Three years into the Trump presidency, the US media are still grappling with the big question: what are we doing here? Transcribing the words of the powerful? Or holding them to account?
How US journalists answer those questions inevitably shapes how the Australian media come to understand its role today.
This week, those questions kindled the fire that’s lit up US media Twitter in a journalistically no-holds barred clash between The New York Times media columnist (and former BuzzFeed News chief) Ben Smith and The New Yorker Pulitzer Prize-winning Me Too star Ronan Farrow.
(In a reminder of how small — and elite — America’s media is, both Smith and Farrow grew up on Manhattan’s upper west side. Both attended Yale.)
Smith punched first with his 3500-word weekend column “Is Ronan Farrow too good to be true?”, questioning Farrow’s reporting about Harvey Weinstein (for which he shared the Pulitzer with the NYT’s Megan Tuohy and Jodi Kantor) and former NBC presenter Matt Lauer.
Farrow blocked: “I stand by my reporting”. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple tagged in to support Smith, tweeting: “Muscular debunking”.
The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyou, in turn, crashed into the ring, broken bottle in hand: “Journalistic high-mindedness from @benyt, the guy who pubbed the Trump dossier without fact-checking a shred of it”.
Me Too casualty Lauer ventured onto digital news Mediate with the plaintive, “Why Ronan Farrow is indeed too good to be true“. Farrow’s editor David Remnick worked the refs from his corner: “Working alongside fact checkers, lawyers and other editorial staff members at The New Yorker, he achieved something remarkable …We’re proud to publish him.”
Ring-side, Politico’s Jack Shafer cheered: “There is something wonderfully cleansing about a full-bore @nytimes vs. @NewYorker fight.” Smith’s WaPo counterpart Margaret Sullivan noted “how thoroughly male this contretemps is, especially given the #MeToo subject matter”.
Beneath the punch and counter-punch, the debate canvasses important issues for the job journalism needs to be doing right now. It suggests that much of journalism is still coming to terms not just with the how-to but with the why of Me Too reporting.
The journalistic revolution wrought by the Weinstein (and subsequent) stories was not the moral fable of the fall of once-powerful men. It was that light-bulb recognition — flicked on by the election of a serial harasser as US president — that workplace harassment and assault was newsworthy, that reporting it was a too-long delayed imperative of our times.
Journalists have had to bring their tempered tools of truth-seeking to this inherently secretive world, including, Smith says, the fundamental principles of corroboration and rigorous disclosure. (Worth noting that the more spectacular failures of Australian Me Too arose from weak pre-publication corroboration.)
In the US, these tools meant journalists clashed with political campaigners over how — or whether — to report the allegations by Tara Reade against US presidential candidate Joe Biden, as canvassed by, among others, Vox’s Laura McGann.
Smith picks up an earlier criticism of Farrow’s book: that it slides around this challenge by resorting to “new journalism on the sly”. The craft’s continued discomfort with the inherent slyness of fiction’s show-don’t-tell re-creation of private conversations is why it remains tagged as “new” some 50 years after Tom Wolfe declared the term.
But the enduring question raised by Smith’s column lies in his equally sly phrasing “of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump” where “the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives”.
The inherent sneer has been grasped colourfully by the left (“a toxic, corrosive, and still-vibrant Trump-era pathology” according to The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald) and eagerly by the right with Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal pompously declaring, “even The New York Times now recognises the problem”.
It can best be read as a more provocative up-date of WaPo editor Marty Baron’s 2017 take on the journalistic challenges of Trump: “We’re not at war. We’re at work”. Not wrong, but not wholly right either.
However, “resistance journalism” has already been too easily read as an attack on journalism that holds power to account.
As governments in the US and Australia take an increasingly flexible approach to truth, that accountability is a job the media cannot resist.
What should the media’s role be in these times? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column.
Its kind of sad that this article appeared on the same day as Bernard Keane’s appalling expose on the media’s dereliction of duty on the continuing big money soft corruption of Australian Government (https://uat.crikey.com.au/2020/05/22/political-reporters-not-doing-their-job-power-corruption/?utm_campaign=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&ins=dHlWTVZIMnhpdFpuSTFrSnNyL0JhQT09).
While I’m not for a moment denigrating this discussion on how media can navigate new ways of story telling in the face of novel challenges, its pretty dismal that the media can’t even acquit its most basic, 20th century task of covering public policy and holding power to account.
Once you start to dig into the backstory and the detail of the Mia Farrow/Woody Allen accusations, it’s pretty hard not to conclude that Ronan Farrow’s journalistic skillset, judgement and/or integrity – maybe all three – are at the very least problematic. And that has pretty profound implications for the profession/vocation more broadly, given his contemporary standing, garlanded celebration and ongoing influence on how it has increasingly defined and conducted itself recently…in a steepening albeit continuous arc stretching back beyond ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’, beyond Watergate, beyond Gonzo…back beyond ‘In Cold Blood’, even, to the total-war-effort ‘reporting’ of WW2.
As always, I think the real problem is deeply epistemological, a haplessness of mode, even a category error: what, even, ‘is’ this contrived hybrid information form, so conveniently fudged as ‘journalism’? Is it fact? Fiction? Truth? Speculative analysis? Descriptive opinion? Material world empirical observation and recording? Answer: typically…it’s all that, and more, when/as needed, IAW whatever is most pragmatically convenient for Teh Byline/Masthead, to get words onto this or that given (monetised) space. Pretty useless and meaningless…but about as honest and definitive as (I think) it’s ever likely to get. ‘Journalism’ is, ultimately, about providing ‘journalistic content’…and while no pro journo will ever admit as much, ‘journalistic content’ is really shaped, primarily, by the container that it needs to fill – and all its accompanying (and banal) practical imperatives: information production resources, timing, space, tone, house style, advertising and owner’s external limitations, editorial preferences, prejudices & pragmatism, legal factors, audience demands…
#MeToo journalism (including plenty of Farrow’s) has had many admirable strands and elements (and outcomes) to it, but it’s also – quintessentially – largely a self-generating product of #MeToo journalism itself. Which is always fraught, in the ‘yarn about a yarn about a yarn about a yarn’ way by which byline egos & narcissism can have ‘Journalism’ flirting with disappearing up its own bum.
It’s hard to understand from this mash-up of listicle, cut’n’paste & dodgy sub editting what the article was intended to convey, except a bit of tut-tutting from a retired hack.
Was there a missing word in “…“resistance journalism” has already been too easily read as an attack on journalism thatFAILED MISERABLY to hold(s) power to account.“.
If the passage as published was intended then the screaming question is “by whom?” was it so read/understood?
It’s complicated by the fact that Farrow’s ‘resistance journalism’ on Weinstein very definitely held power to account (at least Weinstein’s), and yet in case (say) of Matt Lauer, it’s much less clear. Was Lauer treated fairly? Hard not to conclude that plenty of Farrow’s insinuations were not supported by reality…but Lauer was certainly powerful, too, and not particularly nice with it. It was Farrow’s journalism itself which ‘decided’ Lauer’s fate.
In Australia you can draw parallels with Rush, the ‘many’ (but still mostly un-revealed) entertainment industry abusers Tracey Spicer alleged, and even – at risk of moderations! – Pell. All examples where claims to be ‘resistance journalism’ speaking ‘truth to power’ are highly contestable. So often now journalism drives, becomes, creates – IS – the story it’s nominally reporting ‘on’.
Worth reading Bernard Keens article and it’s comments. Spot on.
election of a serial harasser as US president – I assume this is Bill Clinton?
Could also be JFK, LBJ, and DJT (of those we know of 100%).
Could also be JFK, LBJ, and DJT (of those we know of 100%).