NUVO: Not representing Indy’s Voices?

On Dec. 27, 2021 NUVO published the latest of Morton Marcus’' “Eye on the Pie” columns. It was subtitled; “It wasn’t COVID alone suppressing population growth.” In this piece, Marcus sets out to justify his claim that COVID-19 merely accelerated a population loss in the U.S. — that was already in decline — before making much more dubious claims of his own.

NUVO is a nonprofit news website, formerly a print alternative weekly, serving the Central Indiana area.

When this was published, I couldn’t help seeing it in light of the Dec. 26 edition of Meet the Press, where I witnessed Chuck Todd interview The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones on teaching race in schools. Todd said the following to Hannah-Jones in lieu of a question: “Parents are saying, ‘Hey, don’t make my kid feel guilty. A parent of color is going … ’I need to teach reality,'"

“Well, I think you should think just a little bit about your framing," Hannah-Jones responded. "You said ‘parents,’ and then you said ‘parents of color.’ So the ‘white’ is silent."

The current online iteration of NUVO is having a problem with its framing. The editor/publisher Kevin McKinney is publishing only a very narrow spectrum —   a sliver, really —   of op-ed voices. Currently, Marcus is the only opinion writer that NUVO publishes on a periodic basis other than David Hoppe (who writes thoughtfully on environmental issues, and on life in general, from his home near Michigan City. )

Marcus, an economist by training, does a good job of throwing around statistics and anecdotes like a Benihana chef throws around a lot of shrimp and sirloin. But I often wonder to what end.

Take, for example, this excerpt from his April 19, 2021 column, “Crass Commercialism Conquers":

Now commercials are dribbled into baseball broadcasts and present in most shots on TV. Commercials adorn courtside panels at college basketball games. Not just fixed signs, but electronic billboards that change during the course of play.

No shit. Really? Someone might want to remind Marcus that commercialism has been a part of stadium sports for the last century. It was bound to become more sophisticated and intrusive over time. His broader point seems curiously anachronistic. I think Marcus might want to check out the various social media platforms that have conquered audience engagement over the past decade. He doesn’t even mention the internet. Or algorithms.

In his more recent article, Marcus cites a Dec. 23, 2021 Brookings article by William Frey, “US Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined, New Census Data Shows” and reiterates the main point in this headline. Frey uses Census Bureau data to demonstrate that U.S. population growth, after the onset of COVID-19, represents “the lowest annual growth since the Bureau began collecting such statistics in 1900.” Frey goes into some detail about why this is. He cites the 800,000 lives lost to COVID-19 since March 2020, of course. But he also cites the aging of the U.S. population, and women’s decisions to delay childbirth during both the Great Recession and COVID-19. He also cites the Trump administration’s immigration restrictions as a reason for declining population growth. 

Marcus agrees with Frey’s assessment that there should be a renewed focus on reinvigorating U.S. population growth. He goes so far to quote Frey directly from his article: 

It is vital that we examine public policies that can overcome barriers to the bearing and raising of children and, probably most important, stimulate immigration in ways that will reinvigorate the nation’s population growth.

But Marcus goes off the rails with his own unsubstantiated analysis. He writes that “the two biggest movements of our era, environmentalism, and increased female labor force participation, both work against a return to population growth rates of the past. Anti-poverty programs encourage smaller families. Selective immigration is now considered elitist.”

He ends his article with the question, “Are we prepared to return to the values of the ‘Greatest Generation?’” To me this echoes Churchill’s “blood, sweat, and tears” remark in a way that feels overblown and dishonest. Because Frey doesn’t even address female workforce participation or environmentalism in his article. But by quoting Frey so prominently, Marcus seems to imply that he and Frey are in agreement in their analysis when this isn’t necessarily the case. When Frey writes of wanting to “overcome barriers to the bearing and raising of children” this could include anti-poverty programs that might provide daycare for pre-K children. This is a program Marcus might be against because he seems to position himself against anti-poverty programs.

I hate using the term “seems” but it is necessary with Marcus because he uses weasel words and doesn’t define his terms. So it’s hard to know sometimes what he’s insinuating, what he’s getting at. By “weasel words” I mean his passive sentence construction such as his writing “Selective immigration is now considered elitist.”  But what exactly does Marcus mean by "selective immigration"? Does he mean that the U.S. should only accept European immigrants with PhDs for visa lotteries? Who exactly considers selective immigration “elitist”?

When Marcus uses language uncritically, such as when he blames environmentalism and female labor force participation for working against population growth in the US —  and when he fails to substantiate his claims —   he is echoing the same kind of unsubstantiated speculation that I’ve heard on podcasts such as those of (the vaccine-hesitant) Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein where dubious claims abound and “the white is silent,” as it were.  

I should declare my own history here. I resigned as managing editor of NUVO in June 2021 due to a different editorial dispute when I wasn’t able to give the full context of an exhibition on Black Lives Matter murals at the Indiana State Museum. Before that, I was the arts editor from August 2017 to February 2019 when NUVO published its last print edition. (For more details on my history with NUVO, read here.) Suffice to say, I frequently quarreled with the editor/publisher about editorial direction.

I’m currently an adjunct professor of English at a local university. I frequently tell my students, per the curriculum, that they need to substantiate the claims they make with evidence. That evidence could come in the form of statistics or quoted material. This goes for their research papers, personal narratives, and, yes, even the kind of persuasive writing you find in first-person opinion pieces. I also tell them they need to consider those they may have inadvertently silenced in establishing their authorial voice. I tell them, if you’re writing about homelessness in downtown Indy exclusively from a business owner’s point of view, you’re missing the big picture.

By consistently declining to publish op-ed material from across the spectrum while continuing to publish the likes of Marcus, NUVO is not just missing the big picture. It’s not living up to its motto of representing the full spectrum of “Indy’s Voices.”