Dean Starkman: Why does the press use “populist” to refer to policies that are simply liberal?
[Dean Starkman writes and edits The Audit. He is CJR's Kingsford Capital Fellow.]
Before this gets out of hand, big media needs to stop using the word “populist” to describe Democrats’ economic programs and their appeals to voters.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal keep making the same mistake, both calling appeals that are simply left-of-center—liberal—“populist.”
This week, one Times headline said:
"Democrats Make Populist Appeals Before Contests."...
And another story this morning said:
The question of what is and isn’t “populist” is not a nit.
Reporters and headline writers don’t need to be historians-on-deadline to know that the word “populist” has no widely agreed-upon definition, but plenty of negative associations.
Historians have been fighting for decades over how to define and characterize even what is meant by the uppercase “Populist” movement, the nineteenth-century agrarian revolt that spawned the People’s Party. The movement rose among small farmers in the south and west in response to the growing power of lenders, railroads, and other eastern and urban interests after the Civil War. It favored looser credit, government control of railroads, single terms for the president, and popular referendums. It was generally and vaguely reformist, anti-elitist, and yes, anti-big business. It was certainly rural and sectional, not urban, not national.
But that’s where the agreement stops and disputes begin. Was Populism anti-capitalist and backward-looking, a “provincial movement that harbored dangerous tendencies, like anti-Semitism,” or “a positive force for constructive reform,” to borrow from an interesting survey of the literature by William F. Holmes, a University of Georgia historian?
Actually, Holmes says, that was the old debate. The new debate is much more complex.
How much more vague is the lower-case “populist”?
H. Ross Perot, George Wallace, Lou Dobbs, and Fox News all could be described as populist, but they have nothing to do with the appeals made by the Democrats that I mentioned earlier, and, for that matter, little to do with each other....
Read entire article at Columbia Journalism Review
Before this gets out of hand, big media needs to stop using the word “populist” to describe Democrats’ economic programs and their appeals to voters.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal keep making the same mistake, both calling appeals that are simply left-of-center—liberal—“populist.”
This week, one Times headline said:
"Democrats Make Populist Appeals Before Contests."...
And another story this morning said:
The question of what is and isn’t “populist” is not a nit.
Reporters and headline writers don’t need to be historians-on-deadline to know that the word “populist” has no widely agreed-upon definition, but plenty of negative associations.
Historians have been fighting for decades over how to define and characterize even what is meant by the uppercase “Populist” movement, the nineteenth-century agrarian revolt that spawned the People’s Party. The movement rose among small farmers in the south and west in response to the growing power of lenders, railroads, and other eastern and urban interests after the Civil War. It favored looser credit, government control of railroads, single terms for the president, and popular referendums. It was generally and vaguely reformist, anti-elitist, and yes, anti-big business. It was certainly rural and sectional, not urban, not national.
But that’s where the agreement stops and disputes begin. Was Populism anti-capitalist and backward-looking, a “provincial movement that harbored dangerous tendencies, like anti-Semitism,” or “a positive force for constructive reform,” to borrow from an interesting survey of the literature by William F. Holmes, a University of Georgia historian?
Actually, Holmes says, that was the old debate. The new debate is much more complex.
How much more vague is the lower-case “populist”?
H. Ross Perot, George Wallace, Lou Dobbs, and Fox News all could be described as populist, but they have nothing to do with the appeals made by the Democrats that I mentioned earlier, and, for that matter, little to do with each other....