Obsessing over the media story of the week + contemplating more meaningful news consumption
Plus - Maron + Seinfeld, and the glory of the Pacific Northwest
Current view: My parents’ porch. I flew to Portland on Sunday to spend a couple weeks at home. I’ll still be working while I’m here, so it’s not vacation, but a few weeks ago, I had a Monday morning meltdown out of nowhere and felt the full force of my NYC burnout. (Timmy, bless him, had this realization even before I did and suggested I try to get away for a little while.) Just grateful to have the means to do this and to breathe west coast air for awhile.
*Sidenote - the aforementioned meltdown was definitely not my first and I’ve found some comfort in this tweet by Ana Marie Cox from the early days of quarantine. I think about it a lot. Just a reminder if you’ve had one, too, that you’re not alone.
The media story + journalism debate that have captivated me this week
I’ve begun several of these posts with extended thoughts on what I’m feeling and processing. There isn’t going to be a lot of that now, mostly because I still have a lot of that to do on my own, related to last week’s thoughts on the death of George Floyd, and systemic racism in America and the church. I talked with my counselor last week about everything that’s going on, and she encouraged me to make space not just for processing, but for simply being. It’s tough because right now, as I try to reckon with my attitude and actions around race and try to learn more from the African-American community and church, I feel the need to take in information, constantly. If I’m not listening, I can’t be learning. And I think that’s valid. But none of what I learn is going to sink in if I don’t take time to be still, connect with God on my own, and ask him to be the filter through which I process and ultimately apply what I learn.
So that’s in progress. Despite my need for stillness, I still want to write here about some of what I’ve been reading and listening to this week.
A lot of what I am considering revolves around Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed in the New York Times last week. As with much of my fascination around media stories, I’m more intrigued by the effects of the piece than by the piece itself, but you can read his op-ed here. TL;DR is that Sen. Cotton called for the military to come into American cities to quell riots and protests that broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Debate erupted around the Times’ decision to publish it. Times staffers spoke out on social media and via internal channels, expressing concern that the views espoused put black colleagues in danger and that the piece contained misinformation. A few controversy-filed days after it appeared, the Times’ editorial page editor resigned, and a lengthy editor’s note now precedes the piece online. (This Washington Post piece is a good summation of what went down.)
Whatever your thoughts on Cotton’s op-ed or on the Times’ choice to run it, there’s now a huge debate around what this means for American journalism going forward. Do opinion sections have an obligation to present any side of an argument, in the name of fairness? (James Bennet, the now-departed editor, tweeted about his decision to publish in the wake of the initial uproar, and his reasoning aligns with that idea.) Or is there a point at which an opinion should not be given a larger platform, because it espouses objectively dangerous views?
Here a few pieces (written + podcast) I’ve found helpful in understanding the debate and its implications:
Recorded after the op-ed’s publication, but before Bennet’s resignation, The Ringer’s Press Box podcast discussed the issue, and suggested that Cotton’s ideas may have been better handled as a news piece by Times reporters, rather than an op-ed in his own words. (I’ve since heard others say the same thing, but this was the first place I heard the idea.) They talk about it with about six minutes left in the episode.
CNN's Reliable Sources media newsletter from Monday night was my starting point for a lot of other reading on this topic - including these pieces in Vox, Poynter and Reason.
And if you’re going to read one piece linked here, read this: Ben Smith, the New York Times' media columnist, had a fascinating story on Sunday that included the Cotton piece in a discussion on this issue at large. He spoke with black reporters who have clashed with newsroom leadership over their coverage of race.
This is a weird quote to pull directly from the story, but I don’t want to risk having anything taken out of context. I think what Smith quotes the reporter Wesley Lowery as saying here helps frame the debate for me: is the core value of journalism supposed to be “the truth,” or “the perception of objectivity”?
Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ “core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity,” as he told me, has been winning in a series of battles, many around how to cover race.
Taking this a step further…
Almost immediately after the Times published Cotton’s piece last week, my Twitter feed was blanketed with “takes” on it. At one point, every tweet that fit on my screen was either about the op-ed, or about the Times’ staffers being upset, or a literal tweet from an upset Times staffer.
Not that that’s necessarily bad. It at least made me feel plugged in to media news. But - was that the only thing going on in the world at that moment? Absolutely not. And, I realized my perception of the piece was clouded by thoughts from people I follow on Twitter before I had a chance to read it myself.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about ways I can change how I consume media - or at least, how I can change my starting point for media consumption. Twitter is great, but I want to start going “straight to the source” more. Does that mean creating a list of news sites and spending a few minutes on each home page in the morning? Following just an outlet’s main Twitter account vs. following hundreds of individual reporters who often tweet out stories with their own thoughts attached? (I have nothing against reporters tweeting out stories with their own editorials; I just want to have read a story on my own and started to form my own thoughts before letting outside influence shape my view.) Subscribing to newsletters and reading through those each morning before going to Twitter and/or turning on the TV?
I understand that even newsletters and tweets from a brand account are written by someone. It seems impossible to stay entirely away from any outside influence or curation. But I want to try. I want to read more articles and fewer tweets. I want to feel more ownership over my opinions on the news.
I’d also like to be diversifying my news sources. That’s a topic for another day, but right now I’m starting by making a note of all the outlets linked to in the Reliable Sources newsletter each night (it covers media news, so they link to everything, from Columbia Journalism Review and the Associated Press to Deadline and the Drudge Report) and making sure each is on my radar in some way, even if that starts with just following their main Twitter account.
If you have a system you love for taking in news (either one you developed or a service, site, etc.), I would love to know about it.
The lighter side
A couple last things:
1 - Marc Maron talked to Jerry Seinfeld on yesterday’s episode of his WTF podcast, and while I wouldn’t put it in the WTF Pantheon, it’s worth a listen. Seinfeld doesn’t “open up” in a deep emotional sense, but it’s still interesting to hear an icon talk directly about his background and forces that shaped him. Both men are comedians, but have very different views on what comedy means (Maron doing it to work out his rage, Seinfeld doing it purely for laughs). My favorite moment was when Seinfeld said matter-of-factly that both his parents were orphans; Maron thought it was a joke and the way they worked it out made me laugh out loud in the middle of a run.
This was also one of the first interviews Maron recorded after the tragic death of his girlfriend, the director Lynn Shelton. He wasn’t talking directly about her, but he teared up at one point in the Seinfeld conversation (in a way I perceived to be the outpouring of so much intense emotion) and the moment touched me. It was the heart of the vulnerability I love about him.
2 - Last week, I mentioned some fun old Broadway poster designs on Playbill.com, but accidentally linked only to the Playbill homepage. Here’s what I meant to share.
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One last reminder that a meltdown is OK. That’s all for now.