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NY Times, June 8, 2020
Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms
By Ben Smith
Wesley Lowery woke up in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 14, 2014, his cheek sore
from where a police officer had smashed it into a vending machine. He
was also wondering how to get his shoelaces back into his boat shoes,
after the police took them when tossing him in a holding cell the night
before. Around 8:30 that morning, he dialed into CNN’s morning show,
where a host passed on some advice from Joe Scarborough at MSNBC: “Next
time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because
you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.”
Mr. Lowery responded furiously. “I would invite Joe Scarborough to come
down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he’s sitting sipping his
Starbucks smugly,” he said on CNN, describing “having tear gas shot at
me, having rubber bullets shot at me, having mothers, daughters, crying,
having a 19-year-old boy, crying as he had to run and pull his
21-year-old sister out of a cloud of tear gas.”
The outburst from a 24-year-old Washington Post reporter provoked eye
rolls in Washington. But Mr. Lowery would go on to make his name in
Ferguson as an aggressive and high-profile star, shaping a raw new
national perspective on racial injustice. Six years later, few in the
news business doubt Mr. Lowery’s premise: that American police are more
brutal and dishonest than much of the media that came of age
pre-Ferguson reported.
“I look at everything differently, and would never do that again,” Mr.
Scarborough told me of his 2014 exchange with Mr. Lowery. “I should have
kept my mouth shut.”
Historical moments don’t have neat beginnings and endings, but the new
way of covering civil rights protests, like the Black Lives Matter
movement itself, coalesced on the streets of Ferguson. Seeing the
brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens up
close, and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of
reporters, most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned
to their newsrooms.
And by 2014, they had in Twitter a powerful outlet. The platform offered
a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to
hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their
tongues about racism.
Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in
August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground
between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience
that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness
on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.
The conflict exploded in recent days into public protests at The New
York Times, ending in the resignation of its top Opinion editor on
Sunday; The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose executive editor resigned on
Saturday over the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” and the ensuing anger
from his staff; and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And it has been the
subject of quiet agony at The Washington Post, which Mr. Lowery left
earlier this year, months after the executive editor, Martin Baron,
threatened to fire him for expressing his views on Twitter about race,
journalism and other subjects.
Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ “core value needs to be the
truth, not the perception of objectivity,” as he told me, has been
winning in a series of battles, many around how to cover race. Heated
Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like “racially charged.”
The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using “racist”
and “lie” more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump’s behavior.
The Times vowed to remake its Opinion section after Senator Tom Cotton’s
Op-Ed article calling for the use of troops in American cities
infuriated the newsroom last week.
Yamiche Alcindor said that when she saw on Twitter the news of the
shooting and protests in Ferguson, she “thought it was something USA
Today should be covering on the ground.”Credit...Curtis Compton/The
Atlanta Journal Constitution
They Raised Their Hands
The press corps that landed in Ferguson after a black 18-year-old,
Michael Brown Jr., was fatally shot by a white police officer, was
blacker than most big American newsrooms. That wasn’t an accident — many
reporters had raised their hands to cover a story that unfolded, first,
on Twitter. Mr. Lowery, a new congressional reporter, asked if he could
help out on The Post’s live blog chronicling the aftermath of the
shooting, and instead found himself in the streets. Yamiche Alcindor,
then 27, saw the news on Twitter, “thought it was something USA Today
should be covering on the ground” and asked to go. Akilah Johnson, then
35 and a reporter at The Boston Globe, emailed her editor that “an
American city is burning,” and was put on a plane. Craig Melvin, 35 and
an NBC correspondent, asked his boss to “put me in, coach.” Rembert
Browne, then 27 and writing for the sports and culture site Grantland,
was looking at his phone in a bar in Brooklyn when he felt, “I want to
do something,” and bought a plane ticket.
“There was a critical mass of black journalists — most of them young —
many to most of them steeped in the history of race and the history of
police violence in this country,” said Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker, an
elder statesman of the group who celebrated his 45th birthday at a wine
bar near the Ferguson police headquarters.
What they found shocked many of them: Bereft, enraged citizens whose
anger sometimes extended to the press and police officers geared up for war.
“Seeing police in armored vehicles in riot gear with semiautomatic
weapons in a residential neighborhood in America — and seeing them
viewing black people not as citizens and taxpayers and people worthy of
protection but rather almost like enemy combatants was surreal,” said
Errin Haines, then a reporter for Fusion and now editor at large for The
19th, in a telephone interview.
On Aug. 18, after nine nights of unrest, the Ferguson police imposed a
rule that protesters could not simply assemble in one place. So Ms.
Alcindor said she found herself walking endlessly, interviewing tired
protesters who were doing the same.
“Walking in circles and then realizing later on that it was simply an
unconstitutional rule, it changed the way I thought about reporting — it
made me think I have to question everything, including the rules of our
reporting,” Ms. Alcindor, a former Times reporter who is now White House
correspondent for PBS NewsHour, told me in an interview.
The police drew few distinctions between the media and the people they
were covering. “There was no sense that I was any different from a
protester. I got pushed around, the police pulled guns on me and other
people,” recalled Joel Anderson, a BuzzFeed News reporter in Ferguson
who now is a writer and podcast host for Slate.
Some journalists, like Adam Serwer of MSNBC, who’s now at The Atlantic,
arrived skeptical of the police’s side of the story. Others, like Mr.
Melvin, had worked in local news relying on police sources.
“The longer you stayed, the more folks you talked to, and the more
information that emerged, it became apparent that the official account
was a load of crap,” Mr. Melvin said in telephone interview.
The central vein for reporters, producers, activists and a vast national
audience was Twitter, which had already begun subtly shifting the power
dynamic in news. It steered coverage. When John Eligon of The Times
published a largely sympathetic profile of Mr. Brown that described him
as “no angel,” it set off outrage on Twitter, as a symbol of a style of
journalism that seemed too ready to explain away police violence.
“They had a point” about the phrase, Mr. Eligon recalled last week.
Twitter “did make it feel like you’re more accountable to a broader
audience and a more diverse audience.”
The platform also gave the younger reporters “freedom to establish their
own stilts in ways we didn’t have without someone handing us the keys,”
said Trymaine Lee, then 35 and reporting for MSNBC.
“Before you’re at the whim of the newsroom,” said Mr. Lee, now a
correspondent for MSNBC. But on Twitter, the young journalists received
“positive reinforcement, they’re getting thousands and thousands of
people saying, ‘Yes, we do like that.’”
New Pressure on Newsrooms
Some of the lessons learned in Ferguson — about race and the particular
experience of black reporters, among others — carried over into the next
challenging era: the arrival of Mr. Trump, whose bigoted language and
tactics shattered norms. Black reporters were joined by other
journalists in pushing, inside newsrooms and on Twitter, for more direct
language — and less deference — in covering the president.
That pattern continued last week, as Times staff members began an
extraordinary campaign to publicly denounce the Op-Ed article written by
Senator Cotton. Members of an internal group called Black@NYT organized
the effort in a new Slack channel and agreed on a carefully drafted
response. They would say that Mr. Cotton’s column “endangered” black
staff members, a choice of words intended to “focus on the work” and
“avoid being construed as hyperpartisan,” one said. On Wednesday evening
around 7:30, hours after the column was posted, Times employees began
tweeting a screenshot of Mr. Cotton’s essay, most with some version of
the sentence: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” The
NewsGuild of New York later advised staff members that that formulation
was legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety. “It
wasn’t just an opinion, it felt violent — it was a call to action that
could hurt people,” one union activist said of Mr. Cotton’s column.
Times employees sent the publisher a letter, which a reporter shared
with me, saying Mr. Cotton’s “message undermines the work we do, in the
newsroom and in opinion, and is an affront to our standards for ethical
and accurate reporting for the public’s interest.” A NewsGuild spokesman
said more than 1,000 Times employees signed the letter, but that the
names weren’t being made public or shared internally.
The protest worked: The paper veered into internal crisis, and the
publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, decided he could not continue with Mr.
Bennet running the Opinion section, which had repeatedly stumbled in
ways that infuriated the newsroom.
Mr. Bennet acknowledged that he had not read the Op-Ed before it was
published, which people at all levels of the Times saw as a damning
admission. He said in a virtual meeting with nearly 4,000 Times staff
members on Friday that he had long believed that for “ideas and even
dangerous ideas, that the right thing to do is expose them on our
platform to public scrutiny and debate, and that’s the best way, that
even dangerous ideas can be discarded.” But, he said, he was now asking
himself, “Is that right?” (Mr. Bennet declined to discuss the situation
further with me.)
At the same meeting, Times executives thanked staff members for their
public outrage, and later that day published an editor’s note atop Mr.
Cotton’s article, saying that it contained allegations that “have not
been substantiated,” its tone was “needlessly harsh” and that it should
not have been published.
And while those angered by Mr. Cotton’s piece dominated the Twitter and
Slack conversations and won the day, some staff members disagreed in
private and public with the decision.
“A strong paper and strong democracy does not shy from many voices. And
this one had clear news value,” Michael Powell, a longtime reporter and
sports columnist at The Times, wrote on Twitter. He also called the
editor’s note an “embarrassing retreat from principle.”
The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger
is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean
Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent
different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a
particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton
debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly
regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout
meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew
agreement from colleagues in a chat window.
How long Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Baquet will put up with public pressure
from their staff is not clear. In an earlier moment of social turmoil,
A.M. Rosenthal, who led the newsroom from 1969 to 1986, kept a watchful
eye and heavy hand on reporters he perceived to lean too far left. The
words, “He kept the paper straight,” are inscribed on his gravestone.
Minutes after Mr. Sulzberger told the staff in an email that Mr. Bennet
had resigned, he told me not to interpret the move as a philosophical
shift. Mr. Rosenthal, he noted, had presided over a much less diverse
newsroom, and one that focused on covering New York for New Yorkers.
“In this case, we messed up and hiding behind, ‘We want to keep the
paper straight,’ to not acknowledge that, would have left us more
exposed,” Mr. Sulzberger said.
And he told me in a separate interview on Friday: “We’re not retreating
from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to
be objective about things like human rights and racism.”
But the shift in mainstream American media — driven by a journalism that
is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as
the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives — now feels
irreversible. It is driven in equal parts by politics, the culture and
journalism’s business model, relying increasingly on passionate readers
willing to pay for content rather than skittish advertisers.
That shift will come too late for Mr. Lowery’s career at The Washington
Post. After Ferguson, he proposed and was a lead reporter on a project
to build the first national database of police shootings and draw
lessons from the results. It won The Post a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He
seemed to insiders and outsiders the prototype of the precocious,
nakedly ambitious, somewhat arrogant and very talented (though usually
white and male) reporter who has risen quickly at American newspapers.
But Mr. Baron has been more sensitive than other newsroom leaders to
reporters who push the limits on Twitter and on television, as Max Tani
reported in the Daily Beast earlier this year. (At The New York Times,
social media policy is usually enforced by a passive-aggressive email
from an editor and rare follow-up.) Mr. Lowery said that when he hit
back at a Republican official who criticized his Ferguson coverage on
Twitter, he drew a lecture from Mr. Baron.
By 2019, the executive editor had gathered examples of what he saw as
misconduct, from Mr. Lowery’s tweet mocking attendees at a Washington
book party as “decadent aristocrats” to one tweet criticizing a New York
Times report on the Tea Party.
And after a tense meeting last September, Mr. Baron handed Mr. Lowery a
memo written in the wooden, and condescending, language of human resources:
Mr. Lowery was “failing to perform your job duties by engaging in
conduct on social media that violates The Washington Post’s policy and
damages our journalistic integrity,” the memo says.
“We need to see immediate cessation of improper use of social media,
outlined above. Failure to address this issue will result in increased
disciplinary action, up to and including the termination of your
employment.”
Mr. Lowery responded with his own memo, defending himself
point-by-point, pointing to specific errors, and arguing that in one
case he was joining the “debate about a topic I cover directly — race
and racism in America.”
“Generations of black journalists, including here at The Washington
Post, have served as the conscience not only of their publications but
of our entire industry,” Mr. Lowery said in the memo to Mr. Baron, which
I also obtained. “Often those journalists have done so by leveling
public criticism of both their competitors and their own employers. News
organizations often respond to such internal and external pressure.”
Washington Post employees said the confrontation between America’s most
famous newspaper editor — Mr. Baron is portrayed heroically by Liev
Schreiber in the movie “Spotlight” — and his protégé was followed by a
flurry of efforts by the Post’s national editor, Steven Ginsberg, and
others to mediate the conflict. Mr. Baron declined through a spokeswoman
to comment on the episode or its broader themes. “As editor, it would be
inappropriate for him to speak about an individual employee,” the
spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, said.
But six months later Mr. Lowery left The Post, for a “60 Minutes”
project on the new streaming platform Quibi. It was, he said, a great
opportunity. But “you have to live outside the realm of reality to think
the executive editor of The Washington Post dressing me down in his
office and inviting me to seek employment elsewhere didn’t contribute to
me seeking employment elsewhere.”
He still has Twitter, though. On Wednesday, he tweeted that he’d
canceled his subscription to The Times and demanded that Mr. Bennet
resign. The next day, he broke some big news: George Floyd’s family and
the Rev. Al Sharpton would lead a national march on Washington to mark
the anniversary of the 1963 civil rights march.
“American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides
journalism is a failed experiment,” he tweeted of the Times debacle. “We
need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral
clarity.”
That argument is gathering momentum in key American newsrooms. At The
Times, staff members are pressing for changes beyond the Opinion
section. At The Post, a committee reporting to Mr. Ginsberg recently
delivered a review of staff members’ attitudes toward social media
policy. And at The Post’s own tense town hall on Friday, Mr. Baron
apologized for failing in a recent email to address “the particular and
severe burden felt by black employees, many of whom were also covering
the story” of the protests, according to notes from a participant in the
meeting. The Post’s union then sent an email to the staff criticizing
Mr. Baron’s response. “Most striking of all was that the four voices the
company chose to elevate in this moment belonged exclusively to white
people. There could be no starker example of The Post’s lack of
diversity in management.”
Perhaps most tellingly, reporters I spoke to at The Post said they
wished Mr. Lowery was still there, breaking news from Minneapolis for
the paper.
“When an organization loses a journalist as talented and as fiercely
committed to the truth as Wesley Lowery, its leaders need to ask
themselves why,” said Felicia Sonmez, a national political reporter who
clashed with Mr. Baron over a different tweet. “We need more reporters
like him, not fewer.”
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