Why was it so often women, people of color, and LGBTQ people who became the targets of campaigns against journalistic “bias”? To an extent, each case of firing or exclusion, even my own, made obvious sense: every profession has its standards, and holding to them is a part of how professional organizations define their identities. But I also began to see that targeting journalists for violation of conflict-of-interest or impartiality policies serves more than one purpose. It reinforces professional standards and boundaries, and it also discourages solidarity and organizing among media workers, reinforcing the idea that all of our jobs are unstable and we should fear our employers’ power. Finally, for news organizations, these public acts of discipline can serve as a sort of ritual, a scapegoating: demonstrate that you are willing to get rid of people, and you will appear pure and free of conflicts of interest, even though that can’t possibly be true. Wash your hands of the contaminated elements. I had been one of those elements; it wasn’t hard to find others who had, too.
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Sandy Nelson has sharp eyes, short hair, and a pointed, serious way of speaking. She lives with her wife in a small town in Colorado and works what she called a fairly skull-numbing day job as a technical editor. But when she was my age, her early thirties, she was on a career path as a journalist, working a competitive beat as an education journalist in Tacoma, Washington, filing a story a day and keeping up with local and statewide news. She was organized and fed off the energy of reporting. “I always tried to do as hard-hitting stuff as I could,” she said, describing day after day of lining up interviews, getting out in the field to report, coming back and filing a story on deadline.
Nelson came out as a lesbian in 1974, right after she went to college. She studied journalism at the University of Washington and it was while she was there that she first became interested in socialism. After graduation she was determined to become a reporter, convinced of the potential to make real social change as a journalist. She also joined a Trotskyist socialist organization and participated in activism around feminist and socialist issues—rejecting the rules of objectivity she’d learned in school. She stuck with both the cause of journalism and the cause of socialism.
After a few years at a small-town paper, Nelson got a job at the Tacoma News Tribune in 1983, when the paper was still locally owned. She started as a feature writer and then moved to education, and she loved covering school board meetings, protests, and politics, getting out of the office and into the street to find out what people were talking about and doing. She said she scrupulously separated her two worlds of activism and journalism. Plus, when she started, her union contract had protections for journalists’ off-the-job activities. As long as journalists were careful to avoid direct conflicts of interest in their news reporting or disclose any that they had, the publishers couldn’t dictate what they could do in their off time. For many years, Nelson was a by-the-books reporter. She thought you could strive to be fair, balanced, and thorough, and try to get the facts right as much as possible. And she believed that reporting, gathering information, is a different practice than writing polemics or writing to make a point. She kept her worlds separate: as an activist, she was trying to make social change through protest and advocacy, while as a journalist, she was serving the institutional needs of a paper that provided local news in a centrist tone, a divide she was generally comfortable with.
I came across her story accidentally, when I stumbled onto a 1996 piece in the New York Times: “Gay Reporter Wants to Be Activist.” The lede induced a joyful smirk, at least for me: “To labor leaders in this old blue-collar port, a shot-and-beer stronghold, Sandy Nelson is an unlikely hero—a lesbian, Socialist journalist. But to the top editors at The News Tribune, where Ms. Nelson works, she is a walking conflict of interest whose off-duty activities threaten the credibility of journalism.”
Indeed, her peaceful days at the Tacoma News Tribune were short-lived. In 1986 the paper got bought out by the McClatchy Company. Everyone, including her, had to reapply for their jobs. Nelson was rehired, even though McClatchy was not as keen on activist journalists, and she’d been “out” as a radical socialist activist. She resumed her daily work, but she had a feeling the calm wouldn’t last. McClatchy wanted a new contract with the editorial staff that included strict limitations on their off-the-job activities. The workers, who were members of the Newspaper Guild, opposed that and other contract stipulations, and negotiations for a new union contract began and stalled, began and stalled.
At the same time, Nelson became involved in a prolonged battle for a human rights ordinance in the city of Tacoma, an ordinance that protected gay workers from job discrimination. It had already passed, but in 1989 right-wingers were pushing a ballot initiative to repeal it, and her organization was trying to stop that. She attended protests and ran petition drives as she always had, though she avoided public speaking about her activism. None of this was a secret, but one day her editor called her into the office and told her that due to her off-duty political activities, she was being removed from her job as a reporter and sent to the copy desk to edit. This was in 1990, seven years into her tenure as a journalist at the paper. The copy desk wasn’t a pay cut, but it took her away from the work she loved—she said it was clearly a punishment. “When they stripped me of my right to be a reporter, it was really painful because I wasn’t going to be out there doing my thing anymore.”
At that point, Nelson said, she had a decision to make: Go quietly, or make noise. She chose making noise, in part as a gay rights issue (she didn’t think it was fair to be told that she couldn’t fight for her own rights as a gay person, and she suspected discrimination), but more largely, as an issue of freedom of speech and workers’ rights. She thought she was being targeted as the union shop steward in addition to her gay identity and the content of her activism. If an employer can curtail a worker’s off-duty activities, she thought, even free speech activities, where does it stop?
“I wasn’t just doing this for fun,” she said. Her off-duty free speech mattered to her. “We were fighting for abortion rights, labor, gay and lesbian rights. I was fighting for my survival.”
So, rather than quit after she was put on the copy desk, Nelson stayed at the paper—and filed a lawsuit. That process dragged on for seven years, and she remained on the copy desk at the paper the entire time, facing the people she was up against in person each day.
“I’m not really a quitter, per se,” she told me, with a fierce deadpan.
She believed that both hypocrisy and a double standard were driving her treatment. Nelson said she had never had a complaint from a reader about bias in her actual stories, nor was the News Tribune able to produce any examples of complaints as part of their legal response to her. She also said she was able to point to many fellow reporters who were involved in causes, albeit less controversial ones than socialism or gay rights.
“They didn’t go after people who were involved in their churches, or people who were in Boy Scouts. They can be political, can’t they?”
After Nelson fought the case for years, in 1997 the Supreme Court of Washington State decided against her, finding that a state law protecting employees from job discrimination based on political expression could legally exclude journalists. The reasoning was that the free speech right of publications (the right not to publish the work of people they don’t want to publish) takes precedence over freedom of expression for individual reporters. These reporters must choose either their professional responsibility or their personal convictions, and their bosses, protected by the First Amendment, can require them to choose.
And yet, there was a blatant double standard regarding institutional versus individual freedom of speech and expression. In the case of the Tacoma News Tribune, the paper’s publisher at the time of Nelson’s tenure was actively involved in advocating for taxpayer support for a new stadium in Seattle. In 1995 taxpayers in the county voted against providing direct support to the Seattle Mariners for the stadium, but they were overridden by state legislators, who passed several new taxes to be used to support the private enterprise.
Nelson disagrees that employers have the “right” to prevent political activity among their employees and was pleased with the part of the decision that clarified that her case should only be interpreted as a narrow exception for journalists (it protected political expression for workers in other sectors in Washington). Still, she thought the argument for a publisher exclusion was thin—they have “the freedom to publish, not to make a profit,” she wrote, paraphrasing her lawyer’s argument. She argued that publisher freedom of speech shouldn’t extend to the ability to target people if those people could hurt their bottom line—it is, after all, a slippery slope into legalized discrimination. In her mind, publishers’ fears about losing revenue over activist-journalists were winning out over those journalists’ freedom to express themselves politically.
It was journalists’ free speech versus the bosses’ free speech, and her case set a dangerous precedent.
“I never signed away my rights as a citizen when I became a professional journalist 16 years ago,” Nelson wrote in 1996. “I never surrendered my right to political self-defense in the face of attacks from the government or the right wing—so why should I make an exception if I am attacked by the management of the communications medium I work for?”
Nelson lost. The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear her appeal, and it remains true that reporters can be fired for off-the-job acts of personal or political expression. Nelson believes the News Tribune and McClatchy were making an example of her. “Objectivity is a myth, and it’s usually used as a way to go after people who have unpopular or radical ideas that threaten the status quo,” she said. “During the McCarthy era they went after people in the same way.”
When we talked on a Google Hangout in 2018, Nelson said she was glad I was continuing her fight. “People like you and I get targeted, because they think we are easy targets.” The fierce twinkle in her eye matched mine. We weren’t easy targets—and we both knew it. I felt warm when I talked to Sandy Nelson, even though our conversation was relatively formal. I had found another kindred spirit.
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Conflict-of-interest rules limiting political expression for reporters are still a standard in the news media, but one that’s become more and more tricky in the age of social media. Reporters are expected to tweet and have an online presence, but also to walk a fine line between expressing their personalities and expressing their personal opinions. Reporters of color have been chastised for calling an incident “racist,” women chastised for expressing opinions about the #MeToo movement and sexual assault. After Donald Trump was elected, many journalists attended the giant Women’s March in Washington, DC, or New York following his inauguration. Still others signed petitions and wore hats and T-shirts and made political donations—but plenty did not, due to restrictions from their employers. Interest in the march was so high that a variety of outlets issued specific warnings against political activity during that time period. My own editor knew I would be at the march making recordings, and just advised that I not end up getting photographed for anyone else’s news article.
The argument for limiting conflicts of interest in journalism on its surface is fairly simple: the journalist’s role is as a purveyor of truth, not an advocate or a polemicist. Personal involvements—whether they are financial, familial, or political—can divide the journalist’s loyalties; they may be motivated to write a certain story, or present a case in a certain way, by something that falls short of a supposedly pure truth-telling motive. In a traditional conflict-of-interest framing, the journalist is caught between her role as a public servant and her role as a private citizen.
This framing tends to allow that public service is in fact the primary motive of most journalists (and not, say, profit or reward of some kind), and it tends to assume that, aside from a few discrete choices about “involvement,” a person becomes a journalist as a sort of neutral player, an entanglement-free, apolitical body. These are assumptions we need to interrogate carefully, given that most news organizations are motivated by making a profit and given that nobody is neutral. We all have a race and a gender and a sexuality, and we all have ideas about race and gender and sexuality and politics that we are attached to, to varying degrees.
The argument against conflicting entanglements is nonetheless broadly persuasive: the offer of a payout, the fear of judgment from a close friend or family member, or the sense of doing a favor for a cause or group could all legitimately influence or even interfere with fact-finding and truth-telling, and they are the kinds of bias that audience members might understandably want to know about. Many news organizations reason that it’s easiest to simply limit or avoid such entanglements. Of course, even this argument is complicated—take the example of a small-town reporter, who’s likely to be writing stories about their neighbors, mother’s bridge buddies, and kids’ teachers. Such a person earns trust not by eliminating all entanglements, but by reporting as fairly as possible given the scenario and disclosing conflicts where possible. Avoiding payouts or personal financial benefit for a story is a clear-enough rule, but avoiding all conflicts of interest is impossible. Relationships, entanglements, and complicated ethical questions are inevitable, no matter the size of a reporter’s beat, no matter how antisocial and uninvolved they strive to be.
But there is another, more insidious argument for limiting conflicts of interest in journalism—that of appearances and perception. Many ethical policies warn against conflicts of interest, “real or perceived.” This argument concerns itself not with real conflicts of interests as identified by reporters, but with the slippery concept of “perception,” whether audiences might believe there is a conflict of interest or bias in a given journalist. If the problem isn’t actual conflicts (something only the journalist herself can possibly know and disclose) but perceived ones, who’s to be the judge? How can you know if I’m struggling to separate my role as a reporter from my role as something else? The focus on appearances can also backfire, encouraging journalists with minor conflicts of interest to keep them a secret in order to avoid being scolded, fired, or taken off a story. I know full well that many journalists attended the 2017 Women’s March in secret—avoiding the appearance of a conflict rather than the (potential) conflict itself.
News organizations again and again use highly subjective criteria to decide whether a conflict of interest could create a problem of perception. These criteria depend on assumptions about what is socially and politically acceptable in your environment, and they are value judgments rather than the “objective” standards they claim to be. As in Sandy Nelson’s case, the results are troubling, leading almost inevitably to the scapegoating of the most vulnerable people in newsrooms—LGBTQ people (who are often not protected from workplace discrimination), people of color who have been systematically excluded from newsrooms, young people, people with disabilities, Muslims, immigrants, among others. The homogeneity of newsrooms is, in turn, protected by this thinking: white cisgender men remain the ones who can be “objective,” while others are subjective and suspect.
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Linda Greenhouse had been the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times for over a decade when she decided, in spring 1989, to join a national march for reproductive rights in Washington, DC, where she lived. She didn’t go as press, and she knew other women from the Times who also attended. She was open about her plans, even inviting the editors in her bureau to the march.
But then something turned: some of her female friends at the Washington Post got in trouble with their supervisors for attending, and in the ensuing debate, they told the Post that the Times had let reporters march with no issue. Next thing you know the Post ran a story quoting Greenhouse’s boss, Howell Raines. When the Post called him, Greenhouse writes in her 2017 memoir Just a Journalist, he did an about-face and suddenly indicated a belief that Greenhouse was out of bounds. “What evidently had not been a mistake when it happened was now, after the fact, a big one,” she says. Greenhouse was asked to apologize and refrain from future political demonstrations.
The flap received international coverage and became a part of a heated ongoing debate, punctuated by headlines like the L.A. Times’ 1990 stunner, “Can Women Reporters Write Objectively on Abortion Issue?” (The author, David Shaw, later won a Pulitzer Prize for his media criticism.)
The same questions aren’t asked about the men in Washington who attend private dinners with politicians, the Midtown Manhattan reporters who are drinking buddies with Wall Street guys, the small-town beat reporters whose dad and brother and uncle are all cops. And in fact, the same questions aren’t asked about men and abortion: clearly, a man can get someone pregnant, so shouldn’t he have a stake? Maybe conflict-of-interest questions ought to be asked of everyone, but the point is, it’s complicated. If women can’t report on abortion because they have too much personal stake in it, who can report on anything? Awareness or disclosure of the conflicts is one thing, but punishment and censorship is another, and it’s too often women, people of color, and queer and trans people who are the targets of the kind of mottled, extreme thinking that leads to “Can Women Reporters Write Objectively on Abortion Issue?”
Greenhouse, who covered nearly every contentious issue in US politics during her forty years at the Times, began to question “objectivity” at that time in a way she hadn’t before. “When do professional norms, having evolved to buttress the credibility of a craft that only in modern times has laid claim to the status of a profession, unduly constrain not only journalism’s practitioners but journalism itself? Does ‘objectivity,’ with its mantra of ‘fairness and balance,’ too often inhibit journalists from separating fact from fiction and from fulfilling the duty to help maintain an informed citizenry in a democracy?” she writes.
Nonetheless, Greenhouse mostly just got in line: the attention around the abortion march was unwanted, and she stopped taking risks in her political expression. At the end of her career, though, she found herself in hot water over political speech a second time.
In June 2006, she was invited to give an address at Radcliffe, her alma mater, as a recipient of the Radcliffe Institute Medal, the school’s highest honor for graduates. In the speech, she described the George W. Bush administration as “creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world.” Greenhouse, speaking to an invite-only audience, went on: “And let’s not forget the sustained attack on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism. To say that these last years have been dispiriting is an understatement.”
She gave the speech, and that was that. As Greenhouse writes, “The mountains didn’t tremble. In fact, nothing happened. June passed, then July, August, and most of September. Then I received a call from a man identifying himself as the NPR media reporter.” David Folkenflik had seen a video of her speech because his mother went to Radcliffe. She was curt with him, not seeing the wrong in anything she had done, and he ran a story shortly afterward on NPR’s website called “Critics Question Reporter’s Airing of Personal Views.” Folkenflik had called up a series of current and former editors and read to them from Greenhouse’s speech; each gave the opinion that she should have refrained from criticizing the Bush administration, to protect the perceived integrity of her employer.
Greenhouse was indignant: “The reputation of the Times was at stake because two years after the Supreme Court held that the Bush administration couldn’t maintain a law-free zone at Guantanamo, the paper’s Supreme Court correspondent criticized the administration for having tried to maintain a law-free zone? Strong stuff.”
Once again, the flap spun out into a full-on controversy, producing several days of coverage from a variety of outlets. Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the Times, weighed in defending Greenhouse, but Byron Calame, then the current public editor, published a column scolding her for airing her personal opinions in any context. “During the current term,” he wrote, “allowing her to cover court topics on which she voiced opinions in June risks giving the paper’s critics fresh opportunities to snipe at its public policy coverage.”
“In other words,” Greenhouse writes, “there were schoolyard bullies abroad in the land, and this was no time to stand up to them. Might such a time ever come? He didn’t say.”
Even though the paper’s public editor weighed in, her own editors didn’t—she was neither taken off the beat nor told not to say similar things in the future, at least not directly.
“But neither did any Times editor come to my defense,” she writes, noting that one of her editors said to her, “not in the current climate,” by way of explanation.
Her story raises the question: What is the climate in which editors at newspapers and radio shows should consider standing up for something they believe in? Does the temperature need to rise above a certain level, globally, before our collective survival starts feeling more important than our individual careers? Or, taking the use of the word “climate” less literally, are these ethical individuals awaiting a more liberal environment before they air their liberal views, so that they can do so without consequence? Or maybe they’re awaiting a more authoritarian environment—a world of more disappeared children or “enhanced interrogation” or perhaps more white supremacist or homophobic violence—before they stand up for a reporter who would dare to question those forms of violence.
Regardless, “not in the current climate” reflects the kind of moral relativism and weakness with which I have grown impatient, earlier in my career than either Sandy Nelson or Linda Greenhouse. Waiting around for the climate to change is a privilege some of us simply can’t afford.
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After I got fired and made the choice to talk about it publicly, I heard from hundreds of people, most of them sympathetic. Many were audience members who were infuriated by my firing and wrote to tell me of their frustration; others were journalists, some of whom had worked at Marketplace or in public radio before and had similar critiques of those environments; a small handful were trans people, thanking me for standing up for our community in a context that has tended to ignore us, or asking for my advice on navigating the journalism world as an out trans person.
For months, people also sent me link after link about other journalists who’d been arrested, fired, scolded, or demoted in ways that evoked what had happened to me. Perhaps the most resonant for me was the story of Desmond Cole, a freelance columnist who announced his intention to resign from the Toronto Star in May 2017 with a post to his personal blog, entitled “I Choose Activism for Black Liberation.”
Cole had started writing for the Star after he penned a breakthrough piece about racial profiling, “The Skin I’m In,” in 2015, for another Toronto publication. That column, a searing description of his experience growing up in small-town Canada as a dark-skinned Black man, made a splash because it called out Canadian racism and racial profiling. In the piece, he explained he’d been stopped no less than fifty times by Canadian police—and never charged with any crime. He moved to Toronto to try to get away from the small-mindedness, but the harassment continued. Cole, furious about his treatment as a Black man, became a committed activist. The Star invited him to write a regular column for them after “The Skin I’m In” led to a book deal and a documentary.
In his blog post of May 4, 2017, Cole explained that he had by then been a columnist for the Star for over a year, writing a popular weekly and later biweekly column that was often about racial justice issues. Then this happened: he disrupted a Toronto Police Services Board meeting on April 20. The issue at hand was a practice called carding, whereby police stop people (disproportionately young, Black and brown) and take down their information even if they aren’t being charged with a crime. Toronto activists had been demanding an end to carding, a demand they won. Now they were demanding that the police department get rid of personal information previously collected, arguing that the information was collected illegally. Cole, who had been carded himself, made a brief statement at the meeting, then informed the board he wouldn’t leave until he got a response. He raised a fist in silent protest and stood still. He was eventually escorted out by police.
Cole was subsequently called in for a meeting with his editor at the Star, who reminded him of the paper’s editorial policies, which include a prohibition on activism among its writers—even opinion writers. He wasn’t fired or reprimanded—simply reminded of what the policy was. A remarkable aspect of the story is that Cole said he had “never signed any contract or agreement” during his year of writing a weekly column for the Star, nor had he been directed to any of the paper’s formal editorial policies. That said, Cole wrote, “I knew my police protest was activism, and I could have guessed the Star wouldn’t appreciate it.”
Cole, in turn, didn’t appreciate the suggestion that he would need to choose between activism and opinion writing, and resigned. “If I must choose between a newspaper column and the actions I must take to liberate myself and my community, I choose activism in the service of Black liberation,” he wrote in his blog.
He didn’t accuse the paper of a double standard, but after his public announcement, someone else did. The following week, another former Star columnist, a white woman, penned a column for NOW Magazine responding to Cole’s treatment with a pointed accusation.
“In pushing Cole out, the Star seems to have applied a double standard on its own policies, and I speak as someone who spent 25 years as a columnist and activist at the paper,” Michele Landsberg wrote. She said for her entire twenty-five years at the paper, her editors encouraged her feminist activism, even printing petitions she was promoting in the pages of the paper. “I marched on picket lines; I protested at Queen’s Park. I know I brought large numbers of readers to the paper. I know the paper valued and rewarded me.”
As a white woman, it appears, she was not only allowed the freedom to act in this way, but she was encouraged in her activism—a pattern she says is right and good, until it’s applied inconsistently. Landsberg accused the Star of undermining trust with the diverse readership it most needed to reach.
The Star made its institutional views known with a column from public editor Kathy English entitled “Journalists Shouldn’t Become the News.” The opening paragraph: “It has long been Toronto Star policy that journalists do not take public stands on public issues or become the news. This policy is aligned with longstanding journalistic values and the ethics policies of most credible news organizations in Canada, the U.S. and around the world.”
In other words, we have rules, and we stand by these rules because other news organizations have similar rules. And yet it seems as though the rules were applied inconsistently, and sometimes not at all. The rules were subject to a smell test.
English wrote that she and others at the Star became “somewhat uneasy” when they learned Cole had disrupted a meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board. And yet, isn’t uneasiness the only way that change happens? Isn’t disruption the only path to transformation? I have made many people uncomfortable with my personal advocacy as a transgender person; plenty of white people in the US and Canada are made uneasy, at least a bit, by any Black person who raises their voice. An unease test for what crosses the line into activism nearly always favors the powerful and the status quo.
And then came the diversity apologetics, a form that the Star public editor seems to have mastered. To summarize, people in power tend to say things like this: “We like diversity, and we are sorry that our policies, practices, and behaviors can’t support it at this time.” Here’s what English actually wrote: “I am sorry Cole’s strong voice will no longer be a regular part of the Star. While the Star has made considerable strides forward in publishing a greater diversity of voices, I believe it still needs more diverse voices in both its news and opinion pages.”
A solution to the conundrum of feeling “sorry” to lose a diverse voice could be to revisit the paper’s policies or to look closely at the inconsistency with which they’d been applied, or reconsider the decision because each case is, in fact, different. But no such revisiting would take place on English’s watch: she cynically stated that policies shouldn’t be made or amended “on the fly simply to accommodate any one voice or any one cause,” without calling for any broad reconsideration of the policy or its application. She avoided weighing in on whether these are the right rules by simply saying that they are the rules, and rules ought not to change too quickly. It’s a classic dodge, used again and again by people resistant to social change but unwilling to admit it.
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Linda Greenhouse describes a sense of relief when she finally took a buyout at the Times and retired in 2008—suddenly, she was able to fully participate in the political process, to speak her mind as she wanted. She talked proudly about her career-long donations to Planned Parenthood and stood up to critics who contended that somehow all her years of credible Supreme Court reporting were undone by this revelation.
But Greenhouse is, in many ways, one of the lucky ones. After 1990, Sandy Nelson didn’t work full-time as a reporter again. She had imagined working at a big paper someday—the Washington Post or the New York Times. But when she was punished for her activism, she said, that ambition dissolved. “I grieved the end of that career, and then just decided that my next career was as a warrior.”
Desmond Cole’s work as an activist and journalist continued (he has his own radio show and still contributes to many Canadian publications), but he calls his treatment “bad news for emerging local Black journalists and journalism students, most of whom are Black women and many of whom tell me they are also being shunned, not for their actions but for their radical and emancipatory content.” These young Black writers have received the message, loud and clear, that they would be asked to choose between the cause of Black liberation and the practice of being a writer, even an opinion writer.
Freelancers are among the people who are most vulnerable to these blanket policies, and these days more and more journalists are freelancers. In 2011 a freelance journalist named Caitlin Curran was fired from her gig as a part-time web producer at The Takeaway, a national radio news show from WNYC, after being photographed holding a sign at an Occupy Wall Street protest. That same week, music host Lisa Simeone’s show, which was distributed by NPR, was removed from distribution after NPR learned that Simeone had also participated in an Occupy demonstration. “What is NPR afraid I’ll do—insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?” Simeone wrote in a statement. She also pointed out that she was a contract worker, not even working directly for NPR but for a station affiliate.
And of course, every rule has its exceptions, as Simeone herself pointed out: “Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses.” NPR responded that these were unique situations; Simeone pointed out that it is quite difficult to tell why that is.
As we move toward a world in which nearly half of workers in the US are freelance and contract workers, the power these policies give employers is troubling. Can a person who’s stretched between fifteen gigs, none of them offering livable wages or health insurance, be expected to remain an endlessly clean slate, avoiding both past and future violations of ethical policies for all potential employers? As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen said to On the Media after Curran’s firing, “It might be a good rule for WNYC to not try and control the lives of people that you don’t give health insurance to.” Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism professor, called the extension of ethics codes to freelancers “appalling.”
After the Simeone flap, NPR clarified that its ethics code barring participation in protest on any issue the network covers does apply to independent producers and station reporters. If the code were applied consistently, Caitlin Curran, Sandy Nelson, Lisa Simeone, I, and presumably Linda Greenhouse can be forever blocked from contracting with the network, even for a single story about an issue to which we have no personal connection.
“In the name of free speech and a free press, some of the nation’s most powerful employers are trying to subvert the political rights of an entire class of workers—those of us at the front line of gathering and sharing public information,” Sandy Nelson wrote in 1996 in On the Issues, a feminist magazine. Big media companies, whether McClatchy or Sinclair or NPR, command power over large workforces, which in turn wield a great amount of power over public perception and opinion. Maintaining journalists as a class of people unable to stand up for ourselves as employees or as human beings may work well for the management, but it stands to be damaging for the public.
Nelson lost her case, but maybe the remedy isn’t legal but social: we need a culture that recognizes that a reporter, even one doing non-opinion reporting, can challenge distorting biases in their journalistic work while continuing to exist and participate as a member of the public in their non-journalistic work. We aren’t talking, after all, about requiring outlets to publish everything one of their reporters says. The question is about the right to be and exist, even to blunder and make mistakes in public—it is about the idea that we are all more than one thing, that we are vulnerable, whole human beings in addition to being journalists.
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Journalism scholar Jay Rosen has written about a phenomenon in political reporting that he calls the “production of innocence.” Rather than face the consequences of their own inevitable perspective and slant, or carefully engage with practices of disclosure and transparency, news organizations ritually perform innocence in order to protect themselves from accusations of bias. Rosen has described how that performance plays out in the form of false equivalencies and fake balance, the sort of faux objectivity that’s been much maligned by media critics. Journalists often parrot the words of presidents and self-made experts in order to seem “fair,” or insert a “second opinion” on a topic like climate change or gay rights in order to demonstrate balance, sometimes even at the expense of accuracy.
“The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus ‘prove’ in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade,” Rosen wrote in his blog, PressThink.
Rosen suggests that performing innocence is an act of persuasion, an attempt to make a point, rather than a demonstration of ethical consistency. I think this performance also plays out when news organizations periodically fire those who are taken to be too controversial for such a neutral, nonpartisan news organization to tolerate. Juan Williams at NPR, Octavia Nasr at CNN, Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, Dan Rather at CBS, and Peter Arnett at NBC are other examples from the last two decades—and such stories reach back as far as objectivity itself. Whatever you think of their actions, each of these removals can be taken, I think, as a part of the “production of innocence.”
It struck me that I, too, had been scapegoated, washed off in one of these rituals of purification. And that insight felt evocative and strange. Purification through the removal of vulnerable people is a trope with deep roots in the worst parts of American culture. I had been washed off right as people were all asking: What does Donald Trump’s victory mean for the media? Will the media stand up to him? Will they say “lie,” will they say “racist”? This purity ritual is part of what allows news media to forever avoid the implications of actually standing for something or other—or avoid facing that they stand for little but profits and private interests.
Sandy Nelson and Desmond Cole were pushed off of their career paths by this form of scapegoating. Linda Greenhouse avoided such a fate—in part by playing by the rules, stepping back and apologizing, and in part, I’m guessing, by being a white, cisgender woman who had already met with a fair amount of success before accusations of bias flew her way. But even without her being fired, the scouring of her choices as a citizen and as a woman is a part of journalism’s purity ritual.
Something happened in 2017 that made it clear just how troubling these demonstrations were. On January 25, the day I was suspended from my job, NPR senior vice president for news Michael Oreskes defended NPR’s choice not to use the word “lie” to describe Donald Trump’s frequent falsehoods. Not using the word “lie,” not calling Trump a liar, is a classic case of false balance, and an easy one to call out. After all, in regular life, someone who says untrue things several times a day is generally not hard to categorize, and politicians arguably should be held to a higher standard for truth than regular people. In any case, Oreskes’s statement on that particular day was a painful example to me of how far journalism was willing to go to protect its self-image—so far that it seemed this self-protection mattered more than speaking plainly about the truth.
More painful still, Oreskes resigned from NPR in 2017 after it was revealed that he had sexually harassed women who were seeking professional guidance from him, at both the New York Times and NPR. I later learned that in the 1980s, during his tenure at the New York Times, he was one of the reporters criticized by the gay community for homophobia in his coverage. It seemed a certain type of biases—homophobia and sexism—had been acceptable not just for months or years, but for decades in his case. While women, people of color, and LGBTQ were pushed out for questioning “objectivity,” Oreskes had been promoted again and again while upholding the biases of the status quo, homophobia, and sexism.
Similarly, for ten years John Hockenberry was the host of the show The Takeaway that fired freelancer Caitlin Curran for her connection to Occupy in 2011. In 2017 he was revealed to have pushed out multiple women of color as cohosts due to his gendered and racial harassment. Hockenberry was never fired; these revelations came after his resignation.
Public radio saw an exodus of white male hosts at the time: WNYC’s Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz were both accused and eventually fired. Tom Ashbrook, host of the national show On Point at WBUR, lost his job after eleven men and women came forward with accusations against him. It was a seeming watershed as men were revealed as sexual harassers at the New York Times, the New Yorker, VICE News, Vox, NBC, Fox, and the list goes on. Mostly white male hosts, reporters, and editors had made many, many women’s lives miserable, in some cases over many years. Yet none of them had been accused of having a conflict of interest for being unable to respect women. Could they report fairly on women? The question had never been asked.
As 2017 swept along, it only became more clear to me how retrograde the whole situation is. You couldn’t be an activist against sexual assault or harassment and hold a full-time job in most national media. And yet, it seems, you could still assault and harass people. None of us live free of conflicts of interest—and it’s worth engaging what the appropriate line is for individual news organizations and having clear policies that can be fairly enforced. But we also need journalism to change. We need new institutions, with new policies and practices, to put an end to double standards and harassment. Being political about it, being a walking conflict of interest, wasn’t really a choice for me, or for Sandy Nelson or Desmond Cole or Linda Greenhouse. The #MeToo movement has been, like #BlackLivesMatter, a visceral and viral reminder of the fact that our very lives, our bodies, our careers are political—all of us, not just those of us targeted by abuse and harassment.
Journalism’s production of innocence, its purity ritual, needs to become a thing of the past. It is intellectually and morally dishonest. It encourages cynicism about our profession and works to keep oppressed people out of journalism entirely. The courage of people coming forward in the #MeToo movement doesn’t restore all the lost careers, all the discouraged young women and people of color who left reporting and never came back. But even more revealing is the fact that the media has seemingly been more fixated on keeping political signage off its reporters’ front lawns than keeping the bosses’ hands off its reporters’ bodies. Maybe a few more advocates in the ranks could have helped.
“I did not live in the apolitical vacuum my employer carved out for me,” Sandy Nelson wrote in 1996. “I had not succumbed to the cynicism of my profession and my generation. I believed—and still believe—that humans are capable of changing the conditions of our existence.”