Hello there. I’m excited to send today’s newsletter, which I’ve been working on for quite some time. It is part three in a series I’m calling “X,” a loose collection of speculations about how we make ourselves at home in a hostile world. You can find the first entry here and the second one here, or feel free to dive right in.
As always, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment or hit reply. Also, feel free to pass this along to anyone you think might be interested. A little newsletter like this one relies on word of mouth to find its audience.
I love good journalism. I'm the kind of person (i.e. a nerd) who reads a 5,000-word article and then listens to an hour-long podcast interview with the writer to find out how they captured the story. I have a Pocket subscription where I file articles I’ve read and highlight sections for reference. Many people have a favorite athlete; I have a favorite reporter. (Rather, I had a favorite reporter. Being a Rukmini Calimachi fanboy has recently become more complicated.)
Unfortunately, good journalism is increasingly hard to come by. The ad-driven 24-hour news cycle was bad enough, but the rise of censorship is more troubling to me. I see it happening at a national level, but it also extends into our day-to-day lives, altering how we relate to our friends and family—and ourselves—in ways that are significant yet often go unnoticed.
I realize I’m making some big claims. If you (like most intelligent people) have better things to do than track the behind-the-scenes workings of mainstream news outlets, this may sound off-putting or even delusional. That’s why I’m writing this. As a passionate amateur who has spent many hours reading and thinking on this topic, I thought it would be worthwhile to collect and share what I’ve noticed.
If you’re a Liberal with a sensitive gag reflex for conspiratorial thinking, I get it—and I’m here for you as much as anyone. Or if you’re a Conservative who thinks the illuminati is behind every locked door, don’t get too riled up just yet. For all its blatant evils, the problem of censorship is more complex than a ring of men plotting behind locked doors.
We have a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of it is potholed: don’t be surprised if I make some sudden swerves. My hope is that this newsletter provides a place for us to think in public together. Let’s get started.
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To begin, I’d like to return to George Saunders’ The Braindead Megaphone. (Seriously, you should read it—it’s so good.) Saunders describes a man who sits in a room and is told by an Informant about the house next door (metaphorically, the nation of Iraq circa 2003). Here are the four factors that will affect the man’s ability to imagine the house well:
The clarity of the language being used by the Informant (the less muddled, inarticulate, or jargon-filled, the better);
The agenda of the Informant (no agenda preferable to agenda-rich);
The time and care the Informant has spent constructing his narrative (i.e., the extent to which his account was revised and improved before being transmitted, with more time and care preferable to less);
The time allowed for the communication (with more time preferable to less, on the assumption that more time grants the Informant a better opportunity to explain, explore, clarify, etc.)
He goes on to give a best-case scenario, in which all of the above factors are optimized. Then he describes a worst-case scenario that, as it turns out, sounds a lot like our actual media:
Information arrives in the form of prose written by a person with little or no firsthand experience in the subject area, who hasn’t had much time to revise what he’s written, working within narrow time constraints, in the service of an agenda that may be subtly or overtly distorting his ability to tell the truth.
Could we make this worst-case scenario even worse? Sure. Let it be understood that the Informant’s main job is to entertain and that, if he fails in this, he’s gone. Also, the man being informed? Make him too busy, ill-prepared, and distracted to properly assess what the Informant’s shouting at him.
Sound familiar? Saunders wrote this way back in 2007, but it seems to me that things have only gotten worse since then. As news outlets have transitioned from subscription models to ad-driven ones, the need to entertain has only increased. The Internet encourages reporters to ship articles more quickly than ever, mere minutes after an event (or even before an event, as it has become common to saturate public discourse with speculation about what might happen, rather than merely reporting what already has).
Meanwhile, the number of news outlets in the United States has significantly decreased in the past decade. Local newspapers are going under, concentrating the news in mainstream outlets in big cities. Even there, journalists are overworked and underpaid. (This goes against many people’s conception of reporters as an affluent elite. As I listen to interviews with prominent journalists, I’ve been surprised to find that even those with book deals and some measure of fame often struggle to make ends meet.)
All of these factors make for bad journalism, but to understand how greatly the ecosystem of American journalism has changed, we have to go back to Donald Trump’s presidency. I remember watching the news on the night Trump was elected: the sweaty, stuttering newscasters, unable to hide their panic as votes came in. Most news outlets had predicted that Hillary Clinton would win by a fair margin; for many, Donald Trump’s win was unthinkable.
I was as shocked as anyone. I didn’t vote for Trump, and I was baffled by how many of my friends and family members did. His victory forced me to reckon with my assumptions about my country. I realized that there was an enormous population to whom I had paid little attention: Conservative communities whose voice was underrepresented in the media (at least, in my media). I realized I hadn’t taken them seriously, and now they had made their voice heard.
Naively, I thought that journalists would reckon with their blindspots as well, taking stock of their complicity in our nation’s divisions. They were clearly out of touch with a broad swath of the American public, and Trump’s election was a blunt invitation to listen and to learn—to be curious about this strange turn of events.
Of course, that’s not what happened. For four years, journalists consumed themselves with Trump’s misdeeds, obsessing over every Tweet and press conference. Whatever curiosity might have resulted from the 2016 election was entirely smothered by outrage, judgment, and warnings of impending doom.
And yeah, I get it. It’s hard to be a generous listener when you think your nation is going to hell—and when your nation’s leader goes to such great lengths to get a rise out of you. President Trump made life difficult for journalists, denying them access to press conferences, badmouthing them in speeches, undercutting their work at every turn. Having risen to mainstream fame through reality TV, he had a showman’s instinct for escalating public dramas. It’s unsurprising that the media—and our country—should become more polarized in an atmosphere like that.
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Now we have a Liberal president again, but our media has not resumed business as usual. Big news outlets are more entrenched in their positions on the political spectrum—a fact that is most obvious when we consider The New York Times. While local newspapers struggle to stay afloat or go extinct, The New York Times is thriving. This is a direct result of Donald Trump’s presidency. Reeves Wiedeman exhaustively chronicles the new era of Times journalism in his article for New York:
It is difficult to think of many businesses that have benefited more from Donald Trump’s presidency — aside from the Trump-family empire — than the Times. After Trump’s election, in 2016, subscriptions grew at ten times their usual rate, and they have never looked back. The Times has gone from just over three million subscribers at the beginning of the Trump presidency to its record of more than 7 million last month.
A major factor in this growth has been the Times’ strategic alignment with an identity. As Wiedeman writes, “the business side has leaned into its role as a defender of truth. Identifying as a reader of the Times has become a marker of resistance…” Liberal news outlets (i.e. nearly all of what we would consider “mainstream news”) have a monetary incentive to position themselves as “part of the resistance.”
Journalists know what good marketers know—they aren’t selling a product so much as an identity. As news outlets speak in line with what their audience wants to hear, their audiences naturally self-segregate into groups. Wiedeman reports on this:
A Pew poll found that 91 percent of people who consider the Times their primary news source identify as Democrats, roughly the same as the percentage of Fox News viewers who identify as Republicans.
Seth Godin’s marketing axiom applies just as well to our relationship with our preferred news sources: “People like us do things like this.”
Think about your social circles. If “people like us” means Liberals, how likely are you to retweet a Conservative post, even it aligns with your personal ideals? If “people like us” means Conservatives, how likely are you to praise a bill championed by a Liberal, even if it supports a worthy cause? Even when we agree with another tribe on a particular issue, we won’t vocalize it for fear of being considered “one of them.” Most of us are more concerned with social equity than with a strict dedication to the truth.
Our journalists are no different. News outlets are not objective reporters of reality (as if such a thing were possible). Their testimony is constrained by the worldview of their constituents. It is shaped—and misshaped—around considerations of audience and money. There are monetary incentives for journalists to please their audience, especially when their audience is prone to call for quick, severe retribution anytime they step out-of-bounds.
Journalism is not a clean delivery of information, parsed out like discrete lines of code. Like most things, it is an expression of community: “People like us want journalism like this.”
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And that wouldn’t be so bad, if we stopped there. Tribalism is nothing new. Even though most of our conversations around tribalism are negative, we would be misguided to try to eradicate tribes altogether. To be human is to desire a people, a community in which we belong. From Yankees fans to Swifties, members of student council to members of the European Union, we all gravitate toward tribes great and small. The creation of identifying communities is one of our more beautiful instincts.
What troubles me is when one community wields its power to silence others, as I see happening in American journalism. If mainstream media is tribal, the Progressive tribe is the current ruling class. As a writer, this is most apparent when I think about my future in publishing. If I wanted to ascend the ranks of publishing, I know what kinds of things I can and can’t say. My belonging to this tribe would be contingent on my adherence to its ideology.
(It’s worth noting that this is not only a journalistic problem. You might notice the rise of strict ideologies in a variety of disciplines, in law and government, science and education. People are losing their jobs, and many more are learning to censor themselves as a self-protective measure. Since journalism is the field in which I have some level of expertise, I'll focus my attention there.)
For several years now, journalists have been leaving their posts at a variety of publications, citing intolerant work cultures. Conor Friedersdorf with The Atlantic sums up the situation like this:
The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate.
Last year Matthew Iglesias left Vox, the platform he co-founded, to find somewhere he could publish with more editorial freedom. James Bennet, editor at the New York Times, was fired after he published an op-ed from by Republican senator Tom Cotton. Bari Weiss, a Jewish woman whom the New York Times hired to foster greater diversity, outlines the problem in her resignation letter:
…the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Writers don’t feel safe to voice contrary perspectives in mainstream media. Many of them are opting to publish independent newsletters (like this one) on Substack. Some people are getting fired. Some people, tired of being bullied by their co-workers and readers, are quitting. Writers’ testimonies are consistent. They describe an orthodoxy in the media that cannot be challenged. Many of these departing writers are moderates or liberals, but not liberal enough, or liberal in the wrong way.
The result is a media that, while trumpeting the values of inclusion and diversity, is becoming more exclusive and homogenous.
Last year more than 100 public figures signed an open letter to Harpers, which I recommend reading. The list of signees comprises a diverse group of prominent writers and thinkers, including the likes of Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell, Noam Chomsky, and George Packer. They agree:
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted… it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.
Unsurprisingly, as soon as they published this article, a public outcry ensued (which seems to validate their message). This group of writers, racially and politically diverse, was immediately accused of racism and blinding privilege.
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Of course, censorship is not a new problem. The United States has never been an equal opportunity community. For most of our nation’s history, women and people of color were underrepresented on mainstream platforms, and many people’s voices were suppressed. In journalism, Wesley Lowery writes,
…the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses. And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers.
As much as we might like to think that this has changed, mainstream media still appeals to this same class. For all its talk of inclusion and diversity, it is still an exclusive tribe with an exacting demand for conformity. The media works harder than ever to avoid offending the sensibilities of its readers, and—here’s where Wesley Lowery would almost certainly disagree with me—those sensibilities now include a woke ideology that is strict and unforgiving.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the signees of the Harper’s letter, says it better than I could in this interview with The New Yorker:
I’m the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South. I’m very familiar with the kind of cancel culture that he had to pass through and the ways in which he experienced exactly what they’re talking about. But what bothers me and worries me is that the world that we’re creating and that’s enabled by the Twitter reality that takes hold is one in which we’re not actually trying to make everybody as secure as the straight white man who used to be super-secure. We’re actually trying to make everybody as insecure as my father used to be…
Williams’ use of the words “secure” and “insecure” makes me think of attachment theory, a counseling framework I’ve been reading about lately. All of us have attachment styles, ways of relating to ourselves and to our communities. People with secure attachments feel safe and connected to others; they are able to voice dissent without fear of punishment. People with insecure attachments may be anxious or avoidant; they are afraid of losing their connection with others.
I plan to spend more time on this in future newsletters, but for now let’s just note the ways that censorship affects our sense of attachment within our friend groups, our social spheres, our country. Do you feel safe to dissent? Do you feel secure in your tribe?
And what about those people groups who have already endured so much censorship in our country? Does the trajectory of our public discourse ensure their safe attachment, or harm it? I tend to agree with the writers of the Harpers’ letter when they note, “This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.”
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I have known people who, when confronted with the growing tyranny of surveillance, say they don’t mind—“After all, I have nothing to hide.” I wonder if those same people will now excuse censorship—“After all, I have nothing to say.”
This line of thinking has always struck me as idiotic, like saying you don’t mind someone rummaging through your purse since there’s nothing valuable inside, or that you don’t mind someone breaking into your home as long as they don’t take anything. To people who think in this way, I would respond that surveillance and censorship are both wrong because they are a crime against our personhood.
Mass surveillance is wrong, not because we have something to hide, but because our personhood is sacred. Censorship is wrong for the same reason. We are not designed to be surveilled, just as we are not designed to be silenced.
I have more to say on this subject in future newsletters, but for now I’ll sign off with this statement from the Harper’s letter, which gestures toward a solution:
As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
I would argue that this statement holds true, not only for writers, but for all of us who value our communities and want to ensure their health.
Brilliant analysis. I loved reading it and reflecting on my own biases in media consumption. It takes thought and effort to look into what the "other" has to say, and most of us don't have (or don't invest) time to analyze our own knee jerk reactions and question if what we're feeling is conjured by Megaphone Guy, or if it's something we have really carefully considered. Keep the posts coming.
"I wonder if those same people will now excuse censorship— 'After all, I have nothing to say.' " - really excellently phrased, Josh. Great thoughts as always