Journalism

There are two competing ideas going around about “the old days” of journalism. In one, journalism was a sober public service, safeguarded by editors and ethics, untainted by the capital-A, capital-E Attention Economy. In the other, it was a racist, sexist boys’ club we managed to leave behind – even if only briefly, for long enough to support Teen Vogue’s politics vertical. (May they rest in peace.) The current pile-on concerning celebrity reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose ex Ryan Lizza has revealed her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leans hard on the first fantasy. Once there were newsrooms; now there are “personal brands.” Once we had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow; now there is a woman in a Lana Del Rey cosplay Mustang with 1990s porn-star brows.

Once upon a time, in a land faraway, CBS was called the “Tiffany Network.” The network’s glittering jewel was its news division. This is the story of that division’s decline and fall, driven by partisan goals and leftist ideology. CBS News gained its fame in the 1940s, under the leadership of Edward R. Murrow, who not only painted a vivid word-picture of London during the Blitz, but also recruited the best broadcast journalists in the business. For decades, they formed the core of CBS News, first on radio and then on television. That tradition continued through the 1960s, when tens of millions of Americans turned to Walter Cronkite for an honest report of the day’s news. If the newscast included editorial comments, as it sometimes did, they were offered by Eric Sevareid.

There is a recurring type of incident that reflects the insularity of today’s media class: “Everyone was talking about it, but no one reported it.” There is no stronger indictment of contemporary media bias — it doesn’t arise just out of partisanship, nor out of opposition to reporting stories that displease our ruling class. It reaches the point of actively lying and covering up things any average American knows to be true. The most prominent recent example is found in the reaction to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s findings regarding Joe Biden’s hoarding of classified documents.

My path to “media personality” (puke) and cultural commentator was not the usual one. I didn’t get a degree in Journalism or Broadcast Journalism or Communications. I didn’t go to Harvard or Columbia or Syracuse or Yale. In fact, I didn’t get a degree at all. This sets me apart from almost everyone in old-guard media — and were it not for new media and more importantly, social media, I would still probably be excluded by most of the establishment gatekeepers. Our mainstream media and late-night television rooms are dominated by people who went to Ivy League schools. The Harvard Lampoon guys. The Columbia School of Journalism kids.

"We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics. Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the "1619 Project”, almost brought herself to lift a finger in defense of affirmative action — almost. She took to Twitter on Thursday to denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The anger was not strong enough, though, to make it worth picking up the pen. Hannah-Jones tweeted: “Was going to write an essay about it, but why even bother. (Also, Clarence Thomas is actually irrelevant here. So thanks but no thanks)” The Wall Street Journal’s new editor-in-chief has criticized the work ethic of the paper’s staff, but clearly the New York Times is not much better — Hannah-Jones wrote her last piece for the paper in February 2023, which itself was the first in two years.

The clamor of voices, the snapping of shutters, the dazing glare of bulb after bulb. A celebrity is whisked into a waiting car by a no-nonsense staffer, holding back the throng so they can make their escape. But just how easy is it to cause this scene? This week, I put on my most refined accent and dialed the number of a photo agency to find out.  “Hi, I’m a publicist and I have a new client looking to move from London to LA.” “What kind of client?” “She’s done a lot of reality TV and she’s a fashion influencer, mainly on TikTok. I’d prefer not to name her at this point.” “Ok. What are you looking for?” “I was — we were — hoping to create some buzz around the move, something that’ll get her into the papers.

Last week I was at a writers' party in Miami, a city at the cutting edge of tech, finance, the creator economy and nightlife. Naturally the writers were talking about themselves. I asked someone what he would do if he didn’t have to worry about pageviews or proprietors or the other pressing concerns of the modern media. “Think VICE, when it was good,” he replied. To me, VICE when it was good is the girl’s bum on the fiction issue from 2008. It’s Michael Moynihan’s raspy voice reporting from South Korea. It’s the floppy hair of the one super-hot reporter I knew that smoked filterless roll-ups. VICE was where the cool kids at the back of the bus would grow up to write, the place that you would daydream about working for as a young reporter.

Joe Biden has held the fewest press conferences and interviews of any president since Ronald Reagan. And now we’ve learned that when he is allowed to take questions, they appear to be pre-selected, approved by White House staff and agreed to by reporters in the White House pool. Yesterday, while appearing alongside South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, Biden fielded a question from Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times. A photojournalist captured a notecard in Biden’s hand that showed an avatar of Subramanian, the words “Question 1” and a pre-written text of the question she asked the president.So how does a question from a White House reporter make it to the president of the United States’ hands before she even asks it?