"Knowingness is a cancer: if you most signal to everyone constantly that you already know everything, you must never appear to be doing the work to find out what you are supposed to know."
I found this quote particularly compelling because it fits with a lot of what people talk about in studies of wisdom and knowledge, which paradoxically only get anywhere by first adopting a true position of 'not knowing', not the phony insincere one, which is easy to slip into. But is there a typo in the first sentence? Did you mean to write 'must' instead of 'most'? Asking because the sentence is a damn good concise description and I'd like to get it right.
While on the topic, I thought this was a fantastic tiny encapsulation of the issue, but likewise suspect a typo: "The problem is a unusually set of economic, technological, and cultural conditions that have congealed in a way that has created social conformity in an industry where that conformity is uniquely dangerous to the basic mission."
i def agree that "it's too personal" reveals a misapprehension of the critique, and i also understand your frustration w the particular ways this criticism often gets waived away as bitterness. i for one like yr media criticism but i'll take up the bokken here:
i see why many ppl roll their eyes at the media-as-cliques framing. if the point is that these ppl are relitigating high school (or whatever), then it matters that their critics also seem to be relitigating high school (or whatever), just from a different perspective in the cafeteria. the accusation of hypocrisy being frustrating isn't the same as the accusation of hypocrisy being wrong.
bowles does this a lot. maybe that tweet dunking on her is stupid but it's also meeting bowles on the terms that she herself often uses to discuss the political dynamics in web media: tweeting about "cool kids" in "bushwick" having miserable fun without her. that is in fact her own framing for a lot of this stuff! and that framing never sounds like a sensible outsider seeing a bunch of self-conscious "cool kids" relitigating high school. bc it instead sounds like a self-conscious "uncool kid" relitigating high school themselves. and it always sounds a bit ridiculous. only a person obsessed w their own popularity or lack thereof would talk like this, she most certainly does not strike me as "someone for whom popularity is not a goal."
and anyway she's not some cliqueless person! she just has a different clique in web media. a less influential clique? maybe. but a clique nonetheless. and i think more criticism of the dominant cliques in web media could use some self-awareness abt the ways we all seek validation from one corner or another, though i might in fact describe you, and only you, as a cliqueless person. lol
It seems to me there's a vast untapped audience out there for journalism that doesn't rely on knowing who "the cool kids in Bushwick" are. That's proof right there how out of touch elite media is with large swaths of the United States. I never before was one to be like "the liberal East Coast elites, booooo!" but I'm understanding the frustration more every day.
I'm a liberal, but I live in Winston-Salem, NC. There's a lot more nuance here than a big city dweller might think (and I've been one, growing up in LA and Chicago). But I don't know of many national media personalities who are speaking to this, other than those grand sweeping specials talking to Real People or the billions of But Let's Talk to a Trump Supporter articles.
Millions of Americans living a totally different reality from the cool kids in Bushwick, or the people who know who the cool kids in Bushwick are, aren't being given many options between elite liberal journalists who speak the insider lingo and elite asshats who know not to use the lingo and instead speak the language of "happily being an outsider," aka a MAGA hat wearer.
I loathe the MAGA hat wearers, but I get the impulse to choose that alternative for people who never even bothered to try for an elite post-high-school education. It's...sort of punk, in the new high school of United States politics. Ugh. That's gross.
I love your writing, but you do seem to be developing this weird tick where virtually every piece it seems like has to open with a discussion about what topic you are writing about, why you are writing about, what critics have said about your writing on similar topics in the past, and why they are wrong. Honestly, I feel like this distracts from the larger points you are making and the pieces would be stronger if you just dove directly into the topic with a bit more devil-may-care disregard, even if those thoughts are bubbling around inside your head.
Then I get a dozen emails asking for precisely the orientation towards what I publish that you would prefer I not write. Again, there is an essential dilemma in any crowdfunded project that stems from the fact that different people who participate in the funding simply have incompatible desires for the expression of the project.
Do not shoot the piano player; he is doing his best.
Side note: because I psychologize everything, I'm curious about what your experience is like being a seasoned writer while being this responsive to the varied and immediate opinions of your readers/subscribers compared to other pressures of being a writer in other settings. Do you find this part distasteful? Do you like it? Do you wish there were more clarity around what it looks like to be responsive "enough" to your readers? Do you feel constantly pulled in different directions or stressed about trying to please everyone?
I find myself wishing you didn't feel like you had to be quite so responsive to everyone's opinions and I guess I find myself a little worried about the culture of expectations that can grow up around this kind of niche writing platform. Which is just another subject I'm pretty interested in -- what kinds of unspoken performance norms develop in a profession over time. I'm acutely aware of this as a psychotherapist where there are all kinds of unspoken expectations that patients bring and because therapists all do things a little differently, there aren't clear guidelines about what it means to be responsive "enough" to patients needs/wants. I thrive in some of that ambiguity and am driven mad by it sometimes as well.
I find myself wondering the same thing and it makes me anxious on Freddie's behalf. (I'm probably one of the people who emailed not with scolding, but probably maternal concern. LOL). He invites us to complain, but then warns about the cross-pressures. It's like we're all a bunch of demanding children who can never be satisfied, so why even invite the complaints/comments? I think the crowd-funding aspect complicates this dynamic, b/c now we're no longer just readers, we're "clients" in his mind, people that he now has to keep happy b/c we're paying, even though most of us want him to write as if we are NOT paying him, just want him to write as he wants to write.
The closest analogy I can come up with on a personal level is concierge medicine. About 5 years ago, the owner of our practice went hybrid concierge b/c she literally couldn't give the staff raises w/o another source of income. I had the opportunity to do the same and you couldn't pay me enough to do that. I'm not saying it's not right for some doctors, or that it's unethical. I'm saying, for me, it would've gotten into my head. I don't think I could've separated the idea that someone is now paying me extra for special services. I could see it causing a similar dynamic that I see playing out here-- the sense that someone has now "bought" you and I think Freddie is struggling with that. Not that I have a solution.
And the point is not "don't complain about what you don't like." By all means, complain. The point is to understand that there are always cross-pressures that help to explain the conditions that you don't like.
I think you're probably right that it would make the thrust of his point stronger ("that's what she said!"), in some sense, if that prefacing weren't there. But I'm also someone who finds the prefacing interesting and worthwhile, so not sure where that leaves me.
I just want to say I love this kind of comment and it was what I was fantasizing about in that long comment I left on FDB's prior piece. I like that you can come here and say "there's this consideration and there's that consideration, and huh, I'm not sure where I am on it." It feels like a reprieve from the sense that everyone has to have an opinion on everything all the time.
I love your media criticism pieces. Absolutely love them, whether they're fiery like your last one or more contemplative like this one. Because I really really hate Yelling Woke Twitter that much. Most people do. It wrecked my mental health like nothing else has.
Sure, I understand you can't write culture war pieces all the time, nor would I want you to. I'm more than okay with you taking a break every now and then. Writing about other things is good for the soul and helps keep you sane!
But your media criticism is some of the best stuff I've read anywhere. Keep it going.
"We no longer enjoy the pleasure of not having to know or care about what a CNBC stock analyst thinks about circumcision." was a good laugh well done.
I'm one of the complainers about your media criticism, but we all gotta eat so whatever. I will say there's no need to take someone like Nellie Bowles seriously either. These fights are always just two sides of the same privileged media class coin, which is why I don't give a shit about them. Nellie comes from one of the richest families in California, I truly could not care less about her takes on unions. I realize that some people might respond that her background shouldn't be disqualifying, but I don't care. I just don't (and if knowing that about her falls under the umbrella of knowing too much about these people, then I don't care about that either. Pretending like we should evaluate people's opinions in a contextless vacuum is childish).
I really hate the woke union trope honestly. It's quite insidious and I think that anyone on the left that buys it wholesale is just a mark for the reactionary grift. Greenwald and his ilk (probably Nellie and Bari too!) have spent the past couple weeks sounding the cancel culture sirens that Apple fired some millionaire executive because he wrote a book about being a misogynist asshole, but it was actually Apple employees that would have had to work for the misogynist asshole that spoke up and said we don't want to work for this person. That is a good thing, and anyone that desperately tries to apply the cancel culture frame to it is not someone that cares about workers, full stop. The same people did the same thing with the NYT sensitivity readers, (as I understand) it was an informal job that already existed at NYT and the union wanted to formalize it and get people paid for it (which is what unions do, to a fault).
I know people that are in the Gizmodo slack. I've been to their parties. All of your criticisms of these people are absolutely valid. I think I get frustrated or don't care about the media criticism stuff because if opposing view that isn't getting platformed or whatever is Nellie Bowles or Greenwald then it's just different elites posturing for position. They all suck and they're boring.
i think this is a crucial point, i was on the bargaining committee for a contract and the emergent anti-woke notion that these unions just sit around doing "CULTURE WAR" with little to no regard for "old school material concerns" or whatever Bowles is pretending to be nostalgic about is just sort of made up, usually as a wildly disproportionate overreaction to someone's tweets. the unions don't lose sleep and patience over "CULTURE WAR," we lose sleep and patience over money and protections. but nothing beats the social media fanfic abt these issues.
right. I doubt that anyone who has been at the bargaining table or part of a union is persuaded by this, but it's certainly a growing anti union talking point and from I have seen it has zero basis in reality. The cancel culture people (not talking about you Freddie) apply that framework to literally anyone that has a grievance if they get the chance, workers be damned.
Here's a telling reaction from Greenwald after reading a story about how executives unilaterally decided at a remote tech company that workers aren't allowed to discuss anything except work on the company communications channels (effectively outlawing casual chats between coworkers as far as I can tell). One might think a man like Greenwald would be concerned for the free speech rights of the workers, but actually no, one of the workers used woke language to push back on management so actually this is just cancel culture and we should side with management https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1389608061682257932.
yes this is in a thread that began "Wokeness, ultimately, is neither really an ideology nor even a politics. At its worst, it's about petty cultural control, but mostly it's just a personal branding image by those otherwise at a loss for identity, purpose and self-esteem. That's why power centers love it so much."
his characterization of the story about Basecamp is that it is a story of wokeness, which he characterizes above. I say it's a story where executives made a unilateral, draconian decision that their employees didn't like and some of them used woke terminology in their attempts to push back. Interpret that however you want.
"I really hate the woke union trope honestly." I'm with you. I have several decades of experience in the labor movement, in various unions, in various parts of the country. There is much to criticize about unions for sure, going all the way back.
I wouldn't start with wokeness as a crucial thing to criticize. They are mirroring the workers they represent in that, which is to say very selectively. Meantime, they are trying to push through the first significant piece of national legislation in decades to make union organizing a little more of a level playing field endeavor. During Covid, they've done some incredible emergency support work, provided health insurance for out-of-work members, got PPE and hazard pay and other health protections for a lot of frontline workers, and organized some big units of healthcare and other workers.
Unions are, for better or worse, still the main institutions we have fighting for better material working conditions for people who have to work.
>"Meantime, they are trying to push through the first significant piece of national legislation in decades to make union organizing a little more of a level playing field endeavor."
Gee, I wonder which major party opposes this, and which supports it.
It's just so hard to tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats!
Like so many of my fellow lefties, II think I'll go cast a meaningless vote for a 3rd party candidate with zero chance of winning.
I like the excuse, “I’m not bourgie, I’ve never made more than $X in a year,” because it's actually its own disproof. You are bourgie, very very bourgie, if you think that being bourgie is about how much money you make. It isn't. It's about attitudes. The idea that how much money you make says something fundamental about you is one of the most bourgie things anyone could possibly say. The evident lack of self-awareness is very bourgie too.
"For a long time I have said that, were I trying to rise up the ranks in media, I would much rather be popular than good at my job. Again, I concede that there is an element of this in every profession. But there is a certain inherent subjectivity to media that doesn’t exist in, say, plumbing. A plumber can fix a squeaky faucet or he can’t. In media the quality of your work will always be fundamentally subjective." I just started Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and this echoes his concern about politicians in the 20th century compared to previous generations. We're more concerned about whether "we'd drink a beer with them" or their overall likability and aesthetics, compared to, well, you know, how well they do their damn job.
One offshoot to the scorning of viewpoint diversity is the amount of time that gets spent on Twitter or in the comments of Gawkerish websites debating questions like "is a taco a sandwich?" or "what's the best fast food?" with faux-seriousness. Because only the Good People are worth seriously engaging with (as opposed to dunking on), and the Good People all agree on serious matters (or else they wouldn't beGood), the only time people who embrace knowingness get to flex their intellectual muscles is on frivolities.
Not in the media industry but like most a media consumer, so I guess that makes me an expert.
It seems obvious that media is personality-driven, after all writers put their name on their work (most workers don't).
I disagree that there are no principles in media, certainly opportunism is always in play. With the ongoing collapse/consolidation in the media industry, not surprising that opportunism has grown to such an obvious degree.
The Substack phenomena is a kind of revolt against media bundling. I subscribe to Comcast, and I get close to unlimited channels, of which I watch about 10. I cannot unbundle this (Congress tried a few years ago to stop the practice, but of course it went nowhere). The NY Times is another bundle, of which I read 0, so I do not subscribe. Does not mean there aren’t good articles occasionally, but there is too much shit to wade through and overall quality is going down fast.
BTW, it is difficult (if not impossible) to bundle high quality content, instead the approach is to take a lot of crap, add a few gems. Monopoly doesn't hurt either. Result is quantity over quality. Not bad if the consumer has excess time on their hands, but most of us no longer have the luxury.
What Substack represents is an anti-bundle - you pay for what you want, and don't pay for what you don't. What a concept. My guess (complete speculation) is that the media companies (NY Times included) are looking at this as a way to capture high value seeking consumers. I would not be surprised to see the Times try some kind of Substack clone business model. This is what I think scares the crap out of the Times staff (most of whom are mediocre thinkers and writers).
Keep on criticizing the media. They deserve it and it pisses them off. As far as being popular, the rules are changing, and you've made some good choices.
I have loved your writing for a long time. I'm not surprised journalists have strong reactions to your pieces of media criticism, but for what it's worth it has never struck me as a fundamentally interesting topic. It's all a bit inside baseball, and if you don't care about baseball it's not especially compelling. I hope you feel free to write about whatever interests you.
" socializing and maintaining cordial relationships with those you don’t like very much are bedrock values. You eat the kind of shit that we all eat as we make our way up in any industry; ... These are the negotiations with our integrity that capitalism forces on absolutely all of us." Yes, but if you think of life in any nominally socialist country or more or less socialist institutions here, that's one capitalist problem for which we have no hint of a solution. Was it different in hunter-gatherer bands? Doesn't seem like it.
"The problem is an unusual set of economic, technological, and cultural conditions that have congealed in a way that has created social conformity in an industry where that conformity is uniquely dangerous to the basic mission."
I suspect it's more than a simple convergence of conditions, in that there is active manipulation, but recognizing both the "unique danger" and "the basic mission" is why Freddie's media critique is so popular, and why he's drawn a subscriber base broader than his political home.
I don't begrudge media outlets with a particular ideological mission. There is a place for those, and they don't deny their biases/ideologies. But it's absolute poison for the mainstream, forever resting on its Paper of Record laurels, or concocting creepy Democracy Dying In Darkness, Hence our Beacon Lighting the Singular Truth mottos, to pretend that it speaks universal truths and doesn't go out of its way to perpetuate conformity. It's depressing to watch media outlets become the opposite of what they're supposed to be. They pollute our national discourse when they run everything through the same tired and predictable narrative filter.
I've never understood those who wince at the "diversity of ideas" ideal. The criticism is always some infantile Reductio ad Hitlerum brush off, or some popular meme of a sickly looking stick figure speechifying about the collective "we" having determined who needs to be shown the door and instructed to quit talking. This shitty meme is premised on the fallacy that the "we" is the voice of absolute unanimity, and not some self-appointed censor deciding what people must or may not be exposed to. By all means, enjoy your strictly enforced ideological inbreeding, but don't act surprised that your institutions' appeal, vitality and longevity are in decline.
Honestly, knowing what I know of media in the older days, media presenting itself as non-partisan is a massive aberration- a function of the early TV era documented extensively in "Manufacturing Consent". Before, newspapers in the US basically ran the ideological gamut from socialist to conservative with others for more direct audiences. They didn't ask for diversity of opinion within each paper, more there were enough papers for everyone. Afterward, yeah, you end up in today. Of course, the problem is for ideological content, NYT, etc. are completely outflanked- thusly they end up having to play this pantomime where they want to be a liberal paper but they don't want to be branded that way so they throw in a token conservative on the editorial board and call it done.
Though, to be honest, the conservative bleating about 'diversity of ideas' is kinda hilarious to me because no one's making Conor Friedersdorf or Ross Douthat work there- they could easily just wander on over to Breitbart and get no complaints but they want the prestige that Breitbart can't offer.
The strong argument against some meanings of "diversity of ideas" is where you end up discussing astronomy with two astronomers, a NASA engineer, a flat-earther, and a young-earth creationist. That is, there are ideas and beliefs and belief systems that are just silly and counterfactual, and there's no point entertaining them.
The problem is that this gets applied based on social truth--currently popular positions and received wisdom and things everyone's expected to say--rather than on any kind of careful consideration of the facts. So when we were running up to the war in Iraq, there was no reason at all to include viewpoint diversity on whether or not Saddam actually had WMDs or posed a threat to the US--after all, all the right people were saying that he definitely did and was, and only weirdo outsiders were saying differently.
There are many contexts where "diversity of ideas/opinions" is inappropriate, particularly when applied to facts, as opposed to theories or solutions.
But the "diversity of ideas/opinions" plea is an outcropping from diversity initiatives (now rebranded as DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion) in hiring, academic teachings and discourse, and news reporting. It was a response to efforts to diversity the workplace, focusing only on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, while being hostile (outwardly) to diversity of ideas. So the flip side of diversity in the appearance of the workforce was no diversity in the ideas and opinions this workforce may bring to the table, in a strange way maintaining sameness rather than combatting it.
In the media, you will hear the diversity of ideas criticism where editors won't allow certain reports/articles to be run, and maintain a narrative control on news reporting. The tone is set at the top, and you have to stay true to it if you want to keep your job, in a shrinking market where jobs are scarce. The lack of diversity also manifests in the ideologically homogenized cliques Freddie describes. I realize there has always been an angle in reporting. I just don't remember the lines being this starkly drawn, and political disagreements being a valid reason to hate people or cut them out of your personal and work life. That part is new.
A bit of media criticism I'd like to see: how should we, as consumers, find media that's better at telling us actual truth rather than the socially-enforced beliefs within some ideological bubble? As an example, I'm a longtime listener/supporter of NPR, and it has seemed to me that over the last couple years, the quality of their news has gone down significantly, largely because of the need to stay on-message.
It's clear enough that using Twitter and Facebook as sources for an understanding of the world is a disaster--it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet of junk food. 24 hour TV news was always about the same. But what do I do when I would actually like an honest take on some aspect of the world, without having facts omitted or shaded to avoid getting on the wrong side of Twitter or activist coworkers or whatever?
"Knowingness is a cancer: if you most signal to everyone constantly that you already know everything, you must never appear to be doing the work to find out what you are supposed to know."
I found this quote particularly compelling because it fits with a lot of what people talk about in studies of wisdom and knowledge, which paradoxically only get anywhere by first adopting a true position of 'not knowing', not the phony insincere one, which is easy to slip into. But is there a typo in the first sentence? Did you mean to write 'must' instead of 'most'? Asking because the sentence is a damn good concise description and I'd like to get it right.
Yup, typo, will fix.
While on the topic, I thought this was a fantastic tiny encapsulation of the issue, but likewise suspect a typo: "The problem is a unusually set of economic, technological, and cultural conditions that have congealed in a way that has created social conformity in an industry where that conformity is uniquely dangerous to the basic mission."
". . . deciding that criticism designed to reflect on an industry rather than individuals is too personal forecloses on important conversations."
Surely that's the point.
i def agree that "it's too personal" reveals a misapprehension of the critique, and i also understand your frustration w the particular ways this criticism often gets waived away as bitterness. i for one like yr media criticism but i'll take up the bokken here:
i see why many ppl roll their eyes at the media-as-cliques framing. if the point is that these ppl are relitigating high school (or whatever), then it matters that their critics also seem to be relitigating high school (or whatever), just from a different perspective in the cafeteria. the accusation of hypocrisy being frustrating isn't the same as the accusation of hypocrisy being wrong.
bowles does this a lot. maybe that tweet dunking on her is stupid but it's also meeting bowles on the terms that she herself often uses to discuss the political dynamics in web media: tweeting about "cool kids" in "bushwick" having miserable fun without her. that is in fact her own framing for a lot of this stuff! and that framing never sounds like a sensible outsider seeing a bunch of self-conscious "cool kids" relitigating high school. bc it instead sounds like a self-conscious "uncool kid" relitigating high school themselves. and it always sounds a bit ridiculous. only a person obsessed w their own popularity or lack thereof would talk like this, she most certainly does not strike me as "someone for whom popularity is not a goal."
and anyway she's not some cliqueless person! she just has a different clique in web media. a less influential clique? maybe. but a clique nonetheless. and i think more criticism of the dominant cliques in web media could use some self-awareness abt the ways we all seek validation from one corner or another, though i might in fact describe you, and only you, as a cliqueless person. lol
It seems to me there's a vast untapped audience out there for journalism that doesn't rely on knowing who "the cool kids in Bushwick" are. That's proof right there how out of touch elite media is with large swaths of the United States. I never before was one to be like "the liberal East Coast elites, booooo!" but I'm understanding the frustration more every day.
I'm a liberal, but I live in Winston-Salem, NC. There's a lot more nuance here than a big city dweller might think (and I've been one, growing up in LA and Chicago). But I don't know of many national media personalities who are speaking to this, other than those grand sweeping specials talking to Real People or the billions of But Let's Talk to a Trump Supporter articles.
Millions of Americans living a totally different reality from the cool kids in Bushwick, or the people who know who the cool kids in Bushwick are, aren't being given many options between elite liberal journalists who speak the insider lingo and elite asshats who know not to use the lingo and instead speak the language of "happily being an outsider," aka a MAGA hat wearer.
I loathe the MAGA hat wearers, but I get the impulse to choose that alternative for people who never even bothered to try for an elite post-high-school education. It's...sort of punk, in the new high school of United States politics. Ugh. That's gross.
I love your writing, but you do seem to be developing this weird tick where virtually every piece it seems like has to open with a discussion about what topic you are writing about, why you are writing about, what critics have said about your writing on similar topics in the past, and why they are wrong. Honestly, I feel like this distracts from the larger points you are making and the pieces would be stronger if you just dove directly into the topic with a bit more devil-may-care disregard, even if those thoughts are bubbling around inside your head.
Then I get a dozen emails asking for precisely the orientation towards what I publish that you would prefer I not write. Again, there is an essential dilemma in any crowdfunded project that stems from the fact that different people who participate in the funding simply have incompatible desires for the expression of the project.
Do not shoot the piano player; he is doing his best.
Side note: because I psychologize everything, I'm curious about what your experience is like being a seasoned writer while being this responsive to the varied and immediate opinions of your readers/subscribers compared to other pressures of being a writer in other settings. Do you find this part distasteful? Do you like it? Do you wish there were more clarity around what it looks like to be responsive "enough" to your readers? Do you feel constantly pulled in different directions or stressed about trying to please everyone?
I find myself wishing you didn't feel like you had to be quite so responsive to everyone's opinions and I guess I find myself a little worried about the culture of expectations that can grow up around this kind of niche writing platform. Which is just another subject I'm pretty interested in -- what kinds of unspoken performance norms develop in a profession over time. I'm acutely aware of this as a psychotherapist where there are all kinds of unspoken expectations that patients bring and because therapists all do things a little differently, there aren't clear guidelines about what it means to be responsive "enough" to patients needs/wants. I thrive in some of that ambiguity and am driven mad by it sometimes as well.
I find myself wondering the same thing and it makes me anxious on Freddie's behalf. (I'm probably one of the people who emailed not with scolding, but probably maternal concern. LOL). He invites us to complain, but then warns about the cross-pressures. It's like we're all a bunch of demanding children who can never be satisfied, so why even invite the complaints/comments? I think the crowd-funding aspect complicates this dynamic, b/c now we're no longer just readers, we're "clients" in his mind, people that he now has to keep happy b/c we're paying, even though most of us want him to write as if we are NOT paying him, just want him to write as he wants to write.
The closest analogy I can come up with on a personal level is concierge medicine. About 5 years ago, the owner of our practice went hybrid concierge b/c she literally couldn't give the staff raises w/o another source of income. I had the opportunity to do the same and you couldn't pay me enough to do that. I'm not saying it's not right for some doctors, or that it's unethical. I'm saying, for me, it would've gotten into my head. I don't think I could've separated the idea that someone is now paying me extra for special services. I could see it causing a similar dynamic that I see playing out here-- the sense that someone has now "bought" you and I think Freddie is struggling with that. Not that I have a solution.
And the point is not "don't complain about what you don't like." By all means, complain. The point is to understand that there are always cross-pressures that help to explain the conditions that you don't like.
Oh for sure, I get that. Do your thing, I'm still subscribing one way or the other.
I think you're probably right that it would make the thrust of his point stronger ("that's what she said!"), in some sense, if that prefacing weren't there. But I'm also someone who finds the prefacing interesting and worthwhile, so not sure where that leaves me.
I just want to say I love this kind of comment and it was what I was fantasizing about in that long comment I left on FDB's prior piece. I like that you can come here and say "there's this consideration and there's that consideration, and huh, I'm not sure where I am on it." It feels like a reprieve from the sense that everyone has to have an opinion on everything all the time.
I love your media criticism pieces. Absolutely love them, whether they're fiery like your last one or more contemplative like this one. Because I really really hate Yelling Woke Twitter that much. Most people do. It wrecked my mental health like nothing else has.
Sure, I understand you can't write culture war pieces all the time, nor would I want you to. I'm more than okay with you taking a break every now and then. Writing about other things is good for the soul and helps keep you sane!
But your media criticism is some of the best stuff I've read anywhere. Keep it going.
"We no longer enjoy the pleasure of not having to know or care about what a CNBC stock analyst thinks about circumcision." was a good laugh well done.
I'm one of the complainers about your media criticism, but we all gotta eat so whatever. I will say there's no need to take someone like Nellie Bowles seriously either. These fights are always just two sides of the same privileged media class coin, which is why I don't give a shit about them. Nellie comes from one of the richest families in California, I truly could not care less about her takes on unions. I realize that some people might respond that her background shouldn't be disqualifying, but I don't care. I just don't (and if knowing that about her falls under the umbrella of knowing too much about these people, then I don't care about that either. Pretending like we should evaluate people's opinions in a contextless vacuum is childish).
I really hate the woke union trope honestly. It's quite insidious and I think that anyone on the left that buys it wholesale is just a mark for the reactionary grift. Greenwald and his ilk (probably Nellie and Bari too!) have spent the past couple weeks sounding the cancel culture sirens that Apple fired some millionaire executive because he wrote a book about being a misogynist asshole, but it was actually Apple employees that would have had to work for the misogynist asshole that spoke up and said we don't want to work for this person. That is a good thing, and anyone that desperately tries to apply the cancel culture frame to it is not someone that cares about workers, full stop. The same people did the same thing with the NYT sensitivity readers, (as I understand) it was an informal job that already existed at NYT and the union wanted to formalize it and get people paid for it (which is what unions do, to a fault).
I know people that are in the Gizmodo slack. I've been to their parties. All of your criticisms of these people are absolutely valid. I think I get frustrated or don't care about the media criticism stuff because if opposing view that isn't getting platformed or whatever is Nellie Bowles or Greenwald then it's just different elites posturing for position. They all suck and they're boring.
i think this is a crucial point, i was on the bargaining committee for a contract and the emergent anti-woke notion that these unions just sit around doing "CULTURE WAR" with little to no regard for "old school material concerns" or whatever Bowles is pretending to be nostalgic about is just sort of made up, usually as a wildly disproportionate overreaction to someone's tweets. the unions don't lose sleep and patience over "CULTURE WAR," we lose sleep and patience over money and protections. but nothing beats the social media fanfic abt these issues.
right. I doubt that anyone who has been at the bargaining table or part of a union is persuaded by this, but it's certainly a growing anti union talking point and from I have seen it has zero basis in reality. The cancel culture people (not talking about you Freddie) apply that framework to literally anyone that has a grievance if they get the chance, workers be damned.
Here's a telling reaction from Greenwald after reading a story about how executives unilaterally decided at a remote tech company that workers aren't allowed to discuss anything except work on the company communications channels (effectively outlawing casual chats between coworkers as far as I can tell). One might think a man like Greenwald would be concerned for the free speech rights of the workers, but actually no, one of the workers used woke language to push back on management so actually this is just cancel culture and we should side with management https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1389608061682257932.
Where does Greenwald say "we should side with management"?
The entire text of that tweet, in response to the question "How would you define what 'wokeness' means?" is this: "That's a discussion not suitable for the constraints of Twitter, but you can find a pretty good expression of its defining attributes here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion "
yes this is in a thread that began "Wokeness, ultimately, is neither really an ideology nor even a politics. At its worst, it's about petty cultural control, but mostly it's just a personal branding image by those otherwise at a loss for identity, purpose and self-esteem. That's why power centers love it so much."
his characterization of the story about Basecamp is that it is a story of wokeness, which he characterizes above. I say it's a story where executives made a unilateral, draconian decision that their employees didn't like and some of them used woke terminology in their attempts to push back. Interpret that however you want.
And still nothing that shows that Greenwald ever said that "we should side with management", in that dispute or any other.
"I really hate the woke union trope honestly." I'm with you. I have several decades of experience in the labor movement, in various unions, in various parts of the country. There is much to criticize about unions for sure, going all the way back.
I wouldn't start with wokeness as a crucial thing to criticize. They are mirroring the workers they represent in that, which is to say very selectively. Meantime, they are trying to push through the first significant piece of national legislation in decades to make union organizing a little more of a level playing field endeavor. During Covid, they've done some incredible emergency support work, provided health insurance for out-of-work members, got PPE and hazard pay and other health protections for a lot of frontline workers, and organized some big units of healthcare and other workers.
Unions are, for better or worse, still the main institutions we have fighting for better material working conditions for people who have to work.
>"Meantime, they are trying to push through the first significant piece of national legislation in decades to make union organizing a little more of a level playing field endeavor."
Gee, I wonder which major party opposes this, and which supports it.
It's just so hard to tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats!
Like so many of my fellow lefties, II think I'll go cast a meaningless vote for a 3rd party candidate with zero chance of winning.
I like the excuse, “I’m not bourgie, I’ve never made more than $X in a year,” because it's actually its own disproof. You are bourgie, very very bourgie, if you think that being bourgie is about how much money you make. It isn't. It's about attitudes. The idea that how much money you make says something fundamental about you is one of the most bourgie things anyone could possibly say. The evident lack of self-awareness is very bourgie too.
And even if we restrict it to raw economics, it doesn't say where they went to school or how much is in their trust fund. (The answer may shock you!)
I hate these people and love to see you name them
"For a long time I have said that, were I trying to rise up the ranks in media, I would much rather be popular than good at my job. Again, I concede that there is an element of this in every profession. But there is a certain inherent subjectivity to media that doesn’t exist in, say, plumbing. A plumber can fix a squeaky faucet or he can’t. In media the quality of your work will always be fundamentally subjective." I just started Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and this echoes his concern about politicians in the 20th century compared to previous generations. We're more concerned about whether "we'd drink a beer with them" or their overall likability and aesthetics, compared to, well, you know, how well they do their damn job.
One offshoot to the scorning of viewpoint diversity is the amount of time that gets spent on Twitter or in the comments of Gawkerish websites debating questions like "is a taco a sandwich?" or "what's the best fast food?" with faux-seriousness. Because only the Good People are worth seriously engaging with (as opposed to dunking on), and the Good People all agree on serious matters (or else they wouldn't beGood), the only time people who embrace knowingness get to flex their intellectual muscles is on frivolities.
Lot to unpack in this post.
Not in the media industry but like most a media consumer, so I guess that makes me an expert.
It seems obvious that media is personality-driven, after all writers put their name on their work (most workers don't).
I disagree that there are no principles in media, certainly opportunism is always in play. With the ongoing collapse/consolidation in the media industry, not surprising that opportunism has grown to such an obvious degree.
The Substack phenomena is a kind of revolt against media bundling. I subscribe to Comcast, and I get close to unlimited channels, of which I watch about 10. I cannot unbundle this (Congress tried a few years ago to stop the practice, but of course it went nowhere). The NY Times is another bundle, of which I read 0, so I do not subscribe. Does not mean there aren’t good articles occasionally, but there is too much shit to wade through and overall quality is going down fast.
BTW, it is difficult (if not impossible) to bundle high quality content, instead the approach is to take a lot of crap, add a few gems. Monopoly doesn't hurt either. Result is quantity over quality. Not bad if the consumer has excess time on their hands, but most of us no longer have the luxury.
What Substack represents is an anti-bundle - you pay for what you want, and don't pay for what you don't. What a concept. My guess (complete speculation) is that the media companies (NY Times included) are looking at this as a way to capture high value seeking consumers. I would not be surprised to see the Times try some kind of Substack clone business model. This is what I think scares the crap out of the Times staff (most of whom are mediocre thinkers and writers).
Keep on criticizing the media. They deserve it and it pisses them off. As far as being popular, the rules are changing, and you've made some good choices.
I have loved your writing for a long time. I'm not surprised journalists have strong reactions to your pieces of media criticism, but for what it's worth it has never struck me as a fundamentally interesting topic. It's all a bit inside baseball, and if you don't care about baseball it's not especially compelling. I hope you feel free to write about whatever interests you.
" socializing and maintaining cordial relationships with those you don’t like very much are bedrock values. You eat the kind of shit that we all eat as we make our way up in any industry; ... These are the negotiations with our integrity that capitalism forces on absolutely all of us." Yes, but if you think of life in any nominally socialist country or more or less socialist institutions here, that's one capitalist problem for which we have no hint of a solution. Was it different in hunter-gatherer bands? Doesn't seem like it.
Would love to add “This you?” to the list of unfunny tribal signifiers
I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t get any of those 3 examples in the essay. Deleting Twitter and Facebook 4 years ago has paid off :)
Contrapoints created a handy list of all of them here. "That's it. That's the tweet" might be my least favorite right now. https://mobile.twitter.com/ContraPoints/status/1372645873323278342
"The problem is an unusual set of economic, technological, and cultural conditions that have congealed in a way that has created social conformity in an industry where that conformity is uniquely dangerous to the basic mission."
I suspect it's more than a simple convergence of conditions, in that there is active manipulation, but recognizing both the "unique danger" and "the basic mission" is why Freddie's media critique is so popular, and why he's drawn a subscriber base broader than his political home.
I don't begrudge media outlets with a particular ideological mission. There is a place for those, and they don't deny their biases/ideologies. But it's absolute poison for the mainstream, forever resting on its Paper of Record laurels, or concocting creepy Democracy Dying In Darkness, Hence our Beacon Lighting the Singular Truth mottos, to pretend that it speaks universal truths and doesn't go out of its way to perpetuate conformity. It's depressing to watch media outlets become the opposite of what they're supposed to be. They pollute our national discourse when they run everything through the same tired and predictable narrative filter.
I've never understood those who wince at the "diversity of ideas" ideal. The criticism is always some infantile Reductio ad Hitlerum brush off, or some popular meme of a sickly looking stick figure speechifying about the collective "we" having determined who needs to be shown the door and instructed to quit talking. This shitty meme is premised on the fallacy that the "we" is the voice of absolute unanimity, and not some self-appointed censor deciding what people must or may not be exposed to. By all means, enjoy your strictly enforced ideological inbreeding, but don't act surprised that your institutions' appeal, vitality and longevity are in decline.
Honestly, knowing what I know of media in the older days, media presenting itself as non-partisan is a massive aberration- a function of the early TV era documented extensively in "Manufacturing Consent". Before, newspapers in the US basically ran the ideological gamut from socialist to conservative with others for more direct audiences. They didn't ask for diversity of opinion within each paper, more there were enough papers for everyone. Afterward, yeah, you end up in today. Of course, the problem is for ideological content, NYT, etc. are completely outflanked- thusly they end up having to play this pantomime where they want to be a liberal paper but they don't want to be branded that way so they throw in a token conservative on the editorial board and call it done.
Though, to be honest, the conservative bleating about 'diversity of ideas' is kinda hilarious to me because no one's making Conor Friedersdorf or Ross Douthat work there- they could easily just wander on over to Breitbart and get no complaints but they want the prestige that Breitbart can't offer.
The strong argument against some meanings of "diversity of ideas" is where you end up discussing astronomy with two astronomers, a NASA engineer, a flat-earther, and a young-earth creationist. That is, there are ideas and beliefs and belief systems that are just silly and counterfactual, and there's no point entertaining them.
The problem is that this gets applied based on social truth--currently popular positions and received wisdom and things everyone's expected to say--rather than on any kind of careful consideration of the facts. So when we were running up to the war in Iraq, there was no reason at all to include viewpoint diversity on whether or not Saddam actually had WMDs or posed a threat to the US--after all, all the right people were saying that he definitely did and was, and only weirdo outsiders were saying differently.
There are many contexts where "diversity of ideas/opinions" is inappropriate, particularly when applied to facts, as opposed to theories or solutions.
But the "diversity of ideas/opinions" plea is an outcropping from diversity initiatives (now rebranded as DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion) in hiring, academic teachings and discourse, and news reporting. It was a response to efforts to diversity the workplace, focusing only on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, while being hostile (outwardly) to diversity of ideas. So the flip side of diversity in the appearance of the workforce was no diversity in the ideas and opinions this workforce may bring to the table, in a strange way maintaining sameness rather than combatting it.
In the media, you will hear the diversity of ideas criticism where editors won't allow certain reports/articles to be run, and maintain a narrative control on news reporting. The tone is set at the top, and you have to stay true to it if you want to keep your job, in a shrinking market where jobs are scarce. The lack of diversity also manifests in the ideologically homogenized cliques Freddie describes. I realize there has always been an angle in reporting. I just don't remember the lines being this starkly drawn, and political disagreements being a valid reason to hate people or cut them out of your personal and work life. That part is new.
A bit of media criticism I'd like to see: how should we, as consumers, find media that's better at telling us actual truth rather than the socially-enforced beliefs within some ideological bubble? As an example, I'm a longtime listener/supporter of NPR, and it has seemed to me that over the last couple years, the quality of their news has gone down significantly, largely because of the need to stay on-message.
It's clear enough that using Twitter and Facebook as sources for an understanding of the world is a disaster--it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet of junk food. 24 hour TV news was always about the same. But what do I do when I would actually like an honest take on some aspect of the world, without having facts omitted or shaded to avoid getting on the wrong side of Twitter or activist coworkers or whatever?