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Three insights into Elon Musk’s brief, narcissism-fueled reign over Twitter

Photo (cc) 2013 by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

When we learned last spring that Elon Musk might buy Twitter and transform it into some sort of troll- and bot-infested right-wing hellhole, my first thought was: Bring it on. Although I’m a heavy user, I had no great affection for the service, which was already something of a mess. If Musk ran it into a ditch, well, what of it?

On second thought, I realized I would miss it — and so would a lot of other people. In particular, Twitter has become an important service in calling out injustice around the world as well as a forum that gives Black users a voice they might not have anywhere else. My friend Callie Crossley was talking about Black Twitter on the late, lamented “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” ages ago. Black Twitter could go elsewhere, of course, but it would be hard to recreate on the same scale that it exists now.

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For now, I’m staying, but I’m also playing around. Mastodon meets a lot of my needs (I’m @dankennedy_nu@journa.host), mainly because a lot of media and political people I want to follow immediately made the move. But, so far, I see none of the non-Trump conservatives whose presence I value and very few Black users. That may be my fault, and it may change. I’m also skeptical of Mastodon’s extreme decentralization, with each server (called an instance) having its own rules of engagement. I’m also on Post News at @dankennedy_nu, but I really don’t like the micropayment scheme on which it’s staked its future, explained at Nieman Lab by Laura Hazard Owen.

Twitter really does matter. It may be the smallest of the social platforms, but it’s a place where people in media and politics have to be. I’m not sure it can be replicated. So much has been written and said about Twitter over the past few weeks, and no one could possible keep up with it all. Here, though, are three pieces that I think cut through the murk as well as any.

The first is from Dr. Meredith Clark, my colleague at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Professor Clark is a leading authority on Black Twitter and the author of the forthcoming book “We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives.” Meredith says she’s staying. In a recent interview with Michel Martin of NPR, she explained why:

We’re digging in our heels. We’ve been on this platform. We’ve contributed so much to it that we’ve made it valuable in the way that it is today. We’ve made it an asset, and so no, we’re not going anywhere. And then I see other people, honestly, who have more privilege, a number of academics who are saying, nope, we’re going somewhere else. We’re leaving for other platforms.

But I do really think that there are limits to those relationships because there aren’t many platforms that allow many speakers to talk to one another all at the same time in the same place. My use hasn’t changed all that much. I don’t plan to be one of those people who migrate. I just tweeted the other day that I’ll be the last one to turn the lights off if that’s what I need to be, because I’m certainly not going either.

By the way, Meredith was a guest earlier this year on “What Works: The Future of Local News,” a podcast hosted by Ellen Clegg and me. You can listen to our conversation here.

Taking the opposite approach is Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, who has suspended his Twitter account in favor of Mastodon — a step that he admits has cut him out of numerous conversations, but that he believed was necessary in order not to be a part of Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a reflection of his own obsessions and ego. Like Clark, Dr. Cobb is Black; unlike Clark, his reasoning makes no mention of Black Twitter per se, although he does note its value in bringing to light racial injustices. “Were it not for social media,” Cobb writes in The New Yorker, “George Floyd — along with Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor — would likely have joined the long gallery of invisible dead Black people, citizens whose bureaucratized deaths were hidden and ignored.” But that, he emphasizes, was then:

Participating in Twitter — with its world-spanning reach, its potential to radically democratize our discourse along with its virtue mobs and trolls — always required a cost-benefit analysis. That analysis began to change, at least for me, immediately after Musk took over. His reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account made remaining completely untenable. Following an absurd Twitter poll about whether Trump should be allowed to return, Musk reinstated the former President. The implication was clear: if promoting the January 6, 2021, insurrection — which left at least seven people dead and more than a hundred police officers injured — doesn’t warrant suspension to Musk, then nothing else on the platform likely could.

My own view of Trump’s reinstatement is rather complicated. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s easy to justify banning a major presidential candidate, which Trump now surely is. On the other hand, he was banned for fomenting violence — and now that he’s been given another chance, he’s likely to do it again, which means he’ll have to be banned all over again. Except that he won’t be with Musk in charge. (So far, at least, Trump hasn’t tweeted since his reinstatement.) In any case, I respect Cobb’s decision, even if I’m still not quite there.

I’ll close with Josh Marshall, editor of the liberal website Talking Points Memo. Like me, Marshall is dipping his toe into Mastodon’s waters while maintaining his presence on Twitter. And, like me, he’s trying to figure out exactly what Musk is up to. The other day he offered a theory that doesn’t explain all of it, but may explain some of it — especially the part that plays into Musk’s emotions and sense of grievance, which may prove to be the most important in understanding what’s going on.

Marshall sees Musk as traveling a path previously taken by Donald Trump. Like Trump, Musk is a narcissist who can’t imagine a world that doesn’t revolve around his every need and want. Also like Trump in, say 2015, Musk was until recently someone with vague right-wing proclivities who has hardened his views and openly embraced white supremacy and antisemitism because we liberals hurt his feelings. Trump and Musk have both taken up with horrible people because they were offering support and friendship when no one else would. With Trump, it’s Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. With Musk, it’s, well, Trump and his sycophants. Marshall writes:

I doubt very much that in mid-2015 Trump had any real familiarity with the arcana of racist and radical right groups, their keywords or ideological touch-points. But they knew he was one of them, perhaps even more than he did. They pledged their undying devotion and his narcissism did the rest.

Elon Musk is on the same path. There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to Great Replacement.

If anything good can come of this it may be that we hit peak social media a few years ago. Facebook is shrinking, especially among anyone younger than 60. TikTok is huge, but as a number of observers have pointed out, it isn’t really a social platform — it’s a broadcaster with little in the way of user interaction. Now Twitter is splitting apart.

This may be temporary. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg or (most likely) someone else will be able to reassemble social media around the metaverse. For now, though, social media may be broken in a way we couldn’t have imagined in, say, 2020. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing — although I wouldn’t mind if someone put Twitter back together again, only this time minus the trolls, the bots and the personal abuse that defined the site long before Musk came along.

Why some in the media are holding back on a motive in the Club Q shootings

Pride parade in Colorado Springs. Photo (cc) 2013 by Stephen Rees.

You may have noticed some reluctance on the part of the media to label the mass killings in Colorado Springs as a hate crime aimed at the LGBTQ community. Looking at the case from the outside, the shooter certainly appears to have been motivated by anti-LGBTQ animus. He burst into Club Q, an LGBTQ club, and started firing before he was taken down by a military veteran. The Colorado Sun, quoting an anonymous police source, reported as early as Sunday that “law enforcement has collected evidence suggesting the shooting was a hate crime.”

Despite all that, many commentators are holding back. For instance, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, even while decrying the right’s exploitation of anti-transgender and anti-drag show sentiment, felt compelled to write: “Perhaps we’ll learn something in the coming days that will put these murders, which took place on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, into a new light, but right now, it seems hard to separate them from a nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement.”

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Why the caution? I suspect some of it stems from the aftermath of the mass killings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016. That horrifying incident claimed 49 lives. Like Club Q, the Pulse catered to the LGBTQ community, and the shootings were immediately labeled a crime motivated by hatred of LGBTQ people. And so we all believed it was — until evidence to the contrary emerged. As Jane Coaston explained in Vox in 2018, the shooter had originally intended to attack a shopping and entertainment complex but decided security was too tight. His wife told investigators that he chose the Pulse at random. Coaston wrote:

This evidence dramatically changes the mass shooting’s narrative; politicians and individuals across the political spectrum had positioned it as an anti-LGBTQ hate crime. Instead, the new evidence suggests, the Pulse nightclub shooting was intended as revenge for US anti-terror policies abroad.

The evidence emerged during the trial of the shooter’s wife, Noor Salman, whom the federal government charged with aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice. Federal prosecutors argued that Salman had helped her husband plan and orchestrate the attack.

What we later learned about the Pulse shootings is a good reminder that journalism needs to be grounded in evidence. As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel put it in their classic book “The Elements of Journalism,” our work should be grounded in “a discipline of verification.” We all know what the Colorado Springs incident looks like, but until we know for sure, cautionary language such as Goldberg’s is the proper way to frame this.

Of course, there’s an additional challenge: Before can can arrive at an understanding of what happened, we’re already on to the next mass shooting. Colorado Springs came right after the killings of three University of Virginia football players. Then, on Tuesday night, a gunman killed six people at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia.

So no, we shouldn’t get ahead of the story. But what we can do at moments like this is call out politicians who try to turn us against each other because of race or sexual orientation, and whose only answer to the spread of gun-related violence is more guns. Those are universal values regardless of the details of any particular incident.

Ashley Parker wins the 2022 Both Sides Sweepstakes

Stop the competition. We have a winner of the 2022 Both Sides Sweepstakes: Ashley Parker, a high-profile political reporter for The Washington Post, who took to Twitter in order to share this with us:

I put it up as an image rather than an embedded tweet because who knows what’s going to happen to it over the next few days? Plus she might wake up and delete it. But click here, while you can, to see some of the replies.

I should note, too, that as far as I can tell, this is not an imposter who paid Elon Musk $8 for a blue check mark.

Covering Trump: Will the third time be the charm?

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On Thursday I put together a brief lecture on how the media ought to cover Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign. I thought of writing a blog post about it — but then decided I could save time and just post the slides. I’m not going to do this often, but I’m curious to know whether you think this is effective or not.

Kara Swisher can’t make sense out of what Elon Musk is doing, either

Elon Musk. Photo (cc) 2019 by Daniel Oberhaus.

If you are trying to make sense out of what Elon Musk is doing with (or, rather, to) Twitter, I recommend this podcast in which the tech journalist Kara Swisher talks about her interactions with the billionaire over the years.

Swisher is appalled as any of us, but she’s more sad than angry — she says she genuinely believed Musk might be the right person to fix the money-losing platform. She doesn’t attribute any nefarious motives to his brief reign, which has been marked by chaos and performative cruelty toward Twitter’s employees. But she can’t make sense of it, either.

Toward the end, her producer, Nayeema Raza, asks Swisher what she’d like to ask Musk if they were back on speaking terms — which they’re currently not. Swisher’s four-word answer: “What are you doing?”

Best wishes to Peter Kadzis of GBH News as he moves into semi-retirement

Peter Kadzis. GBH News photo by Liz Neisloss.

A true Boston original is heading into semi-retirement. Peter Kadzis, the politics editor at GBH News, announced Monday that he’s stepping down from full-time work at the end of the year, although he’ll continue as a contributor. The good news is that his distinctive Dorchester accent will still be heard on GBH Radio (89.7 FM) and television (Channel 2).

This is personal. Peter was the editor of The Boston Phoenix from the time I arrived as a copy editor in 1991 until I left as the media columnist in 2005. I continued to write for the Phoenix from time to time until it folded in 2013; Peter landed at GBH not long after, and I began writing a weekly column on media and politics for the GBH website in 2015. In other words, Peter was my editor for more than 30 years, right up until I decided to end my column earlier this year.

Peter was an important mentor. My career had stalled out when I was hired by the Phoenix, but he saw something in me, promoting me to managing editor and then news editor. But I wanted to return to the reporting and writing ranks, so, when Mark Jurkowitz (now at the Pew Research Center) left the Phoenix in 1994, Peter gave me a chance. His deep knowledge of Boston and of the media, both locally and nationally, was of enormous help to me as I groped my way toward my own voice and my own approach.

I should note, too, that GBH News became an outlet for a number of former Phoenix people. There were Fridays when three of the five panelists on “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” were Phoenix alums — Jon Keller, Adam Reilly and me. Susan Ryan-Vollmar and David Bernstein write commentaries for the website from time to time. Sue O’Connell appears on radio and television. And, always, there was Peter, back in the newsroom. He continues to be a friend and colleague, and I wish him and his family nothing but the best.

What follows is the official announcement from Lee Hill, executive editor of GBH News:

I’m writing to share bittersweet news. A few weeks ago, our venerable Politics Editor Peter Kadzis informed me of his plans to retire from full-time work with GBH News. We decided together that we’d get through the beast that was the midterm election before announcing to the staff. The time has now come to share the news more broadly. Here’s Peter, in his own words:

After 50 years in the trenches, it’s time for me to scale back. That I’ve been able to cap my career at GBH News is, for me, still a source of wonder. And I hope that as we all move forward, we can find a way to continue our association. While I’m winding down, I’m not hanging it up.

As a kid reporter many years ago, I was one of the hordes of reporters who watched Boston school desegregation and the riots and street violence that ensued. Perhaps because of this experience, I’ve always had a sense of the potential for violence and dirty dealing that lies just below the surface of politics.

In my years at GBH, I’ve tried to put my feel for the dark side at the service of our audience. It helped me to see straight through the mayoralty of Tom Menino; the coming and going of Marty Walsh; and the rise of four remarkable political talents who have at least one thing in common — they are all women, and they are all women of color: Ayanna Pressley, Rachael Rollins, Michelle Wu, and Andrea Campbell.

I transition to part-time status after the disorienting years of Trump and COVID-19 and will watch with interest as Maura Healey tries to tame — or at least co-exist — with the undisciplined gang of ego maniacs known as the Massachusetts legislature.

In my blood, I feel confident that the newsroom’s commitment to the public good will only mature and intensify. I’m proud to have been part of the journey, which continues in the able hands of Katie Lannan, Saraya Wintersmith, Adam Reilly and the rest of you.

Peter is an important and towering presence in our newsroom whose contributions are innumerable because of the brilliance and wisdom he brings to his work. Under his leadership, the GBH News’ politics team has grown to become a respected (sometimes feared) powerhouse that has repeatedly shaped the local and regional conversation around politics and power in the Bay State. And our election coverage this year was consumed by the widest audience ever on GBH.org. That is in part because of his guidance and influence.

Thankfully, Peter isn’t going far anytime soon. He will continue in his current role through the end of January (as we search for a successor), before transitioning into a scaled back political contributor role with GBH News. Our audience will continue to benefit from his keen insights, analysis and wit.

Please join me in congratulating Peter on a stellar career, and to wish him all the best in this next chapter.

Lee

NPR’s top news executive has been hired as the next editor of The Boston Globe

It was a little more than nine years ago that John and Linda Henry completed their purchase of The Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. But it wasn’t until today that they hired their first top news editor.

Late this afternoon the Globe announced that Nancy Barnes, currently the chief news executive at NPR, would replace longtime editor Brian McGrory on Feb. 1. McGrory said in September that he would retire at the end of the year in order to become chair of the journalism department at Boston University.

Barnes, 61, has local ties, having grown up in the Boston area and worked as an intern at the Globe and as a reporter at The Sun of Lowell earlier in her career. Before coming to NPR as senior vice president for news and editorial director in 2018, she had held the top editing jobs at the Houston Chronicle and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Barnes’ tenure at NPR was not entirely a happy one. In September, after a new executive position was created above her, she said she would leave by the end of the year, saying, “Now is the right time for me to pursue some other opportunities.” NPR media reporter David Folkenflik wrote that Barnes could seem “aloof” at times, although he noted that she had come in under stressful circumstances: her predecessor, Michael Oreskes, had departed amid multiple accusations of sexual harassment. Folkenflik described her legacy in glowing terms:

Barnes helped NPR News achieve substantive accomplishments in a period buffeted by external crises that the network had to both endure and cover. She accelerated NPR’s investigative and enterprise reporting efforts; helped map out reporting on the pandemic and the war in Ukraine; and broadened the network’s coverage of issues of race, identity and social justice.

In addition, she oversaw a more aggressive stance in reporting on the growing threat to democracy from supporters of former President Donald Trump. Barnes also established a more muscular presence for the network in covering climate change. The newsroom continued to garner major accolades, winning its first Pulitzer, in collaboration with two member stations, and becoming a Pulitzer finalist several times.

Like Marty Baron, who preceded McGrory as the Globe’s editor, Barnes is an outsider. Throughout the Globe’s history, though, most of the paper’s editors, including McGrory, have been insiders. And here’s a qualification that Linda Henry cited in her memo to the staff, which appears below: Barnes has served as the top news executive at an organization other than a newspaper. As the Globe moves more into podcasts and other forms of media, Barnes will be in a good position to help lead the way.

McGrory — who did as much as anyone to recruit the Henrys as buyers for the Globe, as I described in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls” — leaves quite a legacy of his own. On McGrory’s watch, the Globe has thrived journalistically and has emerged as among a handful of large regional newspapers that have achieved financial sustainability. He was a popular metro columnist before becoming the editor, and he will write a column for the opinion section once he leaves the paper.

This is the second major hire at the Globe this year. In May, James Dao was recruited from The New York Times to edit the paper’s opinion section. Barnes and Dao will both report directly to Linda Henry, the chief executive of Boston Globe Media, and John Henry, the publisher of the Globe. Linda Henry’s full memo to the troops was fowarded to me a few hours ago by several trusted sources. Here it is in full with the exception of the search committee members, since those names would be meaningful only to Globe insiders:

A few months ago, I shared that we began a search for the next leader of the Globe’s newsroom as Brian McGrory begins his next chapter at BU and resumes a familiar, but new(ish) role as columnist for the Globe on the Opinion side. In the time since, we have met with a field of incredibly talented leaders — both inside and outside our organization — and I am thrilled to share with you today that Nancy Barnes will become the 13th editor of The Boston Globe.

Nancy, as many of you know, is an accomplished journalist and transformational leader who has held the top job at some of the largest newsrooms in the country. She currently serves as NPR’s senior vice president for news and editorial director, leading a team of more than 500 journalists and newsroom executives, with oversight of NPR’s journalism around the world and across platforms. She’s also deeply engaged in the industry, serving on the prestigious Pulitzer Prize Board, the Peabody Awards, and as a past president of the News Leaders Association.

This is somewhat of a homecoming for Nancy, who was born in Cambridge and grew up in Wilmington before moving to Virginia. She holds something in common with many of the country’s top journalists, having started her lifelong career in journalism as an intern at The Boston Globe. After college, she returned to the area to work at the Lowell Sun, and then spent a decade at the News & Observer [of Raleigh, North Carolina]. She earned an MBA before joining the Minneapolis Star Tribune as executive editor, where she modernized their digital journalism and led the newsroom to win multiple national awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. When Nancy moved to Texas to take on the role of SVP and Executive Editor for Hearst Texas newspapers, The Houston Chronicle won its first Pulitzer Prize and was named a Pulitzer Finalist three other times during her tenure.

I’ve been delighted and inspired by my conversations with Nancy. She has shared that her priorities in this role are to tap into the tremendous innovation that our company has embraced over the last several years and to ensure that our mentorship and development for journalists at all levels of their careers remains vibrant and transformative. Nancy knows the importance of serving an engaged local audience and has a proven track record of elevating metro news outlets to their highest potential.

On top of her proven track record with metros, I was particularly inspired by all that she has learned in her time away from newspapers over the past few years, immersed in an innovative, digital-forward, and global environment at NPR. She is thrilled to return to Boston with our regional expertise, and I know that her time at NPR has given her best practices, insights, and strategies that will inform her next chapter at the Globe. I am excited for her to guide our continued digital evolution, working with the incredible team of journalists here to better serve our growing reader base.

I once again would like to share my gratitude to Brian McGrory for his bold leadership as editor over the past ten years. Under Brian’s leadership, the Globe has continuously produced ambitious journalism, inspiring the talented journalists here to be searingly relevant and relentlessly interesting. He expanded coverage, led a newsroom reinvention which engaged the entire staff, and has helped the Globe adapt during one of the most challenging times in the newspaper industry. Our work has been recognized locally and nationally with many awards, including multiple Pulitzer Prizes and most recently, the award of General Excellence in Online Journalism by the Online News Association. Today, the Globe is arguably the most successful regional news organization in the country.

Inclusive of Stat News, Boston Globe Media now has the highest number of total subscribers that this institution has had since 2008, and we continue to lead in subscription numbers among our industry peers. We are extremely proud of all the ways that this growth has fueled continuous investment in our journalism, and we look forward to building on that momentum with Nancy’s extensive industry perspective and deep journalistic experience.

Please join us tomorrow, November 15th at 2pm in the newsroom, where Brian and I will be welcoming Nancy in person and she will introduce herself in the news hub. We will send an audio link for those who are not able to join us in person. She will officially join our team on February 1, 2023 and we will plan a time for her to meet many more of you in the new year.

A special thank you to the internal team that helped with this comprehensive and inspiring search process….

Thank you,
Linda Henry

Jackie Kucinich of The Daily Beast will be the Globe’s new DC bureau chief

The Boston Globe has hired a new Washington bureau chief — Jackie Kucinich, who currently holds that position at The Daily Beast. Kucinich replaces Liz Goodwin, who left the Globe during the summer in order to cover Congress for The Washington Post.

Before starting at the Beast in 2014, Kucinich worked for the Post, USA Today, Roll Call and The Hill, and is a regular contributor to CNN.

“This is a big get for the Globe,” said Brian McGrory in a memo to the staff, which a trusted source forwarded to me Tuesday. “Jackie is heralded around Washington, rightly so, for her fresh eye and her appropriately skeptical view, for knowing the intricacies of the city without ever allowing herself to be part of the press pack within it.”

Kucinich, who lives in Washington with her husband and daughter, is the daughter of former Cleveland mayor and congressman Dennis Kucinich. She’ll begin her new job on Nov. 21.

Erik Wemple — belatedly, he says — comes to James Bennet’s defense

Erik Wemple of The Washington Post comes to the defense (free link) of former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet, and says he should have done so two years ago. In a remarkable mea culpa, Wemple writes:

Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennet was immediately apparent, we responded with an evenhanded critique of the Times’s flip-flop, not the unapologetic defense of journalism that the situation required.

Wemple is someone I hold in extremely high regard. That said, I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to Bennet’s full record, including putting the Times at risk because of his sloppiness in handling an editorial about Sarah Palin and helping columnist Bret Stephens evade accountability for a column in which he more or less endorsed eugenics. I wrote all about that recently.

Absent those factors, I think Bennet would have survived the uproar over an op-ed by U.S. Sen Tom Cotton urging the use of military force against violent Black Lives Matter protesters. For that matter, Bennet might have kept his job despite everything had he not offered a full-throated defense of the Cotton piece and then admitted he hadn’t read it before publication.

Still, Wemple makes some strong arguments on Bennet’s behalf.

Are newspaper endorsements obsolete? Ellen and I kick it around with Jeff Jacoby

On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Jeff Jacoby, longtime columnist for The Boston Globe opinion pages. Jeff also writes the weekly “Arguable” newsletter.

Jeff holds degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School, and before entering journalism, he briefly practiced law. He was also an assistant to John Silber, the prickly president of Boston University.

Prompted by a column Jeff wrote in June, and spurred on by the impending midterm elections, the podcast features a free-form discussion of whether newspaper editorial pages should endorse candidates in presidential races. It’s a hot topic these days — this piece by Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab is one of just several to observe that endorsements are on the wane.

I’ve got a Quick Take on a big story out of Woburn. That city has an independent newspaper and is covered by the Globe and other outlets. But this story wasn’t broken by any of the usual suspects. Ellen’s Quick Take is on an opinion column in The Washington Post by Perry Bacon Jr., who calls for $10 billion in government funding to support a news outlet in every congressional district in the country. As you’ll hear, we both have some problems with Bacon’s proposal.

You can listen to our latest podcast here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.