Shortly before the Atlantic story broke, a video depicting income inequality in the United States went viral. Based on data from a 2011 study, the video showed that most Americans seek a more equitable distribution of wealth than what they believe exists - but that the reality of income inequality is far worse than they had imagined. When income was graphed, the middle class was barely distinguishable from the poor. 80 percent of Americans have 7 percent of the nation's wealth, while 1 percent of Americans have 40 percent of the nation's wealth.
The video noted that 92 percent of Americans think this is wrong. So why does it continue? The answer lies in a combination of fear and myth-making that has characterized public perception of the economy since the 2008 collapse. Americans are taught to believe the economy is in a permanent crisis - a position seemingly validated by their own experience.
But has the permanent crisis become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Economic analyst Eric Garland notes that since 2008, executive compensation has steadily risen, but the myth of hard times is peddled to both frighten and lure a permanent supply of unpaid, precarious labor.
"You're only 28. Or 33," he writes, mocking the corporate pitch. "You have a long career ahead of you. You can get paid later! After all, we don't have budget for interns this year. We used that money to increase executive pay at a rate five times greater than the cost of living. Because the economy is terrible right now! And we're at all-time record highs of corporate cash reserves and profits. But it's terrible!"
The economic crisis is a crisis of managed expectations. Americans are being conditioned to accept their own exploitation as normal. Ridden with debt from the minute they graduate college, they compete for the privilege of working without pay. They no longer earn money - they earn the prospect of making money. They are paid in "connections" and "exposure". But they should insist on more.
I understand why they do not. When the Atlantic story broke, many journalists were tempted to write about their own mistreatment. Some did, but others held back. They did not want to seem angry or ungrateful. They did not want to risk losing what little they had. They were told to pay their dues, and now they are paying for it with their dignity.
In the post-employment economy, is self-respect something we can afford? Or is it another devalued commodity we are expected to give away?
Originally published March 12, 2013
Who is a ‘journalist’? People who can afford to be
On September 12, a US Senate panel approved legislation designed to protect journalists from having to reveal their confidential sources. In order to do this, the panel had to define "journalist". According to the proposed law, a journalist is "an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information … [who has been] employed for one year within the last 20 years or three months within the last five years.”
The definition was met with approval by some and dismay by others. Politico, a website that tracks the minutiae of the DC elite, praised it as "a step forward for independent and non-traditional media organizations." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that seeks to protect free speech online, decried it as offering insufficient protection for independent bloggers, reiterating their earlier argument that "Congress should link shield law protections to the practice of journalism as opposed to the profession.”
The Senate debate over who is a "journalist" arose in the aftermath of WikiLeaks, whose activity has been defined as both journalism and espionage. Expanding the definition of a journalist means expanding the legal protection journalists receive.
"I can't support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I'm not going to go there," said Senator Diane Feinstein, in a statement Matt Drudge denounced as "fascist”.
On September 12, a US Senate panel approved legislation designed to protect journalists from having to reveal their confidential sources. In order to do this, the panel had to define "journalist". According to the proposed law, a journalist is "an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information … [who has been] employed for one year within the last 20 years or three months within the last five years.”
The definition was met with approval by some and dismay by others. Politico, a website that tracks the minutiae of the DC elite, praised it as "a step forward for independent and non-traditional media organizations." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that seeks to protect free speech online, decried it as offering insufficient protection for independent bloggers, reiterating their earlier argument that "Congress should link shield law protections to the practice of journalism as opposed to the profession.”
The Senate debate over who is a "journalist" arose in the aftermath of WikiLeaks, whose activity has been defined as both journalism and espionage. Expanding the definition of a journalist means expanding the legal protection journalists receive.
"I can't support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I'm not going to go there," said Senator Diane Feinstein, in a statement Matt Drudge denounced as "fascist”.
The debate over who is a journalist is a debate over journalistic privilege. But in a prestige economy, the privilege to protect the confidentiality of sources is not the only privilege at play.
Journalism is increasingly a profession only the wealthy can enter. To narrow the definition of "journalist" to those affiliated with established news organizations denies legal protection not only to organizations like WikiLeaks, but also to the writers and bloggers who cannot afford the exorbitant credentials and unpaid internships that provide entry into the trade.
"The journalists who can tell my story - the story of urban or inner-city America - have taken a job in marketing while disseminating their opinions on blogs," writes freelancer David Dennis. Since the recession began in 2008, racial diversity in the media has declined while gender imbalance has remained high. The bloggers to whom Dennis refers would have no legal protection under the Senate's definition.
Whom would the Senate's definition protect? Journalists employed at established publications, who are mainly white men from privileged backgrounds - a category of people who may have little interest in critiquing the establishment that benefits them. The Senate's definition of journalist protects the people who need it least.
The price of journalism today
What does it take to succeed in journalism today? For Canadian writer Alexandra Kimball, it was a surprise inheritance. Only after a financial windfall was her freelance career possible.
"To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of ‘work' that is most easily gained from privilege," she writes. "It requires a sense of entitlement … and requires you to think of working for free - at an internship, say, or on one of those gratis assignments that seem to be everywhere now - as an opportunity rather than an insult or a scam.”
As digital media gave more writers a voice, qualifications for journalism jobs became more stringent and dependent on wealth. This is true worldwide. In 2009, the average cost of journalism school, often a prerequisite for hire in the US, was $31,000. Some universities charge over $50,000, along with living expenses the total bill can be above $80,000 (median US income is $52,000.) A British government report showed that in the UK, journalism is the third most exclusive profession to enter, with the greatest decline in social mobility among its practitioners.
The predominance of privilege has led to a deterioration of journalistic standards. "The people who have time to fool around for no money are the people who already have lots of it," writes journalist James Bloodworth. "And if they are the journalists of the future our media will probably resemble the establishment talking to itself, and if that's the case we will all be worse off, not only us hacks.”
Entry-level jobs in journalism have be
en 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 which, 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, 25 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 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.
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 is no different than social media in its callousness and cruelty, and in many ways it is worse because of its 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.
"Twitter hashtags happen because the chances of getting real contact and effective representation from our 'leaders' is non-existent," notes writer and activist Sydette, who tweets as "Black Amazon". 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 US as well as the complicity of those who uphold and benefit from it. When US 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 US 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.
The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior Page 11
