Study Hall Digest 9/23/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

How many Lauren Duca takedowns will we see in our lifetime? BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul profiled the controversial #Resistance writer as she prepares to release her book on how to get young people into politics (young people are already leading political movements, Koul is quick to point out). The writer drops in on Duca’s roundly mocked NYU course and zeroes in on criticism of Duca as a grifter and a generally mean-spirited person. There are some eyebrow-raising new details about Duca berating her students and even targeting an exchange student who struggled with the language barrier. There is also some rehashing of complaints about Duca’s behavior at the Huffington Post, which were first reported on a few months ago by Anna Merlan at Jezebel.

The piece generated a lot of buzz, mostly due to an absurd moment in which Duca (putatively a journalist) snaps at the writer profiling her: “You’re being so fucking hard on me, Scaachi, and I really, really, really, really would ask you if you would be grilling a man in this same way. It’s amazing.”

Duca is a public figure and has profited from demonstrations of righteous indignation and moral superiority to her enemies, so critiques of her as a person and a brand are certainly fair game. But the piece seemed more a concerted takedown effort than a “profile,” even quoting previous takedown author Merlan at length. Author Malcom Harris pointed out that it doesn’t delve at all into Duca’s background — “You’d think she was born on the Teen Vogue site” — and ignores the culpability of NYU as an institution that apparently throws non-teachers into classrooms to capitalize on their fame. (Then again, I’m not that keen on defending Duca — she’s been proudly unapologetic about claims of cruel behavior while at HuffPo, which the site’s editorial director said are just the tip of the iceberg.)

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What will it take to change the way we report on, and absorb, climate change? Five months ago, The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review launched Covering Climate Now, an initiative to unite newsrooms in the shared goal of maximizing and improving climate coverage. The project has drawn the participation of more than 300 outlets and dozens of independent journalists. This past week, in line with global marches and calls to action, participating outlets undertook a week of focused coverage, and CJR took stock of the experiment so far. It has kicked off a conversation about some roadblocks to comprehensive and effective coverage of climate change — some newsrooms were at a loss as to where to begin and how to go about covering the topic; some feared they would be labeled “activists” because the topic of climate change is (stupidly) politically fraught; some feared readers would find the topic “depressing” and refuse to keep reading.

CJR editor Kyle Pope dug into some of these concerns in a conversation with Jill Geisler of Loyola University Chicago, which sought to answer the question of why some big newsrooms with the potential to lead the way in climate coverage chose to forego the project (The New York Times is conspicuously absent from the list of participating outlets). “The very concept of climate change has become tribal,” says Geisler. “The reluctant or resistant editors you describe are overly cautious about the appearance of signing on with a particular tribe. You would hope that the preponderance of scientific evidence…would give them not just comfort, but motivation to aim high on this topic and join in.” Not necessarily the case!

In fact, scientific evidence rarely seems to take center stage in climate coverage, and that’s part of the problem. Two UC Berkley Professors, climate scientist David Romps and Jean Retzinger, former associate director of the school’s Media Studies program, co-authored a study recently published in the journal Environmental Research Communications that found that many Americans lack a basic understanding of climate change and that may in part be due to a failure by the press to cover it in a way that encourages engagement.

Romps and Retzinger looked specifically at the Times, and found that as of 2019, “the fact of a scientific consensus is mentioned in a mere 4% of Times articles about climate change” while “the fact that we are experiencing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that haven’t been seen in millions of years — and never before in human history — is mentioned in only 1% of the paper’s articles.” This especially matters because knowledge of the scientific consensus, according to Romps, is a sort of “gateway” to opening people to learning more about climate change, and maybe changing their position on it.

This isn’t all too surprising, since The New York Times is notorious for a studious both-sides approach to reporting for fear of appearing biased. But it results in some really lukewarm “people are saying” stories about something that should be reported as fact.

Take this recent story on Friday’s climate strike — protesters are “frustrated by what they consider officials’ failure to adequately address a crisis,” and “those who rallied said that too little was being done to stem the rise of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.” A lot of participants are quoted making claims about climate change, some of whom, including a drag queen, are underscored for their apparent wackiness (it’s embarrassing to read), but there is no mention of the scientific consensus on the issue or on the science at all.

All of which goes to say that hand-wringing over upholding outdated standards of bias and neutrality will kill us all — or maybe not, if these 300 outlets have anything to say about it.

Longread of the Week: Osita Nwanevu offers a scathing critique of complaints about “cancel culture” in The New Republic, noting that comedians who whine about it tend to do just fine or a lot better than fine, scoring Netflix specials touting their supposed offensiveness and raking in millions. “As far as comedy is concerned, ‘cancel culture’ seems to be the name mediocrities and legends on their way to mediocrity have given their own waning relevance,” writes Nwanevu. “They’ve set about scolding us about scolds, whining about whiners, and complaining about complaints because they would rather cling to material that was never going to stay fresh and funny forever than adapt to changing audiences, a new set of critical concerns, and a culture that might soon leave them behind.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Let’s see what’s going on in IP land…after a 19-way bidding war, Amazon acquired the screen rights to The Premonitions Bureau, a forthcoming book by Sam Knight based on his longform New Yorker article. The book isn’t even being published until 2022!!!

— The New York Times has shuttered NYT en Español, the Spanish language site it launched in 2016, claiming it wasn’t able to attract enough subscribers and that advertising revenue couldn’t make it sustainable. Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times’ international president, had said at the time of the site’s launch that it would be a “a long-term audience development road.” The decision to shut it down after three years doesn’t seem to align with that — Elias Lopez, the site’s founding editorial director, called the decision “extremely short-sighted.”

— It seems increasingly like the best way into a media career is through building a personal brand online, but the New York Times is still…well, the Times! Nylon’s editorial director, Alyssa Vingan Klein, pointed out a job listing for a fashion news editor at the Times that makes it explicit that influencer types will not be considered.

— To the surprise of no one, Natalie Beach’s essay in The Cut on her friendship with Caroline Calloway has attracted a lot of interest in Hollywood. Publisher’s Weekly (or as Calloway calls it, “an obscure trade journal”) reports producers are clamoring to adapt it. Rumors cite a possible sale price of $1 million. Is anyone interested in this stuff beyond people who work in the media, though?

— The Times probes the phenomenon of writing workshops and retreats, which charge participants $1,000+ to have their work edited by successful or even famous writers. These writers have “commodified creativity” by selling the notion that anyone can be a writer through an expensive training process. IMO, whether or not a workshop is a “scam” no doubt varies case by case, but a lot of what makes a successful writer does seem to boil down to learnable skills, and I would never fault a writer for offering their services at a price as it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living on writing alone.