Study Hall Digest 11/25/2019

 

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Illustrations by Lily Strelich (@lilystrelich)

What do Malcolm Gladwell, Lauren Duca, Amanda Palmer, and a baby have in common?

In a way, every week is a banner week for massive egotists in media who refuse any semblance of accountability, but baby behavior seems especially prevalent recently.

Malcolm Gladwell, a celebrated author and public intellectual who has somehow garnered a reputation for being very smart, sweet-talked Michigan Radio into letting him use audio of an interview with parents of Larry Nassar’s victims for his new audiobook, then ripped it out of context to support his thesis, making it seem like the parents blindly trusted Nassar, the Detroit Free Press first reported. Not only that, but he misrepresents basic facts about the case (he claims Nassar was well-known for treating pelvic floor dysfunction, which is not true). The parents, who were not contacted by Gladwell or Michigan Radio, are devastated. But despite intense criticism from these parents, whose voices were used without their permission, and from the reporter with whom they had spoken, Gladwell remains unmoved, defending his use of the quotes and refusing to change the podcast. In his mind, he has done nothing wrong.

This past week in The Nation, Haley Mlotek expertly dissected the media ecosystem that has bolstered the rise of Lauren Duca as a symbol of the #resistance — Duca’s new book, Mlotek argues, “shows that Duca’s politics were perhaps briefly challenged by a Trump presidency, but absent any actual introspection, all she can offer a reader are well-known aesthetic clichés.” She is held up, rather, by a cloying, infantilized corporate feminism. As we know, Duca casts critics or even skeptics of her work as haters, or sexist, or jealous, or all three (for example, Duca chose to attack me personally because I made the mild argument that she has cultivated a public persona that is better-known than her work). She is also notorious within her (our) own industry for cruel and petty behavior, which she has refused to address, becoming hostile when asked to answer for it.

Then there’s Amanda Palmer, an entertainer who, last week on Twitter, showed an incredible sense of entitlement to glowing coverage. Laura Snapes, who writes about music for The Guardian, recounted how the singer has dragged the publication for not sufficiently covering her recent tour (The Guardian rarely covers tours) and has singled her out personally for apparently hating her work. The grievance can pretty much be summed up in this tweet from Palmer: “WHERE IS MY NEW YORKER PROFILE? WHY IS THE ATLANTIC NOT BANGING ON MY DOOR TO WRITE A TWELVE-PAGE PIECE ABOUT MY INCREDIBLE COMMUNITY?” (Palmer at one point hired her own photographer and writer to give herself the kind of coverage she craved, essentially creating sponcon and acting as if she were revolutionizing music journalism.)

Normal standards — or even indifference — is simply too much for these well-compensated public figures, who balk at the expectation that they answer for mistreatment of others or confront the possibility they may be in the wrong. There seems to be a total lack of circumspection about the place their work holds in the broader cultural landscape, the material impacts of that work, and the systems that bolster it and keep it in place. This is mostly a matter of living in superlatives. If you are smarter, or more morally sound, or more boldly feminist than those who would criticize you, then, apparently, you can never be wrong. Which doesn’t seem particularly journalistic, does it?

One newspaper company to rule them all: The Gannett-Gatehouse merger is complete

As of last Tuesday, one in five daily newspapers in the U.S. is owned by the same company: the newly merged Gannett Media. New Media Investment Group, owner of newspaper chain GateHouse Media, has successfully acquired Gannett, which owns USA Today, completing a merger set in motion months ago and putting roughly 260 dailies under the same umbrella. Now, layoffs inevitably loom as management moves to cut down “inefficiencies” — cuts they swear will not come out of editorial and that will be minimal, but haven’t we heard that before? The News Guild, which represents unionized employees at the combined company, fears the layoffs will be more brutal than advertised, and is calling the merger “bad for readers and bad for local journalism.” Michael E. Reed, who is heading up the newly-combined company as CEO, called the Guild “a big problem.” He plans to make decisions using data around “production at the reporter level” and reader interest, which the Guild opposes.

The language used by the boss indicates, unsurprisingly, an emphasis on efficiency and finances — he has pledged to cut $300 million in annual costs. Part of that is centralizing editing and web operations, which doesn’t bode well for keeping local news local. The Guild is right to be nervous; in my view, a sustainable future for local news should take the form of loyal subscribers pledging small donations, and if the product suffers, no amount of cutting short-term “inefficiencies” can save it. Then there’s the problem of dwindling competition in local news. “From a media economics perspective, more competition is always better,” Iris Chyi said, a professor at the University of Texas School of Journalism told the New York Times. “We don’t want a company to have way too much power.”

Facts are so glad your feelings reached out, but are actually at capacity

This week, the internet was given a delightful window into the communication habits of Melissa A. Fabello, PhD, a writer/writing coach/feminist wellness educator/public speaker/consultant. On Monday, Fabello concluded a thread on venting etiquette with a template for telling a friend you are muting them, reproduced below:

The thread and the text drew ridicule for equating the compassion and occasional sacrifice required in friendship with emotional labor, a term developed to describe jobs that require affective work to do them without being fired. I find the conflation annoying, but I have also been trying to put my finger on why this is so funny. There is a thing that happens when people who advocate for communication as the solution to most problems run up against the limits of language, and that thing is subtext. Here, the subtext is “I want you to still think I’m smart and kind but I also kind of want you to fuck off,” something that is impossible and is why the text has been attributed to failed empaths like Christian from Midsommar and, incredibly, Eminem in the “Stan” video.

Of course, writing something that means “I want you to still think I’m professional, but fuck you” is familiar to any freelancer who’s had an unpaid invoice, so maybe journalists are amused by the advice of Melissa A. Fabello, PhD because she went so far south into communicating a firm boundary in a friendly tone that she ended up in the north of freelance passive-aggression. Welcome, Melissa! —Erin Schwartz

Longread of the Week: For The New Yorker, Rachel Monroe traces the rise of the #nattywine trend, explaining why natural wine — wine created without the technological innovations supposed to make the process easier — is the beverage of choice in the age of anxiety. “Natural wine suited the anxious conspicuous consumption of our times; it was both virtuous and indulgent. An alt weekly in North Carolina advised downing a glass as a way to fight back against ‘the Wine Industrial Complex’; ‘Natural Wine Is My Self-Care,’ a headline in the Times read.”

Department of Good Corrections: Fancy men’s magazine GQ had to issue a correction when it falsely claimed a soldier received a purple heart after being wounded by an IUD rather than an IED (improvised explosive device). Frankly, a lot of women who have gotten IUDs deserve purple hearts.

Everything Else

— Michael Bloomberg is running for president, which means changes at his media company. Bloomberg News journalists will have strict limits on what it can cover with regards to their boss – they are not allowed to investigate him, for instance, but will supposedly republish investigations by other outlets — and will stop running editorials altogether. But most shocking of all, seven journalists from Bloomberg opinion are going to work on his presidential campaign.

— BuzzFeed investigates the internal politics at the New York Times as candidates square off for executive editor Dean Baquet’s job when he inevitably retires in the next two years (per a Times tradition I just learned about, before his 66th birthday). The three recognized within the Times as most likely to inherit the top position are managing editor Joe Kahn, Opinions editor James Bennet, and Metro editor Cliff Levy — all white, East Coast-bred, Ivy League-educated and previous bureau chiefs. Questions loom as to how the successor will address the paper’s critics, but it seems pretty clear it will remain staunchly centrist and is not close to becoming an arm of the resistance. (Why do people have this expectation?? Folks, it’s the Times.)

— Speaking of those critics! In AlterNet, former Times copy editor Carlos Cunha retells how he was fired for making changes to a story about migrant family separations that management felt were unfair to the Trump administration.

— Some white historians and their fans, still fuming mad about the New York Times’ 1619 Project, decided to go after Hannah Nikole-Jones this past week by accusing her of being — what else? — “racist.” Then Andrew Sullivan jumped in to bolster those accusations, and Nikole-Jones had QUITE THE RESPONSE: “Yeah, you stopped concealing [your racism] a long time ago,” she tweeted. “Like when you wrote an email to the NYT asking a black writer how she knew for sure that black people do not have larger penises than other groups.”

— Maris Kreizman explores the pressures on publishing houses that put out books from far-right figures: the books make money (Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered is a best-seller, thanks in part to a $100,000 bulk purchase from the RNC), but uhh they are also full of LIES, and there is a reasonable increased pressure in the publishing industry to fact-check to avoid another Jill Abramson/Naomi Wolf controversy.

— Have you heard? According to Buzzfeed News, we’re all dissociating. All the cool girls are doing it: Lena Dunham, Fleabag, the girl from “Cat Person,” and one half of the podcast Red Scare. It’s interesting to contemplate, but the piece doesn’t strive to account for the performative aspect of this dissociation, or for any historical precedents. I’m not sure irony and humor are necessarily new, trendy coping mechanisms; I’m not sure “dissociating” (or essentially tuning out one’s surroundings) is new for women, either.

— Remember when Marie Kondo told us to throw all our shit away if it didn’t spark joy, prodding us to re-examine our relationship to things and, more broadly, to consumerism? Well, maybe we just didn’t have the right shit! Kondo has now pivoted to lifestyle brand, selling us $75 crystal-and-tuning-fork sets (the copy helpfully tells us Kondo is “never without a crystal”) to fill our homes and the voids in our souls.