#2: The sinking of the USS Bennet
Open and long-overdue rebellion at media companies across the country, as protests continue unabated
“American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is A failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity”
-Wesley Lowery, 60 Minutes correspondent
If we are serious about ending racism and fundamentally changing the United States, we must begin with a real and serious assessment of the problems. We diminish the task by continuing to call upon the agents and actors who fuelled the crisis when they had opportunities to help solve it. But, more importantly, the quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. We have the resources to remake the United States, but it will have to come at the expense of the plutocrats and the plunderers, and therein lies the three-hundred- year-old conundrum: America’s professed values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, continually undone by the reality of debt, despair, and the human degradation of racism and inequality.
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
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Overdue reflection in newsrooms across America
In 1994, The New Republic, then America’s predominant political magazine, published a long excerpt from The Bell Curve, a book in which conservative academic Charles Murray attempted to lay a contemporary groundwork for the long-discussed and long-discredited link between race and intelligence.
“Do African Americans score differently from whites on standardized tests of cognitive ability?” Murray and his co-author asked in the article. “If the samples are chosen to be representative of the American population, the answer has been yes for every known test of cognitive ability that meets basic psychometric standards.” Not only were Blacks less intelligent on average, but also, Murray urged his readers, “however discomfiting it may be to consider it, there are reasons to suspect genetic considerations [beyond socio-economic factors] are involved.”
In elevating Murray’s work—controversial and detestable even at its time of publication—to the heights of a magazine cover story, editor Andrew Sullivan faced a mutiny among his staff. As a compromise, Sullivan allowed his writers to pen a number of essays criticizing Murray’s work and the decision to run the excerpt.
In a reflection of the diversity at Sullivan’s New Republic, 12 of the 16 rebuttal columns were written by white authors. Only four were written by Black men, only one of whom was a permanent staffer at the New Republic.
This was the New Republic perpetrating a white-centric journalistic reality it took an active role in building. One year earlier—and without any gesture towards internal debate—the magazine had devoted a cover to “the decline of the black intellectual,” in which sexual predator and longtime literary editor Leon Wieslstier sought to puncture the “unreal world” of Harvard professor Cornel West. Sullivan pushed his magazine to the frontlines of the Clinton-era effort to brutalize the welfare system, assigning white reporters to cover the political fight while relying on racist tropes to push the social optics of the issue on his magazine covers.
Like so much else in America, being a Black man in journalism is an unfairly difficult task, to say nothing of the additional barriers Black women face. American newsrooms are predominantly run by traditionally-educated, affluent white editors. Research shows this creates a culture hostile to diversification. Perhaps as nefariously, these editors push a farcical, confused, and ultimately cowardly editorial worldview predicated on the tortured strive for “objectivity.” It is the classic “view from nowhere,” an inoffensive, advertiser-friendly worldview that strives for neutrality but often serves to uphold the status quo. Reporting in this style often rejects the premise of identity, and frequently approaches monumental issues of race and gender with yawning indifference. The moral clarity in defining what issues merit debate is nonexistent.
In a country defined by its longstanding imbalances, this emphasis on “seeing both sides” of an issue often pushes journalists and publications into ridiculous contortions. We see it in the hours of coverage cable news dedicated to a presidential candidate lying and spewing racist dogwhistles, but we see it just as overtly and with even more cruelty when a predominantly white magazine “allows” its scant few black contributors to defend their entire race’s intellect against a white pseudo-intellect’s eugenics-twinged screed.
Much has changed since Sullivan’s New Republic. Diversity in newsrooms has inched closer to being representative of the country as a whole. Groundbreaking coverage of the Ferguson protests in 2014 changed the standards in reporting about police brutality and African-American communities. Seminal contemporary journalists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Weasley Lowery, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, and Jamelle Bouie—among countless others—have fundamentally shifted the discourse around race in traditionally stodgy institutions. Yet Black journalists still, with some notable exceptions, aren’t reaching the top of the masthead. And the ideology of rigid neutrality remains ironclad.
In a country being dragged painfully towards awareness, this confused law of objectivity is increasingly unsustainable. In the wake of protests across the country against police brutality towards the Black community, journalists of color are standing up and demanding a better work environment, one supportive of reporting that acknowledges the prejudices of the current moment and allows for the strive towards a better world. Here is a survey of the upheaval the last week has brought.
At the New York Times, the ouster of a controversial debate-minded opinions editor
After a remarkable display of public organizing by Black members of the New York Times newsroom, controversial Opinions editor James Bennet resigned on Sunday. The surprising ouster of Bennet, long-thought to be a candidate for the Times’ top job when current Executive Editor Dean Baquet retires in 2022, came days after the publication of a instantly infamous op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. Entitled “Send in the troops”, the essay argued for military force to quell nationwide protests against police brutality, while including a number of dubious arguments and outright falsehoods.
Since taking over the Opinions section in 2016, Bennet has oversaw a period of ambitious expansion and self-inflicted cataclysm. For every smarthire or breathtaking package, there have seemingly been five horrific misfires. From hiring intellectual diminutives like Bret Stephens, to giving a platform to crooks and grifters like Louise Mensch or Erik Prince, to failing to do the basic legwork of researching your new hire’s old tweets, Bennet has frequently embarrassed the newsroom that his section sits siloed off from. There’s something to be said for Bennet’s stated goal of building “a section that’s genuinely trying to wrestle with the ideas that are shaping America right now;” yet so many of his transgressions stem from downright incompetency. There’s nothing provocative or useful about allowing Bret Stephens to lazily fart out a column about the “secrets of Jewish genius”, as Bennet did to wide criticism late last year.
From the beginning, however, the Cotton blowup felt different. Cotton was openly advocating for violence against the public, arguing for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers,” by the military.
By midday on Tuesday, dozens of Times staffers had posted messages on Twitter criticizing the column, many with the identical phrasing of “ruining this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” The flurry of criticism was in clear violation of a Times policy against airing inner-grievances on social media. Yet the wording, organized in a internal Slack with language specifically developed with the input of the Times’ union, smartly focused on the workplace danger that may follow in practical application of Cotton’s rhetoric. The Times staff, organized in an unprecedented way by outraged reporters of color and supported by their robust union, had effectively forced upper management to address the internal strife.
What followed was five days of Bennet’s standing in the newsroom dissolving. Initially, Bennet defended the column, calling its clear abhorrence “one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.” Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger initially stood behind his editor, telling employees in an email on Thursday morning that “I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit”. Hundreds of Times journalists signed a letter condemning the column, while dozens of technology workers at the company staged a walkout. By the end of the day on Thursday, Sulzberger was acknowledging in an internal Slack message that Cotton’s article “did not meet our standards.” An editor’s note appended to the story late Thursday night acknowledged numerous errors and poor editorial decisions.
The pressure did not end. By Friday morning, during an internal town hall, Bennet appeared shell-shocked and despondent, according to what multiple Times staffers told Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo. He openly wept while acknowledging “the pain that this particular piece has caused. The pain that I acknowledge my leadership of Opinion, I’m responsible for this, has caused.” He also seemed genuinely interested in reform, speaking of the controversy as an opportunity to “interrogate everything about what we do in Opinion, including even the principles” of free debate and provacatation that he staked his tenure on. A New York Times source told Erik Wemple of the Washington Post that Bennet and his editors were debating cutting Opinion’s daily output substantially to allow for more editing work.
These reforms will happen without Bennet. By Sunday evening, Sulzberger had given up defending his embattled editor. “Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing process, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” Sulzberger said in a statement released to the media. “James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.”
In hindsight, the writing was on the wall when Bennet admitted he had not read Cotton’s column before it was published, yet another avoidable bit of incompetency. His standing in the newsroom was all but demolished when a respected editor said in an internal meeting on Friday that he would not work for Bennet, all but ending his hopes for gaining the top spot at The Times or retaining his current position.
For years now, the runningmedianarrative of The New York Times has been that of a cold war between the more establishment, “objectivity”-minded upper-masthead and a younger, more diverse staff interested in more openly-equitable reporting. Commentators, including some in the Times itself, have drawn the battle lines among the “woke” horde and the old guard of “civil libertarianism.”
While this delineation fits neatly into the cancel culture/campus snowflake narrative that so much contemporary opinion journalism lives on, it also profoundly misrepresents the stakes of the debate. Data shows that the Times is making real strides in gender and racial diversity. However, these advances are generally coming towards the bottom-rungs of the newsroom, while the upper-masthead remains predominantly white and male. Instead of demanding sensitivity, this new class of journalists is demanding a repagination of the “view from nowhere,” perhaps because they have experienced how harmful such thinking can be.
The new guard of media—and the next generation of The New York Times—earned a significant victory this week.
At Business Insider, uproar after editor in chief says journalists can’t donate to BLM charities
On Wednesday, at an all-hands meeting, Business Insider editor-in-chief Nich Carlson said that employees donating to protest relief programs like bail funds could “call into question our credibility in covering the protests.” According to a report by The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani, Carlson insinuated that donating to such direct-relief charities could “damage your credibility, and Insider’s credibility as a news organization.” Carlson’s comments angered a number of staff present, who interpreted his statement as a ban against charitable giving to bail funds.
Almost immediately after the meeting, Business Insider backed away from Carlson’s comments, with a spokesperson telling Tani that “[Carlson] does not want to render judgments about any one ‘charitable’ organization. Rather, he wants to underscore with the team the need to use their own best judgment as members of a newsroom which of course needs to cover news in an impartial way.”
At the Philadephia Inquirer, the Executive Editor resigns after a disgraceful headline
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but you should never, never, never, never equate human lives with buildings. Just ask Stan Wischnowski, the now-former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a daily newspaper that drew controversy last week for running an article entitled “Building Matter, Too.”
The astonishingly tone-death riff on the Black Lives Matter movement infuriated reporters at the Inquirer. An immediate apology followed from the editors, but the damage was already done to a newsroom already struggling with pay inequality and lagging rates of diversity in hiring. “The pain was just so palpable,” weekend editor Diane Mastrull told the New York Times.
The day after the headline ran, reporters across the newsroom called in sick as a show of protest. Forty-four journalists of color wrote an extraordinary open letter to the paper’s leadership, demanding action:
We’re tired of shouldering the burden of dragging this 200-year-old institution kicking and screaming into a more equitable age. We’re tired of being told of the progress the company has made and being served platitudes about “diversity and inclusion” when we raise our concerns. We’re tired of seeing our words and photos twisted to fit a narrative that does not reflect our reality. We’re tired of being told to show both sides of issues there are no two sides of. … This is not the start of a conversation; this conversation has been started time and time again. We demand action. We demand a plan, with deadlines. We demand full, transparent commitment to changing how we do business. No more “handling internally.” No more quiet corrections. If we are to walk into a better world, we need to do it with our chests forward—acknowledge and accept where we make mistakes, and show how we learn from them. Your embarrassment is not worth more than our humanity.
By the end of the week, Wischnowski was gone.
At Refinery29, a public reckoning after years of hostile workplace conditions
Like so many online-first publications, Refinery29 rose to prominence by embracing the burgeoning online feminism movement, by creating an editorial identity that embodied gender and racial diversity. Unfortunately, like so many other online-first publications, this was done on the back of an often-exploited and under-compensated workforce, who did their jobs in an environment that felt at odds with the site’s public perception.
This week, long-simmering workplace dissent boiled over at Refinery29, culminating in the resignation of the site’s top editor and co-founder, Christene Barberich.
The criticism of Barberich’s leadership began on Twitter, after the site blacked out their homepage in solidarity with Blackout Tuesday. Former employees criticized the company for pay gaps between white and black staff, microaggressions from management, and a tone-death, vengeful culture at odds with the website’s professed values. Former editor Ashley Edwards described one such incident:
I was brought in with the title “senior editor” although I was doing the job same job as all the directors, was in all directors meetings, and in many cases had way more reporting experience. There were several times I was confronted with problematic situations and I called it out, which I’m almost positive impacted a promotion. Like once, when I raised concerns about the tone of a personal essay about the immigration written by a white actress who grew up in Texas that my team was being forced to run. I emailed the EIC about how I felt this essay could be seen as tone deaf and insensitive when 1) this actress didn’t really grow up in a “border town” and 2) there were plenty of Latina writers who could authentically write about this crisis. The next day, I was pulled into an office by the EIC and told in a very threatening tone that she felt I “was telling her and not asking her” about my concerns. The essay ran and was flooded with negative comments. When it was time for me to get promoted, I was promoted to deputy director, not director, without any clear explanation why. There was no one above me.
The hashtag #BlackAtR29 is filled with similar stories. Former editor Channing Hargrove said she was fired after an editorial executive began building “a case against me” for unclear reasons. Khalea Underwood described a culture where white editors would mock the writing of their black subordinates on Slack.
In an Instagram post announcing her resignation, Barberich said that “its time for a new generation of leadership that’s truly reflective of the diversity of our audience with divergent points of view, one that builds an expands on our original mission to amplify and celebrate a wide range of voices, perspectives, and stories.” It’s a solid acknowledgment of what needs to be done, but Refinery29 rose to prominence by using similar language to gain their audience. Let’s see if the new leadership can actually live up to their own values this time.
At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, solidarity after a black reporter is removed from protests coverage for “bias”
Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are in the midst of an extraordinary campaign of public pressure, after a black reporter was removed from covering Black Lives Matter protests after she posted a sarcastic tweet.
On May 31st, Alexis Johnson tweeted four photos of a trashed city street. “Horrifying scenes and aftermath from selfish LOOTERS who don’t care about this city!!!!! …. oh wait sorry. No, these are pictures from a Kenny Chesney concert tailgate. Whoops,” she added.
The next day, according to a CNN report, editors told her that “her tweet violated social media policy and that she was being pulled off protest coverage.” Coincidently, days later, sports reporter Joshua Axelrod called a looter a “vulgar slang word” on Twitter. According to a NPR report, Axelrod, who is white, was reprimanded by his editors but not taken off the protest beat.
The harsh punishment for Johnson—coupled with the contradictory action with Axlerod—has led to a backlash in the newsroom. On Monday, the Post-Gazette Guild called on the newspaper’s advertisers to demand Johnson’s reinstatement as a condition for their buisness, an unprecedented public demand from a news union. Management at the Post-Gazette has not responded, although a staff photograher, Michael Santiago, told WESA that he was removed from the protest coverage after tweeting support for Johnson.
At Bon Appetit, a top editor’s brown-face picture forces a rapidly-expanding video department to confront its management
Bon Appetit is perhaps the only successful “pivot to video”. It’s chummy, deeply engaging Youtube videos have attracted a massive audience. As Louis Peitzman wrote in 2018 for Buzzfeed News, the channel’s success comes from the intimacy of its hosts; by “highlight the charming idiosyncrasies of their chefs and the convivial relationship between them.” But what happens when that illusion of idlic friendship is shattered?
Over the weekend, a 2013 Instagram photo of BA editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport in brown face resurfaced online. Sohla El-Waylly, an editor at Bon Appetit and one of the few people of color to appear regularly on the channel, said she was “disgusted” by Rapoport’s photo and that he should step down. Additionally, she alleged that “currently only white editors are paid for their video appearances. None of the people of color have been compensated for their appearances.” Former staff member Alex Lau concurred, saying that “white leadership refused to make changes that my BIPOC coworkers and I constantly pushed for.”
Almost immediately, Bon Appetit plunged into crisis. Two popular video personalities, Molly Baz and Carla Lalli Music, promised to not appear in videos until El-Waylly’s issues were addressed. A vocal social media fan base demanded changes. On a staff call that afternoon, many in the newsroom were opening calling for Rapoport’s resignation, according to the New York Times. It came late Monday night, less than 24 hours after El-Waylly’s tweets.
Condé Nast, the company that owns Bon Appitet, denies that there is a racial disparity in payment for video appearances. However, CEO Roger Lynch says the incident will lead to the company “accelerating our first ever diversity and inclusion report to be published later this summer.”
Condé Nast has been the premiere American magazine publisher for over a hundred years. You’ll have to wait until this summer to get an idea of its racial diversity. “Just a reminder that this isn’t solely a BA problem,” Lau wrote yesterday. “This is a Conde Nast problem. Blame Roger Moore, blame Anna Wintour, blame all of the people in Conde corporate that you’ve never heard of. They are responsible for creating this culture.”
At Sports Illustrated/The Maven, a beleaguered staff pushes back against profiteering off the Blue Lives Matter counter-movement
When the media conglomerate The Maven bought legendary sports magazine Sports Illustrated last year, staff were understandably terrified. The Maven’s business model is based on the depressing singularity of a dying media industry and an exploitative gig economy: rather than traditional employment, the Maven frequently hires writers as independent contractors, and essentially tasks them with running all editorial, social, and business operations for their site. In exchange, they are given a merger $25,000 to $30,000 a year, with bonuses for large traffic months. Oh and also the entire company is run by two upwards-failing media bros with a history of misconduct allegations.
One of The Maven’s affiliated sites is called Defense Maven, although throughout the website it’s referred to by a different name: Blue Lives Matter. Yes, it’s a Cop Site, with all the hateful, anti-protestor comments and racist cop glorification that entails.
According to Maxwell Tani at the Daily Beast, the Maven is under substantial pressure from its employees to cut ties with Defense Maven and its racist, violent community. A town hall on diversity turned tense when employees made a stand. “We are not asking for a wide-ranging conversation about diversity right now,” one employee said. “We’re asking for you to take that site down and explain why it is still up.” Other staff members called it “embarrassing,” “a disgrace,” and “horrible.”
As of Tuesday morning, visitors attempting to access Defense Maven are greeted with a open letter, one that acknowledges the site “has been overrun by people more focused on division and hate” and promising a “temporary step back on the website and are making new plans and tactics to move forward and fulfill our original vision and mission.” While the letter says this new publication will live on a “separate platform”, its unclear if The Maven is still financially involved.
Throughout this week of upheaval, a familiar voice has wailed on, demanding a return to his status quo. Andrew Sullivan, now perched comfortably as a weekly columnist at New York Magazine, has been having a bad week. He wanted to write about the protests, but whatever he intended to write was so monstrous that his editors refused to let him. Confined to Twitter, he has watched his ideological peer, Bennet, become engulfed in flames, a development he has called “a total surrender,” “insane”, and “an extinction level event for liberal democracy.” He has been unrepentant about his past, instead holding up the Murray incident as an example of responsible, debate-minded, editorial leadership.
Sullivan’s view of the role of the media in a liberal democracy is unavoidably and by design exclusive. Its reporting is that of constantly pained objectivity; a ideology that is not coincidently easiest to assume if you are white and male. Its commentary exists as siloed castle where great minds can freely debate the tenants of moral issues. This view of media is a construct based on exclusion, it exist in constant opposition to the massed hordes at the gate, who see the reality behind monstrous ideas that Sullivan views only in the abstract. They call for the castle’s reformation, and the castle’s strength comes from its ability to ignore them.
It is ironic, then, that Sullivan has spent the past week screaming about the loss of his ideological empire on Twitter. He is—for the first time in his remarkably privileged career—just another voice in the masses.
There is much to be done in building an equitable and representative media industry. But it is constructive to note that Andrew Sullivan is no longer in a position of editorial power. We must savor the small victories on the long path to building a better future.
A reading list on this moment in history
To state the obvious for a moment: there are a lot of remarkable things happening right now. I often feel that I lack the language, experience, and intellect to adequately convey the reality of what is happening across the country. Instead, I’ve been finding solace in reading writers I admire, who have been capturing the terror, possibility, and hope of this moment. Here’s some of my favorite pieces from the last week.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has a masterful essay in the New Yorker on what brought us to this moment and how we can move forward. Everyone should read it:
The question is: How do we change this country? It’s not a new question; for African-Americans, it’s a question as old as the nation itself. A large part of the reason that rebels swell the streets with clenched fists and expressive eyes is the refusal or inability of this society to engage that question in a satisfying way. Instead, those asking the question are patronized with sweet-sounding speeches, made with alliterative apologia, often interspersed with recitations about the meaning of America, and ultimately in defense of the status quo. There is a palpable poverty of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a banality of ideas pervading mainstream politics today. Old and failed propositions are recycled, but proclaimed as new, reviving cynicism and dismay.
The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber, Farrah Stockman, and J. David Goodman took a look at the entrenched power of police unions, finding a number of defiant and powerful organizations that are “one of the most significant roadblocks to [police reform.” A lot of details here to get your blood absolutely boiling, but this one is perhaps the worst:
When Steve Fletcher, a Minneapolis city councilman and frequent Police Department critic, sought to divert money away from hiring officers and toward a newly created office of violence prevention, he said, the police stopped responding as quickly to 911 calls placed by his constituents.
Alex Pareene at the New Republic on reports of white militias in the streets of Philadelphia and what it says about our police system:
This disparity in cop reactions to demonstrations could be seen as a bias against the left and in favor of the right, but that’s not 1st the whole picture. A wholly unregulated, seemingly impromptu militia is allowed to participate in the guarding of Philadelphia not strictly because it might be more likely to support the Republican president, but because it is white and vocally defending the extant system of dominance and hierarchy against those who seek to upend or even simply reform it.
Jay Rosen, for PressThink, writes about the New York Times and the end of “debate club democracy”:
Debate club democracy — where people of good will share a common world of fact but disagree on what should be done — is an expensive illusion to maintain during a presidency that tries to undermine every independent and factual check there is on the executive’s power, not just a free press and its journalism, but the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the civil service, government scientists, inspectors general, and Congress in its oversight function. Stories about the Trump government undermining all of these have appeared in the New York Times. They are ably reported. But at some point the light bulb has to flick on. This isn’t debate club. It’s an attack on the institutions of American democracy. Just as police work in our cities isn’t law enforcement constrained by the Constitution. It’s systemized suspicion of Black people, free of Constitutional constraint, and it frequently ends in violence.
Ostia Nwanevu at the New Republic also looks at this week’s Times blowup, but instead finds another example of the right’s cultural fatalism, and the “liberal” media’s tendency to appease them:
It would take some time to fully unravel the ways in which the right’s long- standing cultural resentments and anxieties began congealing into an open illiberalism and an untroubled enthusiasm for putting down progressives by state force. But it should be said that some of the groundwork has been laid by figures in the mainstream press, including voices at the Times and The Atlantic, who have worked hard to promulgate the idea that the progressive movement has been overtaken by a totalitarian horde of irrational and emotionally weak, if not psychologically disturbed, crusaders. Broad acceptance of the idea that progressives want to impose their virtues by “any means necessary” has been seeded, in part, by a discourse that regularly distorts pocket controversies on social media and on college campuses into atrocities comparable to the Spanish Inquisition. And there’s not much distance between Cotton’s line about “chic salons” and the insistence of centrist writers that many of the left’s concerns are decadent, frou-frou obsessions.
Jamelle Bouie, at the New York Time’s opinion section, on the significance and history of police rioting:
What we’ve seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence; we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.
And, finally, Betty Morris and Alexandria Nelson at the Columbia Journalism Review take a step back and contextualize the chaos of the last six months. For anyone overwhelmed by everything happening, this is essential reading:
The web of connections is intricate and vast. In recent days, many journalists—and those following the news—have used the word overwhelming to describe this moment. Yet it’s important to acknowledge that the situation did not arise suddenly. To properly contextualize our reporting, we must look at how we got here, turning back at least as far as the beginning of the calendar year.
What else is going on?
Here’s a surprising one: Axios, the hyper-active politics news organization, is allowing its reporters to attend protests as participants. In a statement to the New York Times, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei said that “We trust our colleagues to do the right thing, and stand firmly behind them should they decide to exercise their constitutional right to free speech.” Most news organizations prohibit reporters from attending protests or political rallies out of a fear of appearing biased.
The New York Times is backing away from a Organization of American States audit of the 2019 Bolivian election**. The paper had cited the study in coverage of Bolivian political crisis as evidence of “widespread concerns about fraud.” Now, it says the audit “relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques,” citing a recent independent study. This likely comes as little relief to people of Bolivia, who now live under increasingly right-wing authoritarian rule after President Eve Morales was forced out in a coup by a military that believed his election was fraudulent.
G/O Media’s traffic is cratering. Some of this can be blamed on the coronavirus pandemic, but we cannot ignore the disastrous management installed when private equity acquired the sites last year. CEO Jim Spanfeller has oversaw the destruction of two beloved websites, a massive exodus of talent, and a user-hostile set of redesigns. He should leave.
Remember the global pandemic? Arizona is in the midst of a massive spike in infections and hospitalizations, with experts worrying that Governor Doug Ducey may not reimplement lockdown policies if things get worse. Also, new cases have reached a global high. But at least Californians will get to go back to the movies soon.
Some exciting endorsements in upcoming Congressional primaries: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have thrown their weight behind Jamaal Bowman, the progressive candidate running to unseat the embattled incumbent Eliot Englel in the 16th New York district. Engel was recently caught on a hot mic saying that “if I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care” about speaking at a Black Lives Matter protest. Sanders and Cortez also endorsed Charles Booker, a state representative running a longshot progressive campaign to challenge Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky Senate race. Their endorsement of Booker stands in direct opposition to the Democratic establishment, who by and large prefer the more moderate Amy McGrath. Both primaries are scheduled for June 23rd.
That’s it for this edition of Video Loss. If you have any feedback or comments, please don’t hesitate to leave a note below. I’m also available at tom@tombunting.net or through Twitter. If you liked this newsletter, please consider subscribing or telling a friend.