From here! All links in question text added by me.
How did you get to be so cool and handsome and charming? Asking for a friend. —Yassine Meskhout
Check’s in the mail.
I'll bite. What do you think might be happening at the NYT lately, among its editors and on the news room floor, to shape decisions about which transgender frames to publish? Are there cracks in the artifice of full stop support for gender ideology that we're seeing in some of the recent articles, including Bazelon's but also Pamela Paul's piece, "She Wrote a Dystopian Novel. What Happened Next Was Pretty Dystopian," and Michael Powell's, "What Lia Thomas Could Mean for Women’s Elite Sports"? I'm not optimistic, just curious if the journalists over there are coming to their senses, and being allowed to admit it. —Kemah
I speculated a bit about this on my Callin show the other day. I do think that there was a moment, especially during the peak of the summer 2020 Reckoning, when some outlets put way too much effort into appeasing their most radical, perpetually aggrieved staffers, who tended to be younger. The radicals aren’t just journalists, but, especially at big institutions like the Times, folks in tech and other supporting roles, and they really see part of their job as spreading the gospel about social justice. Definitely check out Reeves Wiedeman’s reporting on all this.
A lot of the time, these folks don’t really hold “traditional” views about what journalism is and how journalists should conduct themselves. I’m not saying there’s any single monolithic incumbent understanding, as journalists themselves argue perpetually about this. But the insurgents really didn’t see much of a difference between journalism and activism. They also, in my opinion, take a particularly punitive approach to colleagues who are seen as violating certain tenets of their belief system, as was abundantly evident during the James Bennet and Donald McNeil Jr. dustups.
All of this led to a situation where bosses were likely to coddle and kowtow to employees not really interested in producing good journalism (as traditionally defined), and, perhaps more importantly, a situation where journalists and editors who disagreed with this approach, despite likely being the majority or the overwhelming majority in a place like the Times, decided to keep their mouths shut. The jobs situation in journalism is so bad, especially if you have a family to support and/or a mortgage to pay. After you’ve watched two or three meltdowns and unjust firings/forced resignations, why in God’s name would you do anything to risk the outrage of the young and the Slacking? Even if you’re not worried about your job, per se — and only a few people actually get ousted as a result of these meltdowns — it’s incredibly unpleasant to watch your colleagues openly deride you for your lack of commitment to the cause. So a lot of employees stayed quiet, and some of them emailed me about how insane things were getting within their outlets.
But the would-be revolutionaries were always a small, loud minority. As a Times staffer pointed out to me, 150 signatures sounds like a lot, but the vast majority of the newsroom didn’t sign the above letter. Most journalists want to do something resembling journalism, and most editors get tired and bored by the fifth or sixth time they have assigned a story along the lines of Isn’t Black Lives Matter Brave And Good? Also, the business types who run media outlets like making money! There’s been a pretty established track record, in past years, of media products (particularly podcasts) designed from the ground up to appeal to the sort of person who would sign a letter seeking Donald McNeil Jr.’s re-investigation failing spectacularly. I was never able to confirm it, but I heard from someone who would know that one Gimlet podcast developed for this crowd, which had a lot of marketing muscle (and money) behind it, got five thousand downloads per episode. That is nothing! Katie and I, two abjectly incompetent people with no marketing budget when we launched, blew past that quite easily with a diet of mediocre dick jokes (me) and thinly veiled anti-Semitism (her).
Yes, here and there these sorts of products enjoy success — Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, for example — but I just don’t think there’s all that big an audience for this particular style, which tends toward the ponderous and predictable and preachy. I am not saying Americans are uninterested in media dealing with race and identity and social justice. We are big and diverse and are only getting bigger and more diverse. It’s the particular style of this fare that people find off-putting.
So for places like the Times, there has to have been some realization that they were publishing a lot of dreck that really appealed only to maybe 5% of the country, if that. Who is reading and reacting positively to “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”? Not a lot of people. I think it’s actually good to get (intelligent) radical and far-left takes into the mix in mainstream publications, but this kind of stuff made up a bigger and bigger proportion of the Times’ output, and it was often staggeringly unsophisticated and incurious. And sure enough, some of these views seeped into news reporting — I’ll never forget this bonkers Times story about police abolition/defunding in which it really did seem as though the reporters, like, fled from any black people who expressed the majority view on that subject.
I think there was probably a general sense in the building that the Times needed to recalibrate a bit, hence carving out the new beat for Michaell Powell, hiring John McWhorter, etc. Remember that all along, there has been very active back-channel conversation, among liberals, on just about every subject you can’t bring up in a questioning manner on Twitter without risking a shellacking. It’s not like normie Obama liberals stopped talking about the complexities of police reform and their skepticism of abolition because 10 mean Times associate whatevers waged a Slack jihad. It’s not like those same normie Obama liberals stopped noticing that a bunch of teens suddenly wanted to transition, or that they stopped exhibiting basic human curiosity about the effects of blockers and hormones. And it’s not like the Times was going to ignore these back-channel conversations forever. How could it? It would be suicide. On top of all that, once Donald Trump was out of office I think the siege mentally lifted, just a little bit, which probably created a bit more room for actual journalism and critical thinking.
I read The Quick Fix recently and thought it was super interesting. I noticed that despite finding huge problems with all the social psychological research you examined that you frequently wanted to draw a distinction between the good and the bad research. The book wasn’t really about good research, but [I] was wondering what you thought social psychology has actually accomplished[?] Biology has given us vaccines and detailed information about the history of life. Physics and engineering has made cars, planes, and phones. Are there big wins from social psychology that have stood the test of time? —Colin
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