Notebook: Opinion
by Ann Kjellberg, editor
I’m always enjoined, as a purveyor of a newsletter, to draw back the curtain and expose y’all, my helpless readers, to “my process.” This first-person premise of newsletterdom does not come naturally to me. I am by nature an editor, and what I care most about is the writers I bring to you—writers who are, for me, the best self and true heart of the enterprise. The scrawling I eek out under my own steam is some sort of provisional accident, though I care a lot about the issues I discuss, mostly because of their effect on writers. Plus I myself find the spectacle of my process inevitably dispiriting; I can’t get away from it soon enough. I stare into a screen and comb through the news trying to find some salient theme that casts light on the state of letters today. I move away from the screen to try to think and am drawn back to it for more punishing onslaughts of information. Every time I want to make something more lyrical and reflective for you, the volume of inputs reasserts itself. I am abashed that even this derivative undertaking depends on an apparatus with which I am not on wholly friendly terms—the internet. When I began my career we used to pile newspapers (on the floor) and magazines (on a shelf under the window) in reverse chronological order—so we could fish back through them looking for articles we remembered reading: literal “search.” To pursue things with more precision we had to go to the library and heave down multivolume bound indexes. Now I can sit at my little desk and summon gales of effluvium on any subject with a little obsessive pounding. Qualms about the extent to which I like everyone have cashed in my curiosity, sold my data and privacy for the convenience of access, screech by me as I rush forward into the cataract.
So, to bring us to the present. In recent weeks I have been sidelined by civic considerations which many of you probably share, and the informational environment in which I hunt for truffles for you has been overwhelmed by anxiety and dread on the same score. Burrowing for something substantive, suggestive, perhaps even hopeful, to offer up to you I came upon precisely the opposite: a curiously timed New York magazine special issue—they repellently call it a “package,” making it sound more like something you are sold with a bunch of attendant deals than something to think about—entitled “The Last Living Media Elites Tell All,” subtitle: “Can the Media Survive”? (A riposte in The Nation headed “Media Elites Are the Last People to Ask About the Future of Journalism” implicitly underlines The Package’s imprecision in distinguishing between “journalism”—or writing, or art—and “media.” One is tempted to say “media” always survive(s); it’s a question of whether there is anything in it.) This encyclopedic review of the self-serving musings of the most well-established, predictable figures in the business is probably illuminating in its way, but was so thick with received wisdom that it stopped me dead in my mental tracks. (“Niche is the new scale,” “What’s going to be our Wordle?,” “It feels like something really new and really authoritative,” “It feels like they’ve got momentum,” “They really seem to have a sense of mission and what value they bring,” and so on.) Time-stamped October 21, with just two weeks to go until the national reckoning, the Media Elites could hardly have picked a worse moment to remind us of their helplessness before the moment. If we are looking to them for any insight, guidance, or even reliable information, they tell us authoritatively here, we have come to the wrong place.
While I was puzzling (back to the atelier) over what to do with this boulder that had landed on the tentatively budding meadow of my thoughts, two major newspapers muffled me further with decisions that seemed to reinforce the lassitude emanating from The Package. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post announced, now thirteen and eleven days before the election, that they would not endorse a candidate for president, although endorsements in both instances were known to have been in the works with their editorial boards. In both cases those endorsements had been nixed by the papers’ billionaire owners, pharmaceutical tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong and gigantized bookseller Jeff Bezos, respectively.
I myself have on-record reservations about newspaper political endorsements and even editorials generally. Indeed the Nieman Lab two years ago published a survey concluding that many journalists “have come to see editorial endorsements as a liability” because journalists “may know the decision of which candidate to endorse is distinct from the newsroom’s reporting, but many readers don’t separate the two.” The announcement of the Post’s non-endorsement by editor Will Lewis (I wrote a bit about his appointment in a note to subscribers in June) tries to draw force from some of these considerations. But even endorsement-skeptics found things about this sequence of events alarming: the timing (see the Post’s hilarious Alexandra Petri: “We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president”) and the unilateral character of the decisions, by tycoon owners who have business before government and strong interests in remaining tycoons. (For one thing, for our purposes, Kamala Harris has faced calls from her home-state tech industry to replace Lina Khan, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which has filed an anti-trust suit against Bezos’s Amazon.)
Taking note of candidate Donald Trump’s recurrent menacing of the press, and the likely effects of greeting it with premature acquiescence in the matter of an endorsement, several commentators (CNN’s Brian Stelter and Columbia Journalism Review’s Sewell Chan), summoned up Tim Snyder’s warnings against succumbing to “anticipatory obedience” in the face of an authoritarian threat. Tim Snyder himself cautioned on Twitter/X that those who “make concessions before [such a ruler] comes to power” are preparing themselves “for making more concessions after,” adding that when the rich and powerful behave this way their message is “I’m going be fine,” and it “puts the burden of taking action on those who are less fortunate than you, puts them in the position of having to be more courageous than you.” As he wrote in On Tyranny, “A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter, whose organization Protect Democracy filed suit against Donald Trump on behalf of PEN America Center in 2018 for attempts to retaliate against news organizations and journalists whose coverage displeased him, prophetically invoked Snyder’s notion of “anticipatory obedience” in an article earlier this month about how media companies he had threatened during his presidency, including The Washington Post, had already begun taking steps at the corporate level to cover him less aggressively since his candidacy became viable in February of 2022.
Even New York mag’s Power Issue (which to tell the truth is not short on vindictive gossip) characterized the LA Times and the Post as weakened by billionaire ownership. “An editor in chief” opined that such patronage “meant they never really took seriously building a business. And at some point, the billionaires get bored with that.” (The Power Issue is free with anonymity, arguing that “our driving interest was in having genuinely honest conversations with people important enough that they can’t always be candid when quoted by name,” apparently not concerned with, or delighted by, the prospect that such people welcome opportunities to skewer their rivals without attribution.) Hamish McKenzie, owner of our platform Substack, said of billionaire-owned media companies, “I don’t think they’re serious players in the business sense … they’re picking up formerly prestigious brands as trophies for their shelves. It keeps these loved institutions alive in some ways,” but they “are mostly just on life support. They’re not actually major cultural players anymore.” Both papers were accused of having squandered the natural advantages of their home markets (entertainment and politics). Sheila Coronel, an investigative journalist from the Philippines who is now a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, told The Guardian that the “‘American notion of press freedom’ was rooted in the fact that newspapers and television were, for a time, ‘vibrant businesses’ that actually made enough money to support themselves.” “‘When the media is no longer a viable business,’ and when it must depend on owners who make their money in other industries, and who have other financial interests to support,” that independence is sacrificed. She said that “the experience of ‘media capture,’ in which media outlets are constrained by pressures from the state and corporations or other special interests, is a familiar one for many reporters around the world.”
The New York Times, for its part, endorsed Kamala Harris in September, as editorial page editor Kathleen Kingsbury reminded us yesterday. She thought it might on this occasion be “helpful to explain how and why the Times weighs in” on presidential candidates, though in the event she only explains how. Today the Times delighted critics of its rivals’ non-endorsement with a whole Sunday Opinion section on “what a second Trump team would bring,” fronted by a full-page headline: “Donald Trump says he will prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, abandon allies, play politics with disasters. Believe him.” The New York Times, somewhat to the distress of the other Last Living Media Elites venting in the Power Issue, is indeed a “vibrant business,” almost the only one, although some of the Elites argued that the Times’s successful subscription strategy meant that “they pivoted from being a newspaper for everyone to being a newspaper for their core reader,” in the words of Living Media Elite Bustle’s Bryan Goldberg. Its vibrancy seems though to have been consistent with a decision last summer to refrain from just those endorsements that some argue do serve a civic function: candidates for local office (among which the Times includes, debatably, US congressional races).
There is a recurrent irritation in the Power Issue with the disruptive interventions of staff. “Staff running the newsroom” is equated with chaos and business-unfriendly social activism. “One executive” complained that newsroom unions lack the vigor of unions of yore and now “mirror the activists’ posture on social issues and everything else.” New York Times editor Joe Kahn is praised for having “drawn the line” “between activism and professionalism.” “You see what happened at the Washington Post; essentially, it’s anarchy,” says “an anonymous executive.” “The staff took over the publication and started dictating moves.” Now LA Times editorial editor Mariel Garza, who says she was caught off guard by the endorsement decision, and two other members of the editorial board have resigned, and nineteen Washington Post columnists signed an op ed objecting to the Post’s decision not to endorse. Legendary journalists like Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, and Marty Baron have decried it. It seems a bit hard to tell when the staff are an unruly activist rabble, when they are “beholden to a core reader,” and when they are upholders of integrity.
The 2022 Nieman survey notes that decisions to endorse political candidates were traditionally made by editorial boards “and owners,” and indeed the LA Times for a century followed the political agenda of their conservative Chandler family stewards. But part of what was shocking to me about the decision not to endorse was that it was, in its very nature, an editorial decision, or should have been. To make a move so entwined with ethics and foundational principles (what does it mean for us to have an opinion? what does it mean for us to take a side?) under business auspices alone seems, well, definitionally corrupt.
Reading the Power Issue I was struck by the bigwigs’ focus on management and strategic blunders, and in particular what might be viable business models—which I agree is a deeply serious problem. But they did not talk much about what they are actually saying and writing, what needs to be said and written. There seems an abiding confusion, there and everywhere, over what sort of writing, what sort of truths, what sort of investigation, what sort of argument, readers are prepared to read and hear and pay for. How to meet the demand, how to create the demand? This seems to me at bottom the existential question. Even after the election we face a chronic unease in this country around learning. With learning itself an object of distrust, what are the parameters in which we create the artefacts we learn from?
To take us back to the atelier. While I was struggling with these problems I went to a reading in an apartment in the East Village that had once been a kind of clubhouse of downtown experimentation and mischief. The host treated us to the singer Madelyn Monaghan, who performed accompanied by the traditional instrument, the shruti box. The shruti box played what I understood as a drone, a baseline note around which the arcing melody moved. All music departs from a point from which it builds distance and to which it leans back. The listener experiences tension and complexity as they move away, and yearns to be returned, to resolution and point of rest. As I listened to the beautiful song “Casadh an tasúgáin” over the ground note of the shruti, and tried to arrive at a way of thinking about all this, my mind settled on the resonant, mysterious drone; what we need is a ground bass, a tonic for our culture, to which all our various interpretations and arguments and challenges can refer and from which they can take flight. We need a way of moving in relation to an idea of shared truth, even if we are not yet (or ever) ready to agree on the shared truth itself.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Find more of her Notebooks on publishing, writing, journalism, bookselling, and the public life of ideas here.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Our recent reviews include: Joy Williams on the hidden Russian modernist Andrey Platonov; Michael Robbins on the perils of translating Ovid, Barry Yourgrau on the policiers of Jean-Patrick Machette.
Dragonfly and The Silver Birch, sister bookstores in Decorah, Iowa, are Book Post’s Fall 2024 partner bookstores. We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa
If you liked this piece, please share and tell us with a “like.”
I notice some symmetry between your characterization of the comments in the New York article on media elites and my reaction to the way e.g. NPR pundits carry on about the election and Harris's campaign and its failings and what she isn't doing right and so on -- as if they all live in a world utterly untouched by the issues they claim to care about -- this passage in particular: "Reading the Power Issue I was struck by the bigwigs’ focus on management and strategic blunders, and in particular what might be viable business models—which I agree is a deeply serious problem. But they did not talk much about what they are actually saying and writing, what needs to be said and written."
Grateful, as always, that you are willing to serve as our canary in the coal mines.