Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon about her new book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy—and her political voyage from doctrinaire progressive to self-described “left-wing populist.”

Transcript

Jonathan Kay: This episode is dedicated to the culture war. And not just the culture war in general, but its most intensely contested war zone, the fight over liberal media bias. If your Thanksgiving dinner was ruined by a political argument last week, there's a good chance that this subject is what you were arguing about.

My guest this week is Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of the newly published book, Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.

And from the title, you'd think that she was either a host at Fox News, or at least someone eager for the job. Batya Ungar-Sargon has a more nuanced backstory. She's an editor at Newsweek. And in her book she expresses a strong nostalgic streak for old-school socialists, including the kind Bernie Sanders used to be before he began playing to the ultra-progressive campus crowd in the run-up to the 2020 election. As Ungar-Sargon sees it, in fact, the problem with American media elites isn't that they've betrayed conservatives or even centrists.

Rather, they've betrayed the poor and the working class, including the people of colour they claim to champion. Her analysis is rooted in questions of class, an issue that progressives often seem to forget about amid their land acknowledgements, carbon offsets, pronoun checks, and Black Lives Matter kneebends.

I spoke to Batya Ungar-Sargon last week over Skype, just after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted in regard to the fatal shooting of two men at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which, as you'll see, is one of the subjects we discuss. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

JK: The Dust Jacket to your book and the title, Bad News How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, like the very use of the word woke might give people the impression that you're looking to get on Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or something like that. But when I read the book, what was interesting is you're really not what I would call a conservative. Is that right?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: I'm a left-wing populist.

JK: Okay. Does that mean you're a, you're a Bernie Sanders supporter?