Younger people with sad faces
This is just silly. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair on the woke young versus the [??] old at the NY Times the night Trump won the election:
Reporters and editors were in overdrive, tearing up one historic front page for another. The story that America’s paper of record had been gearing up to tell in the coming days—months, years—was being obliterated in real time. From a journalistic perspective, that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic.
Ok wait just a god damn minute. Yes, sure it was in a sense good news for journalists, but journalists are also human beings and citizens, and people with thoughts and feelings, and in many cases parents of children who will have to live many decades with whatever messes a new president may decide to make. I can believe an executive editor would be excited about the news possibilities but I can’t believe that would be the dominant emotion, no not even for the executive editor of the Times. The people at the Times have to live here. A glorious flood of stories doesn’t blot out a perpetual horror show.
But it didn’t go unnoticed that, for some in the newsroom, the journalistic mission was not exactly front of mind. “I just remember younger people with sad faces,” a person who was there told me, describing those employees as generally being in roles that are adjacent to reporting and editing. Baquet remarked to colleagues in the coming days about how surprised he was by that. “He’s thinking, We’ve got a great story on our hands,” my source said. “That was the first indication that a unified newsroom in the age of Trump was going to be a very difficult thing to achieve or maintain.”
That’s ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous. If he really did say and think that, there’s something wrong with him. You don’t even have to be on the left to see Trump as a horror show – look at Richard Painter, Bill Kristol, David Frum.
All this is by way of leading into a rather overwrought piece on the political divide at the Times that invokes the usual clichés to not much purpose.
I saw it via some tweets of Chris Stedman’s which sent me to a blog post by Jerry Coyne about the Vanity Fair piece. I very seldom read Coyne these days and I was startled at how…unpleasant he’s gotten.
Now Grania and I always have the argument that Eli referred to: whether the kids will grow out of their Control-Leftism when they enter the work force…
It’s been evident to me for about a year that the New York Times is becoming more and more aligned with the Regressive Left. This likely reflects the election of Trump, but also the currents in universities that were moving even during Obama’s time. Just look at any front page online, and you’ll see articles conditioned and prompted by intersectionalist Leftism.
So, for example, they’ve hired Lindy West as a columnist, who, to my mind, is not only absolutely predictable in what she says, but can’t write, either. True, they did hire Bari Weiss, a Leftist who condemns the Regressive Left, but she’s been demonized not just by the RL, but by her own colleagues at The Times, as I described in a recent post.
Control-Left this, Regressive Left that – to describe anyone he doesn’t agree with, which seems to be nearly everyone. He also makes a sharp distinction between reporting facts and editorializing, which I don’t think makes a lot of sense. He takes exception to a video headline: “How Scott Pruitt’s Repeated Disregard For Ethics Is Finally Catching Up To Him.” Is it not factually true that Pruitt has broken some explicit rules and ignored many ethical norms and precedents? I suppose the headline could be worded slightly more neutrally – “Scott Pruitt Has Broken Several Ethical Rules; Now He Is Having Problems” – but I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of difference.
Coyne looks to Woodward and Bernstein for the good old just the facts reporting:
Take the Watergate affair. While the editorial page of The Washington Post was calling out the administration’s perfidy, those who ultimately brought it down, Woodward and Bernstein, were just reporting the facts. You didn’t see either of those two going on the television to call for Nixon’s impeachment. And that’s the way it should be. Journalists give the facts (granted, they can be slanted a tad; we all know the Times has a Leftist tilt), while the op-eds give us fact-based opinions.
Going on tv to call for Nixon’s or Trump’s impeachment is one thing, and giving “the facts” some context is another. Calling for impeachment or reciting the president’s activities for the day are not the only two choices. Good journalism, like good history, requires more than “just the facts.”
And then, there are the comments on Coyne’s post. He comes down like a ton of bricks on people he sees as “breaking the rules” but his rules are rather…self-serving. The first two comments are no problem at all, apparently.
38 Comments
Taking Lindy West on board is enough to sink any ship.
omg. I tried not to laugh. Really, I did.
Bahahahahahaha.
Nice, huh?
That’s Matt Cavanaugh in the screenshot, if you remember the name. This guy.
So it’s only young people with sad faces? That seems to be the mantra everywhere – only us old people elected Trump, and every person over 30 voted for Trump (never mind that it isn’t true, it sounds nice to people who want young people to be good and old people to be bad). In my experience (granted, it probably isn’t a representative sample, but it might be representative of the area of the country that elected Trump), the young people either (1) voted for Trump; (2) voted for Jill Stein; or (3) didn’t vote because they couldn’t stand Hillary and were mad because Bernie didn’t get the nomination.
In short, we needed their help, and now they are sad because they got what they settled for, because Hillary was just too…old…too female…too e-mail deleting for them. I hear the young people around me continue to berate Hillary, and NONE OF THEM will admit she actually got more votes than Trump. She is a loser! She is a bad candidate! She should have never thrown her hat in the ring, how dare she, how could she do this to their future…oh, yeah, well, I didn’t vote, but if I had voted, I’d have voted for Hillary…maybe…probably…but she was just too…Hillary…for me, and besides, she something something e-mails something something foundation something.
I’m more sympathetic to the sad faces on those of us who worked for Hillary, who stumped for Hillary, who voted for Hillary, and who still got…Trump. In spite of the fact that the amount of votes Hillary had more than Trump was enough to populate the state I live in…twice over again.
Very common: when people want to dismiss something, they usually first pin some label on it. It helps the dismissal process enormously.
I do wish that journalists would get the hint that their readers are not more interested in them as a profession or as a professional culture than we are interested in the workings and feelings of, say, shoe retailers. Yes, shoe retailers are people; yes, shoe retailers as such must have some unique perspective (particularly on, say, shoes, and the retailing thereof); and yes, in the great big world of news, some part of it surely will be both readable and about them. But the editors probably have a good idea of how large the slice of the compelling news pie belongs to shoe retailers and allocates appropriately, and they need to learn to cut similarly when it comes to news about news reporters and maybe share a bit less of their navel-gazing.
It’s not all about you, guys.
Ah, but Jeff, you see that just comes from the old saw “Write what you know”. Which is why there are so many movies about movie makers, so many plays about playwrights and actors, and so many books about writers. Those of us who write have that thrown at us all the time, like it is not possible to learn something new and write about our readers instead of about our writers…
re 4 – *snort* Ya, iknclast, there’s that. And when the first audience for any journalist’s article is the editor, it can’t help: they’re writing something that’s close to the heart of the gatekeeper – even when the gate is supposed to be kept for everyone else.
Jeff – same in my field of playwriting. The first audience is the artistic director of the theatre…they love pieces about theatre, because it is familiar. They don’t like pieces about science (my other career) because they don’t know what it’s about, and if you don’t make the scientist (or shoe retailer, to use your example) familiar and easy to recognize (stereotypes – think Einstein), they won’t believe the character. But in theatre, they realize that the people are diverse so you can write a group of characters with interestingly different personalities and get them past that artistic director.
“I do wish that journalists would get the hint that their readers are not more interested in them as a profession or as a professional culture than we are interested in the workings and feelings of, say, shoe retailers. :”
Thank you. I’m afraid that ship has sailed. At least 15 years ago, it became clear that working journalists really do believe that we, the citizenry, care most and only about the horse race aspect of politics. NPR has been treating it as *only* a team sport, not something with practical and ethical consequences. Just like all major media.
Semi-OT: anyone want to guess the chances that Sam Harris has the researchers behind this study on his podcast?
Screechy Monkey, I was just having a conversation about the “biology classroom” with one of my colleagues. It seems my colleague, who has just joined us (this is his first year, he is under 30, he is white, he is male), has been asked to be on a search committee. I have been told in the past that “you aren’t qualified to be on the search committee” for someone who teaches the exact same classes I teach! Why? Who the hell knows? Could it be the enlargement of my mammary glands that somehow apparently renders all other credentials useless? Could it be the higher level of estrogen running through my system? The second X chromosome? The lack of ability to grow a beard?
The funny thing is, when they hired the person I “wasn’t qualified” to hire, he actually had lower qualifications than I do (though totally qualified for his position). He was the only one on the entire campus who could see that my qualifications were higher than any other individual in our biology department, and that I was, in fact, a fully qualified biologist with years of experience. Alas, he has since left, to be replaced by above mentioned young mansplainer who even knows more than I do about what it was really like to be a woman in the 80s (before he was born, but while I was in my 20s, professional woman, working full time, married with child).
Sorry to continue Screechy’s transgression…just needed to, I don’t know, elucidate on that study to point out that it isn’t just the students….both faculty and administrators seem to have the same problem.