Ezra Klein recently wrote an interesting piece on the changes roiling newsrooms. His jumping off point was the revolt within the New York Times over the opinion section published a noxious piece by Tom Cotton arguing that the US military should be deployed against people protesting police brutality. (This led to the resignation of the Times' opinion editor.) There's much more in Klein's piece, but this stood out to me:
Trende focuses on how editors decide what goes in which category: consensus, legitimate, and deviant. (This is important, because (1) views in the consensus category will be treated as obviously true; (2) views in the legitimate debate category will get a "both sides" treatment; and views in the deviant category will either be ignored or dissected like a lab specimen.) What I found most interesting about Trende's take was his focus on who is making the editorial decisions:
There's much more to what Trende had to say too, but this all sounded like much more intelligent media criticism than I normally hear.
The news media likes to pretend that it simply holds up a mirror to America as it is. We don’t want to be seen as actors crafting the political debate, agents who make decisions that shape the boundaries of the national discourse. We are, of course. We always have been.
“When you think in terms of these three spheres — sphere of consensus, of legitimate debate, and of deviancy — a new way of describing the role for journalism emerges, which is: They police what goes in which sphere,” says Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU. “That’s an ideological action they never took responsibility for, never really admitted they did, never had a language for talking about.”
It’s interesting to imagine what would’ve happened if the Times had simply never solicited Cotton’s op-ed, or if he had submitted it and they had passed. The answer, quite clearly, is nothing. That would have been perfectly normal. It’s because the op-ed was reclassified as deviant after its publication, through a semi-public process, that it’s become such a flashpoint. It made visible a process that is often invisible, and it turns out that process is messy and contested.
Trump has sharpened the contradictions here. He and his allies operate in ways that are fundamentally opposed to the basic values that animate newsrooms. This has long caused newsrooms trouble — consider the endless effort to find euphemisms for the word “lying” when describing the president’s comments in headlines. With Cotton’s op-ed, the decision that ultimately got made pushed the views held by the president of the United States and most of his supporters into a sphere of deviance — or maybe a more modern term would be “deplorability.” That is not the kind of choice news outlets are comfortable making.
Sean Trende from Real Clear Politics had an interesting response to Klein's piece on Twitter:“When you think in terms of these three spheres — sphere of consensus, of legitimate debate, and of deviancy — a new way of describing the role for journalism emerges, which is: They police what goes in which sphere,” says Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU. “That’s an ideological action they never took responsibility for, never really admitted they did, never had a language for talking about.”
It’s interesting to imagine what would’ve happened if the Times had simply never solicited Cotton’s op-ed, or if he had submitted it and they had passed. The answer, quite clearly, is nothing. That would have been perfectly normal. It’s because the op-ed was reclassified as deviant after its publication, through a semi-public process, that it’s become such a flashpoint. It made visible a process that is often invisible, and it turns out that process is messy and contested.
Trump has sharpened the contradictions here. He and his allies operate in ways that are fundamentally opposed to the basic values that animate newsrooms. This has long caused newsrooms trouble — consider the endless effort to find euphemisms for the word “lying” when describing the president’s comments in headlines. With Cotton’s op-ed, the decision that ultimately got made pushed the views held by the president of the United States and most of his supporters into a sphere of deviance — or maybe a more modern term would be “deplorability.” That is not the kind of choice news outlets are comfortable making.
Trende focuses on how editors decide what goes in which category: consensus, legitimate, and deviant. (This is important, because (1) views in the consensus category will be treated as obviously true; (2) views in the legitimate debate category will get a "both sides" treatment; and views in the deviant category will either be ignored or dissected like a lab specimen.) What I found most interesting about Trende's take was his focus on who is making the editorial decisions:
There's much more to what Trende had to say too, but this all sounded like much more intelligent media criticism than I normally hear.
