalists to have the idea that there's a one-to-one relationship between our effort and the outcome. Right.
I quote you, as a matter of fact, in talking about the number of stories that highlighted the misdeeds and misbehavior of powerful men that somehow never generated a Me Too movement. And then all of a sudden, there was one. And we don't know what the ratio is. It's unknowable, unpredictable, completely random.
And my version of encouragement has been that we keep doing the work until we get to that breakthrough moment where it actually really, really does make a difference.
I tend to think of this as a short-term strategy. You know, there was a boxer back in the 80s that you might remember named Frank the Animal Fletcher. I do.
That's shocking. I find it hard to believe. Yeah. But you recall his strategy was just to overwhelm his opponent, to just crowd him and throw all kinds of punches nonstop and so on. There was a flaw in that strategy, which is that eventually you run out of steam.
That you can throw up flak and shrapnel and the kinds of things, and you can do this in terms of flooding the zone for a limited period of time.
Yeah, exactly. I think that at some point, this becomes a counterproductive exercise in its own right.
That's true. It also rests upon the presumption that the things that Trump and his people have foregrounded And the past feels like past hundred days. It's actually been the past two weeks. That aligns with the things that people really care about. And that remains to be seen. The culture war things he's used to great profit.
But as we saw, you know, large reason why he lost the reelection bid in 2020 was the pandemic, which was a national crisis that he mishandled. There are other crises that are going to come up and there are other crises that are emergent even at the moment.
And how they navigate those things, I think, will be at least as important as their ability to flood the zone with all sorts of different distracting, concerning kinds of actions.
During the Cold War, you could taint anything by just saying that it was communistic or Marxist. And the interesting kind of connection with the civil rights movement is that when I was kind of young, I was kind of like, why were people connecting... racial equality with communism, just saying that if you integrate the schools, it's communism.
And then at some point it became clear to me that their definition of communism was integration. It didn't have anything to do with redistributing the means of production or expropriating wealth. Communism can be anything that you don't like. And so now DEI is the boogeyman for anything. If there's a terrible tragedy,
something we would normally have processed in a nonpartisan way, we can all grieve people who've died in a plane crash or a helicopter crash, particularly people who are parts of the military. Now, all of a sudden, that can be blamed on DEI.
If there is something going wrong in any part of your life, you can just, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that somehow another DEI is there. Do you think this will fade? I tend to think that these things are like fevers. You know, they break at some point.
And the fact is that you do have to, irrespective of how masterful Trump and those around him have been in playing on particular social anxieties and fears, at some point you do have to actually govern. And that is not easy. And so we'll see.
Thank you. Good talking to you.
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