Jeff Francis's Reviews > Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

Batya Ungar-Sargon’s “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy” adds itself to the growing list of books that use “Woke” derisively in the title. If that’s your thing, at first blush “Bad News” seems like manna. It makes the big promise of exposing how news media have shifted from objectivity to a type of activism that underlies all its coverage, even at the expense of truthful reporting. Yes, “Bad News” makes that promise… and it mostly delivers on it.

The author’s primary conceit is that with the deterioration of, say, newspapers the last several years, the only people who can survive the entry-level pay are those who don’t have to worry about making a living from one’s job. And that this has produced an elitist/activist class of journalists that much prefers focusing on (if not creating) issues of race/gender, rather than the more pressing one of economic class.

Despite a rather slow beginning about the history of newspapers, “Bad News” eventually gets to those irresistible anecdotes/statistics/conundrums of woke media, e.g., how do they explain that minority votes for Trump actually increased from 2016 to 2020, even after the season of social justice leading up to the second election? If you guessed: by claiming that the minority voters are white supremacists… you’re right.

Ungar-Sargon’s a formidable researcher and writer, and has produced a good book. It’s a shame that—because of what it has to say—it won’t reach the audience that most needs to hear it.