Musa al-Gharbi Profile picture
Nov 1, 2024 6 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Yes, absolutely. Mainstream media is a (*checks notes*) poor helpless victim when it comes to (*double-checks*) influencing public perceptions about culture, world events, and the media itself.

Bezos is definitely *blaming the victim.* Poor widdle mainstream media. 😥

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It's sad that they can't even be perceived neutral when journalists are rabidly clamoring for a political endorsement of the Democratic nominee, and the paper itself quite explicitly defined itself in opposition to Trump since 2016.

And the endorsements definitely don't reflect or enhance perceptions of political bias. The fact that the paper has literally never outright endorsed a Republican since 1976 when they started the practice -- this is just a pure coincidence: washingtonpost.com/opinions/patri…

The Democrats are just better, 100 percent of the time. That's not bias, that's fact. And the editorial bones should make no bones about it. And if the public thinks it might indicate bias that over nearly 50 years the paper endorses only one political party for the presidency (and overwhelmingly endorses Democrats for lower seats as well) -- that's just because *those people* have their brains cooked by the Koch Brothers and Trump.Image
And speaking of facts, the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans 10:1 in the field likely does absolutely nothing to influence which topics they cover and how they cover them (as I highlight here, we're clearly unbiased: youtube.com/watch?v=o-uS14…).

It's silly that people would even think that. There's no evidence of bias whatsoever with how outlets cover (or ignore) contentious moral and political issues. How would anyone even get this idea, other than by through evil right-wing smear campaigns?Image
The fact that the Washington Post and most other mainstream media outlets abruptly grew intensely focused on prejudice and discrimination across all dimensions during the "Great Awokening" -- this likely has nothing whatsoever to do with the political, ideological, and demographic composition of the field: musaalgharbi.com/2023/02/08/gre…

It's dumb to even think that.Image
The fact that the @washingtonpost was absolutely obsessed with Trump, covered him more than any other candidate pre-election and post-election, covering him more than Joe Biden even after he was voted out of office -- with nearly unanimously negatively throughout irrespective of world events -- and the fact that similar patterns held for pretty much all other media outlets...

It's really unfair that anyone could possibly perceive bias in this in any way, shape, or form: musaalgharbi.com/2019/11/13/med…Image
You definitely can't check out my book to find out a lot more about the composition and political economy of the journalism field, and how it relates to a lot of these tensions: musaalgharbi.com/we-have-never-…

After all, there's nothing to even possibly discuss here. Chuck Todd is right. Mainstream media organizations are just tiny helpless victims of an empty moral panic. Nothing they should, would, or even could change about what they do. And no need to change -- things are going swimmingly!Image

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More from @Musa_alGharbi

Jul 3
My latest for @BostonGlobe @GlobeOpinion contextualizes the recent midterm primary elections.

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In the general election, @ZohranKMamdani was able to build a coalition that cut across class, ethnic, educational, age and gender divides by avoiding culture war issues and focusing narrowly on bread-and-butter issues, as I demonstrated here un 2025: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-…Image
In the recent midterm primary elections, Mamdani was able to pull of his coup by basically inverting his 2025 general election strategy. This was a smart move, because the electorate for this type of cycle is very different: musaalgharbi.substack.com/i/178564807/ma…Image
Read 9 tweets
Jun 23
My latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) describes my evolving views on inequality and socialism.

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I'm a sociologist. The study of inequality is now central to our discipline, crowding out other topics that historically defined the field. Socioeconomic understandings of inequality have been eclipsed by work studying disparities along the lines of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/on-inequalit…Image
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Inequality-focused sociological research often defines itself in terms of social justice advocacy. In reality, contemporary sociologists produce very little work focused on helping real-world stakeholders deal with practical problems here-and-now: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/on-inequalit…Image
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Read 15 tweets
Jan 7
I'm kicking off 2026 with a series of articles on the left. I decided to start with an essay on the journalist and sociologist Daniel Bell, and how his work and life course have been instructive to me both as a model and cautionary tale. 🧵 Image
Daniel Bell is my intellectual great-grandfather. He advised my advisor's advisor:

Each of our work focuses on institutions of knowledge and cultural production. Each of us is passionate about sociological theory. Most of us champion public sociology. musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/daniel-bell-…Image
Daniel Bell and I don't just share research interests, we have a decent amount in common:

We both strayed from the religion of our youth. We both had really non-traditional paths to and through academia that led us through some of the same institutions. musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/daniel-bell-…Image
Read 7 tweets
Dec 17, 2025
This is a good piece, worth reckoning with.

One thing I note in my book is that everyone supports lots of progressive social causes in principle but no one wants to be the one to actually pay the costs.

A consequence is that the people who *are* eventually made to pay the costs when progress is actually made are the most vulnerable members of the "privileged" groups: people with the least connections, folks who are less established, those who possess less cultural and financial capital, etc.

The most privileged and established straight white dudes largely made it through the Awokening just fine by trying to outflank other whites on being "with it" and by imposing all risks and costs associated with the demands being made of them and their organizations on less advantaged whites.Image
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As the piece does note (albeit in the background a bit), the Awokening period was tough for *all* symbolic capitalists' employment prospects. As I detail in my book (Chapter 2), Awokenings tend to take off during periods when elite overproduction is especially acute:
musaalgharbi.com/paperback-edit…

Prospects for *top talent* who identified as something other than a neurotypical, able-bodied straight white man were great. There was intense competition for most of the top "diverse" prospects. But most people who aspire to jobs at the New York Times or tenure-line academic positions don't get them. That was true in this period for blacks, for women, for queer folks, and so on. If you went to a middling school, didn't come from privilege, didn't have connections, didn't have a long record of illustrious accomplishments, the chances are terrible no matter who you are.

Although, again, the author correctly notes that prospects were *especially* terrible for straight white dudes.Image
And during the Awokenings (especially), even *top talent* from "diverse" populations struggled professionally if they articulated the "wrong" views.

To use myself as an example: I had an Ivy League degree, 9 publications in good journals with a book under contract from a prestige university press, I had strong letters of recommendation from prestigious folks, I had a strong public profile with hits in the NY Times, Washington Post, and so on: musaalgharbi.com/musa-al-gharbi….

I had tons of teaching experience and even won awards to teach others how to teach: musaalgharbi.com/musa-al-gharbi…

Yet, I had to go on the market three times, and while I did eventually get a six-figure tenure-line job at a R1 research university, it is outside my actual field. I love my colleagues and department. There is no sense in which my career is a tragedy. But it *is* the case that, at the time, in virtue of my views, I was basically unemployable in sociology, despite elite credentials, a strong publication record, checking "diversity" boxes (as a black, Muslim scholars from a non-traditional academic background), and so on. As was described in the article, it was mostly older whites serving as the gatekeepers -- in this case, gatekeepers to whether or not I was the "right" kind of "diverse."Image
Read 7 tweets
Nov 14, 2025
My latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) shows:

1. The outcome of the #NYC mayoral race was less extraordinary than most seem to think

2. Popular culture war talking points about the role of class, gender, sexuality, youth, race and residency length are total bunk

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The fact that @TheDemocrats won the NYC municipal elections should surprise no one. Since 1932, for instance, there have been 26 mayoral elections. Republicans have won 7 of them. The last three consecutive contests went to Democrats by 2:1 margins: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-…Image
Mamdani’s performance in 2025 was far from extraordinary. In terms of vote share, he ranks 12 out of 19 elections since 1953. In terms of turnout, this race ranked 13 out of 19. The million votes Mamdani won? Largely a product of a larger NYC population: musaalgharbi.substack.com/i/178564807/hi…Image
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Read 15 tweets
Sep 9, 2025
My latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) explores the highly censorious culture that prevails in many symbolic industries.

It argues that universities play an important role in shaping institutional culture in all of these other fields --but not for the reasons most think. 🧵 Image
So, one thing that separates WHNBW from many other books charting the culture wars is that it spends precisely zero time trying to genealogize, taxonomize, or evaluate the correctness of "woke" theorists or ideas.

Antiwoke and right-aligned folks were SUPER annoyed with this, apparently having gone into the book hoping the book would be a definitive takedown or refutation of "wokeness" and discovering that, in fact, the book is not very interested theorists and their ideas.

One reason for this, as I've detailed previously, is because these sorts of considerations are orthogonal to the actual questions the book is trying to answer (see screenshots): musaalgharbi.substack.com/i/158204710/it…

BUT, it's also important to stress, that even if we want to answer some of the specific questions that the antiwoke crowd is interested in -- you simply can't get much mileage by studying widely-evoked thinkers and their work, for reasons I explain in my latest essay: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/you-ask-i-an…Image
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This is a place where my thinking was deeply informed by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff's Coddling of the American Mind.

When they began that project, they were working from an assumption that universities were taking normie kids and transforming them into censorious scolds. Through their research, however, they discovered that students were, in fact, arriving to campus already oriented towards safetyism and intolerance.

Universities might be doing a bad job of pushing back against these impulses (often reinforcing them instead), but they were not the *source* of the problem: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/censorship-i…

We need to move away from classroom "indoctrination" stories and look at other mechanisms of enculturation if we want to understand unfortunate institutional dynamics.Image
Read 13 tweets

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