Study Hall Digest 6/1/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Study Hall stands with protestors against police oppression. Please consider donating to bail funds and activist groups; here’s an exhaustive list. We’ll also be donating to bail funds nationwide.

How the Media Helps the Police

One headline got it right. “Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide” reads the title of a Slate article highlighting the brutality and excessive force used by cops in response to weekend protests. The article caught our attention in a sea of euphemistic coverage of police brutality that suffered from unnecessary hedging and both-sides-ism.

At CNN, a video “appears to show” a police car unmistakably plowing into a group of protesters. Compare this to The Daily Beast, which headlined the same video descriptively: “NYPD Officers Drive SUV Into Black Lives Matter Protesters.” A cardinal rule of journalism per my local news training (along with “everybody lies”) is that people do things to other people. Guns don’t discharge on their own, and police cars do not plow into people of their own volition. NYPD officers drive them. (The City got it right too — long live local news.)

While CNN hedges, The New York Times treats chaos and violence as independent, depersonalized forces, acting of their own accord. Protests “turn violent,” cities “descend into chaos,” and confrontations “erupt.” Its coverage also flattens the power discrepancy between police and protesters, treating them as two equal, warring factions. Protesters and police “trade projectiles,” equating demonstrators throwing water bottles with police firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. There is a Times story dedicated entirely to complaints about excessive police force, but even then, in the lede, it grants that brutal police tactics were “intended to impose order” but were “instead inflaming tensions.” I found it an interesting choice, since Times reporters are generally wary of presuming intentions — hence the paper’s aversion to the word “lie” because it presumes intention to mislead.

This weekend, traditional coverage didn’t come close to capturing the atmosphere depicted in live dispatches from reporters on the ground. Twitter was the most vital source of up-to-date information as journalists used the platform to share videos of cops beating protesters and rushing the crowds with little provocation. Dispatches via Twitter from individual reporters are generally more specific and more illuminating than a report where all these individual instances of violence become flattened under ambiguous declarations of two sides “clashing” and tensions “erupting.” There’s no ambiguity, for example, in a video that shows a cop pulling a gun on unarmed protestors in the street near Union Square.

Cops attacked the press specifically with what some journalists say was unprecedented force. Wall Street Journal reporter Tyler Blint-Welsh was hit in the face. In Birmingham, local reporters were attacked live on camera. A photographer in Minneapolis was shot with rubber bullets. Freelance photojournalist Linda Tirado was shot in her left eye and may not recover her vision. An LA Times journalist reported that the press was tear gassed by Minnesota State Patrol at point blank range. A black CNN reporter and his crew were arrested live on air, despite clearly identifying themselves.

Cops attacking and arresting journalists for doing their jobs is not unprecedented, but the openness of the widespread assaults seems new. It might have something to do with Trump drumming up antagonism against the press, or maybe it’s just that continually carrying out violence with impunity solidifies the messages you can do whatever you want, cameras be damned. In any case, these instances of cops attacking journalists make reports showing deference to cops all the more puzzling. (Of course, it should be said the rights of the press are no more sacred than the rights of regular people protesting injustice.)

Condé Nast refuses to recognize unionized workers at Wired

After layoffs, the Wired union is still fighting for recognition. Condé Nast laid off around 100 employees a few weeks ago, which included roughly a dozen employees at Wired. The tech publication’s union had only formed in April, and management at the company has refused to voluntarily recognize the union or even correspond with its organizers. As a result, staffers have been unable to advocate for those who were laid off and were offered “meager or nonexistent” severance packages. Most recently, on May 21, Condé told organizers they need more time to evaluate their request for union recognition.

According to Caitlin Harrington, a writer and research editor at Wired who is part of the organizing committee, the committee has only received communication through Wired’s editor in chief — Condé executives have never corresponded with them directly and have not been forthcoming about reasons for the delay in recognition. (At this point, it’s been about six weeks since Wired announced its union. By contrast, Condé voluntarily recognized the New Yorker union in just a little over a month.)

“It definitely limits us in our ability to negotiate,” said Harrington. “If we were recognized, we would have status quo protection — they would have to negotiate over changes to the staff.” The union is calling on management to negotiate with them over severance packages, which they say are inequitable. “People have said there are discrepancies between how much different people are receiving, and they’re not generous enough given the pandemic,” she said.

Subcontractors at the publication who essentially work full-time hours with no benefits or protections have suffered the worst, said Harrington. “One of my colleagues was laid off, and because he was a contractor — even though he worked for Wired for two years full-time, more or less — he didn’t get any severance,” she said. “We think that’s shameful, especially given the environment that people are being laid off into.”

Longread of the Week: Vicky Osterweil’s 2014 essay in The New Inquiry “In Defense of Looting” is making the rounds again, for good reason. “Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people),” Osterweil writes, “because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state.”

One Podcast Episode: Genie Chance Saves Alaska

Each week we highlight one post from Delia Cai’s daily media newsletter Deez Links. Here’s a podcast episode about journalism during disaster.

I’ve kind of fallen off The Daily train (no commute = no commute’tainment, as it turns out) but you really should listen to this one from last week about this Alaskan radio journalist + working mom named Genie Chance, and how she pulled some Balto-level heroics in 1964 in the aftermath of the biggest earthquake ever recorded in North America. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, just listen to the first half hour (there is some good stuff about the sociology of communities during disasters, but personally I could do without the but what if time is the ultimate natural disaster zoom out at the end lol) and then if you have the connex, get in touch with Christina Hendricks because if she is already playing a super cool working mom with a car salesman husband why not make it a double??

Everything Else

— In good union news, the BuzzFeed News union has successfully implemented a workshare program to avoid more furloughs at the company, with union staff taking a 20% reduction in hours and 20% pay cut. BuzzFeed has provided a pretty clear demonstration of the power and potential of unions in a time of widespread media budget cuts.

— More on BuzzFeed: The website’s veteran foreign and national editor Miriam Elder is taking a furlough/buyout. The new editor in chief Mark Schoofs is likely reorienting the newsroom and the old guard is leaving.

— Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists at Microsoft News and MSN as it gravitates towards the use of AI. Don’t worry, these aren’t pandemic cuts — they’re just robots-replacing-people cuts.

— Lauren Duca is, predictably, attempting to use the current moment of violent racism to promote her book. Some things never change.

— As Vice undergoes a sudden chaotic restructuring that has sown confusion among staff, Editor-in-Chief Derek Mead has left the company. It’s worth noting all this comes after Vice refused to work with the editorial union on proposed cost-cutting measures to prevent layoffs.

— In a Medium post, Jarrod Dicker, an executive at Washington Post, argues that the media industry could learn a thing or two from record labels, which demonstrate how talent can work together with a brand to draw an audience. “Labels are masters at managing a creator and building a brand while allowing the artist to go out and do what they do best; create.” Particularly given the rise of individual subscription newsletters, are journalists’ personal platforms more important than the specific publication?