Study Hall Digest 6/15/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Goodbye to the Old Media Elite

Over the last few weeks, staffers in the media industry have spoken out against racist work environments and leadership, in some cases resulting in resignations from editorial brass: James Bennet stepped down from the New York Times Opinion section, and editors in chief Adam Rapoport and Christine Barberich have stepped down from Bon Appétit and Refinery29 respectively. This is a change years in the making, the culmination of editorial employees of color dealing with toxic workplaces for far too long without seeing their concerns addressed. You wouldn’t know it from reading famed former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s hand-wringing blog post about how the oustings spell doom for the American press.

Taibbi writes that an army of social justice warriors is “denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.” He summarizes internal newsroom rebellions —including staff dissent at the Times over the publication of Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for military suppression of Black Lives Matter protests — as staffers “demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically ‘problematic’ editorial or social media decisions.” The ghost story told by the old guard like Taibbi with flashlights under their chins is this: You make one wrong move, one ill-conceived tweet, one “problematic” comment, and you’re excommunicated. But that’s not at all what’s playing out in American newsrooms.

Much of Taibbi’s post is focused on Lee Fang, a journalist on staff at The Intercept who tweeted a video of a protester lamenting what he saw as a lack of attention paid to, essentially, “Black on Black crime” (a trope often used to dismiss racist violence through whataboutism). After Fang posted the video, co-worker Akela Lacy tweeted that she was tired of Fang “continuing to push narratives about black on black crime after repeatedly being asked not to.” Taibbi dedicates several paragraphs to this one video as representative of a viewpoint counter to the mainstream focus on police brutality. But it’s obvious that Lacy’s tweet is not about a single video; she makes it clear that her objection is to a sustained pattern of behavior which she has addressed repeatedly in private. Fang issued an apology, Lacy thanked him, and Fang remains employed.

Similarly, Taibbi laments the ousting of James Bennet over the Tom Cotton op-ed, which he defends on the grounds that it represents the view of a majority of Americans. (Taibbi cites a poll in which 58% of respondents strongly support or somewhat support “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.”) But according to a staff memo from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Bennet’s departure was not only about the op-ed — as I found in my own reporting for last week’s digest, employees had long been frustrated with a lack of newsroom diversity and felt institutional changes were long overdue. (Bennet also didn’t read the op-ed before publication, and employees felt his failure to immediately take responsibility for the controversy displayed poor leadership.)

Taibbi makes passing reference to editor resignations at Bon Appétit and Refinery29 as further evidence of leftist madness, but these are workplaces where staffers of color were serially underpaid, undervalued, subjected to racist harassment and abuse by white supervisors, and where attempts to address these problems internally were stymied for years. I’m not sure how to take his condemnation of these episodes other than as a preference that these employees shut up, settle for less, or quit their jobs rather than attempt to better their workplace.

To Taibbi and his ilk, including Times Opinion writer Bari Weiss, the ability of James Bennet to publish an error-riddled call to use military force to end protests is a matter of the utmost importance, one in which the very existence of the free press is at stake. Calls from staffers of color for accountability from management, diversity in hiring, equal pay, and a greater consideration of Black voices and Black safety in editorial decisions, on the other hand, amount to tyrannical groupthink and what Weiss calls “safetyism.” But if declining to publish a militaristic op-ed from a senator amounts to a suppression of ideas, what does maintaining a newsroom that is only 9% Black, the leadership of which is only 6% Black, amount to?

Taibbi’s column represents a worldview common among old guard media elites in which an institution matters more than the dignity and safety of that institution’s employees. A remarkable thing about the collective uprising of the last few weeks is that workers are speaking publicly— even at The New York Times, which enforces a strict social media policy — and are receiving support rather than censure from management as they do. It indicates a shift in this industry’s power dynamic, facilitated, I think, by the growing strength of the Black Lives Matter movement and an increased awareness of racial injustice. The default reverence for institutions like the New York Times is giving way to an insistence on lambasting those institutions when they err. This is likely threatening for those, like Taibbi, who are part of the old guard.

Another dimension to these changes is the scarcity of media jobs after the COVID-era purge of staff positions and declining freelance budgets across newsrooms. Since so few remain employed in this hell industry, watching high-ranking staffers like Bennet and Rapoport fumble basic editorial practices or treat their employees of color with condescension and disrespect is even more infuriating.

Longread of the Week: It feels like a good week to revisit Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s series of home-run essays over the past decade, especially “A River Runs Through It,” a 2015 piece in The Believer on Electric Lady Studios, the New York recording studio founded by Jimi Hendrix in 1970. “Another thing that made Electric Lady particularly unique was that it was owned by a black artist during a moment when the right to creative autonomy was all but impossible for black musicians, who had little recourse for taking control of their own production or ownership, especially in the courts. This sort of exploitation was especially true for early blues musicians, the artists that Hendrix most admired as a young man — men and women who would literally sell their souls to play the music they loved.”

More From the Past Week

— A staff uprising is also underway at the Los Angeles Times, where executive editor Normal Pearlstine is facing scrutiny over protest coverage that some argue focuses too much on looting, a lack of newsroom diversity, and pay disparities between white writers and writers of color.

— Linda Tirado, a photojournalist who was blinded in one eye by Minneapolis police when they shot her with a foam bullet, is now suing the cops, claiming they could not have reasonably failed to recognize her as press.

— Now-former Bon Appétit Editor in Chief Adam Rapoport doesn’t know how “off the record” works and decided to send some condescending emails to Jezebel EIC Julianne Escobedo Shepherd.

— Medium launched Momentum, a new blog “that will amplify the voices dedicated to dismantling anti-Black racism.”

— Reporting continues to emerge revealing just how bad and racist Refinery29’s culture truly is. Anecdotes including Editor in Chief Christene Barberich rejecting images of black and plus-sized women as “off-brand” and mixing up Black employees, plus management’s refusal to address pay disparities.

— Nieman Lab compiled a round-up of tweets from journalists of color recounting instances of racism and discrimination they’ve faced in the media industry.

— Audrey Gelman has stepped down from her position as CEO of girlboss co-working space The Wing as the company professes a commitment to racial justice, but a Jezebel report reveals a culture of racism in which Black women were undervalued.