How Brand-Media is Fueling America’s Trans Panic
Taylor Lorenz's alleged doxxing of a Jewish woman reveals a new morality.
Last week, the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, whom I’ve previously described as a member a new approach to news I call the knee-cap media, seemingly doxxed the woman behind the influential LibsofTikTok Twitter account. On the left, Lorenz was praised for her hard-hitting reporting on a Twitter account the left characterizes as a pipeline of right-wing propaganda, including with what it calls the account’s anti-trans activism.
But many online felt as if they were watching a gross miscarriage of journalistic justice unfold in real time. After all, the woman behind LibsofTikTok is an Orthodox Jewish woman—a vulnerable population if there ever was one—who probably kept her identity private for good reason. Despite this, even putative centrists like the Post’s Megan McArdle excused the doxxing, in the latter’s case via a public assurance that Orthodox Jewish politics are uniformly pro-Trump or conservative—or whatever McArdle was claiming about Orthodox Jews, which wasn’t immediately clear.
What is clear is that this case pitted the member of the world’s most historically embattled ethnic group, a Jew (and a woman, at that), with its most freshly championed minority, transgender people. The media lined up behind Lorenz, including with a sympathetic CNN interview giving the journalist, who has a long list of embittered and aggrieved subjects of past articles to her name, the chance to explain precisely why exposing someone’s identity and address does not really constitute doxxing because the account owner could have been “foreign.”
All this begs the question of why the media would reflexively support activist journalism on behalf of one minority group at the expense of another?
One of the most troubling developments in media today is something I call the Great Agglomeration – the aligning of government and media interests. But another key component to understanding this trend is the solvent that liquefied the once sacred barrier between government and journalism: brand advertising.
It’s today’s big corporate brands that provide the funding essential to pulling off spectacles like AOC, a government official, making a splashy “Tax the Rich” appearance at one of the greatest brand-media events of the year, Condé Nast’s Met Gala, whose sponsors over the past four years include Instagram, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. (Talk about taxing the rich.)
“Underwriters” of The Atlantic's landmark event, its annual festival, include Saleforce, PayPal, US Bank, AllState, Genentech, EY (an Ernst & Young subsidiary), and Boston Consulting Group. Its founding underwriter is Facebook.
The New York Times Climate Hub is “presented by” Morgan Stanley and Siemens Energy. Supporting sponsors include KEA (no doubt a champion of climate activism, with its gazillions of tons of particle board), and that great bastion of transparency, Google. Other sponsors include Nike, HSBC, Bain, Novartis, and, again, Boston Consulting Group.
What do these big advertisers get by putting their logo on the Atlantic or Times’ websites? More than credibility, they get respectability. They get nicely laundered, neatly pressed reputations, no matter how egregious their histories of exploiting children in sweatshops, fleecing consumers, laying waste to forests, bowing to authoritarian interests, or a decimating the American economy. With the flip of a switch, order is restored in the brand universe.
And, if not totally okay, this arrangement is low down on the list of serious issues facing the media today. After all, someone has to keep the matcha lattes flowing. But the liaison becomes dangerous when we realize that it’s through these big brands, whose reach dwarfs that of the news media, that major social trends and political issues get repackaged as the new cultural gospel.
Malnutrition kills 3 million children per year—a sickening statistic, not least of all on account of its preventability. And yet Greta Thurnberg issues a jeremiad on behalf of children anywhere on the issue of climate change. That’s all very well, but why this issue and not the other? Where is Greta’s teary counterpart inveighing her elders on the city-population of children who needlessly starve to death every year? Where is The New York Times Malnutrition Hub, sponsored by the world’s biggest banks, consulting firms and aerospace companies? Why this and not that?
American society has been convulsed by the trans issue, what until recently was considered a medical condition that—at least until the last ten or so years—affected around 0.15% of people in the US. Of course, no population should be subject to bigotry or discrimination, and there’s an argument to be made that the smaller a population, the more vulnerable it is to hatred. And, again, that’s all very well.
But where is the corresponding passion for, let’s say, America’s Jews, who make up less than 2% of Americans despite the fact that anti-Semitic attacks constitute nearly 10% of all hate crimes in America and 58% of religiously motivated ones? Why this and not that? Why does President Biden not consider Jews to be the bravest people he’s met, in addition to trans people? Why isn’t there an ultra-Orthodox woman, perhaps one from the same neighborhood as the woman behind LibsofTikTok, celebrated on the cover of Time magazine?
The reason is that a new morality has taken hold of American society. In place of a morality of the soul and an ethics of the human other, we have a morality of the issues, a cover-story ethic.
This morality depends on whatever serves the media interests of the moment—which, by virtue of the Great Agglomeration, is whatever serves certain political interests. And it is manufactured by that same Agglomeration, which self-consciously decides what is the moral imperative du jour.
Today, it’s the trans issue. Yesterday, as Lionel Shriver recently noted, it was the rights of gay people, who now feel themselves to be crowded out by the latest newcomer. Tomorrow it will no doubt be someone else.
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