journalism – Close Read

12 years and counting

I’ve been a journalist for 12 years. For the first few years these anniversaries helped to remember that I was able to survive in the industry but now, after 12, I’m well and truly part of the industry itself — the thing that others survive — and the observances don’t mean anything as such. This said, my professional clock runs from June 1 from May 31 and the day is when I break up the last 365 days into a neat little block of memories and put it away, with some notes about whether anything was worth remembering.

Last year of course, I joined The Hindu as deputy science editor and began a new chapter in many ways (see here and here). One that I’d like to take note of here is The Hindu’s paywall. As you may know, thehindu.com has soft and hard paywalls. You hit the former when you read 10 free articles; the eleventh will have to be paid for. The latter is the paywall in front of articles that are otherwise not freely available to read. Most articles behind a soft paywall are straight news reports and, of course, The Hindu’s prized editorials. Analyses, commentaries, features, and most explainers are behind the hard paywall.

We all know why these barriers exist: journalism needs to be paid for, and better journalism all the more so. But one straightforward downside is that the contents of articles behind paywalls are rarely, if ever, represented in the public conversations and debates of the day — and I haven’t been able to make my peace with this fact. Yet.

Eight years at The Wire spoilt me for it but the upside was clear: everything from analysis to commentary would be part of the marketplace of ideas. Siddharth Varadarajan was clear The Wire would always be free to read. Of course, The Wire and The Hindu are different beasts and pursuing very different survival strategies, and on the path The Hindu is treading, quite simply forcing people to pay to read has become necessary.

This shift has also forced me to contend with my own writing — mostly explainers, op-eds, and reports of physics research — being confined to a smaller, but paying, subset of The Hindu’s readers rather than all of them as well as to the public at large, which in turn often makes me feel… distance, not readily visible, if at all.

Just one more thing to figure out. 🙂

A Q&A about philosophy in journalism

Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his article with The Wire on March 2, 2024.

I’m pasting the conversation the two of us had in full below, with Varun’s permission. Varun also wrote the introductory note, as a preface to the questions. His questions are in bold; my responses are in normal type.

Preface

Newspaper journalists, while writing on a topic, use theories and ideas from history, sociology, economics, sciences and other disciplines to establish the relevance of the topic and analyse the pertinent questions. However, rarely do they draw from philosophical theories that are equally relevant to the topic. Why is it that, for instance, we do not see social/moral/political philosophers’ views also being presented in articles on social topics? Similarly, while presenting a scientific topic, it is not common to find insights from the philosophy of science. Why is that philosophy glaringly absent in newspaper journalism that otherwise seamlessly synthesises views from numerous domains while presenting on a topic?

The non-engagement with philosophy is a characteristic of journalism across the world. There have been a few initiatives – both from journalists and philosophers – to bridge this gap in the Global North. One of the well-known projects in this regard was the column The Stone at the New York Times. Irish Times still runs a philosophy column Unthinkable. There have been very few journalists who have expressed their fruitful engagement with philosophy. (See here and here.) Also, the new kind of journalism brought by Aeon and The Conversation has provided the much-required niche space for philosophy.

The situation in India, however, is abysmal. Indeed, this is largely due to the poor state of philosophy in India and this is not a new point. However, what is not known is the story from the other side. What is Indian journalists’ perception of philosophy and why is that they do not use philosophy? Regarding this, I want to interview a few print/online newspaper journalists and editors. I am also planning to converse with a few journalism faculty as the non-engagement with philosophy might be a symptom of the journalism curriculum that is largely taught in India.

Understanding the perspectives of journalists, I think, is the first step towards remedying the gap in the Indian context. This can open up the conversation between journalists and philosophers to create meaningful journalism projects to make philosophy relevant to the Indian public.

Q&A

1. Why do you think journalists do not draw from philosophical theories/ideas while analysing a topic and writing articles? I am asking this because online/print newspaper journalists draw from theories/ideas of other disciplines (social sciences, history, sciences) in spite of these being nuanced and complex (for both writers and readers).

It depends what exactly you mean by ‘philosophy’ because from where I’m sitting I disagree with the assertion in your question that Indian journalists don’t use philosophical ideas or theories in their work. They use it both directly and indirectly. They use it directly when making decisions about what kind of events, stories, and phenomena they’d rather cover and why. When I say I’m a journalist biased towards principles encoded in the Indian Constitution, there’s a philosophy of journalism at work there. I’m mindful of the philosophical position of falsifiability when I conclude there’s no point trying to fact-check or rebut a claim like “Sanskrit is a good language for AI”. Journalists use philosophy indirectly when drawing on all those other fields, which have been informed and honed by philosophical deliberations unique to them. For example, a philosophy of history determines how we narrativise the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in addition to archaeological, genetic, and climatological data.

If your question is why journalists don’t write articles containing ideas from philosophy and the views of philosophers, there are two answers.

First, all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea a) what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all.

b) Even if I was familiar with what philosophers are experts on, I’d imagine philosophy as a field of study faces the same resistance to being represented in the news as exotic fields (from the PoV of the publics) like high-energy physics or mathematics. When I’m trying to write on the latter, I’m banking on some sort of numerical literacy on the readers’ part. It’s impossible to explain the Langlands programme to someone who doesn’t know (or care) what functions or sets are. I haven’t had the chance to consider the level of philosophical literacy in India but I don’t think it’s very good. So broaching that kind of thinking and reasoning in an article – especially in a news article – requires the author to lay the groundwork first, which is precarious. The more words there are, the more careful you need to be about holding a reader’s attention.

There also need to be concrete developments and they need to be in the public interest, and unless a writer and/or an editor comes along who can extract these nuggets from a paper or in conversation with an expert – and in interesting ways – it’s going to have no engagement. Worse, it’s going to impose a disproportionately high opportunity cost on news-producers’ time and labour by expecting them to be able to separate philosophical wheat from chaff. I believe this goes for both whole articles about philosophy and articles that include philosophical considerations in the mix. The Hindu is trying to step around this ‘concrete developments’ requirement with two daily pages called ‘Text & Context’ and one online-only (for now) science page every weekday. These are both fairly recent developments, which is to say securing such space in a newspaper or any news-focused outlet is difficult and needs the underlying organisation to be ‘healthy’ as well as a sound editorial justification of its own.

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need (in space and time) to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now the second answer: If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

2. I think the previous question needs to be invoked at the editorial level as well. Given that editors do request the writers to make changes (like including some data on the topic or getting a comment from a particular expert), the absence of philosophy in articles might largely be due to editorial decisions and policies: what is considered as “pertinent”, “readable”, “good” etc. For instance, one of the unsaid editorial policies seems to be that philosophical discussions are best suited for op-ed columns. This kind of presumption has resulted in the ghettoisation of philosophy to certain zones in newspaper journalism.

2a. As an editor, what are your thoughts on the points? What might be the actual, pragmatic challenges journalism faces in this context?

2b. Since editors play an equally important role in “setting the agenda” and changing the reading styles of the public, what might be the ways to overcome these challenges? How to break the wall around philosophy in journalism, so that it can be accommodated/incorporated in mainstream journalism?

Imagine the industry of journalism to be like a wave propagating through a medium. Let’s divide this wave into two parts: the wavefront and the wake. Newsrooms operating at the wavefront are distinguished by the resources to experiment and innovate, take risks, and pay more than competitively for the best exponents of particular skills in the market. Newsrooms in the wake are just about staying profitable (or even breaking even), innovating in incremental fashion, avoiding risks, and trying to pay competitively. Of course neither group is monolithic – most sufficiently large news organisations have some departments that are doing well and some that are fighting to stay alive – but this is a simplification to illustrate a point. I believe your questions are about newsrooms in the wake; they’re definitely more interesting in this context. With this in mind:

2a) Newsrooms need to make money to pay their journalists without compromising editorial independence and editorial standards. This is the single largest challenge right now. In the face of this challenge, especially since the rise of news aggregators and social media platforms as sites of news consumption, so many publications have shut shop, downsized or relinquished independence, or some combination of all three. Once a newsroom’s finances are sufficiently in the green and they can graduate from the wake to the wavefront, pertinence, readability, etc. can and do become the first questions an editor asks. Of course, I may not be saying any of this if the times weren’t what they are.

2b) I’m not sure there’s a wall around journalism that blocks philosophy. In fact journalists don’t have the freedom to choose (or decline, for that matter) what they consider to be ‘news’. But the flip side of this is no particular enterprise can be said to be entitled to a journalist’s attention. The reason this is so is because of how public interest is constructed.

For example, there’s a contest – very simply speaking – these days between a journalism that holds we’re doing the country a disservice by turning our heads away from everything that’s going wrong and another that’s particular about pointing its head in the opposite direction. Another example of a similar contest is centred on whether journalists should make plain their biases – because everyone is biased in some way – or if they should cover the news without losing (a reasonable) equipoise.

In these or any other scenarios, whatever constitutes the public interest is built jointly by journalists and the consumers of the knowledge they produce, and will vary from one publication to the next. The Hindu, The Wire, and The New York Times have different covenants with their readers about what public interest looks like, or ought to look like. The construction of the public interest is a shared and complicated enterprise that takes time.

As a result, most journalism, in the present era at least, follows some publics; journalism doesn’t lead them. This also means – taking all of these business, economic, and social forces together – that when people aren’t interested in philosophy-related matters, there’s not much an editor (in a newsroom-in-the-wake) can do to change that.

3. I need your comment on another editorial decision about the op-ed columns that have a specific implication for the Indian context. One of the ways academic journalism scales up the dissemination is by publishing the articles with Creative Commons licence. For instance, The Conversation and Aeon are using this method. The idea seems to be working very well. Create a niche space for academic journalism that usually does not have space in mainstream journalism and make up for the readership through free or paid syndication. This approach seems to be working well, and has provided a good working model.

However, in an uneven world, this does not favour everyone equally. Given its international scale/level/reach, this works well for the Global North academicians who have access to these platforms. Indian scholars do not have easy access to Aeon or The Conversation. And Indian online platforms have easy access to quality articles without having to deal with Indian scholars.

These issues are pertinent for most of the academicians in India. But I want to articulate the problem from the perspective of philosophy. This method of republishing further widens the gap between philosophers and journalism in India. This way of operating does not provide enough motivation for Indian newspaper editors to work with Indian scholars. In spite of publishing philosophy articles, Indian editors do not seem to be interested/invested in working/collaborating with Indian philosophers and commissioning articles. (Republishing international articles has a further implication: it deepens the imbalance between Western and Eastern philosophical systems.)

Would like to know your comments/thoughts on the above note.

I’m uncomfortable with providing a general comment. Please let me know if you have specific questions.

Free/paid syndication option of articles in international platforms indeed provides straightforward access to quality content for Indian platforms. And given the restriction of resources like time and finances, and largely the dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public, it is understandable what the Indian platforms are doing. Having said that, do you agree that there are implications of this shortcut approach? The first implication is about the politics of knowledge and representation, whose views are represented, etc. The second implication is the perpetuation of Indian journalism’s impatience to work with local scholars. If it does not invest and work with, say Indian philosophers, even for op-eds, the problem persists.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first implication. To republish from publications in the US, Europe and the UK that syndicate their articles on a Creative Commons licence is effectively to represent the views of the scholars quoted in those articles – mostly from Global North countries – instead of the views of others, especially those from India (from the PoV of Indian newsrooms and readers). However, it’s important to ask whether this really imposes the sort of opportunity cost that prevents Indian journalists from still trying to work with and represent the views of Indian scholars in other articles. My answer is ‘no’ simply because of the difference in the amount of effort expended in republishing an article and reporting on a scholar’s work, views, etc. Put another way, it takes me a few minutes to identify an article on, say, The Conversation that will work ‘well’ on my site and a few more minutes to republish it. Doing so won’t subtract from the responsibilities of or resources available to a reporter on my team. So if/when a publication says it is making do with stories from The Conversation, the problem arises with people in the newsroom who are choosing not to engage with Indian scholars – irrespective of whether it can or does republish articles from other outlets.

I also want to clarify something about the “dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public” in your question: there isn’t so much a dearth of good academicians who can write, there’s a dearth of academicians who believe communication at large is important at all. I’ve been fortunate enough to find more than a few scientists who are eager to write, and to be frank their numbers are increasing, but my experience is that the vast majority of scientists working in India distrust the media too much and/or don’t believe that the scientific work they undertake needs to be communicated to non-scientists – much less that they need to be the ones doing it. (I’m also setting aside the fact that many of the better scientists working in the country also shoulder many responsibilities beyond teaching and research, especially important administrative tasks, and communication – especially of the form that their employers may not recognise when considering people for promotions, etc. – only adds to this burden.) My point here is that the task of finding scientists to write is a lot more arduous than might seem at first glance.

I feel the same way about the second implication you’ve set out in your question: journalists are not impatient per se; what you may perceive as impatience is likelier than not the effect of newsroom mechanics that expect journalists to be productive to a degree that precludes prolonged engagement with scholars. Also, the distinction I pointed out in my first set of replies matters greatly. If you’re writing for a magazine or if you’re writing a news feature, you’ll have the time and the word limit for such engagement. But if you’re writing a news report for a newspaper, you will have neither the time and the word limit for nor – importantly – any expectation from your readers of slow-cooked material in the article. Finally, while I’ve tried to describe what is, I don’t think I’m prepared to call it justification. I think large newsrooms, especially those departments of such newsrooms that are closer to the wavefront than others, should try (honestly) to establish opportunities for slow-cooked material in their products.

Hasan Minhaj’s search for the premise

When Hasan Minhaj spoke on his show about living through some dangerous experiences as a Muslim man from an Indian family growing up in the US of A, he wasn’t speaking the truth. He told Clare Malone of The New Yorker that his stories have “seeds” of truth”, that his comedy is 70% “emotional truth—this happened” and 30% “hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction”. First, we really need to use words other than ‘truth’ to talk about things that aren’t true the way a ‘truth’ is expected to be. Second, I was only queasy as long as it seemed that Minhaj was passing off other similar people’s stories as his own, but then it seemed to be that they weren’t anyone’s stories at all, a problem exacerbated by the ways in which they involved women. Then he said this, which rang closer home in a different way:

“The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise”

So he had a punchline and went looking for a premise – the sort of thing that’s sunk scientists and journalists when they tried to do the same thing. It’s also the trope that cryptocurrencies popularised in the heyday of ‘investments’ in bitcoin and NFTs. They were solutions looking for problems, and when solutions look for problems, they tend to ignore the structural factors that create the problems. For example, crypto-bros wanted to democratise the ownership of pieces of art rather than letting them accumulate in the hands of extremely wealthy individuals. But NFTs aren’t concerned with the relationships between creditors and debtors, wealth and social signalling, and art and capitalism. So they failed to make a difference.

But that shouldn’t diminish the irony that the world today is one big premise looking for a punchline, sometimes desperately. In India itself, the incumbent BJP government has assumed many elements of authoritarian and fascist ideologies in its rule, and the social fabric has suffered. One cause of suffering is that the government has, together with unscrupulous TV news anchors and some supine public institutions, vitiated public dialogue, spread misinformation, deviated in spirit from the implementation of the RTI Act, and suppressed the production and release of data from public surveys and research that are critical of its dogma.

One consequence of all this for journalists has been that proof that might seal a causal relationship between a hypothesis and a set of facts is often out of reach, and too often just so. During the pandemic, for example, almost every instance of health journalism was also an instance of investigative journalism. In the last decade, using various forms of retaliation and sanction, the government has silenced some critics and forced others to think twice before responding to reporters. In this milieu, journalism can build only a more incomplete picture of reality as we experience or even observe it (more than subjective experiences that it couldn’t fully capture anyway). Individuals are free to piece together the rest in their imagination, and they do. But for journalists at least, it’s a cardinal sin to present this extrapolation as fact. It’s important, but it’s not fact. This was for example one of the issues with Ronan Farrow’s work during the #MeToo movement.

Minhaj isn’t a journalist and punchlines aren’t reports put together through journalistic work – yet his quote is insightful to the practice of journalism. After substituting “conclusion” for “punch line”, for instance, we have a faithful reflection of what might have gone wrong with The Wire‘s TekFog and Meta reports last year, and after which The Wire sued Devesh Kumar, the person at the centre of both investigative efforts, for deceiving The Wire‘s journalists. Kumar had allegedly invented the raison d’être of both series to match what many of us have come to accept as an incontestable reality.

(Note: I worked with The Wire at the time these reports were published but wasn’t involved in reporting or publishing them. I have, however, since unpublished one post on this blog in which I considered TekFog’s implications for science journalism.)

The alleged premise in both cases was broadly that people affiliated with the BJP were using sophisticated IT tools to manipulate the spread of hateful messages (‘TekFog’) and removal of anti-party sentiment (‘Meta’) on social media platforms. The conclusions in both sets of reports – before The Wire repudiated them – were in line with the fact that BJP leaders have regularly resorted to communalising rhetoric to win votes and BJP governments have jailed people for social-media posts criticising the party’s views and actions. But it soon became clear that the conclusions weren’t worth the premise even in circumstances as difficult as those created by the foot-soldiers of Hindutva. This to me is what makes Minhaj’s rationale so disagreeable.

Of course, journalism is different from a talk-show, but Malone’s reply to Minhaj as he tries repeatedly to justify the fictionalising should resonate with anyone who claims to relate the truth but doesn’t: “But it didn’t happen to you.” (Who is experiencing the event matters as well, so the last two words may be redundant.) It’s the simplest argument against confirmation bias, and it also speaks to an important part of the identity of comedians like Minhaj, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, etc.: they’re a source of new information about the world insofar as they expect to be perceived to be credible when they tell us how to think about that information, and that so happens to be in the form of jokes.

While Minhaj is influential, the outing of his more striking anecdotes as untrue leaves him the story, as it did Farrow and Kumar, rather than the actual people and ideas that he apparently wished to highlight. And that’s harmful to those people and ideas. In the words of legal scholars Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, writing in 1997 in the aftermath of the Tawana Brawley case:

Indifference to the distinction between fact and fiction minimizes real suffering by implying that it is no worse than imagined or self-inflicted suffering.

10 years in journalism

Thinking about the number ’10’ is hard. It’s the number of years I will have soon been a journalist for (as will my ACJ batchmates). Why commemorate it?

In this time, I’ve seen many of my colleagues and peers in different organisations quit journalism for communications jobs in non-journalistic settings, which pay better and are likely easier on the mind and on life. So to be able to persist for so long in this profession, also rendered more treacherous by a vengeful state, is to question one’s privileges on various levels.
Ten is a round number, and that roundness has I suspect something uniquely bio-psychological going for it. Our choice of the decimal number system is surely rooted in the number of fingers on our hands, which makes counting in multiples of 10 intuitive. Other than this, the value of 10 – that is, to have 10 of something – seems inscrutable. Do we commemorate six years of something? Or 11 or 4.5? To celebrate 10 often seems to be a privilegement of our own biology – especially when we have achieved little else.
When The Wire Science interviewed physicist Kip Thorne in 2017, the interviewer asked him if the discovery of gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein’s development of general relativity meant anything special to him. Thorne said: “Oh no, not particularly. We just happen to use base-10. If we used base-9, it wouldn’t work. Maybe I have faith in our choice of the base.” Modern classical as well as quantum computing use base-2 systems (0s/1s and two-dimensional Hilbert space, respectively). It’s all a matter of convenience – which I only say to conclude that commemorations based on time alone seem inherently meaningless (except when the passage of time is itself a virtue).
In December 2018, I wrote to a close friend in an email: “On December 23, 2018, I will be 3.94 galactic seconds old (one galactic year is the time Earth takes to go around the Milky Way, about 240 million years). Isn’t that simply more celestial? On May 26, 2019, I will be 4 galactic seconds old.” A nice, round number – but comfort in what is this? Positive integers? Rational numbers? But most importantly, it’s a reminder that there is no fixed way to measure time.
I wrote this post today, May 10, 2022, Tuesday. I’ve developed a habit of making anagrams when I’m bored, and found Anu Garg’s wordsmith.org as a result when I was looking for an anagram animator. I also subscribed to Garg’s newsletter about words and made a donation to support his work on it; you don’t find many newsletters dedicated to words whose authors don’t also bother their readers with too much of their own writing (e.g. Maria Popova). The weekly theme in the newsletter for the week of May 9 is words related to time. Opportune. The word for Monday in particular was timeous: “in good time”. Example: “I knew Bridget always ran out of supplies during a party and thought I should make timeous provision” (source: Andre Brink; Before I Forget; Sourcebooks; 2007).

My commemoration of having been a professional journalist for 10 years wouldn’t be timeous.

On the NBDSA opinion against Zee News

On April 5, JNU PhD student Shehla Rashid tweeted that the National Broadcasting and Digital Standards Agency (NBDSA) had ordered Zee News to remove links to a show it had broadcast in November 2020, alleging that Rashid was indulging in “anti-national activities” and that she was “funding terror”.

The program was hosted by Zee News editor-in-chief Sudhir Chaudhary, who, the NBDSA statement found, hadn’t bothered to present Rashid’s defence of herself on the same show nor stopped to check if the claims being made on the show – by Rashid’s father, from whom she her mother and her sister are estranged – were true.

Even if they haven’t watched the show in question, readers of this blog must know by now what its tone, style and decibel-level must have been: shows like this have been regular programming at a clump of pseudo-news-sites trumpeting Hindutva ideals and hate. These outlets deserve without exception to be brought to book by the relevant national institutions, including the NBDSA – even as Rashid added, agreeably, that simply asking hateful content to be taken down from their pages doesn’t suffice. They need to issue public apologies and pay steep fines, say as a fixed percentage of their revenues, for every transgression identified by the NBDSA.

But even as we rejoice – just a little – in the knowledge that the NBDSA had some integrity where many other national institutions haven’t, I wish it had used different language in its statement upbraiding Zee News. Rashid had shared a screenshot of a part of the NBDSA’s statement showing the bottom fifth of one page and the top four-fifths of the next one. In this portion, the NBDSA is concerned repeatedly with the “impartiality and objectivity” and their absence in Zee News’s show. To quote:

With regard to the broadcast, NBDSA was of the view that the issue under consideration is whether the programme lacked objectivity, impartiality, neutrality and whether it violated the complainant’s privacy. NBDSA noted that by allowing the interviewee … the channel had presented only one side of the story. Further, not only had the broadcaster failed to approach the complainant for her version prior to telecasting the impugned programme but bymaking only a fleeting reference to her denial of the allegations, the broadcaster had also failed to adequately present her version. In any case, the Authority noted that to broadcast the version of the complainant available in her social posts was not sufficient compliance of the [Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards and] Guidelines.

That Zee News failed to accord any meaningful screen time to Rashid in a programme about slinging mud on her work and views is a cardinal sin. Even if you have a great investigative story on your hands, with documentary evidence for every claim, not giving the implicated parties a chance to defend themselves will only undermine the story. It’s a small step and often an easy one: either the parties will decline comment, as many in India have chosen to do of late, or seize the chance to air their side of the story. This opportunity reflects, among other things, the media’s refusal to serve as an arbiter but also its implicit acknowledgment of the possibility that it its narrative isn’t the ‘ultimate truth’, however that’s defined.

However, the NBDSA has tied this rule to “objectivity”, which doesn’t make sense. This is because Zee News, from its point of view, surely believes that it has been objective: Rashid’s father does hold the views that he does, and Zee News has broadcast them without alterations. There is no violation of objectivity here per se.

Even when unscrupulous outlets like OpIndia quote ministers and government officials spouting hateful rhetoric or articulating policies grounded in dubious assumptions, they are being objective in the sense that these statements do exist – i.e. their existence is a fact – leaving the outlets to simply report these facts to a larger audience. And even if OpIndia, and Zee News for that matter, aren’t objective in other ways (esp. when they publish false news first-hand), the definition of objectivity encompasses the reporting of facts and thus allows them to claim to the consumers of their bilge that they’re being “objective” where others aren’t.

This is how the pursuit of objectivity can be, and often is, anti-democracy. Many feckless (pseudo) news publishers in India have hijacked the false virtue of objectivity to project themselves as the purveyors of ‘real journalism’, while many of the rest of us have allowed them to do so by vying for the same objectivity. We don’t need to be objective; we need to be pro-democracy: the latter compels a greater fidelity to the truth, in substance as well as spirit, that proscribes technicalities of the sort that pro-Hindutva ‘reporters’ have been known to employ.

If the NBDSA had instead pulled up Zee News for not being on the side of democracy, instead of not being on the side of objectivity, (that part of) its statement would have been perfect. It would also have set an important precedent for other news outlets, at least those that are interested and willing, to follow.

Cooperative distrust

Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to it (if and when it becomes available in the public domain) is led by cooperative distrust: one and all distrusting it, investigating the specific way in which it has been distorted, undoing that distortion and, finally, reassessing the data.

The distrust here needs to be cooperative not to undermine the data (and thus avoid spiralling off into conspiracies) but to counteract the effects of ‘bad data’ on ethical public governance. There are some things that we the public trust our government to not undercut – but our present one has consistently undercut government while empowering the party whose members occupy it.

In the latest, and quite egregious, example, the Indian government has said an empowered committee it set up during the country’s devastating second COVID-19 outbreak to manage the supply of medical oxygen does not exist. Either the government really didn’t create the committee and lied during the second wave or it created the committee but is desperately trying to hide its proceedings now by lying. Either way, this is a new low. But more pertinently, the government is behaving this way because it seems to be intent on managing each event to the party’s utmost favour – pointing to a committee when having one is favourable, pretending it didn’t exist when it is unfavourable – without paying attention to the implications for the public memory of government action.

Specifically, the government’s views at different points of time don’t – can’t – fit on one self-consistent timeline because its reality in, say, April 2021 differs from its reality in August 2021. But to consummate its history-rewrite, it has some commentators’ help; given enough time, OpIndia and its ilk are sure to manufacture explanations for why there never was a medical oxygen committee. On the other hand, what do the people remember? Irrespective of public memory, public attention is more restricted and increasingly more short-lived, and it has always boded poorly that both sections of the press and the national government have been comfortable with taking advantage of this ‘feature’, for profits, electoral gains, etc.

Just as there is a difference between what the world really looks like and what humans see (with their eyes and brains), there is a significant difference between history and memory. Today, remembering that there was a medical oxygen committee depends simply on recent memory; one more year and remembering the same thing will also demand the inclination to distrust the government’s official line and reach for the history books (so to speak).

But the same government has also been eroding this inclination – with carrots as well as sticks – and it will continue, resulting ultimately in the asymptotic, but fallacious and anti-democratic, convergence of history and memory. Cooperative distrust can be a useful intervention here, especially as a matter of habit, to continuously reconcile history and memory (at least to the extent to which they concern facts) into a self-consistent whole at every moment, instead of whenever an overt conflict of facts arises.

Freatured image credit: geralt/pixabay.

Scicommers as knowledge producers

Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar’s column in The Wire Science, ‘More Fun Than Fun’, about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated as knowledge-producers, I began wondering if the knowledge produced by the latter is in fact not the same knowledge but something entirely new. The idea that communicators simply make the scientists’ Promethean fire more palatable to a wider audience has led, among other things, to a belief widespread among scientists that science communicators are adjacent to science and aren’t part of the enterprise producing ‘scientific knowledge’ itself. And this perceived adjacency often belittles communicators by trivialising the work that they do and hiding the knowledge that only they produce.

Explanatory writing that “enters into the mental world of uninitiated readers and helps them understand complex scientific concepts”, to use Gadagkar’s words, takes copious and focused work. (And if it doesn’t result in papers, citations and h-indices, just as well: no one should become trapped in bibliometrics the way so many scientists have.) In fact, describing the work of communicators in this way dismisses a specific kind of proof of work that is present in the final product – in much the same way scientists’ proofs of work are implicit in new solutions to old problems, development of new technologies, etc. The knowledge that people writing about science for a wider audience produce is, in my view, entirely distinct, even if the nature of the task at hand is explanatory.

In his article, Gadagkar writes:

Science writers should do more than just reporting, more than translating the gibberish of scientists into English or whatever language they may choose to write in. … Science writers are in a much better position to make lateral comparisons, understand the process of science, and detect possible biases and conflicts of interest, something that scientists, being insiders, cannot do very well. So rather than just expect them to clean up our messy prose, we should elevate science writers to the role of knowledge producers.

My point is about knowledge arising from a more limited enterprise – i.e. explanation – but which I think can be generalised to all of journalism as well (and to other expository enterprises). And in making this point, I hope my two-pronged deviation from Gadagkar’s view is clear. First, science journalists should be treated as knowledge producers, but not in the limited confines of the scientific enterprise and certainly not just to expose biases; instead, communicators as knowledge producers exist in a wider arena – that of society, including its messy traditions and politics, itself. Here, knowledge is composed of much more than scientific facts. Second, science journalists are already knowledge producers, even when they’re ‘just’ “translating the gibberish of scientists”.

Specifically, the knowledge that science journalists produce differs from the knowledge that scientists produce in at least two ways: it is accessible and it makes knowledge socially relevant. What scientists find is not what people know. Society broadly synthesises knowledge from information that it weights together with extra-scientific considerations, including biases like “which university is the scientist affiliated with” and concerns like “will the finding affect my quality of life”. Journalists are influential synthesisers who work with or around these and other psychosocial stressors to contextualise scientific findings, and thus science itself. Even when they write drab stories about obscure phenomena, they make an important choice: “this is what the reader gets to read, instead of something else”.

These properties taken together encompass the journalist’s proof of work, which is knowledge accessible to a much larger audience. The scientific enterprise is not designed to produce this particular knowledge. Scientists may find that “leaves use chlorophyll to photosynthesise sunlight”; a skilled communicator will find that more people know this, know why it matters and know how they can put such knowledge to use, thus fostering a more empowered society. And the latter is entirely new knowledge – akin to an emergent object that is greater than the sum of its scientific bits.

On the lab-leak hypothesis

One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus’s “lab leak” origin hypothesis is a problem I’m starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It’s that no one will say why others are wrong, even as they insist others are, and go on about why they are right.

Shortly after I read Nicholas Wade’s 10,000-word article on Medium, I pitched a summary to a medical researcher, whose first, and for a long time only, response was one word: “rubbish”. Much later, he told me about how the virus could have evolved and spread naturally. Even if I couldn’t be sure if he was right, having no way to verify the information except to bounce it off a bunch of other experts, I was sure he thought he was right. But how was Wade wrong? I suspect for many people the communication failures surrounding this (or a similar) question may be a sticking point.

(‘Wade’, after the first mention, is shorthand for an author of a detailed, non-trivial article that considers the lab-leak hypothesis, irrespective of what conclusion it reaches. I’m cursorily aware of Wade’s support for ‘scientific racism’, and by using his name, I don’t condone any of his views on these and other matters. Other articles to read on the lab-leak topic include Nicholson Baker’s in Intelligencer and Katherine Eban’s in Vanity Fair.)

We don’t know how the novel coronavirus originated, nor are we able to find out easily. There are apparently two possibilities: zoonotic spillover and lab-leak (both hypotheses even though the qualification has been more prominently attached to the latter).

Quoting two researchers writing in The Conversation:

In March 2020, another article published in Nature Medicine provided a series of scientific arguments in favour of a natural origin. The authors argued: The natural hypothesis is plausible, as it is the usual mechanism of emergence of coronaviruses; the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is too distantly related from other known coronaviruses to envisage the manufacture of a new virus from available sequences; and its sequence does not show evidence of genetic manipulation in the laboratory.

Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis (minus the outright-conspiratorial) – rather more broadly the opponents of the ‘zoonotic-spillover’-evangelism – have argued that lab leaks are more common than we think, the novel coronavirus has some features that suggest the presence of a human hand, and a glut of extra-scientific events that point towards suspicious research and communication by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

However, too many counterarguments to Wade’s and others’ articles along similar lines have been to brush the allegations aside, as if they were so easily dismissed – like my interlocutor’s “rubbish”. And it’s an infuriating response. To me at least (as someone who’s been at the receiving end of many such replies), it smacks of an attitude that seems to say (a) “you’re foolish to take this stuff seriously,” (b) “you’re being a bad journalist,” (c) “I doubt you’ll understand the answer,” and (d) “I think you should just trust me”.

I try not to generalise (c) and (d) to maintain my editorial equipoise, so to speak – but it’s been hard. There’s too much of too many scientists going around insisting we should simply listen to them, while making no efforts to ensure non-experts can understand what they’re saying, much less admitting the possibility that they’re kidding themselves (although I do think “science is self-correcting” is a false adage). In fact, proponents of the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis and others like to claim that their idea is more likely, but this is often a crude display of scientism: “it’s more scientific, therefore it must be true”. The arguments in favour of this hypothesis are also being increasingly underrepresented outside the scientific literature, which isn’t a trivial consideration because the disparity could exacerbate the patronising tone of (c) and (d), and render scientists less trustworthy.

Science communication and/or journalism are conspicuous by absence here, but I also think the problem with the scientists’ attitude is broader than that. Short of engaging directly in the activities of groups like DRASTIC, journalists take a hit when scientists behave like pedagogic communication is a waste of time. More scientists should make more of an effort to articulate themselves better. It isn’t wise to dismiss something that so many take seriously – although this is also a slippery slope: apply it as a general rule, and soon you may find yourself having to debunk in great detail a dozen ridiculous claims a day. Perhaps we can make an exception for the zoonotic-spillover v. lab-leak hypotheses contest? Or is there a better heuristic? I certainly think there should be one instead of having none at all.

Proving the absence is harder than proving the presence of something, and that’s why everyone might be talking about why they’re right. However, in the process, many of these people seem to forget that what they haven’t denied is still firmly in the realm of the possible. Actually, they don’t just forget it but entirely shut down the idea. This is why I agree with Dr Vinay Prasad’s words in MedPage Today:

If it escaped due to a wet market, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL laboratories because a future virus could come from either. And, if it was a lab leak, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL 3 and 4 … you get the idea. Both vulnerabilities must be fixed, no matter which was the culprit in this case, because either could be the culprit next time.

His words provide an important counterweight of sorts to a tendency from the zoonotic-spillover quarter to treat articles about the lab-leak possibility as a monolithic allegation instead of as a collection of independent allegations that aren’t equally unlikely. For example, the Vanity Fair, Newsweek and Wade’s articles have all also called into question safety levels at BSL 3 and 4 labs, whether their pathogen-handling protocols sufficiently justify the sort of research we think is okay to conduct, and allegations that various parties have sought to suppress information about the activities at such facilities housed in the Wuhan Institute.

I don’t buy the lab-leak hypothesis and I don’t buy the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis; in fact, I don’t personally care for the answer because I have other things to worry about, but I do buy that the “scientific illiberalism” that Dr Prasad talks about is real. And it’s tied to other issues doing the rounds now as well. For example, Newsweek‘s profile of DRASTIC’s work has been a hit in India thanks to the work of ‘The Seeker’, the pseudonym for a person in their 20s living in “Eastern India”, who uncovered some key documents that cast suspicion on Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli’s claims vis-à-vis SARS-CoV-2. And two common responses to the profile (on Twitter) have been:

“In 2020, when people told me about the lab-leak hypothesis, I dismissed them and argued that they shouldn’t take WhatsApp forwards seriously.”
“Journalism is redundant.”

(1) is said as if it’s no longer true – but it is. The difference between the WhatsApp forwards of February-April 2020 and the articles and papers of 2021 is the body of evidence each set of claims was based on. Luc Montagnier was wrong when he spoke against the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis last year simply because his reasoning was wrong. The reasons and the evidence matter; otherwise, you’re no better than a broken clock. Facile WhatsApp forwards and right-wingers’ ramblings continue to deserve to be treated with extreme scepticism.

Just because a conspiracy theory is later proven to have merit doesn’t make it not a conspiracy theory; their defining trait is belief in the absence of evidence. The most useful response, here, is not to get sucked into the right-wing fever swamps, but to isolate legitimate questions, and try and report out the answers.
Columbia Journalism Review, April 15, 2020

The second point is obviously harder to fight back, considering it doesn’t stake a new position as much as reinforces one that certain groups of people have harboured for many years now. It’s one star aligning out of many, so its falling out of place won’t change believers’ minds, and because the believers’ minds will be unchanged, it will promptly fall back in place. This said, apart from the numerous other considerations, I’ll say investigations aren’t the preserve of journalists, and one story that was investigated to a greater extent by non-journalists – especially towards a conclusion that you probably wish to be true – has little necessarily to do with journalism.

In addition, the picture is complicated by the fact that when people find that they’re wrong, they almost never admit it – especially if other valuable things, like their academic or political careers, are tied up with their reputation. On occasion, some turn to increasingly more technical arguments, or close ranks and advertise a false ‘scientific consensus’ (insofar as such consensus can exist as the result of any exercise less laborious than the one vis-à-vis anthropogenic global warming), or both. ‘Isolating the legitimate questions’ here apart – from both sides, mind you – needs painstaking work that only journalists can and will do.

Featured image credit: Ethan Medrano/Pexels.

The climate change of bad news

This post flows a bit like the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. As one friend put it, “It starts somewhere and then goes in a different direction.”

This year hasn’t been beset by the same old steady drizzle of bad news we have every year – but has borne the brunt of cyclonic storms, each one distinctively episodic and devastating. The latest of these storms is l’affair Rukmini Callimachi. To the uninitiated: Callimachi is a reporter with the NYT who shot to fame from 2015 or so onwards for her inside reports of the Islamic Caliphate; she later dramatised her efforts to produce these stories in a podcast called Caliphate. And in this time, she raked up four Pulitzer Prize nominations (although I don’t set much store by prizes in general).

I haven’t read or listened to her work, so when a friend shared a link to the NYT’s own report, by its media columnist Ben Smith, discussing the charges against Callimachi and their newfound, but evidently delayed, efforts to reevaluate her work, I wasn’t guilty of not having criticised her myself. (If you think this is a tall order: the headline of Jacob Silverman’s review of this storm for The New Republic describes, in a few words, how quickly her house of cards seems to fall down.)

However, these days, a successful journalist is two things: she is the producer of stories that have changed the world, and which continue to live lives of their own, and she is a role-model of sorts. Her output and her resolve represent what is possible if only one tried. An even greater example of such work is that of the journalists at the Miami Herald – especially Julie Brown – who exposed Jeffrey Epstein and brought on, among other changes, a reckoning at various universities around the US that had knowingly accepted his money and overtures.

But now, with Callimachi’s articles seemingly teetering on the brink of legitimacy, both the things she stood for are on the edge as well. First, the good thing: her stories, which – if Smith’s account is to be believed – Callimachi seems to have composed in her head before moving in to report them, often, if not always, with the spiritual and material support of many of NYT’s senior editors. Second, the bad: her legacy, such as it is – erected as a façade at which we could all marvel, at least those of us who unquestioningly placed our faith and hope in the greatness of another. This is the guilt I feel, a fractured reflection of what Callimachi’s coverage of the Islamic Caliphate at the NYT is itself going through right now.

However, I will also be quick to shed this guilt because I insist that as much as I’m tasked – by my employer, but the zeitgeist, so to speak – to be wary, cautious, skeptical, to fact-check, fact-check, fact-check, to maintain cupfuls of salt at hand so I’m never taken for a ride, just as much as I’m behooved to stand on guard, I’m also fortifying an increasingly small, and increasingly precious, garden in a corner of my mind, a place away from the bad news that I can visit in my daydreams, where I can recoup some hope and optimism. Today, the winds of l’affair Callimachi blew away her articles and podcasts from this place.

Make no mistake, I will still call out everything that deserves to be called out: from the multiple red-flags Silverman spotlighted to the anti-oriental undertones of Callimachi’s methods, of her claims and even of the self-recrimination bubbling up around her, to a lot of which Rafia Zakaria has (repeatedly) called attention. I’m only saddened, for now, by the unstoppable eradication of all that is good, such as it is, and by the guilt for my part in it. As a political being, in this moment I deem this march upon ignorance to be necessary, but as a human one, it is deeply, and to my mind unforeseeably, exacting. A cognitive dissonance for the times, I suppose, although I’m sure I will cope soon enough.

Fortunately, perhaps in a counterintuitive sense, the Callimachi episode is personally not very hard to recover from. While it is true that what Callimachi and her collaborators have (still largely allegedly) done is quite different from, say, what Jonah Lehrer did, they were both motivated by a common sin: to print what could be instead of what is (and even these words might be too strong). More specifically, reporting on war brings with it its own seductions, many of them quite powerful, to the extent that some – as Zakaria implied in her piece for The Baffler – may choose to believe Callimachi et al’s failings are still the failings of an institution vis-à-vis conflict journalism. But no, the problem is pervasive.

However, looking on this shitshow from not-so-distant India, two bells have been quick to go off. First, this is very old wine in a new bottle, in which, to borrow Zakaria’s words, “the greed for catching terrorists” is pressed into the service of making “white journalists’ careers”; you could replace ‘terrorists’ with anything else that has been touched, at any point in its history, by a colonist or invader. Also read Priyanka Borpujari’s 2019 essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, in which she writes:

The title ‘foreign correspondent’ has long been synonymous with whiteness, maleness, and imperialism—journalists fly in from North America, Europe, and Australia to cover the poverty and wars of the non-Western world. In recent years, a push for diversity has meant that more women are pursuing stories in what was once the domain of men—conflict zones and fractured democracies—or in traditionally private female spaces. But the opportunities for journalists in non-Western nations to tell their own stories in international outlets have not been as great. Overwhelmingly, foreign reportage still relies on a model of Western, and largely white, reporters hiring local journalists in subservient roles.”

And thanks to biases in the way technology is constructed, used as well as located around the world, the problem extends to the consumption of journalism as well. To quote from an older post:

Where an app [that amplifies content] was made matters because nobody is going to build an app in location A and hope that it becomes popular in faraway location B. Pocket itself is San Franciscan and the bias shows: most recommendations I’ve received, or even the non-personalised trending topics I’ve spotted, are American. In fact, among all the tools I use and curation services I follow, I’ve come across only two exceptions: the heartwarming human-curated 3QuarksDaily and Quora. I’m not familiar with Quora’s story but I’m sure it’s interesting – about how a Q&A platform out of Mountain View came to be dominated by Indian users.

I notice a not insignificant number of articles and essays, in English, to this day emerging from blogs and publications in Central, South and Southeast Asia, South America and of course Africa that will never go viral on Twitter, make it to the list of ‘most read’ articles on Pocket or be cited by even the most quirky columnist – even as the same ideas and arguments will virtually ‘break the internet’ the moment they emerge from The Atlantic or New Yorker a few months later.

None of the writers of The Atlantic or New Yorker can be blamed, at least not most of the time, for something quite hard to discover in the first place, but that doesn’t mean Big Tech isn’t distorting our view of who is doing good work and who isn’t. And many Indian journalists and writers are often at the wrong end of this discovery problem.

In this light, what Callimachi and the NYT did is not new at all but in fact further widens, or accentuates, the divide between being non-white, non-Western and being white and Western. This is a divide that I and many others, perhaps especially the others, have been habituated to ignore – especially when the crime at hand appears to be victimless but in fact quietly sidelines those who have already been historically, and today structurally, displaced from the ‘mainstream’.

On the other hand, what the NYT has perpetrated here is akin to what many in India (myself included) have done and, to different degrees, continue to have a part in. Specifically, the second bell that goes off has to do with my privileges, one product of which is that I will always be a parachute-journalist in my own country – a member of the top 1% who claims to understand the problems of the 99%.

Journalism professor Justin Martin gently defended parachute journalism in a 2011 essay, deeming fluency in “one of the main local languages” to be a prerequisite of parachuting well. I am not likely to speak any other languages than the four I already know, and less literally, I can never know, in any meaningful sense, what it means to be poor, transgender, tribal, of a lower caste; that lived experience will stay out of reach, and my assessment of what is right will always be inferior to those of, say, a desperate job-seeker, a transgender activist, a member of a tribe, a Dalit scholar when, for example, the topic at hand is poverty, gender, Indigenous people’s rights and caste.

As Martin also admits, “Hiring correspondents who live in the countries and regions they cover … is ideal”, and my higher social status in India does place me in a country other than the one I’m writing about. Although I may not be guilty of allowing information sources I haven’t vetted enough to feed exaggerated stories that I can’t prove in any other way to be true – that is, although we may not all be Rukmini Callimachis ourselves – the composition of our newsrooms means we are only one illegitimate source away, only one moment of weakness for what could be in place of what is away, from creating the next storm.

Good journalism is still around

This morning, a trusted scientist called my attention to a tweet thread by Jordan Fischer listing the many good stories journalists in the US had done that had improved the lives of people. The scientist then tagged me, presumably to respond to his request for someone to compose a similar thread of stories that journalists in India had produced to similar effect – but which he also suggested could push back against the low credibility Indian journalists had among the people who had abhorrent names (you know which ones) for our ilk.

The two of us had a short exchange during which I wrote an extended reply on my Notes app and shared a screenshot of it, to save me the trouble of threading it out. I’m pasting this reply below.

I’m glad Jordan did that thread but … I’m yet to see a reasoned rebuttal to the activities of journalists that makes moral as well as logical sense, and that’s why I’m reluctant to have to explain myself in response to such requests (to publish a thread of things journalism has done right, etc.).

For example, I’ve had an uncle watch the news on TV every night for a month and not once ask why channel X was freely showing a man being murdered or beaten unconscious or why channel Y was making ludicrous (to me) claims about a vaccine’s safety based on studies of mice – but he would take umbrage at every single report by The Wire, if only to ask, “Is this really true? Are you guys sure you’re not making this up?” This is not reasoned opposition to how different journalists are doing their jobs, leave alone journalism as an enterprise.

Beyond the level of taking exception to individual pieces, I’m yet to meet a person who, for example, has questions about why it’s not good for journalists to submit to external regulation or how different business models affect editorial decisions. It’s always been about how “irresponsible” we are to criticise the government at every turn, with a clear and widening divide between groups of people who are often pro-Hindutva and people who are not that the law of large numbers simply doesn’t explain. This is clearly, if only to me, not about journalism. It’s a contest of views, missing the point though it does, about the role and responsibility of every enterprise that claims to serve the people in a nationalist country.

And those who think journalists ought not to speak truth to power, but help expand the scope of such power – that’s when we become “press******s”. (I’m as averse as any journalist to use this term; I invoke it here to be clear about the sort of thinking I associate with it.) We don’t seem to become “press******s” when we pillory the Gandhi family for their dynastic politics, but we seem to do when we investigate corruption in the BJP. We don’t seem to become “press******s” when we pull up the West Bengal government for its incompetent response to the COVID-19 crisis, but we seem to do when we turn our attention to the ‘Gujarat model’ and its effects on public healthcare.

This doesn’t seem like it’s about what journalists are or aren’t doing but about what journalism stands in the way of. It’s about people undermining journalism for personal gains. And power is personal. It’s a personal choice to call journalists foul names because it’s a personal choice to decide which lines are okay to cross en route to whatever goals the utterer has in mind.