Study Hall Digest 8/19/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

After a series of blows — racist tweets from a high-ranking editor, a very bad headline that credited Trump with promoting unity and denouncing racism, and resulting unrest from staffers — the New York Times doesn’t seem to know what it is, who it is for, or what role it serves in the current moment.

Executive editor Dean Baquet did seem open to criticism while facing staff at last week’s town hall meeting — a transcript of which was published by Slate. But he offered more reassurances that his office door is always open, and fewer satisfying answers to his employees’ probing questions about how the Times covers race, the Trump presidency, and power more broadly.

One such probing question from the meeting: When would the Times opt to use the word “racist,” which it has studiously avoided so far in describing the president’s explicitly racist words and actions? Baquet doesn’t know. “I mean, it’s hard for me to answer, but yes, I do think there are instances when we would use it,” he says, after noting the Times should have a written standard for using the word. “It’s hard for me to articulate an example of it.” Is it really?

In other answers to similar lines of questioning, Baquet seems to contradict himself, at one point claiming it is more “powerful” to describe racist words and actions than to simply use the word “racist,” and at another claiming that if the word is used too much it will lose its power.

When asked about the paper’s blunt description of “racist agitators” in a 1957 report from Central High School in Little Rock, Baquet concedes that “I don’t think anybody would avoid using the ‘racist’ in a scene like that,” and goes on to argue that no other word would do for such an explicitly racist action as a segregationist protest. “It was such a powerful scene of the American South at that moment, that in that instance, to have not used the word would have been weak,” Baquet says.

So is the word now insufficient, somehow weakening any subsequent “show-not-tell” journalism the paper should be producing? Or is too powerful for routine use? Baquet himself doesn’t seem to know.

The larger issue, as one staffer points out, is “about what kind of credulousness we want to reflect in terms of [covering an] administration” and how that credulousness is reflected in a reluctance to use straightforward language.

Jay Rosen at his blog PressThink took note of a culture clash between more traditional staffers at the Times who still favor access journalism, and the younger staff, who feel the Times should more aggressively cover the president. That kind of coverage would likely include making value judgments about the president’s behavior.

Baquet himself told CNN that “there is a generational divide in newsrooms right now.” Rosen pointed to a former Times reporter who took to Twitter to explain the Times coverage of Trump: “There’s this decades-old journalistic reflex that because of the importance of the office, you have to take everything a president — including this president — says seriously, no matter how demagogic Trump is,” wrote Steven Greenhouse.

That approach is being challenged both because younger staffers,and particularly staffers of color, who reportedly led the charge at the town hall, are calling it into question. The Times doesn’t have a public editor anymore because now we readers are supposed to be the critics; when the Times Reader Center was launched in March 2017, the pitch was to make the readers’ role more active, incorporating their feedback into the Times’s approach. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger argued social media would replace the public editor. The problem is that if Twitter is your backstop, you have to actually listen to the outcries against your misfires of tone and content, which the Times isn’t doing (in fact, Baquet was pretty dismissive of Twitter feedback during the town hall).

I can’t really see the Times ever effectively reconciling these opposing views on journalism in the Trump era, especially if its leadership object even to the word “racist.” Their stated imperative seems to be to tell the truth, if their aggressive ad campaign is anything to go by, but of course they’re also concerned with maintaining their subscriber base and not alienating conservative factions too much.

Associate managing editor for standards Philip Corbett at one point in the town hall says he has worried the Times has occasionally made choices that could reflect a bias against Trump. That impulse to cut everything down the middle will persist, no doubt. We are doomed to keep tearing apart headlines that call Stephen Miller a “firebrand” while the Times publicly tries to figure out if an unbiased, documentary approach to journalism is even possible anymore, if it ever was.

NYT politics editor Jonathan Weisman was recently publicly disciplined and then demoted (rather than fired) for his straightforwardly racist tweets. So, uh, why can’t the paper decide that the word is important?

Longread of the Week: Amidst all of the above, the New York Times has published The 1619 Project, a very impressive interactive project exploring the legacy of slavery in America and redefining the country’s founding as the start of American slavery, rather than the signing of the Declaration. The series of reported essays explores the ways in which black Americans have fought to actualize the American dream, which is made incomplete by racism. (The project will also be a podcast, naturally!)

EVERYTHING ELSE

— AND ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE TIMES. According to BuzzFeed, when Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush’s book deal blew up following allegations of sexual misconduct against Thrush, Haberman had to give up her advance after deciding not to go forward with the book (Thrush was fired, so presumably he kept whatever payout he had already received or had in his contract). (What’s Thrush up to now? He was recently moved to political investigations after a brief time out from covering the White House).

— Deadspin editor in chief Megan Greenwell quit shortly after after publishing a deep-dive on the current state of G/O Media (formerly Gizmodo, former parent company of Gawker), saying she has been “been repeatedly undermined, lied to, and gaslit in my job.” G/O didn’t seem sorry to see her go, claiming they had different visions for Deadspin (it seems Greenwell’s vision included rigorous journalism, while G/O wanted her to “stick to sports”).

— Axios is planning to sell software to help companies produce newsletters, though it won’t play any role in crafting the newsletters themselves. Lots of media companies are supplementing revenue by selling CMS tech.

— Two trans employees have left the Guardian over its transphobic coverage and hostile environment. Last year, the newspaper published an editorial claiming trans rights were at odds with women’s rights; that was the tipping point for one employee. “It suddenly became real,” one employee told BuzzFeed. “I’m entering this building with people who are denying my humanity.”

— The National Labor Relations Board is now investigating charges against Barstool Sports and its founder Dave Portnoy, who went on an anti-union rampage on Twitter last week that included threatening to fire employees who considered unionizing. (He also said “unions are for pussies” — apparently sucking up to your boss is not!)