Digest 04/04/2022

Instability in the media industry (again), CNN+ woes, a wider picture of online harassment, and more.

This week’s Study Hall Digest has been handed over to Juwan J. Holmes, a Brooklyn-originating journalist and multipotentialite currently working as a Contributing Writer at Mediaite. He can be found on Twitter at @JuwantheWriter and all other platforms at @JuwantheCurator.

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A Clearer Picture of the Media Industry’s Instability Begins to Develop

As everyone correctly (and unfortunately) predicted, *that* slap from the weekend before last continues to reverberate around the mediasphere. After all, it is the perfect snowball effect for combining our obsession with celebrity fodder, Hollywood controversy, racial and gender complications, and viral violence. It’s as if every week’s hot topics were brewed into media tea (or vice versa?) and offered up as a buffet menu option to fill society’s endless hunger for endless discourse. It was practically engineered (and some still maintain it was) for this stage of digital-first media.

This is a scenario that producers and talent on talk and news TV shows have probably dreamed of all their careers. Unfortunately for those at the Black News Channel (BNC), the network shut down on March 25, just two days before it happened. As I explained in my debut article for Mediaite that weekend, despite bringing desperately-needed diversity to the field, BNC was not able to survive its financial windfalls, oft-questioned content and massive audience desert. 

Since cable news is on the decline, Black News Channel’s demise was arguably predictable, but the way it happened — with the company failing to meet payroll the day before — doesn’t exactly happen to a national cable TV network everyday. Yet, even its shutdown — much like the network during its operation — seems to have garnered little coverage across national media news outlets. Not even the New York Times, whose columnist Charles Blow hosted a primetime show on the network, has covered it as of this writing. Stephen Battaglio’s article in the Los Angeles Times on it garnered two replies-limited tweets from CNN’s Brian Stelter, two more than he appears to ever have previously sent in reference to the network; it received barely a mention in his Reliable Sources newsletter with Oliver Darcy, and no known mention on the show Stelter hosts of the same name. 

Now, in fairness, there is no shortage of media companies bleeding money and/or talent. The union for staff at BuzzFeed News – a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom! – has authorized a strike as they prepare to fight off layoffs (if not their entire department’s shutdown). This is within a company currently valued at more than US$500 million and that just months ago bought multimillion-dollar media network Complex and its estimated 500 employees – just a year out from acquiring mega-news company HuffPost. It seems in both cases, media journalism at-large doesn’t seem keen to examine how – or why – even wallet-padded startups and large conglomerates are struggling to keep newsrooms in operation.

Many media workers have long been aware that this industry is unsustainable in the long term. (Surely you’ve reviewed the memo Study Hall sent regarding its subscription prices just a few days ago!) That’s a driving factor behind a slew of independent startups across the landscape coinciding with the recent pivot-to-newsletters. Yet, even in the short-term, most of these aren’t proving to be the end-all solution to the looming nuclear disaster that is journalism. As ridiculous as it was to watch legacy gatekeepers clutch their company-provided pearls at Taylor Lorenz’s observations about the industry for the last month, it’s important to examine why they did so: while many have the talent, resources, and even the “branding” (read: recognition) to go out on their own, they’ve staked their reputation – you know, “branding” by another name – by latching onto gigs at legacy publications and/or spinning a security web out of corporate/nepotist/privilege built support. 

They know that no matter how well-done the work or the “branding” is, there are very few places in this industry to go that can protect us from falling through the Swiss cheese-modeled floor this industry is built on – which most of us are tiptoeing around, too.

For example, BuzzFeed bet big on news years ago to legitimize their content-farming goldmine – then doubled down by throwing in two well-known but economically-challenged operations right to further dress up the company as it went to the market – and still, despite the miraculously stellar product that was created as a result, it’s not “profitable enough” to justify the price tag to the wallet-holders. BNC had a $50 million injection last year, a media executive’s treasure chest of talent, so-called racial “reckonings” energizing audiences, and two years in millions of homes to try and become profitable, or at least palatable to investors; it didn’t. Just this Friday, the Washington City Paper announced it has become digital-first, will no longer print periodicals, and laid off five staff members. Study Hall’s already told you about the shutdown of Inside Science, hemorrhaging at SiriusXM and WHYY, and end of print… anything at Dotdash Meredith.

Even with the heaps of media workers going months without jobs or finding sustainable work outside the industry, there’s nowhere near enough businesses above the red to accommodate those still seeking freelance work in media, let alone anything full-time or remotely stable. That reality, coupled with the still-abysmal pay rate standards, harassment and violence they face (more on that later) and other inequities, has left media workers enmasse with socioeconomic anxiety and mental trauma – almost the same effect The Slap has apparently had on the rich… Almost.

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CNN PLUS MORE POLITICOS

Speaking of cable news and instability, CNN has had quite the week. The network’s CNN+ service launched last week, and it’s already getting plenty of complaints, negative reviews, and (largely tabloid-driven) rumors that staffers are not safe from potential layoffs or the platform will be merged when new ownership calls the shots. The streaming service has even already reached the “inexplicably posting a picture of their all-beige appearing staff, then acting surprised when people point out how beige-appearing everyone is” space on the “Media Monopoly”™ game board, and received the “your staff and content is lacking in diversity” community call out card to go along with it. 

The company’s push for the premium CNN2-like service is being done in an effort, it seems, to uphold their “world leader in news” tagline following the shattering of their reputation thanks to Jeff Zucker, Jeffrey Toobin, and Chris Cuomo. Oddly enough, they decided that to do so, they needed to continue seeing through the Zucker-approved plan to supply more content at a point when the company’s new ownership is heavily scrutinizing its work. In other words, CNN is cutting off its nose in an effort to save its face. 

This may signal the cable news’ stronghold over us all beginning to tatter. Before you get all blissful, though, let’s not ignore that by contrast, Fox is getting along just fine with exceptional ratings, despite the on-a-rolling-basis outrage cycle fed by Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, etc. In fact, CNN allegedly tried to make a “truce” with their “rivals” recently to end the “war” staged between the two during the Zucker regime. Take this into account along with CBS News handing out paychecks to stars of the Trump administration and White House spokesperson Jen Psaki slated to become an anchor for Peacock and MSNBC, and it illustrates the clear abandonment of political “objectivity” in favor of partisan power-jockeying. Beyond that, it suggests network heads know that the navel-gazey, bothsidesism style of old is on its way out the door, and they’re primed to replace it with a new navel-gazeless, idol worship-style to match the times we’re in (or at best, heading towards).

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CABLE NEWS DOES A DISSERVICE

On the topic of Taylor Lorenz and cable news, MSNBC’s Meet the Press Daily aired a segment from NBC News Correspondent Morgan Radford on gender-based harassment against women journalists, featuring an interview with the Washington Post reporter alongside The 19th LGBTQ+ Reporter Kate Sosin. While Sosin is non-binary – that isn’t mentioned in the segment – all the language about online harassment in the segment  is explicitly stated to be against “female” and “women” journalists. That gives you a pretty clear picture of the veracity of this segment within itself, but for more focus on the problematic reliance on gendered language throughout journalism, I’ll point you to this article in The Objective by Liana DeMasi.

Understanding, of course, that covering the issue of online harassment of media workers online cannot really be well conveyed in any four-minute segment, there were many other underlying issues from the jump. The segment almost entirely focuses on Lorenz and this “new” research, which first came out in January. It shows violent rhetoric directed at Lorenz dramatically increased after Tucker Carlson attacked her on Fox News in February, as did another Carlson segment about WIRED columnist Virginia Heffernan. They also showed data from NYU researchers detailing how the digital harassment increased even more after what they call “one Twitter thread” from a “male media figure.” The thread they’re referring to is one by none other than Glenn Greenwald, who wrote a thread about Lorenz in August over Lorenz’s criticism of Greenwald’s association with the “free speech” social platform Rumble. Screenshots of Greenwald’s “criticism” of Lorenz appear on-screen to viewers for less than two seconds, but a bizarro-world statement from him claiming “no journalist” should “want… some special immunity shield” is included at the end. 

During the segment, Lorenz begins to cry and says, “I have severe PTSD from this [harassment]… It’s so isolating… it’s horrifying, it’s overwhelming, it’s very hard.” Unsurprisingly, once that clip went online, that moment became nothing but encouragement  for the very people the segment sought to talk about (but did very little of, anyway). Even host Chuck Todd’s response immediately after the taped portion of the segment ended was dismal: “Folks who live online know exactly what they’re doing.” Well, apparently the people at Meet the Press Daily didn’t know what they were doing, because all they did was just tee up Lorenz, Sosin, and a number of other journalists up for a complete weekend of shitty subtweeting and veiled disparaging Substack article that we’ve begun to accept as “discourse.” Unsurprisingly, in doing so, they covered little revelatory information about the issue of online harassment, and how it affects women and LGBTQ+ people… 

Read the rest:

MSNBC Segment on Online Harassment and Gender Misses The Mark

— Juwan J. Holmes

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Per the Washington Post, Vogue, Bon Appétit and other Condé Nast workers have formed a union and are asking for voluntary recognition from the company. The union, if recognized, would cover “500 editorial, production and video workers across 11 publications.”

— Graydon Carter can still be counted on for a notable quotable. When asked about the Conde Nast union, he said to NY Mag: ““Why not?” he asked. “They don’t even have desks anymore. They don’t have landlines. They probably share a pencil. I think, in this case, a union is probably fine.”” (h/t Nicholas Jackson)

— The A.V. Club is relocating to California and it’s a farewell-of-sorts for the site’s longterm midwestern vibe. 

— As you may have read above, the BuzzFeed union authorized a strike last Tuesday. 

— More journalists have been killed in Ukraine as the war continues; this week, Maks Levin, a Ukrainian photojournalist, was killed by Russian troops.