Study Hall Digest 5/28/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

A doctored video of Nancy Pelosi, slowed down to make her seem drunk, has been shared millions of times — Facebook acknowledges the video is doctored but won’t take it down. The platform’s user guidelines do not require that posts be true. This has prompted a larger discussion about the role of Facebook and what it owes its users (and the world).

• Facebook’s VP of product policy and counterterrorism defended the company’s decision to keep the video up, stating the company wanted to let users decide for themselves what to believe.
• Kara Swisher recalled Mark Zuckerberg using similar reasoning to claim he wouldn’t deplatform Holocaust deniers — sometimes people are wrong! But they have a right to be wrong.
• Facebook’s whole strategy consists of shifting responsibility for content on their platform to users. In doing so, they refuse to acknowledge the power they wield as a platform, or even the reality of the function they serve: As Charlie Wurzel pointed out in a Times opinion piece, Facebook functions as a media company, but it does not identify as one and refuses to take the steps a self-described media company would take to regulate the veracity of its content.

“Fake News” Takes Many Forms

As we know, Trump and his followers are constantly plagued by hallucinations of Times reporters inventing quotes and sources to smear them. — This obsession has even led the president to advocate changing our strict libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue the press. So when political scientist Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group and a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, tweeted out a fake Trump quote, it seemed to validate that hallucination and further embolden Trump’s calls to suppress critical coverage.

• Bremmer has deleted the tweet, apologized, and claimed the quote he attributed to Trump, “Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden,” was meant as a joke.
• In any case, the end result was the same. The quote was used by right-wing outlets to validate fears of “fake news,” and journalists were mad at Bremmer for giving conservatives that ammunition.
• Obviously Bremmer is a huge dumbass and making up quotes is bad, but BREMMER IS NOT A JOURNALIST. He is being depicted as one by the right, which is predictably using the mishap to discredit actual journalists, but that’s what the right does. TI feel like the right will always find ways to discredit the press and people who want to believe journalists

A Fancy Man Departs, and What it Means for Esquire

It was the departure that launched a meme — Jay Fielden announced his exit from the helm of Esquire via an Instagram photo of him emerging from the Hearst building into the golden sunlight, carrying FOUR TOTE BAGS, dressed to mimic a vintage photo of Jack Nicholson, having felt the “lure of new possibilities.” (The Cut paid tribute to Fielden as the ultimate fancy man.)

By the Times’ assessment, the departure of a fancy man might spell doom for the image of the “Esquire Man.” “An editor with a fondness for literature and high fashion may no longer be the Esquire man,” the Times laments. In 2017, the Times had already dramatically announced “The ‘Esquire Man’ is Dead,” and wondered how the magazine could operate “in an era of transgender bathrooms and pink hats.”

Honestly I think all this misses the point. It’s not that all these things are suddenly undesirable — it’s that they’re not obligatory. Magazines are aspirational in nature, and they succeed when they sell a vivid image for readers to aspire to. Esquire sold a vivid, aspirational image of manhood. But there is no longer one correct way to be a man, and that makes the task trickier. When there are many ways to embody and express one’s gender, it may be more difficult to sell an aspirational ideal based almost solely on gender presentation. And new publications like Mel Magazine allow for a much broader definition of manhood and masculinity, and therefore maintain relevance beyond the magazines reliant on staid gender roles for sales.

Booksmart: Must Everything Be Critical?

I’ve been fascinated by the critical reception to Booksmart (which I haven’t seen), a presumably light-hearted coming-of-age movie designed to provide two hours of distraction from the hell of reality. It has been overwhelmingly well-received, netting a 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the majority of my Twitter feed seems to have liked it. But it has also been panned for its politics (or lack thereof).

Richard Brody of the New Yorker opened his review with a rumination on filmmaking in the age of Trump: some films ignore it, some confront it, but Booksmart presents “a world minus Trumpism” that is “faux-sweet and faux-innocent.” The world of Booksmart is devoid of real divisiveness or pain. “There isn’t anybody with a big problem, whether with family, poverty, drugs or alcohol, or with illness, physical or mental,” writes Brody. Maria Bustillos at Popula called it “a high school movie for Biden voters,” accusing the young, moneyed protagonists (both headed to Ivy League schools) of “entitled striving.” Should these critics lighten up? Some viewers thought so.

https://twitter.com/dstfelix/status/1133203472080412674

Kate Wagner earlier this month penned a timely piece in the Baffler on the strange task faced by critics in the age of Trump, noting that many viewers feel fatigued by what they perceive as overserious and pompous assessments of pop culture when they just want mindless escapism. This has led people to implore that others “Let people enjoy things” (a phrase originating in a web comic that has become a meme). But a world without criticism is a far worse fate than a world in which consumers must confront dislike of something they personally enjoy, argues Wagner. The solution is for consumers to not so intimately identify with the entertainment they consume.

You can, it turns out, enjoy something as well as be critical of it. I doubt anyone is totally ideologically pure in their tastes, and that’s fine — I don’t see the harm in being aware that what you’re enjoying is imperfect. I have a feeling I may find myself agreeing with Brody and Bustillos to an extent when I see Booksmart. But I’ll probably still like it!

Longread of the Week: This Vox feature on Robbie Trip, aka Curvy Wife Guy, has it all: Ruminations on the allure and downsides of viral fame, compulsive online attention-seeking, the complicated politics of body positivity, and the introduction of the term “desert money” (it’s when rich people move to the desert?). And, for better or worse, the debut of Tripp’s curvy summer anthem “Chubby Sexy.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— An update to the ongoing drama at The Markup, a tech news startup co-founded by Craig Newmark (creator of Craigslist): Julia Angwin, the editor in chief who was ousted amidst some bizarre internal drama, is slated to return. Executive editor Sue Gardner and managing editor Jeff Larson, both co-founders with whom Angwin had butted heads, are out. It remains to be seen whether all the staffers who walked out on solidarity with Angwin will return as well.

— Sports Illustrated got sold to a company called Authentic Brands Group (lol) basically as fodder for licensing deals: “Salter envisioned possibilities ranging from Sports Illustrated medical clinics and sports-skills training classes to a gambling business.” I wonder if they’ll even bother with printing the magazine.

— Matthew Schneier of the New York Times Styles section is going to New York Magazine, where he will write features for The Cut and for the print magazine. A great steal for NYMag — Schneier has excelled at covering fashion and cultural phenomena.

— Questions of content moderation don’t just plague Facebook and Twitter. Video-game streaming platform Twitch was inundated with porn, the new Game of Thrones season, and footage of the Christchurch shooting, though the streams seem to have been temporary, and are gone (for now).

— The New York Times and its star White House reporter Maggie Habberman were under fire this past week for bizarrely gentle coverage of Hope Hicks. A story about the former Trump aide featured a glamorous photo and framed the question of whether to comply with a subpoena as an “existential” question. Huffington Post journalist Michael Hobbeslaid out the larger issues with the story’s framing, noting what appears to be dry, objective language is misleading and works in the White House’s (and Hicks’) favor.

— Media is a shitshow and everyone is being fired, but Rahm Emanuel is THRIVING in this industry. The former mayor of Chicago, remembered for violence and displacement, is now a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

— Houston Chronicle reporters are calling out the New York Times for claiming it broke the story on the Trump administration separating migrant families — in fact, the Houston Chronicle broke the story. If national outlets with a broad reach are serious about supporting local news, they need to support local outlets, and part of that is crediting them with scoops.