Contra Evan Urquhart On The Right To Journalistic Exclusion

(Because it doesn’t exist.)

Journalists on Bluesky (via Getty)

Last week The New York Times released The Protocol, a six-part podcast series about the American fight over youth gender medicine. The podcast is hosted by Austin Mitchell and centers on the work of Azeen Ghorayshi, the science section’s point person on this subject. Katie and I will discuss it on the next free episode of Blocked and Reported, but you should listen to it in the meantime.

For now, I’d like to talk a bit about the reaction. Or preaction, to be more precise. Well before the podcast was released, activists were outraged. They were outraged, at root, because they do not think there should be any meaningful debate over any substantive aspect of youth gender medicine. I understand that many activists would claim otherwise, that I am caricaturing their position, but their actions speak otherwise. And the more honest members of this group are open about their views.

To her credit, Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter at The Guardian US, expressed this explicitly on Bluesky: “The idea that there should be a public debate about the appropriate medical care for a minuscule population of children remains one of the most absurd lies that these liberal transphobes, NYT edit board included, tell themselves. No there shouldn’t! It’s not an appropriate matter for public debate!”

Because these critics are opposed to any genuine coverage of this issue but aren’t usually willing to say so out loud, they often have to reverse-engineer reasons to be mad. In the case of The Times, which has come under a lot of unfair fire from these activists in recent years, that has led to all sorts of ridiculously bad faith accusations, some of which can fairly be called lies.

It’s unsurprising, then, that in the run-up to the release of The Protocol, activists busily engineered reasons to get mad at the Times over a podcast that didn’t yet exist. GLAAD, to take one example, issued a searing preemptive denunciation of the podcast-to-be.

Whenever one of these outrage campaigns spins up, the activists will attempt to attack the journalist(s) in question by misrepresenting journalistic norms and then claiming those norms were violated. It’s annoying when activists do it; it’s very annoying when journalists themselves do it, which seems to happen quite often.

A truly idiotic version of this occurred last week. Evan Urquhart, the trans journalist and activist, seems to consider the Times and Ghorayshi to be mortal enemies. (He is not a fan of my work either.)

Urquhart therefore already knew, before he listened to a word of The Protocol, that it was going to land somewhere between “terrible” and “heinously evil.” He faced a challenge, though, because he couldn’t critique a podcast that hadn’t yet aired.

A solution: Accuse Ghorayshi and the Times of violating a journalistic norm based on an unhappy source. Which is what he did. The day The Protocol came out but before it was up, Urquhart published a new investigation, if you can call it that, on his website, Assigned Media. He was also able to get it co-published by the lefty outlet The Objective. Keep in mind, again, that everything that follows was published before anyone involved had heard the podcast, because it wasn’t out yet.

“Hey everyone, I have a new story out showing how the sausage got made in the new NYT podcast on youth gender-affirming care,” said Urquhart on Bluesky. “It’s pretty ugly—my source refused to participate in the podcast so reporters used audio of her captured in public against her will.”

If you’ll indulge me:

This is very confusing. If the producers of a podcast decide that audio of someone recorded in public is relevant to the story, then at the end of the day, whether that person wants their audio used — or approves of the podcast itself! — is almost wholly irrelevant.

I say almost because, as with most debates over journalistic norms, it does depend a bit on the specifics. There may well be instances in which you grant a source’s requests not to appear in a story (at least by name), not use their audio, et cetera. And there could be other instances in which most editors and producers might agree that posting certain publicly recorded audio crosses a line, like someone’s last words before they are killed in a mass shooting, or something like that.

But overall, Urquhart’s post is devoid of any real accusation: Nothing in there suggests anyone at the Times did anything wrong. Maybe there’s more context in the actual article?

Here’s his more in-depth account:

A New York Times podcast on transgender youth health care, released June 5, features the mother of a trans girl against her will after producers caught a vulnerable moment on tape.

. . .

The audio clip captures a confrontation between Heidi, the mother of a trans girl, and Jamie Reed, a former Missouri gender clinic staffer-turned-activist whose sworn affidavit misrepresented the medical history of Heidi’s daughter, Grace.

Although Heidi refused to be interviewed for the podcast, the New York Times senior vice president of external communications, Danielle Rhoades Ha, maintains the paper is within its rights to use the audio. Via email, Rhoades Ha stated that Heidi “was aware that the Times was recording for the purposes of audio journalism” and the audio was recorded at a public courthouse, “where news media were allowed to attend and record.”

GLAAD dutifully picked up on this, linking to Urquhart’s piece in its prebunking of The Protocol and writing, “One parent says the Times captured audio from them outside a courtroom, which the reporter knew was a public space and therefore fair game for the Times’ purposes, further poisoning the Times’ reputation with unwilling sources.”

This piece is about journalistic ethics, not the broader dispute between Reed and the mom, who goes by the name Heidi. But I want to be clear that Urquhart is correct that Reed’s affidavit misrepresented Heidi’s experience. Reed said she included the story in question after hearing it secondhand from a nurse she worked for. My own view, having spoken and corresponded extensively with Reed, is that this is more likely an honest — albeit very foolish — error than intentional deception on her part. Reed’s claims tend to check out (when they are checkable), and when Ghorayshi devoted significant time and resources to investigating them, that was what she found, though she also found parents who vehemently disagreed with Reed’s assessment of the quality of the care delivered at the clinic. It was Ghorayshi’s article that first reported the discrepancy between Heidi’s experience and Reed’s description of it(!), and that piece quoted her directly. “My daughter’s situation was exploited,” she told Ghorayshi. No reasonable person can accuse the Times of ignoring this falsehood in Reed’s affidavit (more on which shortly) or not letting Heidi (justifiably) complain about it.

Urquhart’s article explains that Heidi has not been happy with Ghorayshi’s coverage of the case. Which is Heidi’s right, and is not, on its own, an indictment of Ghorayshi or The Times — it would be impossible to write any in-depth story on this subject that didn’t leave some of the people involved feeling unhappy. But, again, there is no violation of any norm here. The Times is allowed to play publicly recorded audio, and any wobbly argument to the contrary collapses entirely by dint of the fact that Heidi knew she was being recorded, as The Times told Urquhart. (Later in the piece, Urquhart attempts to buttress his position by quoting “an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin whose work has focused on solidarity journalism,” but if you read those quotes carefully, there’s no there there, especially given that the Times asked Heidi for an interview and she declined one.)

Even before the podcast came out, it was clear this was a ridiculous attempt to smear the Times and the team behind The Protocol. Urquhart, an experienced professional journalist who recently completed a prestigious MIT fellowship where he must have received yet more training on the craft, surely knows this, as do the journalists — including the editors at The Objective — amplifying this nothingburger attack on the Times. (I emailed Urquhart and Gabe Schneider, co-executive director of The Objective. Urquhart replied to acknowledge having received my query but said he did not want to speak about this on the record, and I did not hear back from Schneider.)

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Once the podcast came out, though, it was clear that even “ridiculous” wasn’t sufficient to capture how silly Urquhart’s allegation is. The segment in question comes from Episode 4, which covers Reed’s accusations and eventual testimony in support of Missouri’s ban on youth gender medicine.

Austin Mitchell explains in the episode:

There was one woman in particular who was clearly agitated by Jamie’s testimony. When Jamie was talking about a medication used at the clinic with a risk of liver toxicity, the woman stood up from her seat and left the room. Azeen gave me a look and then followed her out.

The podcast doesn’t name her, but that woman was Heidi. After their testimony, Mitchell was talking to Reed outside the courthouse. Here’s what happened next, according to the transcript:

Austin Mitchell: As we were talking, we saw Azeen and the woman that she’d followed out of the courtroom heading in our direction.

Mitchell [from the recording]: Sorry, I’m recording, if that’s all right. Just to let y’all know.

The woman stopped a few feet away from Jamie.

Speaker 1 [Heidi]: Collateral damage. Ruined lives because of lies. So, so sad for me? That’s my problem now? That’s my problem?

Mitchell: This was the parent whose daughter’s case had been misrepresented in Jamie’s affidavit. It was a case Jamie had pointed to as one of the most egregious examples of harm she had seen at the clinic. She said the teenager had experienced liver damage after being prescribed a drug to block testosterone, and that this parent had then made a kind of threat to the clinic, saying she was not the type to sue, but that, quote, “this could be a huge PR problem for you.”

In actuality, Azeen had learned, the patient did experience liver damage, but the medical situation had been more complicated than the affidavit had accounted for. And the girl’s mother, this parent, had never threatened the clinic. When Azeen went to Jamie with this, Jamie acknowledged that she’d gotten the information secondhand from the clinic’s nurse, but she said it didn’t change what she thought was the most important part of the story — that the kid had been harmed.

The Times did not do anything remotely wrong here. Heidi chose to walk over and be recorded, and then her voice was used. She later turned down an interview request for the podcast. In a text message that Heidi said I could use for this post, she said, “I'm not mad about how I was portrayed. I never said that. I did not want to be part of the podcast.... period. I was asked several times and said no. The NYT found a legal loophole.” But again, this isn’t some sort of strange, sneaky loophole — Heidi chose to confront Reed with reporters and recording equipment present.

I don’t blame Heidi or other non-journalists for sometimes being unaware of or misunderstanding journalistic norms. But Urquhart is simply acting out an ongoing vendetta here, not engaging in remotely reasonable media criticism. And all the people within journalism amplifying his claims, including The Objective, are, frankly, pretending to be stupid, and using that feigned stupidity as a cudgel against Ghorayshi, her team, and The Times.

Just to zoom back out to the basic point here, since so many people are attempting to muddy the waters: No legal adult, anywhere, has any ironclad right not to be included in a piece of journalism, whether they like the thrust of that journalism or not (journalism does treat minors differently, but that’s not relevant to this case). Journalists are certainly required to hear out adults who want to be kept out of stories, or who want to remain anonymous (again, the Times does not use Heidi’s name, which I think is itself a pseudonym, in the podcast), but that’s the only requirement, and it isn’t always granted. “We can’t use this person’s publicly uttered and legally recorded quote because they asked us not to” just isn’t a thing in journalism.

Further extending the logic, “This source is mad about the story” does not, on its own, tell you anything about the quality of the underlying reporting, any more than a guy disliking a film tells you that the film is bad. This, too, is a made-up norm — one that no competent journalist believes — that Urquhart has been using for years to attack the Times, and Ghorayshi in particular. Despite the fact that competent professional journalists understand that upsetting sources is an unavoidable part of the profession, for years, now, a subset of assholes within this industry have been trying to nuke Ghorayshi’s reputation on the basis of a handful of upset parents. Noah Kulwin jumps to mind as just one of many examples:

He is a professional journalist! He knows that the fact that a group of parents got mad at Ghorayshi for her reporting does not mean she did anything wrong. It’s one thing to be stupid — it’s another to pretend to be stupid for the sake of joining an ugly online dogpile against a fellow journalist.

It doesn’t help anyone to misinform the public about journalistic norms. If you encounter a journalist, you should assume, unless you have an explicit agreement otherwise or unless there’s some other intervening law or rule, that anything you say to or near them could end up being published. That’s just the way the world works. The Bluesky crowd might respond to Urquhart’s hit piece with feigned outrage — HOW COULD THEY DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT?? — but this whole thing is pathetically contrived. They can’t actually engage, so they make shit up.

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Questions? Comments? Requests to quote from this newsletter without my express written, verbal, and sung approval, which is a violation of both state and federal law? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on X at @jessesingal.