Donald McNeil Jr

It’s very unlikely that I’d be a reasonably successful journalist today if I hadn’t come from an upper-middle-class family. Fresh out of college, I got a series of non- or low-paying internships. It wasn’t until spring of the following year that I found a staff position with benefits (and a salary of $33,000, which at the time seemed like plenty to live on). Because my parents provided financial support and because I had no debt, I was able to gain the experience and connections that helped launch my career. Somewhere, surely, there is a 37-year-old who is very similar to me and who wanted to be a journalist, but who is now doing something else because it just wasn’t feasible, financially.

The New York Times fiercely defended editorial board member Mara Gay this week after she faced ridicule on Twitter for comments she made on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Gay had told the Lucy and Desi of cable news that she was 'disturbed' by the sight of American flags flying high in Long Island on Tuesday. She apparently witnessed anti-Joe Biden flags standing alongside the Stars and Stripes. This horrid scene prompted her to fear that Donald Trump's supporters did not see a difference between 'whiteness' and 'Americanness'. 'We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy...how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness,' Gay said. 'I was really disturbed,' she continued. 'I saw...

It’s 2021, and as your new Spectator media columnist I’m here to tell you that the American media is a disaster. It’s not that there aren’t still many exceptionally talented reporters and editors doing good work, against all odds — there are. It’s that the overall scene is being destroyed. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction. Newer, supposedly more agile online-only outlets are shedding staff or shuttering as well. No one has come close to developing a replacement for the funding model that kept journalism humming along nicely until the internet came along and broke everything. Of course, the destruction has birthed creation. Journalistic startups pop up frequently, though few do anything that seems worthwhile and sustainable.

On January 21, a Canadian online news outlet called the Tyee published a hit piece on Angelo Isidorou, a 24-year-old journalist for the Post Millennial, another online Canadian magazine. Isidorou had made himself a target by becoming a board member of the Non-Partisan Association, a municipal political party in Vancouver which, in spite of its name, is center-right. Isidorou’s sin, as captured on the Tyee’s front page, was that he had been photographed ‘flashing a symbol favored by hate groups’. The symbol in question was the thumb-to-index-finger ‘OK’ sign, which according to the Tyee’s reporter is a ‘widely recognized white power signal’.

John 'Rick' MacArthur, the president of Harper’s, is one of those old-fashioned cats on the American left who think that journalism should be lively, provocative, interesting to read. He doesn’t think that the purpose of all writing is to treat every reader as a vile racist who must be reeducated through endless hectoring. That makes him a heretic, of course, in New York media circles, so the knives must come out. Somebody called Ryu Spaeth, a school-hall monitor manqué who’s had to settle for the less elevated role of features editor at the New Republic, has decided that enough is enough. 'John R. MacArthur is a disgrace,’ his latest article declares. A disgrace! Oh dear, what has Rick done now?