Countless articles have been published in recent weeks, often under the guise of straight news reporting, in which journalists take for granted the legitimacy of novel theories about race and identity. Such articles illustrate a prevailing new political morality on questions of race and justice that has taken power at the [New York] Times and [Washington] Post—a worldview sometimes abbreviated as “wokeness” that combines the sensibilities of highly educated and hyperliberal white professionals with elements of Black nationalism and academic critical race theory. But the media’s embrace of “wokeness” did not begin in response to the death of George Floyd. This racial ideology first began to take hold at leading liberal media institutions years before the arrival of Donald Trump and, in fact, heavily influenced the journalistic response to the protest movements of recent years and their critique of American society.

Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.

This occurs by a process of concept creep—a stretching of the terminological and normative boundaries of what constitutes racism and racist behavior. In other words: The racialization of things that weren’t previously viewed or understood through the lens of race. The upshot is that the more aspects of social life the media racializes, the more “racism” there is for the media to report on.

In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

You think racism got that much worse in six years, so that double the number of white liberals thought it was a “big problem” in America? Goldberg goes on to say that the percentage of black and Latino Democrats who say they know someone who is racist did not really increase over that time — but it shot way up among white Democrats. In other words, white liberals — who totally dominate our media class — came to believe that America is a more racist place than do blacks and Latinos who share their politics.

More:

The divergent moral reactions toward perceived inequities have not emerged in a vacuum. Rather, the informational or media environment interacts with underlying orientations to elicit them. Members of society can be encouraged to see themselves and others as belonging to homogenous in-groups and out-groups. They can, further, be made aware, through frequent reminders and exposure, of the outcome disparities between them and the pervasiveness of discrimination. Finally, these inequalities must be framed as illegitimate and resulting from the past and/or present injustices perpetrated by the advantaged against the disadvantaged. Taken together, and in the context of the “Great Awokening,” white people need to see themselves as belonging to a collective that enjoys illegitimate privileges at the expense of racial others. Similarly, nonwhites need to be frequently reminded of their victimhood and unjust social position. They see themselves as belonging to a collective that is bound by their experience of racial oppression. The effect overall in terms of the coverage at publications like the Times and Post is that quite often, articles about racism are not reports about events occurring in a particular time and place—they are part of a totalizing theory of the world.

Having seen how powerfully the media’s ideology-driven writing has changed attitudes over the last decade, it is important to note this from Goldberg. Emphases are mine:

For decades, the term “racial equality” was the ubiquitous framework for understanding and evaluating racial justice. This is now changing as “equality” gives way to newer concepts such as “racial equity,” which refers to the redistribution of resources from the supposedly privileged to the supposedly disadvantaged as a means to redress claimed discrimination. As Ibram Kendi puts it: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist … The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Thus the goal is no longer ‘racial equality’ or equal treatment under the law. It is, rather, the attainment of a state of the world in which all groups have equal outcomes—even if some are deliberately disadvantaged in the process. Until very recently, “racial equity” was a largely unfamiliar phrase only rarely featured in the pages of the major newspapers. But this has changed dramatically in the last few years. In 2013 “racial equity” constituted 0.000003% of all words in The New York Times. One year later, it was being used six times more frequently (0.00019%). And, by 2019, nearly 32 times more frequently (0.000096%). Remarkably, in The Washington Post, “racial equity” was not only being used 27 times more frequently in 2019 (0.00032%) than in 2013 (0.00012%), but its rate of usage actually surpassed that of “racial equality.”

I bet most people think that “equity” is a synonym for “equality.” That’s not how these woke journalists and academics see it. What Goldberg’s analysis predicts is that the mainstream media are propagandizing the country to prepare it for racial oppression and the seizure of property for redistribution. Or, to put a fine point on it, they are providing the ideological framework for elites to justify redistribution.

You think elections don’t matter? You think judges don’t matter?

One more excerpt:

What the data presented here suggests is that editorial decisions made over the past decade at some of the most powerful media outlets in the world about what kind of language to use and what kind of stories merited coverage when it came to race—whatever the intention and level of forethought behind such decisions—has stoked a revival of racial consciousness among their readers. Intentionally or not, by introducing and then constantly repeating a set of key words and concepts, publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that “color” is the defining attribute of other human beings. For those who adopt this singular focus on race, a racialized view of the world becomes baseline test of political loyalty.