‘Very few have balls’: How American news lost its nerve
This is so goddamn true.
I myself am afraid to pursue my dream career — independent freelance journalist — for fear of libel lawsuits. A mere threat of a lawsuit can bankrupt a small news venture, let alone a single journalist.
How can you speak truth to power if you fear losing everything?
For those who don’t know, Jezebel was one of the many Gawker properties that survived after the OG Gawker was bankrupted in 2016.
I’ve had a long love/hate relationship with Gawker properties, and I won’t miss Jezebel. Catty, angry, mean-spirited, sarcastic and thoroughly millennial, Jezebel was known for pioneering a style and tone of journalism that’s taken over the internet. It has long since given up the populist David-versus-Goliath vibes that it once embraced 15 years ago, and now just throws shade for the sake of throwing shade.
I’ve watched with horror as this millennial tone — a creature of my own design — has taken over legacy media. The pursuit of objective truth, insomuch as we acknowledge “objective truth” is largely an aspirational pursuit (at least when it comes to human experience), went out the window. Activist journalism took over, and did so with a vengeance.
Activism is good and necessary, but I don’t want it near my meat-and-potatoes journalism. I want information, not to be told how I should think.
For that reason alone, I’m not going to miss Jezebel.
I thought to compare the text on the page to the text on my screen. Word for word, they were exactly the same. I was shocked. What happened? Why did a text that read so well in galleys read so shambolically online?
The uniquely powerful insight of the 20th-century discipline of cultural anthropology as formulated by the great French thinker Claude Levi-Straus was that culture is a closed system. A tribal mask hanging on the wall of a hut in Africa or New Guinea has meaning within the culture of the tribe that produced it, which is bound up with their social structures and cosmology. Hang the same mask next to a Picasso in a white-walled room in MOMA, and it becomes a different object, embedded within the cultural system that contains 20th-century Western art. Culturally speaking, the two masks are wildly and indeed irreconcilably different from each other—even if, physically speaking, they are the same mask.
So too with the act of reading. Like every other human activity, reading is a culturally bound activity, whose meaning is determined by its relation to the larger cultural system in which it occurs.
Working in both online and print journalism, this resonates.
The former always feels tinny and thin given its context in the sheer enormity of the internet. Text on a screen is always merely text on a screen. Ephemeral.
Print, though merely ink on a page, holds up.
Scenes From the End of the Sexual Revolution
The Ace Theater boomed with laughter, a thousand bodies convulsing right back at him, blonde beach waves straight from the dry bar bouncing with mirth. That energy hit the stage. He kept shaking. This was not the sound of “offense,” but its opposite, the release of people hearing something they had long wanted to say, reassuring themselves that they are not culpable for the misery they Lyft beyond.
What a fucking line.
A+, 10/10, no notes.