“Journalism is our salvation. It is the cure for unfairness.” — Whitlock
These words come at the beginning of a 2,400-word blog post billed as “The Explanation 2.0.” The post is part of a process in which Jason Whitlock plans to discuss the failure of the race, culture and sports site ESPN hired him to create; his departure from the Worldwide Leader and his own social theory of race as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. He has since moved on to direct score-settling, which is less interesting.
Whitlock thinks true journalism can save our society, a thesis that many journalists (and observers of journalism) undoubtedly would agree with, at least in part. But Whitlock’s discourse on journalism is one in which non-journalists appear to play a starring rule.
Whitlock offers three examples of true journalism in his post. They are a work of fiction (The Wire), a work of scholarly research that has rightfully found a popular audience (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow) and his own work, stretched across a variety of outlets. Those who are outside of journalism appear to include The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates – whose case for reparations and discussion of the negative effects of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s work on poverty in the 1960s are dismissed as fostering hopelessness among black people — and the “bullies” at the website Deadspin.
Deadspin has reported fairly deeply on Whitlock’s time at ESPN at a website that never really launched, including the detail that Coates turned down an offer to triple his salary at ESPN. Deadspin’s thesis has been that Whitlock’s personal politics prevented him from recruiting many of the talented young black journalists working today. Whitlock counters here that writers who view him as problematic have fallen victim to groupthink enforced by BLM and white hipsters that runs counter to the traditions of the black community. Other people can debate the truth of that. Whitlock, the defender of true journalistic values, casts himself as having been assailed by the punks and ne’er-do-wells that populate the Internet and that are perverting journalism.
Journalism is being abandoned and used to censor independent thought, demonize people who speak imprecisely and/or violate our constantly moving line of political correctness. Social-media-driven faux outrage dominates today’s journalism. Unseasoned, untrained, instant-gratification-seeking children are beginning to set our journalistic agenda.
The deployment of professional identity as a cudgel is actually a well-studied practice, which sociologists call boundary work. Members of a professional group articulate membership standards, although they are, in truth negotiating them with the public. Medicine and law are the classic examples. Increasingly, scholars are applying this idea to journalism. In an era in which reporters no longer have monopoly control over the dissemination of information, what now defines a journalist? The answer is in the articulation because there is no such thing as a journalist in nature. It is a constructed category, like most other categories. Journalism, in essence, is a thing we made up to take on the task of keeping people informed about the world. Its meaning is subject to change.
Whitlock’s post is a disjointed form of boundary work. He is at once articulating classic definitions of the journalist, with all the glorification of truth-seeking and independence that drew me into the business in college (and that make bloggers use obscene gestures while rolling their eyes). At the same time though, his articulation expands the category of journalist beyond all coherence. David Simon was a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, but the work Whitlock regularly cites is (great) fiction. Michelle Alexander is a lawyer and civil rights advocate, job categories in which truth-seeking is involved, but not ones that have ever been mistaken for journalism (lawyers would object strenuously to the demotion). I do not blame Whitlock for aligning himself with Simon and Alexander. But can that connection be journalistic?
If anyone with a pure heart and an independent spirit is a journalist, then what makes journalism distinct from academic research or scriptwriting? I think that’s an important question to answer if journalism is indeed capable of saving the world. If The Wire is journalism rather than social commentary, what do we call a journalism that substitutes essential truths for literal ones? Maybe journalism is changing to that point, though I’m not convinced. I’m also not sure I can accept a definition of journalism that includes The Wire but not The Case for Reparation.
It’s a conversation worth having, I guess. But it is a conversation that will be open to journalists and non-journalists alike, including the hipsters at Deadspin. I think that’s ultimately a positive, if the media is to serve the public.
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