I’m reading about “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy” (Encounter, 10.26), a just-published book by Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon.

It got my attention because roughly the same thing has been happening in the film industry for the last five or six years. I summarized the situation twice this year — on 9.9.21, and on 3.22.21.

Amazon synopsis: “Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before ‘fake news’ became the calling card of the right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore.

“That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including ‘antiracism,’ intersectionality, open borders and critical race theory. How did this come to be?

“The moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. ‘Bad News’ explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.”

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But there’s no way in hell that Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (which is being aggressivejy junketed right now at the Four Seasons) can even fantasize about winning the Best Picture Oscar.

Those insisting that it’s time for Campion to snag an Academy trophy might be able to push this notion through, but the film itself is a rancid bowl of grim about a mean and smelly closet case (i.e., Benedict Cumberbatch). The Gold Derby kiss-asses who are projecting a Dog Best Picture win are completely out of their fucking minds.

And Anne Thompson, by the way, rating Dune higher than King Richard? That’s crazy stuff!

But she doesn’t. She wimps out. Probably because she knew N.Y. Times wokester thinking would just lead to a watering-down process so why bother?

The closest Dowd comes to just saying it is to quote James Carville kvetching about “stupid wokeness”.

Here’s what she could have said: Goaded and justifiably alarmed by Donald Trump’s racist, dog-whistled taunts during the ‘15 and ‘16 campaign, doubly freaked by his defeat of Hillary Clinton, jarred by “The 1619 Project” (launched in August’19) and then carried along by the agonized George Floyd protests of May ‘20, Democrats embraced the woke progressive agenda lock, stock and barrel.

The time had come to not only push back against 300 years of systemic racism but to embrace anti–white racism as a counterweight. The tables had to be turned, and whites had to not only be confronted but condemned for a bedrock biological poison in their bones a la Robin DiAngelo. Which required stringent anti-racist education in not just colleges but public schools, and in some cases with young kids being taught this doctrine.

This led to suburban parental perceptions that wokesters had overplayed their hand — that the basic educational thrust in schools was that people of color are sainted figures and hothouse flowers and needed to be treated with scholastic kid gloves (equity vs. “racist” meritocracy) and that European-descended Anglo culture is rooted in cruel, dismissive, anti-persons-of-color attitudes.

Nobody has any arguments with frank teachings about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic governmental prejudice and neglect, but instructing kids that whites are infected with a fundamental evil gene was a bridge too far, and telling parents not to try and mess with school curriculums (as Terry McAuliffe did) was rubbing salt in the wound. Hence the decisive victory of Glenn Youngkin last Tuesday.

That’s what Dowd could have said.