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January 26, 2022 11:45 am
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Outspoken Journalist Calls for Dialogue Amid Hate and ‘Wokeism’

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avatar by Alan Zeitlin

Opinion

Batya Ungar-Sargon. Photo: Renata Bystritsky.

If you’re looking for a journalist armed with zingers, look no further than Batya Ungar-Sargon.

ON CNN, for example, she ripped MSNBC’s coverage of Virginia gubernatorial Glenn Youngkin, with some saying his victory was a win for racism, by pointing out that they ignored that he flipped districts with large Black populations, and that his lieutenant governor was the first African-American to hold that position. Ungar-Sargon, the former opinion editor of The Forward and current deputy opinion editor at Newsweek also fires away in her new book: “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.”

While there is obviously racism in America, people should not label someone as racist without evidence, she writes. Coming from the left, Ungar-Sargon dishes out criticism for the right and left, pointing out Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was rightly suspended for saying Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)’s wearing a hijab meant she shouldn’t serve in Congress. She said while Fox News clearly deserves criticism for this, too many things fall under a vast blanket of white supremacy without evidence of that being always the case.

Although she didn’t vote for Trump, she knows people who did.

She noted that, “nothing helps more than talking to Trump voters. That’s more important than reading my book. Go meet people who you disagree with, on the left or on the right, and teach yourself to respect them. That’s the only way out of this mess.”

She also made clear that while there is bad reporting, she doesn’t believe the “woke” journalists are bad people.

“The people I am criticizing, journalists who work in woke media, wake up every day thinking they are making the world a better place, thinking they are on the side of justice,” she wrote. “There are no villains here, just misguided people who happen to be benefiting from inequality by misdiagnosing America’s biggest problems, perhaps without even realizing it. It’s really, really hard to keep that in mind, but it’s also the most important thing: Our opponents are not evil; they just disagree.”

As to the critical question of censorship by the likes of Facebook or Twitter, she wrote that it is a serious matter, but doesn’t know how to solve the problem.

“This is one of the hardest questions in America today, and I’m not smart enough to know the answer,” she wrote. “I have been convinced by the evidence that big tech companies have become monopolies. … But do I want the government meddling in there? Do I want the state to have a say in what gets published or how? Definitely not.”

On the Jeff Lax show on WSNR radio, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor said she wished members of “The Squad” felt differently about Jews, but didn’t think it always rose to the level of Jew-hatred.

Lax asked for her response to Vice President Kamala Harris, who was told by a college student that Israel was guilty of ethnic cleansing. Harris, rather than correcting the student, bizarrely referred to the statement as “your truth,” an answer that gave no hint to whether or not the vice-president thought the statement was true or false.

Ungar-Sargon said, “I feel like our politicians today are politician product. They’re just not leaders. They exist to reflect focus groups and polling.”

In an e-mail response, she explained that while there is certainly division in America, many in the media make the situation appear worse than it is.

“Americans have never been more united on the crucial values this great nation was founded on: equality, dignity, and justice for all,” Ungar-Sargon wrote.

The author is a writer based in New York.

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