Media Nation

For $2,000, you too can be on the cover of the Rolling Stone

Well, maybe not the cover. But if you want to pay $2,000, you can write an essay that will be published in Rolling Stone. The once-great magazine’s pay-to-play scheme was revealed by The Guardian, which reports: “Rolling Stone magazine is offering ‘thought leaders’ the chance to write for its website if they are willing to pay $2,000 to ‘shape the future of culture.’”

A few observations. First, actual thought leaders don’t have to pay $2,000 in order to be published. Second, they don’t call themselves thought leaders. Third, and most obvious: There is a name for this, and it’s called advertising.

As The Guardian notes, the scheme is at least a cousin to native advertising or branded content, which is advertising in the form of a feature story that is aimed at enticing readers rather than beating them over the head. Properly labeled, there’s nothing wrong with such ads.

But Rolling Stone proposes to go quite a bit further than that. Even if it’s properly labeled, they’ve made themselves a laughingstock. This is embarrassing, right down to the hilariously named “Culture Council” that’s going to vet this crap — a process that I assume will consist mainly of making sure the check cleared.

Lauren Wolfe, The New York Times and the never-ending dilemma over social media

In what should be a surprise to no one, follow-ups show that The New York Times fired freelance editor Lauren Wolfe after several previous incidents in which the paper’s editors believed she had violated social-media guidelines. It wasn’t just the “I have chills” tweet about President Biden. But the question remains: What was the big deal? As Joe Pompeo of Vanity Fair puts it:

As the situation snowballed, there was also a palpable yearning for more information about what was behind the Times’ decision. Was Wolfe a sacrificial lamb thrown overboard in the face of bad faith criticism? Had the Times overreacted to what could be interpreted as an expression of relief given the authoritarian bullet America just dodged? Or was there more to the story?

The answer, Pompeo says, citing “a number of senior Times sources”: “Wolfe had previously been cautioned about her social media behavior. A manager gave her a warning months ago after staffers expressed discomfort with certain tweets she was told bordered on being political.”

Tom Jones of Poynter argues that Wolfe’s termination raises questions that need further exploration:

This incident once again brings into question the social media presence of journalists. When a journalist tweets, do they represent just themselves or the organization they work for, as well? Can someone’s work be questioned over something they post on Facebook? Is a journalist always “on the clock,” even when they are tweeting personal thoughts?

Finally, Wolfe herself speaks to Erik Wemple of The Washington Post. And what she has to say casts doubt on the idea that her previous transgressions played any role in her firing. Wemple writes:

Months ago, recalls Wolfe, she received a warning from the same manager about her Twitter activity; as an example, he cited a tweet in which, Wolfe says, she’d connected the resistance of conservative men to wearing masks to “toxic masculinity.” She deleted the tweet. But, according to Wolfe, the manager said her posts in general were “borderline” and that other Times staffers had done “worse.” Last week’s tweet was “the only reason they fired me,” Wolfe says.

Wemple also describes as “dreadful” the Times statement (see previous item) in which management said it would respect her privacy while not respecting her privacy. It surely is that. By insinuating that Wolfe was fired for something much worse than the “chills” tweet, the Times harmed Wolfe’s reputation and made it more difficult for her to move on to her next job.

The Times is known for having strict guidelines about its straight-news journalists expressing opinions on social media. If, in fact, Wolfe proved incorrigible after previous warnings, then I suppose the Times acted appropriately, even though it still strikes me as an extreme reaction to a pretty harmless tweet.

It also appears that Times management reacted as much to the outrage stirred up by the gadfly journalist Glenn Greenwald and others as it did to Wolfe’s actual tweet. According to Pompeo, Wolfe was told that her tweet had sparked an outcry, and “we can’t have that.” For what it’s worth, Greenwald says Wolfe shouldn’t have been fired.

Earlier:

(Not) getting to the bottom of why The New York Times fired Lauren Wolfe

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(Not) getting to the bottom of why The New York Times fired Lauren Wolfe

For journalists, Twitter is a seductive and dangerous place. It’s a forum in which to see and be seen. Editors encourage journalists to use it in order to promote their work and build their personal brands, which in turn redound to the benefit of their employer. But the way to do that is to be edgy — and journalists who are too edgy often find themselves without a net, and sometimes without a job.

The latest journalist to run afoul of these contradictions (maybe, as we’ll see below) is Lauren Wolfe, who, until last week, was a freelance editor for The New York Times. Yashir Ali, who writes for New York magazine and HuffPost, tweeted last Thursday that Wolfe had been dismissed for tweeting “I have chills” as Joe Biden’s plane was landing in advance of the inauguration. She also tweeted and then deleted criticism that Donald Trump had refused to send a military jet to pick Biden up; that turned out not to be true.

1. Some news…

Lauren Wolfe, who was an editor on contract for the NYT, has had her contract canceled after she tweeted what's on the left.

Wolfe also tweeted what's on the right, but deleted when she learned Biden chose to take his own plane.

Per two sources. pic.twitter.com/uaB0INZ1q8

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 22, 2021

Liberals and fellow journalists on Twitter erupted in outrage over Wolfe’s dismissal, seeing it as a sign that the Times is twisting itself into knots to avoid being accused of bias. For instance, Wesley Lowery, who left The Washington Post after he and executive editor Marty Baron clashed over Lowery’s social-media posts, tweeted, “We allow critics — of good and bad faith — to hang us by our own rope when we conflate objectivity of process with individual objectivity. Someone having or expressing an opinion does not mean they are not capable of providing fair and professional coverage on a topic.” (Lowery now works for the Marshall Project, a well-regarded nonprofit that covers criminal-justice issues.)

Virginia Heffernan, a Los Angeles Times columnist who hosts the soon-to-be-retired podcast “Trumpcast,” also came to Wolfe’s defense in a thread that compared the liberties that The New York Times allowed to swashbucklers of the past like Johnny Apple and David Carr to the locked-down mode that prevails currently. She also defended a tweet by Times contributing columnist Will Wilkinson, who was fired from his position at the Niskanen Center, a think tank, for a dumb tweet in which he joked, “If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.” Sorry, but that’s a tweet too far. Leaving aside the fact that Wilkinson was lampooning insurrectionists who really did want to kill Pence, his tweet was wildly inappropriate, as Wilkinson himself acknowledged by apologizing.

Which brings us back to the matter of Lauren Wolfe, whose tweets strike me as innocuous and in keeping with the relief most of the nation feels at the departure of a president who incited violence against Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of the election. At most, Wolfe should have been taken aside and told, “OK, enough.” But is that really why she was let go? The Times issued a murky statement that read:

There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters, but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we don’t plan to comment further.

Needless to say, that does Wolfe a disservice by leading all of us to speculate what dastardly deeds she committed to warrant having her gig terminated. Ali tweeted, “There were other tweets Wolfe was warned over I’m told but so far don’t know what those tweets are.” If that’s the case, then Wolfe’s publicly getting chills over Biden could be seen as the last straw after a series of missteps. (Even so — seriously?)

In any case, there’s an argument to be made that editors shouldn’t worry about their reporters’ Twitter feeds as much as they do. The all-time classic remains a tweet by Julia Ioffe in December 2016 in which she crudely speculated that Trump was having sex with his daughter Ivanka. Ioffe had already given her notice at Politico in order to accept a job at The Atlantic. Politico terminated her employment immediately. Fortunately for Ioffe, The Atlantic honored its agreement, and she has continued to churn out good work ever since.

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Slavery, the Constitution and Frederick Douglass: What was The New York Times thinking?

There is a bizarre omission in The New York Times’ review of James Oakes’ new book, “The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.”

The question at the center of the book is whether the Constitution should be viewed as a pro-slavery or anti-slavery document. And the reviewer, the historian Gordon S. Wood, never mentions Frederick Douglass. Good Lord. If there was one central takeaway from David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (2018), it’s that Douglass embraced the Constitution as a weapon with which to fight slavery, breaking with William Lloyd Garrison, who thought the Constitution was irredeemable.

Curious, I decided to dig a little deeper. And I found a review in The Washington Post by Elizabeth R. Varon of the University of Virginia. It turns out that Oakes not only mentions Douglass, but is a scholar of his views about the Constitution. Varon writes:

This book represents a shift in Oakes’s own thinking. While his 2007 study of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln, “The Radical and the Republican,” juxtaposed Douglass the crusading reformer with Lincoln the cautious politician, this volume foregrounds the commonalities between the two men. Lincoln shared with Douglass, Oakes emphasizes, an abiding belief in the abolition movement’s core principle of fundamental human equality.

Much insight is to be gained by contrasting the antislavery constitutionalism of Douglass and Lincoln with the proslavery constitutionalism of Southern enslavers.

By leaving out Douglass, Wood manages the task of writing a nearly 1,300-word essay about slavery without mentioning a single Black person by name. What was he thinking? And does anyone at the Times edit these things?

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Hank Aaron could have played in Boston — and he’s still the true home-run king

Hank Aaron. Photo (cc) 2015 by David Valdez.

Imagine if the Braves had never left Boston. The great Hank Aaron, whose death at the age of 86 was announced Friday, might have played here. Of course, Boston was a notoriously racist city when Aaron was playing, and we still have plenty of problems. But it’s interesting to ponder what might have been.

Like many fans, I remember watching the Braves as Aaron approached and then surpassed Babe Ruth’s seemingly unbreakable record of 714 in 1974. Braves games were carried on national TV during Aaron’s pursuit, which meant that the entire country could watch. Sadly, the obits all go into some detail about the hate to which Aaron was subjected for having the temerity to break a white man’s record.

On Friday, Twitter was abuzz with the possibility that Major League Baseball’s recent decision to regard the Negro League as “major” might mean that Aaron’s final home-run total of 755 would be revised upward — conceivably by enough to pass Barry Bonds’ steroid-tainted 762. But apparently that’s not going to happen. Mike Oz of Yahoo Sports addressed the matter in December:

One thing that would have caused a tectonic shift in the record books was if Hank Aaron’s 1952 season in the Negro Leagues counted. He hit either eight or nine home runs that season, depending on the source, but Barry Bonds sits atop the all-time home run leaderboard by seven, so either one of those being accepted would have made Hank No. 1 again.

Alas, the 1948 cutoff was chosen because most of the top talent fled the Negro Leagues after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, making the leagues more like the minor leagues than the majors by the time Aaron arrived.

That’s a shame, and maybe MLB will revisit the issue. Either way, though, Henry Aaron will always be the truth home-run king.

AP obit of Larry King leaves out his ties to Russia

Larry King. Photo (cc) 2017 by Gage Skidmore.

This Associated Press obituary of Larry King makes no mention of his spending his waning years working for the Russian propaganda outlet RT. But RT itself doesn’t hold back, even touting a 2019 interview King did with George Papadopoulos, a figure in the Russia scandal who was pardoned by Donald Trump just before he left the White House.

We all got a kick out of King during his CNN days, but let’s not revise history.

The Washington Post deletes an embarrassing anecdote about Kamala Harris

This should have been caught. The Washington Post recently updated a 2019 story about now-Vice President Kamala Harris and her sister that included an anecdote about Harris laughingly comparing life on the campaign trail to being a prison inmate begging for water. In order to recycle it as part of an inauguration package, that embarrassing detail was eliminated and new information was added.

But the Post didn’t change the URL. As a result, a moment that Harris probably wished would be forgotten was, well, forgotten, as it disappeared down the black hole of the internet.

Eric Boehm of Reason magazine, a libertarian publication, found it, though, and the Post had to backtrack, restoring the original version and republishing the new version with a different URL. New York Times media columnist Ben Smith took note, tweeting, “This is pretty weird.”

https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1352660344485904385

Although I don’t think it was a good editorial decision to delete Harris’ tasteless remark in the updated version, that was the Post’s prerogative. But it shouldn’t have required an inquiry from Reason to restore the original. I can understand why it happened — someone wasn’t paying attention to the technical details. But for all the Post’s vaunted technology, you’d think it wouldn’t be that easy to publish a new story using the old URL.

Boehm writes that the “disappearance suggests something about the Post, and about the way traditional political media are preparing to cover Harris now that she’s one heartbeat away from the presidency.” Well, maybe. I hope not. As I said, this sounds like a screw-up rooted more in technology than editing.

There’s also some cosmic connection between the Post’s error of judgment and The Boston Globe’s unveiling its right-to-be-forgotten initiative. Although I think the Globe is doing the right thing, what happened at the Post is a reminder that you have to be careful about rewriting the past.

Kathleen Kingsbury named opinion editor at The New York Times

Some pretty big news from The New York Times: Kathleen Kingsbury will become the new opinion editor, a position she’d been filling on an interim basis ever since James Bennet was pushed out for running a terrible op-ed that he later admitted he hadn’t read. From publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s announcement:

For those who have worked alongside Kathleen, this announcement will come as little surprise. She’s a natural leader, fearless journalist and creative innovator. She has a wide-ranging intellect, with a passion for exploring the ideas and arguments shaping the world today. A former foreign correspondent, business reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer herself, Kathleen is known in the department for championing her colleagues and elevating their work.

Kingsbury is smart and accomplished, having won a 2015 Pulitzer for editorial writing when she was with The Boston Globe.

You can now ask the Globe to remove an embarrassing story about you from Google search

There’s a difference between rewriting history and making some of it more difficult to find. Which is why I think The Boston Globe is doing the right thing with its “Fresh Start” initiative, more commonly known as the right to be forgotten. The proposal was announced by Globe editor Brian McGrory last July, and is being formally put into effect today. In a Globe story, McGrory says:

It was never our intent to have a short and relatively inconsequential Globe story affect the futures of the ordinary people who might be the subjects. Our sense, given the criminal justice system, is that this has had a disproportionate impact on people of color. The idea behind the program is to start addressing it.

The idea is that the Globe might have reported on some past embarrassment about you — a minor arrest, or an arrest that led to a conviction that was not reported. You can appeal to the Globe to have the story updated or removed from Google search. The story would still exist. It couldn’t be removed from the print edition, obviously, and many libraries still carry newspaper microfilm archives. It wouldn’t even be removed from the Globe’s servers. But no longer would one of your less stellar moments rise to the top of a Google search about you, interfering with employment prospects and other aspects of your life.

In some ways, Fresh Start is similar to Gannett’s move in 2018 to take down mugshot galleries from its newspaper websites, which it extended to the former GateHouse Media sites in 2020 after that chain was merged with Gannett. “Mugshot galleries presented without context may feed into negative stereotypes and, in our editorial judgment, are of limited news value,” the company said in explaining its reasoning.

The Globe’s Fresh Start is a good step because it solves a problem without going too far. It merely restores the situation that prevailed before the internet, when you had to put some work into finding information that had been published about someone. That tended to separate those with a legitimate interest from the voyeurs.

It’s also a better solution than the mandatory right-to-be-forgotten laws in effect in Western Europe, where Google under some circumstances can be ordered to remove information about certain people. The First Amendment would make that impossible in the United States.

Thus it’s up to the media to take voluntary steps. As the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics puts it, “Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.”

More: Arun Rath of GBH Radio (89.7 FM) and I kicked it around on Friday.