The View from Nowhere
Good morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Are You Engaged? I’m writing to you from Austin, Texas, where I’ll be for the next month. I spent six days on the road after Memorial Day weekend and got a chance to see a little bit of how the world outside of New York City is handling life amid COVID-19. And, since I’ve arrived in Austin, I’ve been diligently observing, listening, donating, and taking action where I can to contribute to the end of police violence and racism in our country.
That’s my preamble for today. Since this newsletter is focused on audience development and media, I will certainly discuss current events in some form or another over the coming weeks, but I want to stay as close to topic as possible.
Your Weekly Rundown:
This is a little bit of a cheat, as some of these storylines will be catching up on news from almost two weeks ago, but either way, here is your weekly rundown.
The biggest story of the last week was James Bennet, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, stepping down from his position. Bennet resigned amid the controversy over an op-ed written by Senator Tom Cotton that was published under Bennet’s oversight. Or, rather, lack of oversight, as he admitted to not reading the piece before publication. This story has been well-covered, so I won’t go further into the specifics here—though later on I will touch on some of the fundamental questions around objectivity in journalism that the whole situation raises.
Bennet’s resignation was the first of a few high-profile resignations over the past few days. On Monday, Adam Rapoport, the editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit, resigned after a photo of him in brownface emerged online, as did claims of Rapoport perpetuating systemic racism at the publication. Christene Barberich, the co-founder and editor of Refinery29, also stepped down from her position on Monday. Barberich’s resignation came after several employees of color stated that the editor discriminated against them during their time at the company.
Sadly, there were also more layoffs in the media industry. Last Friday, The Athletic laid off eight percent of their staff. Alex Mather, co-founder and CEO of The Athletic, stated that their subscriber base has remained strong amid COVID-19, but the lack of live sports has had to have made an impact on revenue—maybe not as much as lower than projected ad revenue from their podcast network, but it still has to have hurt their bottom line. As I’ve said before, I am rooting for and admire The Athletic. As live sports leagues attempt to come back (some sooner than later), things could turn around for The Athletic.
There were also layoffs at CBS News, as Deadline reported. This latest round comes on top of layoffs that were done in the wake of the merger between Viacom and CBS. Mark Knoeller, a legendary White House correspondent (and very informative Twitter follow), was reportedly included in those layoffs—though that fact is not entirely clear.
Meanwhile at Vox, a few notable writers and editors at SB Nation (Vox’s sports publication), appeared to accept buyouts. And at BuzzFeed News, staff members agreed to pay cuts and workshare plans that will allow employees to claim for partial unemployment to help offset the pay cuts. This move by BuzzFeed follows the Los Angeles Times taking a similar approach earlier in the year.
In a depressing story first reported by The Verge, Microsoft has reportedly laid of dozens of staff members at Microsoft News and MSN. I never frequented either of those sites at all (and I doubt many of you did), so I can’t claim to know much about the work being done. However, it pains me to read that Microsoft claims that these layoffs aren’t related to COVID-19 but part of a larger push to increase the use of AI to collect and promote news on Microsoft’s news sites.
And on Tuesday, the much-anticipated full launch of Facebook’s new News Tab in the United States finally arrived. The product was first released to limited user groups in October of last year and it seemed like there were so many stories or references to the fact that the News Tab was coming. Facebook’s News Tab is part of its recent push to work more closely with journalists and support journalism—the stories featured in the product will be selected and vetted by actual journalists. I haven’t spent any time with the product yet, but I will definitely be checking back in on this story.
What I’m Engaged With
I want to focus on a topic that has come up over the past week and has really been something on my mind for awhile. And that topic is objectivity in journalism.
This week, the conversation about objectivity in journalism has primarily been attached to the coverage of the protests around police brutality and racism that have spread in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
In his Sunday column, Ben Smith of the New York Times, covered the internal turmoil at the Times after the Opinion section, led by James Bennet, published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that called for the use of troops in American cities to combat “nihilist criminals”—how Cotton referred to protestors—who “are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction.” The idea at the heart of running the op-ed is to “give equal time,” to view points across the political spectrum in hopes of achieving some kind of objectivity.
Smith used the Cotton op-ed as one example of a growing number of cases of journalists and newsrooms pushing back on the idea that journalism should, in fact, be completely objective. Especially now, when it has become clear that there are clear moral failings in so many of our institutions.
In his book The Powers That Be, David Halberstam details the apparent beginnings of objectivity at the New York Times. The idea of the Times’s objectivity originated with Adolph Ochs, the legendary publisher who bought the paper in 1896 for $75,000. Once he owned the paper, he wanted to separate it from his direct competitors the World and the Journal. To quote Halberstam:
“Whereas other publishers had used their newspapers to amplify their political opinions and were intensely partisan, Ochs wanted none of that, he had no particular political opinions, other than that America was a good society. He wanted as little partisanship as possible ... Whereas other publishers with powerful egos loved being at the center of public attention, Ochs hated the idea...since public attention was always a little dangerous; if you were a Jew and you were successful, particularly in that era, people were bound to resent it. That translated directly into the tone of the paper’s columns; he did not want to make people unhappy, he did not want controversy, he wanted to make as few judgments as possible, and he wanted as weak an editorial page as possible. He wanted to be respectable rather than powerful.”
That excerpt, to me, is stunning. First, the fact that the Times’s journalistic identity, one that continues today, was in some way tied up with perhaps its most important publisher’s personal identity, was a revelation when I first read about it. Second, the fact that Ochs wanted his editorial page to be weak, whereas in recent years the editorial page or the Opinion section of the Times has arguably been—for better or worse—its most notable section.
The Times’s commitment to objectivity, to reserving judgment, was at first something of a matter of being a good American citizen, of not making trouble. That, over time, turned into the moral fabric of journalism. The sensationalism that the Times countered at the start of the 20th century gave way to the objective journalism we’ve come to take as the gold standard.
But the 20th century is over. The idea of objectivity in journalism, or “the view from nowhere,” is almost impossible to maintain. And, in many cases, is dangerous. When the President of the United States is tweeting conspiracy theories, how can the reporting on what he does remain objective?
The freelance community-cum-publication Study Hall, published a thoughtful statement on their stance on objectivity. In it, they make the claim that, “All journalism, whether you realize it or not, involves choosing sides. We believe in choosing the side of justice, of skepticism at the state and police and others in power.” I tend to agree with Study Hall: In journalism, you are presenting a version of facts and what is real and nearly all of that relies on who you speak to and what they relay as real. There is fact-checking, of course, but the decision on who to speak to and who to include in the telling of the story is in a way choosing sides.
Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist, made many of the same points in her piece on Sunday too. She concluded by assessing our current moment and saying, “As these difficult moments continue to arise—and they will—journalists and their newsroom bosses shouldn’t be trying to make their work inoffensive. They should concentrate on how they can best serve their mission.”
As the director of a small newsroom that is part of an ecommerce brand, my day job doesn’t fit neatly into the category of newspaper or digital media organization or even freelance community-cum-publication. But over my time working at the company, most of which has taken place during the Trump administration, we’ve faced many of the same issues. Our stakes are much lower: we rarely cover politics, tech, pop culture, or anything else that would be considered firmly in the major news cycle. However, in the past, when we did veer into political coverage, I perhaps naively thought there was a way for us to be fully objective in our coverage. I personally wrote our ethics and standards document, building off the values and resources from organizations like the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Reuters, and NPR.
Those organizations, and many more, may be facing changes to their policies, their procedures, and their ways of reporting—standards that have been in place in some cases for over 100 years. And at my publication, from our little vantage point, we may have to change as well. Because I’m not sure that anyone working in journalism in any capacity can say in good-conscience that there is a way to be truly objective anymore.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Sex Education
All right, so I know that a lot of people were on top of Sex Education (that’s not quite an innuendo, but it feels like one, or maybe it is?) when it first came (is that another one?) out in 2019. But I wasn’t one of those people. For some reason—and I have no idea why—I thought it was a seriocomic series set in the 1950s. So when my girlfriend once again suggested we watch it in May, I finally relented because...well it was almost the third month of quarantine, why the hell not?
Holy shit was I pleasantly surprised. What a truly delightful show! Instead of a period piece, I got a show set in the modern day (though there are heavy 1980s vibes) with a charming cast and lovable characters. I mean, seriously, these characters are so damn charming. If you haven’t seen it, Sex Education is kind of like a British Gilmore Girls, except its raunchier and its centered on a mother-son relationship, not a mother-daughter relationship, and their relationship is nothing like Lorelai and Rory.
But it's the feeling. When you’re in Moordale, it feels the same as when you’re in Starr’s Hollow: everyone is quirky, but likable; there are tensions, but everyone really gets along and likes each other. Though Moordale has way more stunning vistas than Starr’s Hollow.
Plus, there is Gillian Anderson’s performance and the way she turns a chin tilt into a whole new means of expression. I’m serious. I have never seen an actor use a sustained tilt of their chin to indicate such a wide variety of emotions. And every character in this show seems real, lived in—there are tropes and types, but never cliches. When a character is presented to you, you get the sense that the writers deeply thought about their likes and dislikes, their tics, their bad habits, and their pleasures.
I plowed through two seasons in maybe a week. And I’m ready to rewatch.
THE ACTION I’VE TAKEN
For the next few weeks, and maybe months, I’ll conclude each newsletter with a brief list of actions I’ve taken to end police violence and to support an America that is free of racism. This isn’t meant to virtue signal or pat myself on the back—it’s merely meant to show my commitment to change. I won’t share any donation figures here but can provide them upon request.
Donated to this collection of ActBlue bail funds.
Emailed 7 Michigan government officials that have accepted police donations and asked them to reallocate or return them.
Donated to find justice for Ahmaud Abery.
Donated to Communities United for Police Reform.