Wednesday, June 10, 2020

That Fucking Newspaper

The ideal rule is, of course, "never tweet," but having a Brand is how young journalists, especially people of color and others from nontraditional backgrounds such as "not having a Dad who worked at the New York Times," get these jobs in the first place, and they are expected to promote their work and their newspaper. And then there are social media guidelines, which of course just means some journalists tweet whatever the fuck they want and some can't. You see the most opinionated assholes (not all from the New York Times) waxing dumb about JOURNALISTIC OBJECTIVITY and then 5 minutes later doing a racism and never getting punished for it, because racism is just objectivity.

Of course expressing opinions like "JOURNALISTS SHOULD BE OBJECTIVE" is just good journalism, while expressing opinions like "don't write stories about black people being genetically inferior" is just ACTIVISM and BIAS because that black people are genetically inferior is just SCIENCE according to editors, apparently.
If your newsroom doesn’t like to be described as racist, it’s bad to publish stories that suggest “Black people are genetically inferior.”
When Kendra Pierre-Louis tweeted that newsrooms should not publish or uplift stories that do exactly that, she said the New York Times’ Standards Desk had a response, delivered to her by way of an editor:
“Don’t do it again.”

Pierre-Louis, a Black reporter who previously covered climate for the New York Times, said she was not asked to delete her tweet thread, which went on to critique American journalism’s failure to diversify and its failure to use the “R word.” But she was sanctioned for it, supposedly because it was not her job to cover race.
Ah, yes, that's covering race, which is absolutely not her job.

People get mad that I'm so harsh about the New York Times. I think there are a lot of very good reasons to be very critical of it. One is that, yes, I do hold the New York Times up to a higher standard, if for no other reason than they certainly claim to be of a higher standard. Times brain is a hell of a thing.