Stuff I was thinking already that came to the front of my mind when reading this Matt Taibbi article:
(i.)
There really has been an upsurge in bizarre ācancellationā-like phenomena lately.Ā Specifically, the rationalesĀ for cancellation have gotten weird, hyper-trivial, sometimes simply unintelligible (to me).Ā
David Shorās offense was retweeing a study by a prominent black political scientist who was trying to understand what parts of the civil rights movement were most effective.Ā Lee Fang shared a clip of an interview he did with a black BLM supporter (not a public figure) who expressed a narrow critique of one aspect of the movement.Ā In neither case is anyone trying to cancel the people who actually said things, only people who related to others that they said those things.Ā Wild!Ā Some seriously 2013-tumblr-levelĀ āreceiptsā here.
(People allude to some long history of Fang being racist, which maybe he was, but then talk about how.Ā Itās like tumblr in 2013 in that people offer you concrete evidence at the level of āonce reblogged a ship I hate,ā paired with the allegation of some larger pattern of unspecified badness, as though anyĀ concrete evidence paired with anyĀ bigger allegation are enough to convince, no matter how unrelated or disproportionate the two.)
What confuses me most about this is its supposed connection with the George Floyd protests, which were/are very pointedly material.Ā In the pejorative sense that right-wing culture warriors use the wordĀ āwoke,ā the protests arenāt actually āwokeāĀ in any meaningful sense.Ā Police brutality is not a symbolic offense;Ā ādefund the policeā is not a demand to replace one symbol with another.Ā The protests have not focused on elevating or deposing specific individuals, modifying language norms, asking white people to more openly proclaim their anti-racist bona fides, or anything like that.Ā Theyāve taken aim at a specific, dysfunctional part of American city governance (the police).Ā They have pursued those aims effectively, from what I can tell, without diffusing their focus, getting hijacked by personal agendas framed in related-sounding terms, or devolving into infighting.
The right-wing culture warriors would say leftists are never notĀ āgetting hijacked by personal agendas framed in related-sounding termsā andĀ ādevolving into infighting,ā and TBH, on that one they have a point (echoed by no shortage of leftists since forever).Ā To them, it is simply another prediction confirmed to see a BLM protest one day and a bout of nonsensical left-of-center infighting the next.Ā But these arenāt actually the same people, or the same movement, are they?Ā So whatās going on?
FromĀ āstop killing us!ā toĀ ācancel cultureā there is a missing step that needs some explaining.
(ii.)
The Taibbi piece helped convince me that something strange is happening inside major news outlets right now.
The Scott Alexander / NYT thing feels more intelligible (although perhaps this is a coincidence) in the context of a concurrent industry-wide upheaval which, justified or not, certainly can be expected to throw usually well-oiled machines into disarray.Ā Taibbi:
Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues whoād made politically āproblematicā editorial or social media decisions.
The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.
At the Washington Post, there was that baffling choice toĀ ācoverā theĀ āstoryā of a random person coming in blackface to theĀ Washington Postās own Halloween party two years ago,Ā in an ill-advised reference to a then-current Fox News gaffe about blackface.Ā One of the most prestigious papers in the US ran this story, and somehow no one could figure out how this even occurred:
In the hours after publication, the story started to receive widespread criticism from journalists on social media on the grounds that it got its subject fired while lacking news value. (Readers had to get 85 percent of the way through the story to even learn that Schafer had lost her job when she told her employer the story would be running.) The article now has drawn over 2,000 web comments, which are overwhelmingly negative in nature. Yet aside from PR statements to outlets covering the Postās coverage, the Postās response to the criticism of this story has been silence.Ā If this is a story with ānuance and sensitivityā that the Post felt āimpelledā to run, why is a spirited defense of the Postās journalism coming only from a non-journalist spokesperson for the paper?
The answer we reached, after interviewing ten current Post journalists for this story, is that the paperās staff generally does not consider the story to be defensible.āMy reaction, like everybody, was, What the hell? Why is this a story?ā a feature writer at the Post told New York. āMy second reaction was, Why is this a 3,000-word feature?ā The feature writer added, āThis was not drawn up by the āStyleā section.ā
Employees at āStyleā ā the paperās premiere location for long-form storytelling ā were confused and displeased to see the piece running on their turf, two Post employees with knowledge of the situation said. Neither Fisher nor Trent works for the āStyleā desk, though as newspapers have gotten increasingly focused on digital distribution, the walls between newspaper sections have become more porous.
When things like this are happening, when one hand doesnāt know what the other is doing, when upper management is rotating out above you ā¦ things like the Scott Alexander episode donāt really feel surprising.
Journalism is always on a special kind of thin ice, because it has no function other than being a trustworthy source.Ā We understand that businessmen will lie to you to make a buck, and we may decry this, but we understand itās not a paradox: that there is (or at least could be) some value in business itself, that must be traded off against truth-telling.
But a journalist is just a better version of your gossipy-but-trustworthy friend who hears a lot of things on the street.Ā Thatās their purpose.Ā If they lose your trust, thereās nothing more there.Ā If they behave mysteriously, and do not explain themselves, and lean only on their august reputation (built by others, not the present speaker) for support ā¦ thereās nothing more left, to elevate them above your friend.Ā (Your friend wouldnāt do that!Ā Your friend would tell you what the hell is up, thatās making them all weird!)
Discussions about the prudence of āmaking war on the mediaāĀ need to take this into account, I think.Ā Peopleās trust in the media has a certain lack of inertia.Ā Its role is clearly scoped, failure to serve that role is easy to document and publicize, and there is not enough built-up stock of trust, at the institution level (Iām sure youāve seen the relevant public opinion polls), to prevent people from asking the question: āif you canāt do that, then what the hell do I need you for?ā
(iii.)
Among the things that irked me about that Scott Alexander article in the New Yorker, there was this:
Additionally, it seems difficult to fathom that a professional journalist of Metzās experience and standing would assure a subject, especially at the beginning of a process, that he planned to write a āmostly positiveā story; although there often seems to be some confusion about this matter in Silicon Valley, journalism and public relations are distinct enterprises.
What does this mean?Ā It appears to be bald distrust of what Alexander relates about his own experience, on the basis that an experienced journalist like me wouldnāt do that.Ā It presents itself as something somewhere between opinion and fact.Ā Alexander is a character, the tone says, and I am an author.Ā He says his piece, and then I tell you theĀ ārealā story, with my imprimatur.
I felt the same allergy reading another, unrelated New Yorker article the same day.Ā Discussing Ibram X. Kendiās How to Be an Antiracist:
As a boy in Queens, Kendi found his life shaped by a fear of victimization. āI avoided making eye contact, as if my classmates were wolves,ā he writes. āI avoided stepping on new sneakers like they were land mines.ā In South Jamaica, his neighborhood, there was a local bully named Smurf, who pulled a gun on Kendi, and once, with Kendi watching, beat a boy unconscious on a city bus in order to steal his Walkman. This sounds terrifying, but Kendi now claims that his fears were delusional. [ ā¦ ]Ā By the end of the section, the bully named Smurf seems less like a real person and more like a spectre: the personification of old racist ideas, come to life in the imagination of a fretful future scholar in Queens.
As it happens, there actually is a notorious tough guy named Smurf who grew up in Kendiās neighborhood around the same time. He came to be known as Bang āEm Smurf, a sometime rapper [ ā¦ ]
Is Kendi worthy of some basic modicum of trust and charity, or isnāt he?Ā He says he was bullied by a guy named Smurf.Ā The writer expresses ambiguously couched doubt (āseems less like a real personā¦ā), but what he takes away, he then gives back āĀ with his special imprimatur.Ā Ā āAs it happens, there actually isā a Smurf.Ā Ā You cannot know this from Kendi, a mere unreliable narrator, a subject of my narrative.Ā But you can know it by my word, for I am a priest of truth.
It might be a tasteless comparison, but there is some basic affinity between the way I feel reading these things ā right now ā and the way I feel watching the police mace civilians for no discernible reason, and then watching some functionary relate a sanctimonious yet incomprehensibleĀ āexplanationā at a press conference later, saying the police department has done excellent work, weāre very proud of them.Ā Among the best in the country.
You are so used to my trust.Ā Your rhetoric, your reputation, live on that trust. I feel so oddly powerful, when I think about what it would mean to just provisionallyĀ retract it, and ask yourself to prove your worth, for once.
If you canāt do this, what are you for?
