Our media can’t even tell who is sympathetic anymore

Of all the factors contributing to the media’s crisis of credibility, few are as harmful as its ideological monoculture.

When the overwhelming majority of those in a small but influential industry believe the same things, talk about the same things, attend the same schools, go to the same parties, watch the same shows, read the same books, and vote for the same party, it is easy for them to adopt a narrow worldview, losing all sense of self-awareness along the way.

Consider the New Yorker , which last week published a feature that cast as an object of deep sympathy a noncitizen who specializes in U.S. election engineering. Daysi Gonzalez came from El Salvador on a tourist visa but stayed after her home country qualified for temporary protected status following a series of earthquakes in 2001. She may soon have to leave because that not-so-temporary program finally expired last week.

“Unlike most immigrants in America, Gonzalez has a job that puts her in rooms with powerful people,” the profile reads. “As a partner at the consulting firm Solidarity Strategies, she tries to help Democrats win some of the most consequential races in the country. … Her biggest client this cycle is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has paid her firm more than a hundred and eighty thousand dollars this year.”

This raises the question: Has our insularity so destroyed our sense of what makes a figure sympathetic that we now offer as the face of the cause a foreign national who is paid (and paid very handsomely) to meddle in U.S. elections?

Of the twenty-five years Gonzalez has spent here as a noncitizen, nearly ten have gone to political consulting. She has worked on issue advocacy, ballot referenda and Democratic campaigns through nearly half a dozen election cycles, including this one. She explored a few paths to citizenship, including an H-1B lottery bid, and declined to pursue others, including marriage. She found no immediate way forward. Her boss, political consultant Chuck Rocha, is frustrated that his attempts to skirt immigration law by pulling strings have failed.

The New Yorker answers all this with a naked appeal for pity. It treats as a minor tragedy the prospect that Gonzalez — a non-voting noncitizen whose bread and butter is U.S. election engineering — may soon have to return to her home country.

The New Yorker may characterize it as a tragedy, but not everyone thinks it a tragedy when rich foreigners cannot tinker in U.S. elections.

Even so, Gonzalez’s story hardly holds a candle to the New York Times ‘ even more preposterous feature last week, bemoaning that artificial intelligence has made it harder for Kenyans to make money by helping foreign students cheat in school.

The Times story follows Teresios Bundi, who once made a fine living writing papers for American academic cheaters. “He sometimes considered the ethics of helping students cheat, but decided it was ultimately their choice,” the story reads. “He said he saw himself as a tutor and was proud that a young Kenyan was thriving unnoticed inside Western academia. … Essay writers drove new Subarus, carried the latest smartphones and booked exclusive tables at clubs.” Then AI arrived, “and the good times ended. … Kenya’s experience shows how the technology is already dismantling some lower rungs of the global labor market,” the Times warns.

If the aim is to raise awareness about AI job loss, surely the Times could have found someone more sympathetic than the middlemen in a global academic fraud scheme. And by the way, this A.I. profile was in addition to a separate Times article last week that complained that a raid on an illegal gambling and drug ring in Tennessee, run by a twice-deported Honduran felon, led to multiple other deportations and put enough fear into the local illegal immigrant community that people are afraid to go out and party.

And if you think that’s bad, wait until you see the Times profile of Romeo Perez-Bravo , a thrice-deported illegal immigrant from Guatemala with convictions for domestic violence and forgery who stole an American’s identity. Perez ruined his victim’s credit and caused him to pay thousands in wrongful fees and garnished wages when the IRS came after the wrong man. The American victim was even sued for wrongful death after Perez was involved in a fatal car accident — a crash apparently unrelated to Perez’s six drunk-driving convictions.

Yet this is the headline the Times chose for the story: “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.” Perez was just sentenced to seven years in federal prison last month — perhaps we’ll get another sympathetic Times profile when he finishes his sentence and is deported for a fourth time in 2033.

Nor should we forget when the New Yorker published this whopper of a blurb : “Orville Etoria, a Jamaican national who’d lived in New York for nearly 50 years, was shackled and put on an ICE flight to Eswatini. ‘It helped me imagine how the slaves might have felt, going to another land in shackles and chains,’ he said.”

Etoria had been convicted of multiple serious felonies, including armed robbery and murder. Of the nearly 50 years he spent in New York, 25 were in state prison on a murder sentence. He did part of that time at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He had already served about three years for other offenses in the 1980s.

Etoria was issued a final order of removal in 2009, but despite his lengthy criminal history of victimizing Americans, he somehow managed to stay in the U.S. for another decade.

Are we so far out of touch that now we offer political strategists, identity thieves, academic fraudsters and even actual robbers and murderers as the sympathetic face of the cause? Are we all out of orphans and widows? Do you profile writers even hear yourselves?

The late film critic Pauline Kael identified and articulated this flavor of insularity as early as 1972, in remarks that would be badly misremembered : “I live in a rather special world,” she said. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

Nixon had won that year in a landslide, with 60 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes.

For Kael, to know only one person who helped make those numbers possible was merely embarrassing. The problem now is that her narrow outlook has become a feature, not a bug, of the modern news industry.

For an industry to be this far removed from the concerns and ideas of ordinary readers is more than embarrassing. It is untenable.

Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.