Digest 1/25/2020

Biden-era media anxiety, the New Yorker union, and more.

WHAT WILL BIDEN COVERAGE LOOK LIKE?

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but everyone is pretty on edge when it comes to coverage of newly-elected President Joseph R. Biden, particularly at the paper of record. It came to light last week that an editor on contract at the Times had been let go over violating the paper’s social media policy, at least partly due to tweets about the new president. Lauren Wolfe tweeted on Tuesday that she had “chills” watching Biden’s plane land. Two days later, Yashar Ali tweeted that Wolfe’s contract was cancelled over the tweet, which has been quote-tweeted mockingly by Glenn Greenwald and a few right-wing Twitter personalities. Ali, whose clout is apparently so great that an entire news cycle can be powered by a single one of his tweets (the accuracy of which will not be questioned!?), later clarified that Wolfe hadn’t gotten the axe over the one tweet, but that it was more of a last straw situation following some other offending tweets.

This lines up with what I’ve heard as well, with one Times employee telling me that “she had been on thin ice for a while” over tweets that were perceived as activist. The Times has released a statement clarifying that Wolfe was not fired over a single tweet. (I did shoot Wolfe an email requesting an interview but have not heard back.) The Times, of course, has a very strict social media policy for all its employees and freelancers (op-ed writers are an exception) that forbids sharing political opinions. Still, the episode indicates how the paper is approaching the future of its political coverage. It seems the Times is attempting to studiously adhere to its appearance of impartiality at a time when people are frankly sick of impartiality during such a batshit crazy historical moment.

Then there’s the question of the future of that social media policy, which seems to become more difficult to enforce during chaotic times. The policy also seems unevenly applied and only enforced when there’s some kind of uproar. The employee I spoke to put it this way: “I think the policy is basically, if you’re a star they let you do it.”

The heightened anxiety about covering Biden manifested in the backlash to a piece in the New York Times Styles section about Biden’s choice to wear a $7,000 Rolex watch to his inauguration, a noteworthy sartorial choice given that recent presidents had opted for less flashy timepieces (sometimes still expensive, yes, but not near Rolex expensive). It was a pretty straightforward fashion story that is standard for the Styles section, which has painstakingly covered the symbolic significance of fashion choices in the White House before now. The story also noted other presidents’ decisions to wear more “everyman” watches were likely for show — it didn’t criticize Biden for being rich (all presidents are rich) so much as it pointed out the significance of the choice to not self-consciously obscure that wealth for the public eye.

Yet media Twitter was furious over the story! The Times was criticized for giving ammunition to right-wingers and for not learning anything from the past four years; some said it was worth cancelling their subscription over. To be clear, the Times has more reach and influence than any other paper and I will always prefer excessive criticism of its editorial choices to none at all — it can take it. But I was surprised by the strong reaction to what was explicitly labeled a fashion story within the Styles section, not part of the paper’s political coverage, about one of the most powerful men in the world. 

It occurred to me that this might be a release of a broader anxiety over what the tone of coverage for the Biden administration will be like. Media consumers are so shell-shocked after four years of Trump that Biden’s relative normalcy is disorienting. I also imagine progressive readers are resentful of the paper’s perceived commitment to “both sides” coverage through the Trump era, so everything is viewed through this lens. I predict that coverage of Biden will continue to be scrutinized in light of the media’s shortcomings in reporting on Trump, that readers may be on edge about anything they perceive as unfairly critical. But the Times is the Times — it is explicitly not activist, and has made a point of not explicitly being part of the “resistance,” though resistance activists still stan the Times. And furthermore, the Styles section is the Styles section. 

THERE IS POWER IN A UNION

Employees represented by the New Yorker union undertook a 24-hour work stoppage on Thursday over what they called a disrespectful response from management to a wage proposal. The union had proposed a salary floor of $65,000, and management counteroffered with $45,000 ($3,000 more than the current lowest full-time salary) and asked to keep the right to lower salaries by 20% at any time. The union is made up of fact-checkers and copy editors, while the magazine’s staff writers are technically independent contractors and so not union members. So far, a few TNY writers have expressed their support: Naomi Fry, Emily Nussbaum and Vinson Cunningham all tweeted in favor of the work stoppage, and Jiayang Fan, Doreen St. Félix, and Hua Hsu all retweeted tweets about the union action.

COMINGS AND GOINGS

Kathleen Kingsbury has been named Opinion editor at the New York Times following years as deputy and interim editor for the section. Kingsbury is replacing James Bennet, who resigned over the summer when his decision to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the deployment of US troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests sparked furor, and it came out that Bennet hadn’t even read the piece before publication. 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Have you found yourself wondering what Joan Didion makes of the hell we’re all currently living through? The answer, via a very brief interview in Time magazine, is not much!

— The New Yorker is returning its National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for Elif Batuman’s “A Theory of Relativity.” Last month, the magazine discovered that subjects in the story about a rent-a-family service in Japan had lied about themselves and their involvement in the service.

— The inevitable evolution of a meme: We’re all having a good time with the image of Bernie Sanders sitting at the inauguration with his mittens, then the scolds come in and inform us that an old man sitting in a chair wearing mittens is misogyny. Meanwhile brands have co-opted the meme to sell shit.

— The Boston Globe has launched a new initiative through which people can ask the paper to update or anonymize past coverage of them (including minor crimes). This is a larger trend wherein newsrooms are reconsidering the relevance of old stories about minor offenders vs. the harm done to the subject. Local news site Cleveland.com last year announced it would allow people to petition to have outdated stories of minor crimes removed from the archives. 

— The tech wars in Australia are heating up: In response to proposed legislation that would force tech giants pay publishers for news they aggregate on their sites, Google has threatened to make its search engine unavailable in the country if the bill is passed, while Facebook has threatened to block users from posting or sharing links to news stories.

— The podcast boom means everyone has a podcast, but very few are making money. Axios reports that 1% of podcasts receive 99% of downloads. In other words, it’s a lucrative medium for the Times and for stars like Joe Rogan, but not for most podcasters.