Digest 5/23/2022

Recapping the NYT-Haiti drama, more layoffs at Netflix, and the worst tweet of the year (so far).

THE CITATION WARS CONTINUE

Over the weekend, Black Twitter, academics, and journalists criticized The New York Times’s five-part investigation about Haiti in which the paper declared it was the first to tabulate the colonial debt owed to the Caribbean country. The dispute marks yet another online spasm related to race, citation practices, and contested ownership over historical narratives, with academics of color in particular accusing journalists of stealing or ignoring their work. Like many such disagreements, deeper political implications — perhaps invisible to those unfamiliar with Haiti and its history — have contributed to the bifurcated takes online, with many Black Twitter users pointing out inconsistencies in the Times’s report and its reception.

In part, the controversy stems from the Times’s framing of the story. One segment of the investigation claims it is “rarely taught or acknowledged” that Haitians “were forced to pay for their freedom […] in cash,” in reference to the 1825 indemnification agreement France forced on the country to make up for property it lost during the Haitian Revolution. (Black people and historians beg to differ: Haiti’s history is not unknown to researchers and scholars, like activist and writer Anna Gifty and Columbia University professor Natasha Lightfoot, who challenge the assertion that these events were ever forgotten. However, this unsavory bit about CitiGroup’s role in pioneering the 1914 US invasion of Haiti was not on my radar.) The “Times Insider” vertical meant to provide background and “behind-the-scenes insights” about the investigation, says that: “Leading historians, who assessed the work done by The Times, said it is the first time this amount has been tabulated. Further estimates by The Times found that the double debt cost Haiti from $21 billion to $115 billion in lost economic growth over time.”  

Though the Times provided an explainer that outlined their sources and published their data set to Github, none of their reporting lives up to their outsized claims. If the sizable gap between $21 billion and $115 billion is any indication of what might be causing the backlash, the decision to focus on the debt and make its impact seem measurable was probably ill-advised. Neither figure can account for the lives lost and hardship the Haitian people continue to endure, nor does a calculation of this debt do much to shift thinking about the country, which has been treated as an ideological dumping ground for decades (if not centuries). With costly and unflattering interactive Javascript content spread throughout the package, it’s clear that the investigation is far likelier to become dinner conversation for the series’ implied white liberal audience, than, say, bring groundbreaking change to Haiti. 

The report later contradicts itself, citing a 2003 speech by Haiti’s then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide where he demanded reparations and calculated that France had extorted $21,685,135,571.48 from the Caribbean nation — one of the true origins of the Times’s estimated “double debt.” The investigation even mentions how Aristide’s speech led to the number 21 becoming a political symbol for reparations throughout the country. But the Times wasn’t always sympathetic to Aristide’s role in rebuilding Haiti. When Aristide was deposed in a coup that he believed was orchestrated by the US government in 2004, the Times described him as a “slum priest” and made no mention of his demands for reparations, the debt calculation he popularized across Haiti, or his claim that the US was responsible for the coup — a shift in view that goes unacknowledged in their new report. It should come as no surprise that  a paper that helped justify Bush-era US intervention in Haiti might  skip over its previous characterizations of Aristide, which would undermine the sympathetic perspective the investigation seeks to establish, and draw attention to its inconsistent views. 

Adding to the controversy was a series of extremely uninformed tweets by New Yorker contributing writer, Adam Davidson, who decided to lecture academics about how “writing clearly, powerfully, for a broad audience […] while also constantly citing research” can be difficult. It didn’t take long for Davidson’s thread to become retweet (and subtweet) fodder. Meanwhile, academics like Brown University professor and MSNBC columnist Dr. Keisha N. Blain posted existing writing that debunked the Times’s claims, and journalists including Kendra Pierre-Louis criticized the paper for its sloppy framing, linking to a number of stories that challenged the paper’s approach. “I am not angry that they are covering [Haiti’s history],” Pierre-Louis tweeted. “I know more than most the reach of the NYT. I am profoundly disgusted at their self-satisfied framing. I have other thoughts on who gets to tell this story but that’s for my group chats.” 

Similar to last month’s kerfuffle in which The Washington Post omitted journalist Kim Kelly’s citations when it published an excerpt from her book, “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” the online arguments reveal incompatibilities in the citation practices of journalists and academics. In each case, criticism centered on what could be colloquially described as “Columbusing,” a reference to the Spanish explorer wrongly credited for discovering the Americas, and attacked the idea that these reports had uncovered an untold history. Instead, critics argue that these reports failed to credit others who told the story before them — especially those whose lives were historicized. Responding to Davidson’s thread, Boston University professor Joseph Rezek succinctly summarized the ongoing citation dispute, saying that “Academics are not asking journalists to tell bad stories, just ones that are true.” 

It should say something about the larger news media industry that patently false but provocative ideas still reign. Too, that the sensationalist framing devices deployed in news media to manipulate unwitting readers have long-term repercussions on our ability to pay attention — as the outcries on Twitter hope to remind us. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Abraham Gutman provided a piece of salient advice, warning that long form and explanatory journalism should abandon “the need to frame *every* article as a scoop. Some things aren’t new or a secret, they are still worthy of being told in full *again*.” But the deeper unsettling truth here is that ownership of stories about race and class, whether as intellectual property or cultural inheritance, has in many ways eclipsed the subjects of those stories and whatever rights that are owed to them. As critic Shamira Ibrahim put it bluntly on Twitter: “If only Haitians were upset no one would give a fuck about them wanting the right to have ownership of their history and scholarship.” Given the media’s habit of regurgitating its own self-aggrandizing and delusional takes, I’m sure we can expect to have this conversation again next month, if not next week. These points of criticism are not new or difficult to swallow. Media workers have yet to learn how to gracefully detach themselves from the making of history. 

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WHAT I’M READING AND WATCHING

The onslaught of reality television about rapid-fire dating and marriage has frosted my already undersized heart. But New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz’s profile of Orna Guralnik, the star therapist of Showtime’s “Couples Therapy,” now entering its third season, has me thinking the solution to my woes is to divest from Netflix and move to a more mature streaming service.

Schwartz’s descriptions of the series — specifically the lengths filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg go to keep the cameras out of sight and out of mind — strike me as clarifying reminders of the ongoing interplay between visual media and therapy. With Schwartz’s prose replicating the “eyeline shots and closeups” found in the show, the article itself is brimming with allegories of the souring nostalgia of our era in which anything can be methodically reconstituted for the screen. It is also a potent argument for acknowledging that documentarians and psychotherapists increasingly rely on one another to explain the baffling interpersonal conflicts that form the bare substance of our daily lives. Placed somewhere between the two, critics like Schwartz are then tasked with providing language about what we experience in the cycle between reality and reality TV — a task she manages with deft precision.

Maybe it’s because crunching economic pressures have made obtaining an inquisitive life like Guralnik’s seem impossible. (I’m personally jealous of the camera team who get to watch her work in the studio.) Maybe it’s the murky ethical waters through which the series treads when it commits the cardinal sin of letting voyeurs into the therapeutic encounter. Either way, the “chance to gawk at the splayed viscera of other people’s lives” through Schwartz’s eyes (and on my television at home) has captured my attention.

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— BBC podcaster Eman El-Husseini quit her job at the media company after it ran a headline that inaccurately described Israeli police’s attack on attendees of journalist Shireen Abu’s funeral.  

— Reply All co-hosts Emmanuel Dzotsi and Alex Goldman are stepping away from the Gimlet Media podcast. Their last episode will air June 23. 

— Condé Nast selected former Vox.com senior editor Rachel Wilkerson Miller as editor-in-chief of SELF.

— Chantal Braganza was promoted to deputy editor of food at Chatelaine. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— More layoffs at Netflix: the tech company cut approximately 150 employees to reduce expenses due to a slowdown in “revenue growth,” Variety reports. Rumor has it that the media company fired its entire queer social media team weeks before Pride. Former Netflix employee Evette Dione said the layoffs are “targeting social channels [that were] designed to bring marginalized viewers into the fold.”

— As Study Hall reported last week, McSweeney’s regained ownership of The Believer, putting an end to a long and sultry saga in which the University of Las Vegas, Nevada sold the publication to horny sex toy people to recover from the embarrassment of employing horny flash-your-genitals people. McSweeney’s is now fundraising to support future operations at the beloved literary journal. 

— The Wall Street Journal reported that Recurrent Ventures, owner of 24 publishing brands including Popular Science, Outdoor Life, Domino, and Saveur, “raised $300 million in a round of funding led by private-equity firm Blackstone Inc.” The funding round marks “one of the biggest investments in online publishing in recent years.”

— Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg published an 8,000-word essay on Medium (lmao) about the metaverse that added to the confusion about what exactly Meta (formerly Facebook) hopes to become and how its product, the metaverse, will benefit the lives of literally anyone. 

— A self-effacing user survey appeared on Tudum’s website. Whoever put it there is an excellent human.

— NBC News Senior Reporter Ben Collins, who claims to cover dystopia (???), receives my nomination for worst tweet of the year (so far) after this unforced error. Happy racism in the aftermath of a mass shooting to you, too, bro.