on unimaginative interpretations of objectivity
There are entire j-school seminars to be held on the genre of happenings that is New York Times Folks Getting In Trouble For Tweeting Views On Twitter, and the latest example of Lauren Wolfe’s editing contract getting canceled last week speaks to the renewed anxieties that news outlets have about maintaining the appearance of objectivity in the midst of our current culture war + disinformation hellscape, sort of like an uptight butler who’s consumed with the proper place settings for dinnertime now that the raging house fire around him has finally been contained.
There are a million ways to read into this — for one, compare the tweet with, say, consistently bad behavior of certain other NYT staffers and contrast repercussions (firing versus….oh u get to host The Daily for a day?). You might argue that it’s two different issues at stake, objectivity vs. employee conduct, but if you think being a documented dick to women doesn’t give away your potential biases as obviously as someone saying they felt “chills” to see the end of fascism……..reexamine yourself mate.
You could also read this as a labor issue: what does the NYT, as an employer, owe to employees (yes, even contract employees, though I know it is high tradition in this industry to pretend they don’t exist) when the platform they put their workers on is so enormous that it attracts the very worst kind of harassment and threats to their well-being?
The other facet to all this goes back to the age-old (usually white-man-defined) idea of objectivity itself, and how the tension between holding your journalists to some ivory tower ideal of a perfectly blank canvas devoid of the thinnest whiff of impartiality, per the corporate social media policy, compares to the reality of an industry where a chatty Tweet presence and the slightest suggestion of personal feeling during a tumultuous period of history are well-known prerequisites to professional success, if not also approximations of feeling human, too.
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