-
sponsorship
A post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck:
In an Onion-esque piece of news this week, the New York Times reported
that Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered a student newspaper to “tidy up”
its coverage of his recent appearance at a high school assembly.
Kennedy, an ardent protector of First Amendment rights—and apparently,
irony–allowed the young journalists to attend the event on the
condition that his office would pre-approve any articles written about
him.
Why would Justice Kennedy do such a thing? Two reasons. First, the
Bill of Rights protects speech in part to encourage transparency and
create a Millian
slurry of ideas in which the creamy globs of truth eventually float to
the top. An inaccurate or misleading quotation by reporters with
exclusive access to Kennedy's speech would be nearly impossible to
correct. Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, the Supreme Court has a deep-seated interest in practicing defensive PR ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig:
When I was in college, I did what every aspiring journalist did back
then, in the dark ages of the 1970s—I would research and write an
article, type it out on my portable electric typewriter, put it in an
envelope, lick a stamp, and mail it off to a glossy magazine in hopes
of getting it published. How quaint every step of that process seems
now, right down to the stamp. Writer’s Market was
my bible, a fat directory I’d leaf through to get editors’ names and
addresses for the magazines in which I longed to appear. Oh, to have my
words printed on the pages of Esquire, the Atlantic, Saturday Review, or that pinnacle of sophistication and beautiful prose, the sanctified New Yorker ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix makes an interesting connection between ESPN’s prompt response to the creepy nude tape of sportscaster Erin Andrews and its extended silence on the rape allegations against Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
If ESPN truly understood from the Andrews case the abusive relationship
between women and the world of pro sports, Reilly argues, it should
have known the importance of covering the rape charges. He writes ... (Read more in Double X.)
-
sponsorship
Earlier this month, an Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz, undertook an intriguing experiment. What would happen if, instead of traditional journalists, novelists and poets wrote the news?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, now I'm cracking up at the image of you racing off to give talks on work-life balance while two midgets yank at your coat begging you not to go. "Hands off! I have to go talk about work-life balance!"
-
sponsorship
I agree with June. Except it’s not that I suspect that all journalists secretly fantasize about becoming freelancers (two words: dental plan). I just suspect that every working woman secretly fantasizes about marrying someone with boatloads of money. Not because, as Jessica suggests, we all secretly dream of princess-hood. No, I think it’s because the myth of work-life balance has been so thoroughly demolished at this point that any rational woman understands it’s not to be had.
Sarah Palin? Bad mom for refusing to defer her career for her kids. Caroline Kennedy? Bad senator for refusing to defer caring for her kids to pursue her career. Only way out? Marry someone so rich, you can work and take care of your kids at the same time! I’m not sure that opposing such a strategy makes you a retro-feminist, Hanna. I just think that given the sheer impossibility of balancing work and kids, a young woman isn’t totally insane to dream of a corner office and a nanny.
-
sponsorship
I’m with Hanna, June, and E.J.: I prefer my sugar self-administered and have never entertained the fantasy of being kept by a sucrose parent of either sex. (Having money and nice things, without having to work hard to pay for them … that’s a whole 'nother fantasy.) Before going on (unpaid) maternity leave, I freelanced like a mofo to sock away money, embarrassed by the prospect of going to my partner hat in hand—though I’m sure he would have been both willing and able to spot me on living expenses had I run short at the end. Maybe this is a result of growing up with a Jill Clayburgh-ian '70s working mother (though my parents stayed married and were well enough off). Honestly, I’ve never even understood what still seems to be an acceptable default assumption that a man should pick up the tab in restaurants on dates. Why, because I have a physiognomy that’s potentially capable of childbearing, should I not be responsible for providing my own nutrition? And doesn’t that moment when the guy gets out his wallet and you don’t do jack make the whole dinner feel like a sordid transaction?
Of course, there’s a world of difference between “someday my prince will come” and a couple with a child making a life that makes sense for them: You work while I take care of the kid for a few years. Then later, when the kid is in school, I go back to work, or maybe we take turns. For people doing it, this arrangement, which often makes more financial and emotional sense than “let’s both work like dogs to pay the baby-sitter,” is often experienced as the furthest thing from a luxury.
I remember thinking about this stuff when Meryl Streep’s character sang “Money, Money, Money” in Mamma Mia!, as a fantasy sequence showed her being kept in style by a zillionaire. The character Streep played, an independent ex-hippie single mother running an inn in Greece, seemed an odd candidate to entertain such a reverie. But, you know, they had to work all those great ABBA songs in somehow.
-
sponsorship
Isn't the sugar daddy—or, for some of us, the sugar mommy—just a lovely fantasy? And aren't people's fantasies supposed to be off limits for criticism? (I'm not entirely sure what the official position is on that last issue these days.)
I love my job, but are there times when I wouldn't rather pursue my own wonderful creative flights of fancy—research and write the stories I think are fascinating and important? Sure! Doesn't everyone with a full-time job fantasize about walking away, at least now and again? For those of us in journalism, that fantasy has a name: going freelance.
Of course, the reality is rather different. There are many successful, high-earning freelance journalists—several of them contribute to this blog—and then there are a lot of people struggling to pay the rent and others being subsidized by their families.
I would never voluntarily go freelance—I'm an immigrant, and I don't have family who could bail me out if I didn't sell enough stories or if a check didn't come through—but naturally I've dreamed about that special someone reaching across the dinner table and saying, "Pookie, your ideas are so wonderful, I don't want to deprive readers of them any longer. Why don't you give up your job and just focus on your own projects? Don't worry; I'll take care of the bills so we can stay in our lovely apartment in this fabulous neighborhood, and we can keep premium cable, and have a fresh batch of bonbons delivered every Monday. ..."
And then I wake up.
In other words, writers (and just about every other group of people) would be crazy not to have this fantasy. Just so long as they don't expect it to come true ...
-
sponsorship
Here's the thing: I just do not see you chasing anybody into the men's room in the middle of the night, Emily B. Or you either, Mickey. And believe me, I mean this as a compliment. So, if you wouldn't want all-night stakeout duty outside the hotel where the National Enquirer seems to have cornered John Edwards and his "love child''—sorry, but I can't hear that phrase without imagining Diana Ross breaking into song—why are you so enthusiastic about having someone else do the dirty work?
Isn't cheering and leering from the comfort of the cheap seats on something like this (yeah, you go out and get that sleazo story that I personally would consider beneath my dignity) the journo equivalent of being a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-style chickenhawk? And isn't there a journalistic equivalent of the fruit of the poison tree? I mean, this is how sex scandals become news: Either the stories burble up from the tabloids, like toxic sludge at a superfund site, or the former lover steps to the microphone, a la Gennifer Flowers. (I used to think the reason we had so many more Democratic than Republican sex scandals was that the conservatives were rather more liberal in taking care of their former close personal friends—a theory developed after some or other supposed mistress was busted for failing to pay duty on several fur coats she was bringing into the country. But this is an outdated assumption on several levels.)
Anyway, the relevant question isn't whether every time a fire breaks out in somebody's pants it's news; if people want to know about it—and oh, we do, and me as much as anybody—then of course it meets that low bar. To me, the question is whether this is how we in the news business want to spend our time, energy, and ever-shrinking resources. Mickey quite fairly accuses me of failing to get totally "inside the marriage'' of John and Elizabeth Edwards and I don't disagree; that is an awfully big claim. (That he saw my piece on them as a PR release in defense of their big ol' house, however, just shows that the reader brings at least as much to the story as the writer does; I'd be willing to bet good money—euros, in other words—that Elizabeth didn't see it that way.) In any case, there is a difference between "inside the marriage" and inside the pants! We can learn plenty that's legit and pertinent about a candidate by looking at his or her spouse and their relationship without necessarily providing a detailed sexual history.
And if you think stories like that are no problem to double rivet even if you wanted to, just look at the debacle of the NYT piece on John McCain and Vicki Iseman; four top reporters were on the case for months and netted only hearsay that struck readers across the political spectrum as cheap and beneath the paper's usual standards. Not that I'm looking down my nose at their efforts, because the exact point at which the public interest outweighs privacy concerns is not always so easy to pin down, either. On the contrary, it's because I've been sent out on so many stories like that—located out there somewhere in the vast expanse of moral gray area—that privacy issues are not theoretical for me.
Grieving relatives? I've knocked on their doors at daybreak and approached them coming out of church. Politicians and their personal lives? I've asked questions that made even me wince lots of times, and written a handful of stories that were true but broke my own heart to see in print. On one memorable occasion, I was ordered to "dress up like a delivery girl if you have to'' to get the scoop on Donald Trump's first divorce. (No, it didn't come to that, but I did come back with the story and made my editor's day.) So I'm not pure, pretending to be pure, or acting like these aren't ever hard calls. And if you've never toiled in these particular vineyards, then how much easier it must be to declare, as Emily did at this week's "Gabfest," that love affairs involving public figures are always news and that proof of philandering is automatically disqualifying. (Can I possibly have heard you right? You really couldn't bear having an AG who had fooled around? After all we've been through with this crew of perhaps perfect husbands who happened to be lousy public servants?)
So here's my invitation to Emily and Mickey: If you are so high on stories like this, if they seem to you such a cinch to nail down and such a no-brainer to run with, then what's stopping you? It's not like all the good ones are taken, just because the Edwards story is already in print and available at your local supermarket. No, there's a wide selection of rumored philanderers out there—gay and straight, old and young, R and D—just waiting to be bagged. And once you have done that, then you can get back to me on whether that experience has altered your opinion at all, about either the righteousness or the relative value of these stories.
Meanwhile, the bottom line for me looking at the Slate site back when we started this conversation was wow, here we have this great, well-reported story on how a bunch of top Bush officials may have committed war crimes they will in all likelihood never be prosecuted for—but a luv child, now that's a clear career-ender? Sometimes, I just think that when it comes to sex, our whole country needs some kind of therapeutic intervention.
-
sponsorship
OK, Rachael, so how about the selfish reason most of us wouldn't want to be that particular messenger? Unless I trip over a presidential candidate in the Bois de Boulogne some night - unlikely, as I live in Maryland - I am just not that eager to write up whose-what-is-going-where; that sort of thing might give readers a little wahoo, she said haughtily, but they will not respect you in the morning. Or on any subsequent morning. This is an especially tragic admission, I know, coming from your adultery, I mean, marriage correspondent. (While I'm confessing, I also got thrown out of Arthur Ashe's apartment building on purpose the day the world found out he had AIDS, so as to avoid having to ask him, "So, sir, plan on dying soon?' And doesn't every reporter have at least one story like that, about hiding behind the potted plant when they were supposed to be harrassing people?) Nobody who could also make a living doing data entry wants to be the one to break a story like this. I mean really, I try to put myself in the gum-shoes of the guy who says he chased John Edwards into a bathroom stall, and is there any chance in heaven he is thinking ah, now this is the reason I got into the biz; why can't every day be like this? No, he is going home, drinking himself to sleep as it's getting light outside, and dreaming about the various ways God will pay him back. Bad juju, I tell you.
-
sponsorship
Melinda, I think you are tellling me to go have that drink. Actually, I can think of more than two fingers' worth of women journalists who are pro-life, or who I think are, but I'll stipulate that they are relatively few. So what does that prove? That not many pro-life women are drawn to journalism, especially opinion journalism? Or that there are lots of women out there who are being stomped on by the liberal establishment and not enough conservative outlets to house them? I'm not sure I buy the idea of making the pro-choice/pro-life divide stand for feminism more broadly. But is your point that women commentators pay for having conservative views much more often than they're rewarded for that, and that I should welcome the exceptions who stumble through somehow? Because you may well be right about that, though I'm not sure how we'd prove it one way or the other.
-
sponsorship
I don't know how this escaped my notice, unless maybe it's because I never read anything newspaper ombudsmen (or ombudswomen) have to say, and not only because they are so boring. (With the business model failing, the industry in apparent freefall, staffs shrinking so fast the survivors have to scurry just to keep up on government disinformation, and left and right uniting against the lazy, dull-witted, and otherwise very bad people without whom we would know nothing—nothing!—that is going on in the world, aren't in-house scolds superfluous?) Anyway, as the rest of you doubtless saw, the public editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, called out Maureen Dowd for her supposedly sexist Hillary coverage. Maybe I wouldn't feel this way if I hadn't agreed with every last nasty word of it, but since when does the public editor tell columnists what to think? "Dowd's columns about Clinton's campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism,'' he wrote. OK, I never read Clark Hoyt, but he never reads Maureen Dowd? (And since she is a woman, does that make Hoyt's opinion of her opinion sexist, too?)
-
sponsorship
Why is the New York Times still flummoxed by the idea that women might embrace technology? The paper's Technology section today ran a "trend" story marveling at how women are expected to buy the new iPhone in record numbers (sample quote: "'Companies need to be careful to not think that to sell smartphones they just need to be pink," she said. ‘There are other things women want.' " Gosh, really?) It's not even been a year since the paper wrote another color-schemed piece on the breaking news that women had really gotten behind improvements in technology, with the headline "To Appeal to Women, Too, Gadgets Go Beyond ‘Cute' and ‘Pink.' " In February, it delved into the world of girls who create Internet content (quoting an expert as saying that to these girls, hotlinking is "the digital equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as another girl).
To affect surprise that women are using technology and the Internet in an era when it's nearly impossible to be engaged with the world and ignore either one is a rich bit of condescension for the paper that endorsed Hillary in the Democratic primary. Was the editorial board expecting her to receive those 3 a.m. phone calls on a hot pink Swarovski-studded BlackBerry Pearl? This feels a little like hearing someone express surprise that women might want to play sports or enjoy sex. The notion that using technology would make you a geek is also a straw man argument that's years out of date—can't remember thinking that way since perhaps middle school, which was right around when IMing became cool, not just the late-night pastime of pimpled anime enthusiasts. (And besides, haven't pimpled anime enthusiasts become cool since then?)
Despite the price scale-back and functionality improvements, the iPhone is still at least as much status symbol as useful tool. The Times is clearly no stranger to the commodity fetishization beat, especially when it comes to women, so you'd think they'd be all over the digital desideratum angle. But I guess the paper thinks this recent story sheds some light on how technology is changing the way women live.
-
sponsorship
Following up on Anne A. and Melinda H.'s posts earlier in the week: Let me confess here that I have entirely stopped reading primary coverage. Wake me when it's over. I am more than a little outraged (OK, so I'm cranky today) that so much of each day's NYT front page is devoted to the primary horse race and to the psychological profiling of the candidates, the voters, the pollsters. ... Isn't there any *real* news worth covering? *Must* we keep eating these rewarmed meals? I even turn off NPR and switch to music whenever I can smell primary punditry coming.
And yes, there's a limit to that shrinking news hole. My organization (shameless promotion here: Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism) has been told outright that there's no room for "soft" news on the issues we've been researching (say, family policy or sexual harassment case law) because the election coverage is eating up so much space. Is it that the reality show of primary coverage is just cheaper to produce than original reporting?
I hope that will be my last word on the primary. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.