TR: I try to convey the degree to
which both sides feel their party has failed them—certainly voters but also people who are in power. There are people on the hard right who think Republicans need to go further right and really blow things up because they’ve been too accommodating. And people on the left are demanding universal health care and the Green New Deal, and they think their party is weak because of wanting too much to compromise—they’re coming belatedly to the same conclusions that the Republican base arrived at several years earlier. All of those are understandable motivations, but they pull us toward gridlock. You could write that in a New Yorker piece, perhaps, but you’d still be inferring what people believe. It’s not as persuasive. Fiction tells you not just what happened, but what it feels like and what people are thinking. OAM: We’ve been talking about trends in politics and journalism that have been going on for decades, but what about this particular moment did you try to capture in your book? TR: It’s about an election, and how
our elections can possibly be an expression of what voters want amid all the disinformation and the fear that the future will not be better than the past. All of our confidence about our democracy has withered away very quickly, and now our elections are driven by fear rather than hope. We have an American population that doesn’t fit neatly into either party. What if you’re someone who believes in most of what the Democratic Party stands for, but you believe abortion is murder. What if you’re a Republican who thinks climate change is the biggest threat facing the planet or that we should have universal health care? Where do you go? You just have to bite your tongue and keep it a secret.
Meanwhile, our information ecosystem is controlled by these platform companies [like Twitter and Facebook] that do not understand the implications of their own technology. They’re led by millennial sociopaths who have seen enough of life to know that the hopes they had in their 20s were naive. But they’re so powerful, and we’re all suffering from it. OAM: After the 2016 election, there was a lot of journalist hand-wringing and soul-searching and asking, ‘How did we miss the rise of Trump?’ Did that also shape your views on journalism versus fiction? TR: Yes. It’s almost too big a story
[for reporters to tell]. When my first novel came out in early 2017, people said, ‘Wow, this is so timely! How was he able to anticipate all these forces?’ It was flattering, but I wasn’t anticipating anything. I was describing everything I had seen, things that had been going on for a long time. Trump is an expression of everything that has led up to this moment rather than the creator of it. What makes him both interesting and terrifying is what he reflects about us. OAM: Why do you think most journalists were unable to make those connections? TR: For one, most journalists are
based in cities, and most cities are blue. You don’t have many mainstream journalists who are from or know or understand the parts of America that elected Trump. Additionally, as the media fragmented over the past few decades, conservatives left traditional newsrooms. For example, when I wrote my first non-fiction book in the early 1990s, Brit Hume was the White House correspondent for ABC News and was regarded as one of the best on the beat. Then he went to Fox and became this angry ideologue. That was happening across the media, and it left mainstream newsrooms
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unable to understand large parts of America. They weren’t intentionally biased, they were just unable to see how biases they were even aware of were tilting the coverage. The fact that many people saw the 2016 election as inexplicable is, to me, a failure of journalism. OAM: Given that you seem very pessimistic about the press, how do you feel about Oberlin launching a journalism concentration? TR: I’m not entirely pessimistic
about the press! In many ways, Trump’s attacks on the press have made the press much more transparent, which is really healthy. Journalism is getting better even as it’s under siege, perhaps because it’s under siege. And because the advertising model has blown up, journalism is now forced to win subscribers by creating content of real value. Look at the New York Times—it’s a better newspaper than it’s ever been. They’re writing fewer stupid stories that nobody wants to read, because it no longer serves their economic model. In terms of the new journalism program, since they’re starting from scratch, there’s a great opportunity to Oberlin-ize the curriculum. Don’t teach it the way it’s always been taught. We need to understand the way people receive information. We need to bring in psychology and sociology and ethnography and anthropology and other disciplines in order to learn how to build stories in ways that aren’t based on a 19th-century model. How do people process visual data differently than writing? What new story forms could work? How do you know that what you’re observing is accurate? How can you listen with an open mind? These are things that other journalism schools never include. Will Oberlin do that? I hope so. This is a great opportunity to bring a liberal arts approach to what has historically been viewed as a craft.
New Journalism Concentration Launches in 2020 Oberlin has long produced outstanding journalists, defined broadly as individuals who communicate about current matters in nonfiction genres, including newspaper, magazine, and online reporting; writing and editing creative nonfiction and nonfiction books; radio production and podcasting; and documentary filmmaking. Journalism has undergone rapid and disruptive change in recent years, creating a need for an innovative approach to prepare students for a career that remains extremely popular. When it launches in fall 2020, Oberlin’s integrative concentration in journalism will differ from the programs found at traditional journalism schools. The concentration’s design will allow students to combine it with any of Oberlin’s more than 50 majors—whether in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, arts, or music—and merge coursework with cocurricular and extracurricular work, including internships and other forms of applied learning. The new concentration will serve the career goals of students interested in many forms of journalism, such as news and political reporting; investigative, music, and science journalism; literary criticism; and related communications careers. For more information on the new concentration, visit oberlin.edu/journalism. 13