Entry-level jobs in journalism have been replaced with full-time internships dependent on other internships. Today people work for the possibility of working, waiting to be considered good enough to be hired by the employers under whom they already labor.
Over the past decade, most internships in journalism have been unpaid. Even The Nation, a magazine known for its exemplary coverage of labor exploitation, paid its interns less than minimum wage until the interns protested. They will now make minimum wage—a salary that, in New York City, still locks out the majority of applicants. Only the rich can afford to write about the poor.
Protests against unpaid internships—and unpaid writing, a practice common in publications like The Atlantic and the Huffington Post—are on the rise. But the bulk of journalists remain vulnerable. Many lack consistent employment along with health care or a living wage. Now, under the Senate’s definition, they may lack legal rights as well.
In an economy this unstable, there is no such thing as a fixed professional identity. The ability to protect the confidentiality of one’s sources should not depend on one.
Unequal Pay
The plight of journalists is emblematic of broader trends in the prestige economy. In multiple professions, workers are performing nearly identical tasks for radically different salaries.
In academia, the tenured professor and the adjunct may teach the same courses and publish in the same journals, but only the latter earns poverty wages. In policy, unpaid interns often write and research the papers for which their well-compensated superiors get credit. And in journalism, freelancers often receive nothing while their staff equivalents earn lavish salaries.
Title may determine whether a journalist will get to maintain the right to confidentiality. But title is an arbitrary measure. It does not show professionalism so much as prestige, ethics so much as affluence and luck.
In an economy in which full-time work has been replaced by part-time labor, it is very easy to lose one’s professional affiliation, and the benefits—both material and reputational—it provides. Many do not define themselves as one thing but move in and out of different professions, struggling to find what work they can.
Kelly J. Baker, a well-published PhD working, like most scholars, as an adjunct professor, was told at a conference that she was “not a real academic” because she lacked a tenure-track job. “What the hell was I supposed to say to students now?” she recalls thinking. “Please ignore me as I contemplate my lack of reality? Don’t listen to me because I don’t matter?”
The Senate’s definition of “journalist” applies that same standard to unaffiliated writers and reporters: Do not listen to them, because they do not matter. Do not protect them, because what they offer is not worth protecting—although it may be worth prosecuting.
Credibility is not something that can be bought, but credentials are. Using affiliation as a criterion to define “journalist” means only the privileged get journalistic privilege. The Senate’s target may be WikiLeaks, but their proposed ruling gives a de facto demotion to writers locked out for economic reasons.
Journalists of prior generations worked their way up. Today, journalists are expected to start with an elite status and accept wages that have dwindled to nothing.
The result is that journalism is a profession which most Americans cannot afford to formally enter. The Senate should not be able to determine who is a journalist, when the people whom they represent cannot afford to determine that themselves.
—Originally published September 17, 2013
Blame It on the Internet
In June 2013, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey was under threat.
“There is a problem called Twitter right now and you can find every kind of lie there,” he told reporters following days of mass protest in Istanbul. “The thing that is called social media is the biggest trouble for society right now.”
Days later, twenty-five Twitter users were arrested on charges of inciting demonstrations and spreading propaganda. Officials claimed they used Twitter to organize protests.
“If that’s a crime, then we all did it,” said Ali Engin, an opposition representative.
Social media was not Erdogan’s biggest problem. His biggest problem was that citizens whose lives and nation were harmed by his rule were fighting back, and they had found an effective medium through which to organize and express their protest. Twitter was the problem because its users had identified Erdogan as the problem.
Erdogan is far from the only leader to use “social media” as a stand-in for the people who use it. Repressive regimes ascribe inherent characteristics to the Internet as if it were a contact disease. In Azerbaijan, Facebook gives you “mental problems.” In Saudi Arabia, Twitter costs you a spot in the afterlife. In some countries, official denouncement of social media is followed by the arrest of those who use it to criticize officials.
When the powerful condemn the medium of a marginalized messenger, it is the messenger they are truly after. Most recognize that in authoritarian regimes, the demonization of social media is a transparent play for power. Few who see themselves as advocates for justice support the condemnation of those who use it to fight for their rights.
That is why it is startling to see social media portrayed in nearly identical rhetoric by those who claim to support social justice.
“Twitter is a poisonous well of bad faith and viciousness,” tweeted Nation columnist Katha Pollitt after engaging in Twitter debate with feminists who disagreed with her views. Pollitt’s comments were followed up by a Nation cover story called “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” which described Twitter as a site of “Maoist hazing” and “perpetual psychodrama.”
The article was written by Michelle Goldberg, a journalist, who in December wrote a spirited defense of Justine Sacco, the white PR executive who tweeted a racist joke mocking black Africans dying of AIDS. The antagonists of Goldberg’s “Toxic Twitter” were female activists of color, although particular wrath was reserved for Mikki Kendall, a prominent black intellectual best known for starting the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen to highlight the lack of support for women of color in the mainstream feminist community. The hashtag was partly inspired by white feminist defense of Hugo Schwyzer, a writer who had attacked women of color online and confessed to numerous acts of harassment, describing himself as “a breathtakingly cocky fraud” and a “piss-poor feminist.”
Nothing about Schwyzer was in Goldberg’s article. Instead, Goldberg frequently alluded to Kendall’s bad reputation.
“Many consider her a bully, though few want to say so out loud,” she wrote in the pages of a magazine to which over 100,000 people subscribe. No “fear” stopped Goldberg from calling Kendall a “bully” in one of the most prominent publications of the American left. But despite the lengthy profile, she could not name a single case of Kendall bullying anyone.
Target the Medium, Slander the Messenger
It is a tactic reminiscent of dictators facing a challenge to power: target the medium, slander the messenger, ignore the message.
What is Kendall’s message?
“Feminism as a global movement meant to unite all women has global responsibilities, and—as illustrated by hundreds of tweets—has failed at one of the most basic: It has not been welcoming to all women, or even their communities,” she wrote in The Guardian last August.
Since then, she and other female intellectuals of color have used Twitter hashtags to draw attention to social issues like poverty, racism, stereotypes, media bias, and the sexual exploitation of black girls. They were wildly successful, reaching millions of users who appreciated the opportunity to have their struggles acknowledged and their voices amplified.
* * *
“The thing that is called social media is the biggest trouble for society right now.”
* * *
As in any discussion of a contentious issue—online or offline—the conversations from hashtag activism are
heated. In the view of Goldberg and others, this renders some women “afraid to speak.”
“So glad [Goldberg] wrote about online feminist toxicity in The Nation. So many of us are scared to talk about it,” tweeted feminist writer Jill Filipovic, who, like Goldberg and others cited in the piece, has a mainstream media platform where she can talk about it regularly.
As I have written, the mainstream media are no different than social media in their callousness and cruelty, and in many ways they are worse because of their perceived legitimacy. In the last few months, mainstream authors have bullied a cancer patient, inspired a transgender woman to commit suicide, and argued that violence against black men is justified. The prestige of old media gives bigoted ranting respectability, recusing the author from consequence.
Social media is viewed by gatekeepers as simultaneously worthless and a serious threat. Balancing these opposing views requires a hypocrisy that can be facilitated only by the assurance of power.
Gatekeepers to mainstream feminist venues, like Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, proclaim that tweeting is not really activism. In contrast, the women behind hashtag activism argue that Twitter is one of the few outlets they have in a world that denies them opportunities to be heard.
“Twitter hashtags happen because the chances of getting real contact and effective representation from our ‘leaders’ is nonexistent,” notes writer and activist Sydette Harry, who tweets as “Blackamazon.” Her statement mirrors those of activists around the world who use Twitter to oppose repressive governments.
Twitter activism among black Americans causes discomfort because it highlights the structural nature of racist oppression in the U.S. as well as the complicity of those who uphold and benefit from it. When U.S. journalists cover Twitter activism in other countries, they portray it as empowering. When marginalized people of color—people whose own history of oppression in the U.S. is systematically played down—share their plight online, it is recast as aggression, exaggeration and lies. This, too, mirrors the rhetoric used by dictators around the world.
Rhetoric is not the same as action. But it is the disparate nature of repressive foreign dictatorships and the comparatively open media environment of the U.S. that make the similarity in rhetoric so striking.
Does Twitter Activism Matter?
What does it mean for Twitter activism to “matter”? Four years ago, I wrote about Kyrgyzstan’s use of social media during its 2010 uprising, which was dismissed by foreign commentators as unworthy of note. But it was not social media they were dismissing. Kyrgyzstanis used social media to reach other Kyrgyzstanis, but this focus on their own community made them, to outside commentators, impenetrable and irrelevant. The dismissal of Central Asian social media was in fact a dismissal of Central Asians. Western reception—and approval—was viewed as more important than the relevance of the medium for the community in question.
“There isn’t a neat separation between the online world and a separate place called the ‘real world,’” write activists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Smith in a thoughtful rejoinder to the Nation piece. “In the 21st century, these places are one in the same. As such the concept of ‘Twitter feminism’ strikes us as dismissive and probably a misnomer.”
“Twitter activism” is dismissed because the people who engage in it are dismissed—both online and on the ground in Western countries where few minorities hold positions of power. Media is one form of power, and hashtag feminism is an attempt to challenge the narratives that bolster discriminatory practices.
Hashtag feminism makes visible what was never truly invisible, but what people refuse to see. The simultaneous sharing of personal stories is a revelatory process and a bulwark against gaslighting. Our pain matters, the storytellers say, to those who deny their pain ever existed.
In her history The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson describes the migration of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. She notes that their migration resembled the pattern of those fleeing famine, war, and genocide, despite the fact that African Americans were moving within their own country. This is not a distant history. The protagonists of Wilkerson’s book lived in our lifetime, and the legacy of racial violence, segregation, and exclusion they experienced continues into the present.
It is difficult to confront a complex history. It is painful to acknowledge systematic injustice. It is uncomfortable to hear firsthand accounts that contradict the dominant narrative, or that undermine what many would like to believe.
But it is easy to blame the Internet.
—Originally published February 4, 2014
When the Mainstream Media Are the Lunatic Fringe
On January 8, 2014, Emma Keller, a journalist for The Guardian, wrote a column about a woman named Lisa Bonchek Adams. Adams has stage IV breast cancer, and Keller was annoyed.
“As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity,” complained Keller. “I couldn’t stop reading—I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck—but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI?”
Keller’s column inspired outrage among the thousands of people following Adams’s Twitter account, many of them cancer patients who find solace in Adams’s words. Guardian readers questioned the cruelty of believing the worst thing about pain was that it is too consistently expressed. Why had Keller not simply stopped reading the Twitter account, instead of belittling an ailing stranger? Why would The Guardian sanction a column attacking a cancer-stricken mother of three?
But the attack on Adams had only begun.
On January 12, Bill Keller, husband of Emma Keller and the former executive editor of The New York Times, wrote his own column chastising Adams for not dying more quietly. He accused her of “raising false hopes” for other cancer patients, and compared her active online presence unfavorably to his “father-in-law’s calm death.”
Writing about cancer is not new. Under Bill Keller’s tenure, numerous Times contributors penned articles about their own struggles. But these were different than Adams’s Twitter account: they were sanctioned by Keller for print consumption. In Keller’s world, mere mortals should not deign to tweet about their mere mortality.
When Keller was pressed by the Times’ public editor to explain himself, he did not apologize for hurting Adams or for using column space to defend his wife’s ill-begotten ideas. He blamed his critics for using Twitter, “a medium [that] encourages reflexes rather than reflection.”
Keller’s aversion to social media is common among media’s old guard, who believe it has eroded standards of ethics and behavior. Outlets like The Atlantic regularly run pieces such as “Is Google making us stupid?” or “Is Facebook making us lonely?” (According to researchers, it is not.)
“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said. In the digital age, condemning the medium is often shorthand for condemning not only the message but the messenger—and her right to speak. Twitter, which is extremely popular among young African Americans, functions as a public gathering space for marginalized groups to rally under common causes—one of which is countering cruel and inaccurate portrayals of them found in mainstream media.
Old Viciousness, New Visibility
The condemnation of digital media has two sides. There is a legitimate claim that digital media has given old viciousness new visibility, as demonstrated in Amanda Hess’s piece on the attacks women receive for writing online. (Hess’s piece neglected to include women of color, who arguably experience more vicious harassment than anyone.) Certain facets of social media—speed, anonymity, the ability to “dox”—have changed the nature of harassment, making it easier to accomplish and less likely to be redressed.
But are the mainstream media any different in their biases and cruelty? They do not appear to be. Mainstream media cruelty is actually more dangerous, for it incorporates language that, were it blogged by an unknown
, would likely be written off as the irrelevant ramblings of a sociopath.
Instead, the prestige of old media gives bigoted ranting respectability. Even in the digital age, old media define and shape the culture, repositioning the lunatic fringe as the voice of reason.
Shortly after the Kellers’ debacle—which resulted in the removal of Emma’s piece—a journalist nonchalantly announced that he had prompted the subject of his story to commit suicide. In “Grantland,” a blog associated with ESPN, Caleb Hannan profiled a mysterious inventor known as Dr. V. During the course of Hannan’s interviews with Dr. V, he learned that she was transgender. Hannan threatened to out her against her will. A few days later, Dr. V committed suicide.
“Writing a eulogy for a person who, by all accounts, despised you is an odd experience,” wrote Hannan, in a typically heartless and cavalier passage. Much as cancer patients condemned the Kellers, so did transgender activists condemn Hannan, for an act of cruelty made more incomprehensible by the fact that Hannan’s piece was actually published. A woman died for a story, and that, for “Grantland,” was okay. A woman suffering from cancer was attacked for suffering the wrong way, and that, for The New York Times, was okay.
* * *
In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter are locked out of the discussion.
* * *
It is not surprising that people lack empathy. What is surprising is that unbridled antipathy toward innocent people continues to be sanctioned in an era when fatuous arguments—and terrible ethics—are called out en masse. For critics of mainstream media cruelty, social media is a means to prevent lunacy from being accepted as logic. To the mainstream, it is mere “snark.”
The View from Flyover Country Page 12
