Spring 2021: What Is Journalism? (Or, The Existential Issue)

THE EXISTENTIAL ISSUE

What is Journalism?

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

2

Contents 3

Editor’s Note

by Kyle Pope

5

They Really Like Me Philip DeFranco and the power of news-influencers

by Clare Malone

12 Who Needs a Press Pass?

The origins of an exclusionary object

by Savannah Jacobson + Keith Henry Brown

22 Off-Label How tech platforms decide what counts as journalism

by Emily Bell

26 As I See It Atlanta’s Canopy project brings the community in

by Feven Merid

33 Special Delivery Where the news finds you

by Savannah Jacobson

35 Showing Up The revelatory art of Minerva Cuevas

by Jack Herrera

42 Viewers Like You Public access programming, past and present

by Alexandria Neason

47 On the Edge The ethics of going undercover

by Joshua Hunt

54 Passion Projects What’s the difference between freelance writers and gig workers?

by Maya Binyam

59 Media Diaries Six Americans log their news consumption over the course of a day

by Lauren Harris

69 Avatars of Anxiety Falling into the deepfakeindustrial complex

by Simon V.Z. Wood

77 Looks Authentic The aesthetics of conspiracy

by Haley Mlotek

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

3

Editor’s Note

T

he past year has been traumatic.

Now, as vaccines are administered and businesses reopen, the world turns to renewal and rebuilding.

The journalism industry is no exception. Since last spring, for all the excellent pandemic reporting we’ve seen—coverage that saved lives—the media’s shortcomings have also been on painful display: the inability to focus on multiple, interconnected stories; a willingness to be distracted by demagogues and disinformation; the shameful silencing and sidelining of audiences and colleagues of color.

We now face a choice between an incremental return to where we left off and a more fundamental transformation of what we’re about. “What Is Journalism?”—this digital edition of the magazine— takes us down that second path, and we hope it will raise fundamental questions for you, too.

It is the most ambitious digital project we’ve ever tried at CJR. Every day this week, we’ll roll out a new chapter, each exploring a question from the most basic tenets of reporting: Who gets to call themselves a journalist? Where can journalism happen? How is it produced and shared? When do we engage with it? And finally—with trust in the press at an all-time low—why bother doing journalism at all?

This project was born out of pragmatic concerns: because many of our subscribers are away from the offices where they receive our print magazine, we figured it made no sense to send them something they would never see. But, as often happens with ideas like this, what began as a work-around soon became something much more. I am especially grateful to Betsy Morais, the managing editor of CJR, and to our partners at Point Five, the firm that designs the magazine, all of whom embraced the challenge of creating something that had never been made before. To address the subject at hand, and in tribute to the new forms of storytelling that constitute the media today, we’re using an array of formats: in the coming days, in addition to written features and columns, you’ll find audio pieces, interactives,

a collection of diaries, and a comic strip—all from a wide-ranging group of contributors and subjects.

Our hope is that by exploring the edges of our profession—where journalism sits beside art, community organizing, comedy, and conspiracy—we can gain inspiration and draw meaningful lines.

In a way, this project continues a theme that has consumed us since last fall, when CJR sponsored a two-day online conference in the wake of the recent anti-racism protests. We called it “The New Journalism: Rethinking the News” and explored how journalism should change. In December, we followed that up with a print magazine we called “What Now?,” examining the ways in which the media industry had already been forced to reimagine itself. With “What Is Journalism?” we go even deeper into the assumptions we make about our work—so much so that we’ve referred to this as “The Existential Issue.” We ask: Who says we can’t deliver the news by livestream, borrowed radio frequency, or text message? Why shouldn’t coverage be beautiful?

Must we always identify ourselves to subjects? What is truth, and how can we be so sure we know it? And why, really, does anyone need a press pass?

The past year—the past decade, really—has been hard on our profession. Thousands of our colleagues have lost their jobs; dozens of outlets have shuttered; millions of readers have moved on. And the sad reality is that more difficult news is almost certainly still to come, as the economic fallout from the pandemic continues to reveal itself in its entirety. Yet there is optimism to be found amid the wreckage. We have reached a pivotal, promising moment, charged with reconceiving the nature of our industry. It is an opportunity to do nothing less than remake journalism.

Kyle Pope

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

Chapter 1: Who

The people we call journalists

Some reporters are given credentials, by a government or a private organization. Increasingly, technology companies like Facebook are taking on the role of deciding who is a “verified” news source. But it’s not always clear which outlets and personalities to take seriously; follower counts confer dubious authority, and the line between journalist and social media influencer has blurred. A reporter might be anyone who comments on the news or has an item of gossip to share.

That can get dangerous, when false claims go viral. It can also be uplifting, in communities where people have taken it upon themselves to fill gaps in coverage—rejecting the idea that journalism means chronicling events from the periphery, and instead telling stories from within. —The editors

4

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

FEBRUARY

2021:

CLARE

They Really Like Me Philip DeFranco and the power of news-influencers

by Clare Malone

MALONE

5

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

M

2021:

C lare

M alone 6

ost every weekday, Philip DeFranco sits down in front of a camera to face the internet. Behind him is what looks like a man cave: red walls; a black leather couch with red and silver throw pillows; “industrial chic” knickknack shelves showcasing a globe shellacked in black paint—the aspirational style of a frat house president. Thirty-five, with a pomaded swoop of brown hair, DeFranco often wears hoodies, sometimes tie-dye ones with slogans like EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTED or DON’T BE STUPID, STUPID. He greets his audience with the same line he’s used for years: “Sup, you beautiful bastards?”

DeFranco is the host of an eponymous show on YouTube that aims to deliver the news in about fifteen minutes. Episodes have covered Russian hacking, Donald Trump’s tweets, Tom Cruise’s on-set COVID-19 safety rant, YouTuber JoJo Siwa’s coming-out, Pornhub’s removal of underage content, and an apparently much anticipated but wildly glitchy video game called Cyberpunk 2077.

Each segment—helpfully labeled if you hover over the video progress bar—is usually around two or three minutes; some run longer depending on the complexity of the subject at hand. It’s news aggregation without the need to scroll, perfect for when you’re sipping a morning cup of coffee or hunching over a sad desk salad.

The Philip DeFranco Show is not prestige journalism. In an informal survey of New York Times– subscribing friends, none knew who he was; he has a not-that-impressive (as these things go) 1.2 million followers on Twitter. DeFranco is aware of this.

“There are people in the industry that see themselves as higher,” he once said. “You see it every time someone writes about a YouTuber in a very disrespectful light, like we’re nothing, like we’re this fad.

Even though this is the swing of the new normal.”

But if, years ago, onlookers expressed curiosity about how long it would be until YouTubers entered the media mainstream, it’s instead the mainstream media that has become more like YouTube: busted

up into narrow verticals of interest. To his audience, DeFranco is, as the Orlando Sentinel put it, “Walter Cronkite for the YouTube generation,” serving more than 7 million YouTube-channel subscribers. That’s 1.7 million more than a recent week’s viewership of the CBS Evening News, and 4.5 million more than the February prime-time audience for Fox News. His videos have been seen more than a billion times.

To the uninitiated, DeFranco’s YouTube dialect and cadence can be jarring: lots of “Hit that like button or else I will punch you in the throat” mixed with jump cuts and hand-and-eyebrow emoting.

(DeFranco, who also goes by PhillyD, has cited Dane Cook as one of his early influences.) By the end of an episode, his viewers have been “filled in.” (Get it?

Phil, fill!) DeFranco also makes room in his lineup to cover YouTube stars’ myriad controversies— Jake Paul’s coronavirus denial, Gabi DeMartino’s OnlyFans dustup—in a way that both emphasizes the celebrity of his cohort and potentially alienates newcomers. (Get ready to Google.)

Still, as an elder millennial, DeFranco presents himself as a voice of reason in a chaotic world.

Original reporting it is not, but his news sense is substantive, and he has a compelling way of talking through chewy politics stories and buzzy entertainment items by plucking intersecting threads of culture, business, and shifting norms. Take the January show in which he covered Trump’s deplatforming by various social media companies: DeFranco started with the news of Twitter’s ban, then quickly dived into the question of free speech, citing legal experts who said that pushing Trump out wasn’t a violation of the First Amendment; then he tacked on an open-ended riff on the disproportionate power that unelected tech executives hold over American life. Back in December, he posted a similarly deft segment: focusing on Olivia Jade’s appearance on Red Table Talk—she of “Operation Varsity Blues” fame, the red table belonging to Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook talk show juggernaut—DeFranco summarized what had been an

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

C lare

M alone 7

often uncomfortable dissection of wealth and race, inserting his own musings on redemption in the age of cancellation.

It’s not heavy-handed, think-y opinionating; the short-segment format saves DeFranco from polemic. For what he’s trying to do—digest the news, offer a point of view, and solicit audience feedback— it’s effective. And, evidently, he’s uniquely capable of bringing people back day after day. Geoff Weiss, a senior editor for TubeFilter, a publication that covers the entertainment industry, told me that the combination of DeFranco’s steady viewership—his daily videos regularly rack up more than a million views— and longevity on the platform is “kind of a stunning accomplishment.” Many of the early YouTube stars

Years ago, onlookers wondered how long it would be until YouTubers entered the media mainstream. Now the mainstream has become more like YouTube. have either burned out or been canceled, Weiss said.

“He’s stood the test of time and remained relevant in a way that is pretty rare.”

DeFranco is, in that sense, a well-developed model for a recently emergent category: the journalist-influencer. His career path becomes instructive to the newsy YouTube shows, Substacks, Patreons, TikToks, and Twitches that continue to proliferate, as their proprietors must learn to balance coverage, business, and community—all while maintaining trust (a/k/a “influencing”). Ostensibly, he’s living the dream of the “mini media empire” that downtrodden, underpaid journalists envy; his hoodies, by the way, are for sale in his Emotionally Exhausted merchandise collection, as are a line of recently produced DON’T BE STUPID, STUPID masks “for all your favorite influencers who keep partying in the middle of a pandemic.” How he does it and who’s tuning in tell us quite a bit about who America wants its journalists to be.

T

he archetypal image of a journalist used to be pretty easy to conjure: dogged and supposedly objective in search of truth; soft waistline; passionately self-righteous about civic duty while remaining square in delivery. This is not, however, the contemporary conception of a journalist—who, depending on your outlook, might

be an “enemy of the people,” some kind of elitist, alarmist culture-warrior, or a standard-bearer of an oppressive and overly nostalgic monoculture centered on white anchors and scribes. So it is perhaps no surprise that, despite or because of a lack of reporting experience, DeFranco, a white man, has both found success in the news realm and chosen to eschew the label “journalist.” His Twitter bio reads, “I talk about and try to make the news consumable for a living.”

Before becoming a YouTube star, DeFranco, who was born in the Bronx, was a college dropout who for a while lived out of his car, in Florida. His home life had been troubled; he held a series of odd jobs. In early blog posts (available now only through the Internet Archive), he revealed rough edges and more than a little youthful angst and vitriol. Since then he has become polished, though he’s made it plain to his audience that he wants to be seen as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a profession that has witnessed tanking trust numbers over recent decades. Gallup has long tracked the American public’s lagging faith in the press, and in 2020 only around 40 percent had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in media; the Edelman Trust Barometer report for 2021 found an eight-point drop in trust in traditional media globally. Among Republicans, trust in the press is the lowest it’s ever been.

Young audiences maintain journalism-consumption habits that are radically different from their parents’; the Reuters Institute found that news consumers in Generation Z (ages eighteen to twentyfour) have a weak connection to mainstream media brands and are more than twice as likely as the rest of the adult population to seek out news from social platforms. Some of the most popular YouTube news channels are produced not by large media organizations, but by independent YouTube stars.

(Otobong Udofia, age nineteen, has been watching DeFranco for years: “I think what I like about him is he’s informal,” he said. “Rather than your average news network, where everyone’s in suits and ties.”

Udofia has stuck with DeFranco partially out of habit: “I guess it’s like the way Gen Xers probably see late-night.”)

DeFranco isn’t cosplaying the role of newsman; he understands that people come to him because he’s forthcoming with his takes. In a sense, he is of the classic commentator mold (Walter Winchell, Rachel Maddow), doing the news from a known perspective, but what makes him next-generation is that he spends a lot of time defining himself to his audience in intimate terms. During a segment about an internet controversy involving Lizzo and “diet culture,” for instance, he broke in and talked about his weight gain. “I’m actually two hundred and fifty-six pounds right now,” DeFranco said. “As a bigger person currently, I am still as deserving

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

C lare

M alone 8

of love.” In another video, posted on his personal-life-focused spin-off channel “Defranco Does,” he discussed the toll that the pandemic has taken on his mental health. “I started developing an eating disorder where I would binge, and then I would binge and purge,” he said, noting that he’d just begun taking a low dose of Lexapro. He’s spoken of his mother hitting him when he was a child and of their recent reconciliation. Longtime viewers have seen lots of footage of his two young children, and you can watch DeFranco’s wedding, in 2015, to Lindsay Doty, a former YouTube influencer. (He’d proposed to her in front of a live audience of paying fans.)

When a knottier subject comes up, DeFranco applies the “Comment below” feedback system. His audience—his “community”—feels respected and heard; he offers them a stake and a sense that he’s responsive to their opinions. Sometimes he literally is: DeFranco has a text number where fans can reach him, and apparently he replies personally (though he declined to be interviewed for this story). His fan relationships run so deep that a member of his audience once gave DeFranco’s father a new kidney.

DeFranco has been honest with viewers about his shifts in thinking, too—political and otherwise.

During the 2012 election, he endorsed Gary Johnson, a libertarian. He has made it abundantly clear that he dislikes Trump, though he expressed irritation in 2016 when YouTubers sent public pleas for their fellow stars to endorse Hillary Clinton. In a recent video about Morgan Wallen, a white country music star who used an anti-Black slur, DeFranco said, “Here’s the thing—saying it has always been wrong.

I mean, way, way back in the day, I thought it was okay, like, if a Black person was saying it and I was quoting them, I could say it. No.” In a 2017 interview with DeFranco, Dave Rubin, a fellow YouTuber, attributed DeFranco’s appeal in the midst of a whipped-up political climate to his fundamental “decency” and willingness to engage with everyone. “When you put someone in a corner, all you’re really doing is locking them down in their belief,” DeFranco said. “If the real intent is to hopefully provoke truth, hopefully promote the right thought, hopefully then you’re leaving the door open for them.” Fair enough. But that’s also what traditional news outlets strive to do, albeit while they speak to broad demographic swaths and work within established reporting norms, like developing sources. There’s a certain smugness that can come across in DeFranco’s self-assessments, as if he doesn’t realize it’s easier to build trust within a narrow slice of the population that identifies with you—his show’s audience is 66 percent male— especially when you’re never breaking news that might displease them.

Still, DeFranco’s personality-driven style offers a direct contrast with the impartial mode of traditional

journalism, at once an indictment and a corrective.

Other emergent stars have followed suit: Marcus DiPaola (2.6 million followers) reads the news on TikTok in seconds-long bites and has a section on his website announcing his personal biases; Hasan Piker (1.1 million followers) talks politics with a left-wing slant on Twitch. Lately, even mainstream outlets seem willing to humanize their contributors to build trust—and avoid losing ground—by becoming more transparent about their reporting process and narrative positioning. Many journalists engage with followers on Twitter (sometimes a good idea, often not) or show their work, like David Fahrenthold, of the Washington Post, who shares snapshots of his notepad as he ticks off calls and primary source documents. The New York Times has the Times Insider, which reveals the paper’s editorial decision-making. DeFranco’s take, when it comes to connecting with his audience, is frank: “I’ve made people angry, and that’s fine,” he’s said. “My hope is that I’ve formed a relationship with people where it’s okay to do that—that I’m your friend or that person you’re friendly with that you talk about stuff you don’t necessarily agree with.”

A

ll that trust has allowed DeFranco to cash in. His sponsors—Squarespace, Get Roman, NordVPN—buy around a minute of DeFranco reading their ad copy in his videos. Marketing with DeFranco seems pretty effective: after he plugged BetterHelp, an online therapy service, a fan tweeted, “I just applied for online counseling through BetterHelp bc Philip Defranco recommends it and I trust that man with my life.” In addition to his show-related merch, DeFranco hawks a line of hair-care products called Beautiful Bastard. He has a Patreon, of course, offering five- and ten-dollara-month membership options. His exact net worth is unclear, but in 2019 DeFranco bought a $4.1 million home in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles: a palm-tree-lined estate, hidden from street view, that includes a guesthouse, pool, and tennis court—as well as a screening room that features, in the words of Variety, “recliner chairs upholstered in a particularly lurid red velvet and a fiberoptic ceiling treatment meant to mimic a starry night sky, something unheard of in Los Angeles.”

Of course, DeFranco’s wealth is far from representative of the financial situation of most or even many independent journalists. (That broad categorization contains multitudes: pundits, commentators, podcasters, people with Substacks, people with decent Twitter followings.) I asked Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine, if there was any precedent for the niche fame available on today’s platforms. Radio during its heyday, perhaps?

Socolow was skeptical. “Broadcasting is a push medium, where you push your thing out to millions,”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

C lare

M alone 9

he said. “But like cable TV, YouTube would be a pull medium, because people have to go to you.” In other words, if you want to make any kind of sustainable living while operating in today’s balkanized media market, building a loyal audience is key.

DeFranco spent years doing so. When he made his debut on YouTube, in September 2006, he’d gotten in on the ground floor, registering under the account name “sxephil,” with an interest in discussing “Newsie type stuff.” In those early days, he solicited donations from viewers, telling them that he was out of money and needed to pull enough together to drive to Florida. The following summer, seeking to expand his audience, he posted a video called “Big Boobs and You,” with a thumb-

DeFranco’s personalitydriven style offers a direct contrast with the impartial mode of traditional journalism. nail image of a woman’s breasts. It was a hit, with 1.8 million views, and put DeFranco—“bawdy YouTube humorist,” per the Los Angeles Times—on the map.

Over the years, DeFranco spun out a “vlog,” as well as “SourceFed,” a channel focused on news. By 2012, with funding from Google, he was covering the Democratic and Republican Party conventions.

The following year, Revision3, a part of Discovery Digital Networks, acquired the rights to his full portfolio of channels and merchandise. DeFranco stayed ensconced in the corporate structure until 2017, when, as he put it in a video, “For the first time in four years I am an independent creator again.”

In the same breath, he introduced his Patreon, “to make sure no corporate interests can manipulate and control how the news is presented.”

Absent a viral gambit like “Big Boobs,” newcomers to personal-brand journalism, or the not-quite-journalistic-influencer business, seem more likely to make it if they have preexisting clout— often acquired through traditional institutions, with all their attendant blind spots. Substack, for instance, has approached established writers such as Matthew Yglesias, Anne Helen Petersen, and Andrew Sullivan, who, with their loyal fan bases, seemed sure bets to make money. (Yglesias, a cofounder of Vox, came through: Substack paid him an advance of $250,000, and it turned out that, thanks to his 9,800 subscribers, he’s due to make more than $800,000 a year.) “It’s the influencer economy,” Socolow said.

He was dubious that many unknowns could become high-earning breakout stars.

And say you’ve made it to a new platform.

Building an enduringly monetizable brand requires dedicated audience engagement, which takes up a whole lot of time. Jessica Yellin, a former CNN White House correspondent, now streams TV-news-esque rundowns and daily interviews on Instagram; if you sign up for her Patreon, she offers additional behindthe-scenes content and Zoom Q&As. Yellin, who works fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days, also engages with her viewers in DMs and in the comments section: “It’s the downtime activity of every day,” as she wrote to me. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, a climate news Substack, set up her email with an “auto reply from a busy lady” message; her workload is immense, she told me, but she aims to send at least five substantive notes to readers per day and to reply to Twitter DMs. “I definitely try to read the comments on the articles every day because only paid subscribers can comment,” she said. “And I try to either like them or interact with them, since it means a lot to people to be able to pick my brain.”

Jay Caspian Kang, who along with E. Tammy Kim and Andy Liu runs It’s Time to Say Goodbye, a Substack newsletter and Patreon podcast, makes a habit of replying to readers’ emails. “Reacting to people you haven’t met feels a little bit like the early days of the internet,” he said. “It allows you to have a connection with people that’s deeper than the sort of processing through ‘the take’ filters on Twitter.”

As Goodbye evolves, that might leave fewer hours for feature writing—Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine—but he figures his new venture is a worthwhile investment. “I looked around, and I was like, Well, I can’t just write magazine stories for the next ten years,” he said. “I just don’t get paid enough doing it to support a family, and I don’t get health insurance; I don’t get any benefits or anything like that.” Maybe, he hopes, the podcast will “grow to a point where it helps pay for some portion of our lives.”

The rest depends on the consistency of the product. “I will not talk shit on money, but for me it’s really what we’re putting out there,” DeFranco has said. “Every move that I’ve done, while money might have been a part of it, it’s always about: What is the end result of the content we could make or that we want to make?” Of course, doing work you’re proud of is hard enough, and when you’re juggling so many facets of production, from community management to ad sales, it can be easy to screw up. In 2018, for example, BetterHelp was accused of misleading users about the quality of its online therapists; in a video, DeFranco scrambled to address “ridiculous accusations” that he was scamming viewers.

Later, he dropped BetterHelp as a sponsor. By this past January, when the investment firm RobinHood

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

C lare

M alone 1 0

ran afoul of pretty much the entire internet for suspending trades of GameStop stock, DeFranco was out ahead of the pitch: he opened his video the following day with a strong condemnation of the company’s actions and an assurance that he would pull its future sponsorship of his channel. “Burning some bridges with this new Thursday show,” he tweeted. It may be that DeFranco’s greatest value proposition is a keen awareness of his audience’s mindset—and a willingness to adjust to suit.

S

triking out from the irksome constraints of corporate overlords has an obvious appeal, but scaling up is hard to do. To make things work, you might just need to fall back on an institution—or form one of your own. As it happened, DeFranco, the independent new-media success story, did not generate his huge fan base all on his lonesome. By 2012, when he was hosting SourceFed, he had nine people working for him, supported by funding from Google; there are now as many as thirteen people included in the credits for The Philip DeFranco Show.

A spokesperson confirmed that, pre-pandemic, there were thirty on staff across the DeFranco enterprise, which now includes Rogue Rocket, a production company DeFranco founded in 2017.

That’s not exactly a secret to his fans: “I know that he’s got a team of researchers, and he provides the links, all the original sources,” Allison De Jong, a twenty-five-year-old who watches DeFranco over dinner, said. But even so, the fact that he has a team at all punctures any illusion that YouTube— or any other platform—is a means by which an obscure solo operator can rise to prominence.

The news-influencer business belongs, at this point, to professionals—those with the means to operate at high capacity and the ability to navigate complex relationships with powerful tech companies. Weiss said, of DeFranco, “He’s done a lot of different things, a lot of different businesses, a lot of different formats.”

DeFranco has also been outspoken about why YouTube might not be his creative home forever. In 2016, at the behest of advertisers, YouTube cracked down on the monetization of videos, disabling ads on those deemed not to be “advertiser friendly” or to contain “graphic content” or “excessive strong language.” The dragnet, executed by artificial intelligence, was ostensibly targeted at right-wing hate speech and sexually explicit material, but creators like DeFranco, who swears in his videos and talks about controversial subjects, got caught up. Traditional news outlets with YouTube channels were not similarly affected. “I’ve seen channels dinged now for talking about depression and anti-bullying,” he complained to Vox. “And I’ve also seen channels like CNN include footage of a Syrian boy covered in blood, after his house was reportedly bombed, and

right next to the video is a nice little ad for sneakers.

So you get the question, ‘Why me and not them?’ ” DeFranco claimed, too, that some of his posts no longer appear on viewers’ personalized YouTube homepages and called YouTube’s actions “a form of censorship.” In the first month of YouTube’s disciplinary spree, DeFranco’s ad revenue dropped by 30 percent. In a company comment at the time, YouTube said that it hadn’t changed its policy or methods of enforcement but acknowledged there had been “some confusion.” In late 2017, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, addressed the ongoing controversy in a lengthy statement, promising that the company would try to “conduct more manual curation.” (YouTube did not comment for this article.)

The nature of the sweep seemed to be a sign that YouTube had ambitions to moderate videos but found it expedient to waive editorial judgment by ceding the matter to advertisers. “YouTube would love to regenerate the broadcast model—in other words, to figure out a way to channel huge audiences to a few select videos in order to maximize their profits,” Socolow said. “One of the biggest problems that YouTube confronts is the diffusion of so many videos.” Major news outlets seem to have an easier time monetizing their content, Socolow said, because “YouTube makes a lot more money by exploiting the CNN brand identity for news value than any random user.” By 2018, YouTube’s upfronts featured not homegrown stars but celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato. “YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this,” Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today. When The Verge covered this trend, YouTube provided a post-publication statement: “Our core content strategy and investment remains centered on our endemic creators.” But the Verge thesis held: the “community” felt forgotten.

That DeFranco is still considered a “random user,” despite his millions of subscribers, has given him motivation to break away from the platform that first conferred on him the status of star. “I am tired of trying to work with the alcoholic, negligent stepfather that is YouTube,” DeFranco said in 2018, announcing a Rogue Rocket expansion. “At this point it really doesn’t matter if you’re swerving this car into a tree on purpose or you’re just asleep at the wheel.”

Early the next year, he debuted a Rogue Rocket site, completely separate from YouTube and fully staffed, with verticals on domestic, international, business, and entertainment news. He also began building out his Rogue Rocket channel, through which he planned to introduce hosts who could share their own news takes: on misogyny at Victoria’s Secret, the Lizzie McGuire reboot controversy. COVID put a stop to the protégé videos, at least for now—in

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

C lare

M alone 1 1

May of 2020, fifteen DeFranco employees were laid off—but the site continues to be updated on topics as wide-ranging as the stimulus package, a woman who mistakenly coated her hair in Gorilla Glue, and protests in Myanmar, written with Axios-style bullets and the earnest tone of a Vox explainer.

Whether DeFranco can thrive without the platform that YouTube provides remains to be seen.

Will his audience move with him? Or have they stuck with him simply because he’s the name that pops up when they open their YouTube homepage?

DeFranco may also run up against challenges of scale: a more sprawling operation, with staffwritten and -hosted stories, could dilute the individual credibility upon which he built his core business. There may be such a thing as growing too big and misreading what the audience actually wants—which is, in the end, nothing fancy: “It feels something like, ‘Oh, this is a nice way to just bolster what I’m getting from other news sources,’ ” as De Jong put it. “In a way that’s entertaining.” cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 2

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 3

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 4

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 5

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 6

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 7

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 8

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 1 9

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 2 0

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson

+

K eith

H enry

B rown 2 1

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

E mily

B ell 2 2

Off-Label How tech platforms decide what counts as journalism

by Emily Bell Illustration

by Richard A. Chance

I

n the aftermath of the deadly Capitol insurrection, technology platforms were forced to acknowledge their role in poisoning the media atmosphere, as the principal distributors of digital news and the sources of so much misinformation.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google acted as they never had before: Twitter flagged Donald Trump’s incendiary lies, removed some posts, then suspended his account; Facebook banned him for inciting violence.

Overnight, Web hosting services dropped Parler, a social network popular among right-wing extremists. The platforms that had delivered and sustained a toxic presidency were now abandoning their most mendacious hitmaker.

The great deplatforming of January 2021 had an immediate effect: in addition to Trump, thousands of conspiracy-theory accounts disappeared from the internet. It felt like a turning point that technology companies had long resisted, until the pandemic gave them a first push: last March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, announced a “coronavirus information center” that would place “authoritative information” at the top of news feeds. (“You don’t allow people to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded room, and I think that’s similar to people spreading misinformation in the time of an outbreak like this,” he told journalists on a conference call.) From there, platforms began rolling out new features and responding directly

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

E mily

B ell 2 3

to misinformation flare-ups. In May, Twitter put a warning label on a Trump post for the first time, alerting users that it contained “potentially misleading information about voting processes.”

Later that month, after police killed George Floyd, Trump made racist comments that Twitter hid behind a barrier; a warning label stated that the post had violated rules against glorifying violence.

All of that came after a forty-year period of media deregulation, as I recently told the House of Representatives, that created an environment “optimized for growth and innovation rather than for civic cohesion and inclusion.” The result, as we’ve seen,

After the Capitol riot, there’s no going back to the way things used to be. has been the unchecked spread of disinformation and extremism. But putting a stop to militarized fascist movements—and preventing another attack on a government building—will ultimately require more than content removal. Technology companies need to fundamentally recalibrate how they categorize, promote, and circulate everything under their banner, particularly news. They have to acknowledge their editorial responsibility.

The extraordinary power of tech platforms to decide what material is worth seeing—under the loosest possible definition of who counts as a “journalist”—has always been a source of tension with news publishers. These companies have now been put in the position of being held accountable for developing an information ecosystem based in fact.

It’s unclear how much they are prepared to do, if they will ever really invest in pro-truth mechanisms on a global scale. But it is clear that, after the Capitol riot, there’s no going back to the way things used to be.

B

etween 2016 and 2020, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made dozens of announcements promising to increase the exposure of high-quality news and get rid of harmful misinformation. They claimed to be investing in content moderation and fact-checking; they assured us that they were creating helpful products like the Facebook News Tab. Yet the result of all these changes has been hard to examine, since the data is both scarce and incomplete. Gordon Crovitz—a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a cofounder of NewsGuard, which applies ratings to news sources based on their credibility—has been frustrated by the lack of transparency: “In Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter we have

institutions that we know all give quality ratings to news sources in different ways,” he told me. “But if you are a news organization and you want to know how you are rated, you can ask them how these systems are constructed, and they won’t tell you.”

Consider the mystery behind blue-check certification on Twitter, or the absurdly wide scope of the “Media/News” category on Facebook. “The issue comes down to a fundamental failure to understand the core concepts of journalism,” Crovitz said.

Still, researchers have managed to put together a general picture of how technology companies handle various news sources. According to Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, “we know that there is a taxonomy within these companies, because we have seen them dial up and dial down the exposure of quality news outlets.” Internally, platforms rank journalists and outlets and make certain designations, which are then used to develop algorithms for personalized news recommendations and news products.

Very occasionally, these designations are used to apply labels. Grygiel was instrumental in identifying the problem and pushing platforms to label state-controlled media outlets such as Russia Today and China’s People’s Daily. In the summer of 2020, Facebook announced that it would flag state media on its platform and on Instagram and would block state media from targeting US residents with advertising. (Today, the RT page on Facebook is pinned with a label advising that the publisher “may be partially or wholly under the editorial control of a state.”) Soon, Twitter announced that it too would label state-controlled media. Yet the practice of doing so has been inconsistent: Even if a page is flagged on Facebook, individual posts—RT videos, for example—continue to float around without a label. And Facebook has refused to identify Voice of America as state media—which posed a big problem when, last year, Trump decided to replace its staff with loyal propagandists.

E

arly attempts at labeling have also precipitated questions about what comes next: How far are social media platforms prepared to go in categorizing other pages that are just as manipulative but less glaring? Grygiel doesn’t like the notion of tech giants certifying journalists, but does feel a need to draw lines and to focus on misinformation-spewing websites that have ties to political funders or partisan think tanks. “We don’t want credentialing for news,” Grygiel told me, “but we can apply tests for what is definitely not news.”

Take the case of Texas Scorecard, which identifies on Facebook as a “Media/News Company.”

On election night this past November, while the news cycle was dominated by the slow process of

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

E mily

B ell 2 4

vote counting, false stories were circulating at an altogether faster pace. Texas Scorecard published one of the most viral—an easily debunked article about the “suspicious” movement of large cases into and out of a Detroit voting center. (“The ‘ballot thief ’ was my photographer,” Ross Jones, an investigative reporter for WXYZ Detroit, tweeted.) Its inaccuracy was the product not of poor reporting, but political interest; Texas Scorecard is a project of Empower Texans, a right-wing lobbyist group, and the categorization as “Media/News” was self-applied—on Facebook, almost anyone is permitted to call themselves a publisher. That has allowed Texas Scorecard to effectively disguise itself as a legitimate local news source to its nearly two hundred forty-five thousand followers—almost a hundred thousand more than the highly reputable Texas Tribune.

Over on Google, by contrast, Texas Scorecard did not show up in the “News” tab. Unlike Facebook’s honor system, Google’s search engine deploys an algorithm to decide who falls into the “news source” category. This is an automated process whereby Google indexes news sources according to a number of criteria, including how frequently sources are linked to elsewhere on the internet; to assess how the algorithm is doing, a panel of

“We don’t want credentialing for news. But we can apply tests for what is definitely not news.” human beings—“quality raters”—regularly check in on Google’s search results. But that doesn’t mean Google has solved the disinformation problem: the “news source” label doesn’t consistently reflect veracity; even the Epoch Times, the conspiracy-driven pro-Trump Falun Gong–linked newspaper, meets the standard. And Google users are increasingly engaged with the “Discover” feature, introduced in 2018, which recommends links on an individual’s home screen and is so highly personalized that it’s hard to track as a reliable recommender of legitimate journalism.

Politically funded local “news” sites like Texas Scorecard became a signature of the 2020 campaign cycle and represent a new model for using the trappings of journalism to wield dark-money influence. At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, where I work, we conducted extensive research into this phenomenon, examining how platforms have struggled with these false proprietors of “journalism” in their labeling and flagging

processes. Just last year, Facebook announced that it would prevent sites with “direct, meaningful ties” to political organizations from claiming to be news and using its platform for promotion. Yet Texas Scorecard, despite its connection to Empower Texans and being a blatant spreader of misinformation, remains “Media/News.”

I

n deciding where and how to apply labels, tech companies are, in an important sense, defining what journalism is. As Jillian York—the author of a new book, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism—pointed out to me, this is not a novel concern: “It feels as though we had many intense discussions around the issue of ‘Who is a journalist?’ in around 2010, when we were considering how to think about organizations like WikiLeaks,” she said. At the time, the Islamic State was on the rise, she recalled, and social media platforms were starting to experiment with more direct intervention in content moderation: misinformation whack-a-mole.

Since then, tech companies’ stubborn reluctance to get involved in editorial matters has provided us with a working definition of journalism—a confused and undermining one that offers a weak gesture toward “balance.” Facebook has practiced this kind of technological false equivalence as recently as 2018, when Mother Jones learned that it was subject to an algorithm change that weighted its site negatively and the Daily Wire, a right-wing site, positively. The difference between the two outlets comes down not merely to political orientation, but to quality: Mother Jones is a rigorously reported and fact-checked magazine with a track record of award-winning investigative journalism; the Daily Wire is dominated by the opinions of Ben Shapiro, a right-wing commentator with a track record of advancing untrue stories.

“The problem with all taxonomies is that even the ones that are useful are often wrong,” Ethan Zuckerman, a media scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. But he hasn’t given up on labeling altogether. “We perhaps need new language for some of these digitally native, wildly popular disinformation sites,” he said.

Zuckerman believes that tech platforms should make use of the work done by organizations like NewsGuard and the Trust Project, which develop standards for assessing the quality of news sources.

During his tenure as director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, Zuckerman assisted in building Mediacloud, an open-source tool for examining the media ecosystem, which wrestled with how to categorize news-ish outlets such as Gateway Pundit and One America News Network. “We tried digital-native versus analog-native, but that was not very useful, and then we tried left, center-left,

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

E mily

B ell 2 5

center, center-right, and right, which was more helpful,” he said. (Researchers used Mediacloud to demonstrate that right-wing sites were creating a “propaganda feedback loop” while presenting themselves as news.) “I don’t think it is the case that we need journalism to be licensed—and certainly not credentialed by platforms,” York told me. “But if individuals or organizations are going to identify themselves as journalists, then there needs to be an accountability process.”

Of course, the people who will be making these designations are tech executives, who tend to espouse both a profound faith in the idea of free speech and an extreme skepticism of journalists. How they settle on their approach to labeling matters; the proven harm of failing to distinguish between truth and fiction, or to account for the motivations and funders of those who deliberately aim to mislead, requires that platforms be more open with news producers. But much depends, too, on whether the platforms actually want to change.

Unless they utterly transform their revenue system, the odds don’t look good. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

F even

M erid 2 6

As I See It Atlanta’s Canopy project brings the community in

W

by Feven Merid Photographs by Aboubacar Kante

hen Kamille Whittaker began working on Canopy, a journalism project in Atlanta, she thought of something she’d studied during her undergraduate days, at Howard University: Mbongi, a Congolese learning practice. The idea of Mbongi was to “gather around and talk about ideas, but nobody was the teacher or the student; everybody was contributing,” Whittaker said. She thinks of it as a space with no walls. The ethos of Mbongi guided Whittaker, who is Canopy’s fellowship director, as she reached out to six community members—most of whom had no formal journalism experience— inviting them to take part in a paid fellowship program that would pair them with a mentor to help them report the stories they wanted to tell.

“Canopy started to form around this idea that there are communities that needed local journalism,” Max Blau, a journalist and one of Canopy’s founders, said. Blau had observed how, in parts of Atlanta that lacked formally trained reporters, people were already disseminating information on an informal basis. “With a bit more training in terms of skill sets,” he figured, “we’d be able to help them advance the work they’re already doing that is journalistic in nature.”

Starting in July, as the pandemic raged, Canopy had its fellows and mentors meet virtually, over six weeks of workshops on research, interviewing, and narrative writing. The West End—the neighborhood of Atlanta in which the contributors lived—was to be the focus of the inaugural issue. With guidance from local residents and contributions from professional journalists, Canopy’s West End Issue debuted in October. Stories covered everything from the community’s arts scene in the days of COVID-19 to its rich urban farming tradition and highway “water boys.” “It goes back to that idea of: Why don’t we stop trying to write around communities?” Gavin Godfrey, the issue’s editor and an Atlanta-based journalist, said. “Why don’t we just let the community tell these stories?”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

F even

M erid 2 7

NAYA CLARK, who is twenty-five, has lived in the West End for two years. “It’s so apparent how deeply rooted arts and culture is, especially within this very Black community,” she said. “There are the stores that you go into with the African textiles, the weave shops, the braid shops; there are those places that sell knockoff fashion brands.” On assignment for Canopy, Clark surveyed how members of the creative community were faring amid the pandemic.

What she found provided her with a sense of herself as a journalist. “As a writer I’ve always felt like everything needs to be that kind of breaking-news, statistic-heavy, very serious format of a story,” she said. “But for a slow researcher like myself, or someone that’s interested in more cultural critique and cultural observation, there is a space for that and there is a way to go about it that makes it relevant to the now—and how it’s going to impact the future.”

Jewel Wicker, a freelance entertainment journalist in Atlanta and Clark’s mentor, was similarly inspired: “Working in this community-journalism capacity was a real reminder of what the root of journalism should be,” she said.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

BRENT BREWER, a forty-six-year-old civil engineer, has lived in the West End for seventeen years. He remembers that, when the housing bubble burst, as much as half of the West End’s housing stock was vacant; one of his neighbors started a local newsletter, to which Brewer contributed a series on foreclosure and mortgage fraud. He was interested, too, in showcasing who provided the community’s identity. “I saw Black people lose their voice through gentrification,” Brewer said. “So doing this type of journalism is important to me because I know what happens when you don’t do that—people forget that Black people ever lived here.” His columns for the newsletter ran about three hundred words; when he joined up with Canopy, he wanted to develop his prose. “I never thought I could write a long-form article,” he said. “I tried before and failed miserably.”

With the help of Blau, his mentor, Brewer shared a byline on a twenty-five-hundred-word feature about the West End Mall, a Black commercial center whose redevelopment is now uncertain. “Having a deep and local expertise about the place where you live is something that is, unfortunately, undervalued in media,” Blau said. “You can’t teach that.”

2021:

F even

M erid 2 8

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

F even

M erid 2 9

AYANA CLARKE, a forty-two-year-old director of training with the Georgia Charter Schools Association, collaborated on the West End Mall feature with Brewer and a few others. “We all had a different voice in our work,” she said. “I was really people-centered, so I did a lot of interviews; another team member was very into data research.” Clarke had noticed the neighborhood around her changing—a lot of new people were coming in, and they tended to be vocal on social media. When she set out to report, she said, “we were being intentional about lifting voices of legacy residents.” As the story developed, she acquired an appreciation for editing and fact-checking: “It just pushed the bar for documenting your community and making sure that your work is credible.”

Whittaker, her mentor, observed Clarke’s pleasure in the process. “I think she’s an editor at heart,” Whittaker said. “It was so good to be able to just hear how she thought about the story and how she thought the molding of the story would be.”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

F even

M erid 3 0

NZINGHA THOMPSON-HALL, a twenty-eightyear-old program manager at a reproductive-justice nonprofit, moved to the West End months before the pandemic hit. Canopy, she figured, “would be a really great way to learn about my neighborhood, about my neighbors, learn about the history, what issues the neighborhood was facing and its strengths.” Thompson-Hall worked on the feature about the community’s art scene. “Always looking up at the murals, I was like, ‘Okay, let’s see if I can see who are the artists who paint the public art here,’ ” she said. “There’s a Colin Kaepernick piece that’s not too far from my home. There’s a piece against a brick wall with African statues. There’s lots of Black Lives Matter art.” She interviewed two Black women who have contributed vital creative work to the West End. “Nzingha was such an advocate for her sources,” Whittaker, her mentor, said. Reporting brought her closer to the neighborhood. “It gave me an idea of what’s coming next,” Thompson-Hall said, “with issues like housing, small businesses, and how a neighborhood responds to unprecedented times.”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

F even

M erid 3 1

ABOUBACAR KANTE, a twenty-five-year-old photographer, grew up in the West End. He’d always been interested in reporting; Canopy offered him a chance.

“I knew journalists do research, but really getting in depth and learning all the tools you can use stuck with me,” he said. Kante signed on for two assignments, working in different capacities: he conducted interviews, wrote, took photographs. For one piece, he focused on Atlanta’s “water boys”—Black teenagers who sell cold drinks along the highway. “I’ve always seen them selling water on the streets but never actually got a chance to interact with them, outside of giving them money,” Kante said. “The whole process of being out there with them for a couple of days, talking to them, and building a connection while photographing, I feel, made the photographs in the story more personable.” His mentor, Dustin Chambers, a freelance photojournalist in Atlanta, helped Kante work through tricky moments. (“It kind of got hairy a couple times when they were demanding that he delete photos,” Chambers recalled.) Kante also photographed demonstrations against police brutality. “I love the way he went out and approached the protests from his own style, from what he knew,” Chambers said. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

Chapter 2: Where

Journalism emerging through the cracks

In an ideal world, the news would be consumed not only within a certain bubble—“a self-created and self-referring class,” as Joan Didion once described it—but by everyone, everywhere. It would be accessible, in terms of language and form; intelligent and empathetic; interested in the places power comes from and where it slams down. Instead, we find that traditional models of journalism have struggled to reach people where they are. But unconventional means of delivery—installation art, Twitch stream, pirate radio—are flowering, carrying vital information where it needs to go. —The editors

32

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

by Savannah Jacobson Illustrations by Julie Murphy

REVIEW

SPRING

O

2021:

S avannah

J acobson 3 3

ver the past decade, amid the decline of the physical newspaper and the rise of online clickbait, journalists have often been driven by the same question: How do we get people to see our coverage? Audience engagement has grown into a vital, if still underappreciated, facet of many newsrooms. It’s also where some of the industry’s most creative work takes place.

Back in 2014, when WNYC wanted to report on sleep habits, it introduced an app that posed twenty questions about the quantity and quality of listeners’ sleep; more than twenty-six hundred people responded. When, in 2017, ProPublica opened a newsroom to cover the state of Illinois, staffers teamed up with a community theater to hold workshops and connect with residents from different regions. In 2019, Radio Ambulante, a Latin America– focused podcast, established Clubes de Escucha (Listening Clubs) to gather in-person audiences to hear and discuss the show. In 2020, a Pew Research Center survey found that 53 percent of American adults “often” or “sometimes” receive news via social media, so it’s no wonder that journalists have

increasingly headed to online platforms—seeking to meet audiences where they are, and to head off conspiracy-fueled rants.

These efforts are not just about growing or serving an audience. They also make journalism better. A few years ago, a CJR report found that, “while many journalists’ decisions are made with readers in mind,” those journalists tend to picture the consumers of their work as “unfocused, imagined abstractions, built on long-held assumptions, newsroom folklore, and imperfect inference.”

At some outlets, the old presumptions may still hold.

But there are a great number of journalists today whose audience engagement is dynamic, responsive, and effective at delivering information where it ought to go.

DIRECT MESSAGING SERVICES

In the evening, Nigel Mugamu, a journalist in Zimbabwe, uses WhatsApp to send out an “e-paper” of the day’s news. Through his news organization, 263Chat (a reference to the country’s calling code), Mugamu aims to foster progressive civic dialogue and, as he told Jamlab, a journalism project focused

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S avannah

J acobson 3 4

on innovation in African media, to address “the thirst for news and knowledge among low income earners who can’t afford buying newspapers on a daily basis.”

In New York, Documented uses WhatsApp to keep Spanish-speaking subscribers informed about the latest immigration news. In Detroit, Outlier Media invites residents to text “Detroit” to 73224 for updates about housing and, recently, COVID-19.

These modes of communication remind us that, at its core, reporting serves to inform the public—and there may be no better direct line to readers than sending a few sentences by phone.

INTERNET FORUMS

After only a couple of years, the Reddit account of the Arizona Republic has grown so popular that, by the platform’s own measure of success, it has received 105,700 “karma points.” Angel Mendoza, whose attentive moderation made the account buzz, reeled in commenters by leading discussions in various Arizona-related subreddits. Fluent in the Reddit tone (inquisitive, jocular) and conversation style (Redditors don’t want quick links, they want community), Mendoza learned “to use Reddit as a way to keep stories alive.”

In China, investigative journalists have embraced Weibo, a microblogging platform similar to Twitter that attracts more than 520 million active monthly users. In a report for Oxford University’s Reuters Institute, the journalist Jiao Bei has argued that, even in China’s repressive media environment, Weibo is liberating: “Perhaps this really is a kind of democratization,” she wrote, “democratization with Chinese characteristics.”

STREAMING

“It’s real, folks. And guess what? Guess what? It is actually, actually real.” So began a livestream from WGBH, one of Boston’s public radio stations, during a virtual “escape room” on Twitch. Last year, WGBH hosted a series of Twitch streams about outer space, featuring interviews with an astronaut, a space architect, and engineers, plus a live two-part spacethemed “escape room” experience—all part of a broader effort to engage young audiences. At least one commenter was impressed: “They finally made it to prime time lol.”

In less family-friendly news, Vice’s food vertical, Munchies, joined OnlyFans, a subscription and pay-per-view platform commonly used by sex workers. (The New York Times has called OnlyFans the “paywall of porn.”) Munchies videos are mostly close-up cooking shots. (Get it? Food porn.) “There’s an intimacy, whether doing something risqué or not,” Clifford Gulibert, the executive producer of

digital video for Vice, told Axios. “A platform like this is about ‘deep’ interaction.”

INSTAGRAM AND TIKTOK

Adults have called the Washington Post’s TikTok account a “must follow”; teens have deemed it “pretty funny.” Neither demographic seems wrong. The account has accumulated some 913,100 followers and 36.7 million likes, with videos that occasionally address the news of the day but more often embrace the absurdity that the platform enables. On the TikTok for NPR’s economics show Planet Money, explanatory videos can become fully surreal: recently, the account posted a video called “Werner Herzog presents the Erie Canal.”

Where TikTok plays for antics, Instagram goes for aesthetics. Mona Chalabi, a data editor for The Guardian, creates extraordinary infographics that distill complex subjects—eviction rates, federal taxes, Palestinian history—into drawings. Illustrations like Chalabi’s have become so widespread on social media that some newsrooms are even hiring people to produce them. And if a news outlet’s blaring Instagram bulletin comes out looking less than artsy (see: CNN), the posts are still eminently shareable.

PHYSICAL SPACE

In 2012, Superstorm Sandy tore through the New York area, stranding waterfront communities like Red Hook, in Brooklyn, without power or clean water. A local community center quickly established itself as a hub for relief; residents could find information about available heat, food distribution sites, and how to apply for federal assistance.

Over time, the center worked with community groups to launch the Red Hook Hub, which now maintains digital and physical bulletin boards that let readers know about community board meetings, job opportunities, housing lottery applications, and fresh-vegetable distribution.

In Chicago, City Bureau, a local news nonprofit, organizes an event series known as the Public Newsroom, hosted by community members who address everything from banking to sexual assault.

Scalawag magazine—with staff based in Atlanta, Durham, and Birmingham—throws “Jubilees” across the Southeast. The events feature authors and stories from recent issues, then pass the mic to local poets, artists, and musicians. When COVID hit, the Jubilees went online. “After a hardfought unprecedented year,” Scalawag tweeted, “we all need a little tradition and Southern hospitality to ground us.” cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 3 5

Showing Up The revelatory art of Minerva Cuevas

by Jack Herrera Photo courtesy Art21 Inc.

A

few years ago I was reporting in Mexico, traveling from shelter to shelter along the United States border. In a refuge in central Tijuana, a group of children played on a dusty concrete porch. The shelter, built for asylum seekers coming from the southern part of the country and Central America, had been running at almost twice its capacity; a single room hosted some three dozen people. At the door, I interviewed a father from Nicaragua who said he’d spent close to a year there with his daughter. As he spoke, my eyes wandered to the children. It was afternoon; leaves from a laurel tree fell into a long shadow and a breeze carried the clean, cool smell of the Pacific Ocean. Almost all of

the children had chicken pox. After the man finished, I thanked him; went home, to San Francisco; submitted my article, in English, to an American publication; and felt a pang of dissatisfaction with what I had not been able to convey in my dispatch.

There were some things, it seemed, that one could not carry out of a place, like the force that puts people in motion to migrate over barbed wire and between iron beams, through illness and discomfort. Then I went to the Museum of Modern Art in downtown San Francisco and, for the first time, stood in a room with the work of Minerva Cuevas.

The piece was called Río Bravo Crossing. On a wall, a projector showed images of a woman standing in a large river. As gray-blue water lapped

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 3 6

at the shore, the woman moved across the length of the river, painting a white streak across stones in the current. She left behind a single line, broken up by the water, that appeared to stretch out over the rocks and, eventually, the length of the river. The paint appeared so natural in the desert landscape that it could have been a geological occurrence.

When she reached the far end of the river, the woman—Cuevas—had walked southward from the United States into Mexico and back. Río Bravo is the Mexican term for the Rio Grande, the river that marks the border.

Cuevas had brought something into the gallery that I did not think was possible to translocate.

Her installation came with historical documents and other ephemera: antique maps; a thick glass jug filled with water from the river; stones from the bank; a compass; wildflowers preserved under

Coexisting with the awful immensity of the border— with its hundred-andseventy-five-year history of violence and bloodshed— was an undeniable, inexorable beauty. glass hemispheres; and a bucket of the white paint that she used for her line. As I walked through the exhibit, I thought of a Salvadoran father named Óscar Martínez and his daughter Valeria, who earlier that year had drowned in the Río Bravo, arm in arm, as they sought refuge in the United States.

And yet coexisting with the awful immensity of the border—with its hundred-and-seventy-five-year history of violence and bloodshed—was an undeniable, inexorable beauty.

Río Bravo is also the name that was used for the Rio Grande long ago, back when the border was hundreds of miles north. Cuevas had learned this—and developed the idea for the piece—over a period of deep research: she’d spent time at the border, studying migration and the desert; she’d ingratiated herself with locals. “When I arrived on the border, in 2010, I was surprised to see that not all the area was marked—there were kilometers and kilometers without any signs saying that this was the limit,” she told me recently. “You were free from the political imaginary, but, at the same time, you bring it with you. The people who were with me understood that the river was a borderline, and that made it dangerous.”

If my work, as a journalist, often felt like a process of extraction (identifying a story, mining its details, leaving with them), Cuevas’s work felt like a process of distillation, bringing herself to a place of compassion and understanding in order to create. I asked if she had any relationship to reporting. “My research is a responsibility,” she replied. “It’s very right that you compare it to what a journalist does, because what I do involves talking to people I trust about context and issues, and often I make contact with local activists.” But she pointed out an important difference: “I don’t only work through subjects or themes,” she said. “I work through a very close personal connection to something, or some place.”

The result, in the case of Río Bravo Crossing, could also be found in reality—that is, on the land and river that a person can walk on and over was the line, the work of art.

Since the nineties, Cuevas, born in Mexico City in 1975, has earned international renown for her sculptures, video pieces, and “social interventions” that confront starvation, ecological decline, neoliberalism, and borders. Cuevas often works on a grand scale: She’s produced provocative billboards that satirize brands, painted bumper cars with the logos of oil corporations, and hijacked an amusement park ride. She founded a mock corporation, through which she engaged in a campaign of “culture hacking.” In 2007, working on a project in Finland, she created a cellphone network based around autonomous transmissions. The project traveled to Germany, and eventually to Oaxaca, where it led to the establishment of the first phone lines in a small Indigenous village.

A reporter’s place is often on the periphery, producing a story for people who may be distant from its subjects. As I continued to study Cuevas’s work, I found that it has much in common with the process and purpose of journalism but that her way of doing things pursues, above all, intimacy. For Río Bravo Crossing, she went so far as to stand in the river at its deepest point, feeling its weight on her body.

“I start my research from a place of doubt, a recognition of my ignorance,” she told me. “I know that I need to enter with a good will to understand others in that context, and that’s why it’s so important for me to exchange with local people.” When it comes time to produce art, her choices of form are boundless, immersive. She meets her audience where they are, wherever that may be.

I

n her late teens, Cuevas started carrying a deer skull onto the Mexico City subway. It was the early nineties; she’d go at rush hour, during what Carlos Monsiváis, the Mexican writer, has described as “a critical battle for oxygen and millimeters.” Cuevas had no awareness of critical theory, no project or campaign in mind; she did

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 3 7

not consider what she was doing to be art at all.

“Did you take pictures of it? Or look for people’s reactions?” I wondered, when she told me. “No,” Cuevas replied. She laughed. “I did this just for me.” The deer skull had come from her grandfather, who lived in a rural village of Mixtec people in the verdant mountains of Oaxaca; it represented a bucolic contrast to the crush of Mexico City. “I wanted to display this object in different situations, and so I cruised around the city with it,” she said. One day, as workers tore up pavement to lay a telephone cable, she placed the skull in the dust and stood, staring at it. The scene thrilled her: an impossible archaeological site.

Cuevas’s parents—both primary school teachers who had moved to the city for work—liked to drive her and her sister out to Oaxaca to see their grandfather. She remembers the green hills and valleys, the

Cuevas did not consider the MVC a charity; the “interventions” provided aid out of a desire to create art that reflected on—and lived within— the mass consumerism spreading through Mexico’s bloodstream. rivers, the viny plants, the sounds of spoken Mixtec.

The trips were “like camping,” she said: the town did not have phone lines or radio; electricity was still making its way to the pueblo. From an early age, on those breaks from the city, Cuevas observed vast disparities of development and class. She was also awakened to the instability—the artifice, really—of “Mexican” identity; in the Indigenous regions of Oaxaca, people referred to Mexico as a foreign state.

“To them, ‘Mexico’ means Mexico City,” she said.

Back at home, the subway—the Sistema de Transporte Colectivo (STC)—provided its own sort of education in social dynamics. (There was “a humanity to the squeeze,” in Monsiváis’s words.)

Cuevas loved to people-watch. After high school, she entered the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (the National School of Plastic Arts, or ENAP, now known as the Facultad de Arte y Diseño), part of Mexico City’s prestigious national university, and she had plenty of opportunities to ride and observe: in those years, she lived in the opposite corner of the city from ENAP. She had a lengthy commute.

By her third year, however, Cuevas was ready to move on. She’d grown alienated from the institution, which, with its focus on technical practice, felt frustratingly removed from the politics of the moment. Mexico City has long been a world capital for art—picture the detailed populist murals and the surrealist films of the early twentieth century—but things were changing: Mexico’s most controversial modern president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had just left office, having auctioned off the country in a neoliberal revolution. The nation’s telephone lines were sold to his friend Carlos Slim, kicking off the empire of one of the richest men on earth.

The country’s agrarian communal land holdings, the pride of the Mexican Revolution, were privatized. By 1994, Mexico had signed on to NAFTA, the monumental free trade agreement; multinational corporations were sweeping in. At ENAP, Cuevas was offered no theoretical means by which to address these changes, nor was there instruction in experimental forms like video or performance art. “It was a very traditional education and bureaucratic,” Cuevas said. With less than a year to go, she dropped out.

Free of school, Cuevas was ready to live the untethered existence of an artist in a city undergoing upheaval. She found odd jobs—including graphic design, for both commercial clients and bootleggers—and began conceiving of a defiant project, something that would satisfy her urge to create “aesthetic conditions,” as she put it, and connect her to the transformations taking place in Mexico. She settled on a decidedly ironic scheme: in 1998, she founded a company, which she called Mejor Vida Corp. (Better Life Corporation), to spoof the multinationals upending her country.

To establish the headquarters of MVC, as it became known, Cuevas rented out office space in the Torre Latinoamericana, an iconic structure of glass and steel that was often featured on Mexico City postcards, yet poorly maintained. The building housed an eclectic combination of businesses— from international firms to cheap jewelers—and a public housing office. The most popular attraction,

by Cuevas’s estimation, was a collective of shamans from Colombia who welcomed hundreds of visitors a day for cleansings and healings. Rent was cheap, and she managed to pay it in part by moving in, a squatter in her own office. Guards harassed her, knocking on the door late at night as she was trying to sleep, but she stayed for four years.

From the Latinoamericana, Cuevas unveiled a line of MVC “products,” all distributed for free, all forms of civil disobedience: There were barcode stickers, which she brought to supermarkets and placed on random items that, when scanned, would result in lower prices for shoppers. (Cheese, nuts, a package of zucchini became cheaper.) She designed

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 3 8

ersatz student ID cards that provided discounted entry at museums and movie theaters. Cuevas found “customers” by meeting people outside the office of public housing assistance, her neighbor in the tower.

Word got around; soon, the same guards who had knocked on her door at night were arriving during the day, with their families, requesting IDs. Cuevas happily printed them cards.

The MVC also took her back into the STC, where she cleaned subway stations (a photo from the time shows Cuevas, in a white blouse, pushing a mop at rush hour) and distributed free tickets to passengers.

The tickets received mixed reactions from people underground: sometimes, they’d refuse to take one, or they’d flash a confused glance, accept, then hurry off. In these interactions, Cuevas never identified herself as an artist, or as anything else. “Sometimes it’s better to camouflage,” she said. “To just be there.” She felt it was a fair exchange: a free ride for a look of surprise and wonder. “For me, generating these first interventions in Mexico City represented a kind of strategy,” she explained. “And it started from my desire to merge my interest in art formation with my interest in social change.” Though the MVC functioned as a nonprofit corporation, Cuevas did not consider it a charity; the “interventions” provided aid, yes, but out of a desire to create art that reflected on—and lived within—the mass consumerism spreading through Mexico’s bloodstream.

Though she’d left school, Cuevas had remained part of the Mexico City art scene, and the MVC began to attract attention. “It really expanded my idea of art,” José Kuri, a prominent Mexican gallerist, told me recently. “What I liked about it was how she was infiltrating into these preexisting systems.” Even if her “customers” didn’t know what was going on, “it would ignite a little spark inside them.” Kuri received an MVC student ID, which he used for years. “Her work dealt with this moment of consciousness that suddenly arose,” he said, “that new awareness of how civil society can create something, or change something.”

As acclaim for the MVC spread, Cuevas set up the project in the form of a gallery exhibition using photographs, ID cards, and grocery items with barcodes; it was shown in Mexico City and Seattle, as well as in Germany and France. Her profile as an artist grew; she was invited to residencies everywhere from the United States to Lebanon. But praise from critics came with a burden with which she has since lived uncomfortably: the art world called her work “activism” and Cuevas “an activist artist.”

F

or more than twenty years, Cuevas has lived in the historic center of Mexico City: “It’s probably the border between the touristic side and the dark side,” as she described it to me, “the neighborhood with the worst reputation.” Her home is a block away from the former printing house of

Ricardo Flores Magón, a Mexican anarchist who has been a major influence on her work. Two streets in another direction are the Diego Rivera murals that adorn the Ministry of Public Education’s headquarters. Also nearby is the Tepito market, a commercial area that has existed since before Spaniards arrived in Mexico. Cuevas is placed, too, at the center of modern resistance in Mexico City: all around her, protesters march through the streets.

To weather the coronavirus pandemic, Cuevas traveled to be close to her sister, renting a small Airbnb on Baja California Sur. For the past year, she’s worked with limited art supplies, mainly her computer; her only domestic companions have been her cat, Sid Vicious, and her dog, Chia. She has taken a break from hosting annual pozole cookouts.

Now forty-six, Cuevas is at once petite, shy, and soft-spoken while possessing, as her friend Francis McKee, an Irish writer and curator, put it to me, the power of a “nuclear bomb.” People who know her well call her determined, hardcore. She is a voracious viewer of films and an avid reader, in possession of an impressive collection of comic books. She also remains enamored of Mexico City. “Minerva reads the city like a person reads a book,” McKee said. “She just looks at the city and goes, ‘This happened here, this happened there; that’s why this is important, and this is how they connect.’ ” In my conversations with Cuevas, I had the feeling of talking with a professor: confident in her knowledge, she spoke slowly and precisely, whether in English or in Spanish. She tended to be restrained in her manner, though she would bristle at one thing: being labeled an “activist.” The term stung, she said, because it denied her position as an artist. “I separate activism from art production,” Cuevas explained. “For me, there is a very clear separation between both things. With activism, you can have a very specific goal, and it’s measurable.

But with art, part of the freedom is that you cannot measure the result.”

That distinction, in practice, is subtle. “What she’s really doing is revealing a system at work,” McKee said, “revealing the infrastructure underneath.” As the Mejor Vida Corp. grew, it had an opening in Paris, at the Chantal Crousel; Cuevas expanded upon her social interventions by stipulating that the gallery provide unemployed Parisians with letters of recommendation for jobs nearby. At exhibitions in other cities, she negotiated identical agreements; when Hartware MedienKunstVerein, in Dortmund, Germany, hosted the MVC, the gallery promoted the exhibit with a question: ARBEITSLOS? IHRE ZUKUNFT GEHT UNS AN; WIR VERTRAUEN IHNEN VERTRAUEN SIE UNS. (Unemployed? Your future matters to us; we trust you, you trust us.)

Through the aughts, Cuevas continued traveling around the world, seeking out opportunities for socially conscious research. She visited favelas in

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 3 9

Brazil; met with Zapatistas—Indigenous revolutionaries—in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas; and ventured into the Hambach Forest, in Germany, where environmentalists lived in tree houses, fighting to prevent their ancient woods from being consumed by an open-pit coal mine. With activists, Cuevas always maintained a sense of reportorial distance, and yet—perhaps precisely because she does not conduct formal interviews—she had a remarkable ability to elicit honesty, information, and good stories. “Especially as an artist, I never have to declare myself the way journalists do,” she told me. “It makes it more natural for people to welcome you.” She’d present no particular agenda, only a desire to develop a mental cartography of global resistance against capitalism, consumerism, and ecological devastation.

Sometimes, art emerged. In New York, she saw posters for a campaign discouraging riders from sleeping on the subway: AWAKE IS AWARE. The signs inspired a new MVC product, “safety pills”— caffeine tablets that Cuevas placed in dime bags and distributed to commuters in the MTA and STC. In Slovenia, she encountered activists protesting the country’s entry into NATO; she created a series of more than a hundred billboards, which drivers would see on their commute: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET TO NATO? The work was classic Cuevas: both confusing and familiar. Rather than present artistic ideas in the expected places, her approach was to disorient people in their own context, disrupting the normal flow and sense of things. She asked rushed commuters to think about an area of concern (overtime, NATO) and about where they were—on a road, trying to get to work or home, bombarded by capitalist messaging.

Cuevas’s allergy to the “activist” label felt familiar to me as a journalist; in my world, it’s a word typically leveled as an insult, a way of saying that one has failed at the job—which, at its simplest, is to tell the whole truth. But to the extent that a reporter would be hindered by fear of aligning too closely with activists, Cuevas sees in that anxiety an artificial, and deleterious, barrier. “I don’t think we should socially classify people who are caring about things socially, or caring for communities, as activists,” she said.

“It should be a more general understanding of our ethical relation with the world.”

O

ne of Cuevas’s most important works took an assertive social stand, with the investigative enterprise of the best accountability journalism: through her “Del Montte—Bananeras” campaign, she cast light on the unrighteous history of Del Monte, the produce company, in Guatemala. For more than a century, multinational corporations have waged a bloody assault on Latin America, characterized by corruption scandals,

labor abuse, and land dispossession. United Fruit is the most notorious—a 1928 massacre of its workers in Colombia was immortalized in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and, eventually, the company’s name became so tainted that it rebranded, to Chiquita Brands International.

In the seventies, United Fruit sold off all its banana plantations in Guatemala to Del Monte, based in Walnut Creek, California; at the time, it was reported that the deal was secured with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to a businessman with political clout, and it was widely believed that he shared his “fee” with Guatemala’s president. The farms remained the same, the managers had remained the same, only now the bananas bore a new sticker.

Unlike United Fruit, Del Monte kept a low profile, even as it carried on the same dreadful labor practices. That continued through 2001, when a group of former Del Monte employees from Guatemala sought asylum in the United States and filed a lawsuit against the company. The workers, seven union leaders, claimed that they were held in their office at gunpoint by armed security forces working in coordination with Del Monte executives. With a strike underway, they said in court documents, they were kept for eight hours and told they had to announce an end to the protest and resign from their union leadership positions. The case, Aldana v.

Fresh Del Monte Produce, dragged on for more than a decade as executives fought to have it dismissed.

In the end, judges decided that the workers did not have standing to bring a suit against Del Monte in the United States. The proceedings received little coverage from American outlets.

With the case tied up in court, a group of Cuevas’s friends traveled to Guatemala as human rights observers, to investigate land and natural resources being sold out from under local and Indigenous people to Del Monte. As part of a campaign to publicize the company’s operations, they asked Cuevas if she would create a logo. What she produced was simple—a faithful rendering of the Del Monte trademark symbol, except for an added t, to make it “Del Montte.” It was a subtle change that proved deeply affecting for Guatemalans: In 1982, Efraín Ríos Montt, a right-wing military general, had risen to power in a coup d’état. During his short reign (and with support from the United States) Montt oversaw a brutal genocide against the country’s rural Indigenous population. What Cuevas had done was at once surgical and immense; a single letter connected Del Monte to some of the worst horrors in the history of the continent.

Soon, Cuevas began a series that expanded on the idea, what became the “Del Montte Campaign”—billboards and products hijacking Del Monte’s branding to tell an alternative story.

Following her standard process, she conducted

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 4 0

research, pulling archival documents on Del Monte’s history in the country. Eventually, she came across a treasure: a 1976 edition of the Latin America and Empire Report, an independent journal from the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), that included a series of case studies on fruit companies’ exploitation in the region. One article, “Guatemala: Del Monte’s ‘Banana Republic,’ ” was particularly sharp. “It still operates as though it were above the law,” the report read, “it is allied with the most reactionary elements within the Guatemalan bourgeoisie; it manipulates its workers to avoid labor unrest; and along with the other banana companies, it has tried to torpedo efforts by Central American governments to gain greater control over their natural resources.”

Cuevas’s Del Montte campaign sought to bring the company’s legacy of violent subjugation to the places where it had been ignored. Drawing from her work on the MVC, she developed a set of new labels for Del Monte foods that went further than adding a t: a can of tomatoes read PURE MURDER and featured two skulls in the guts of cut tomato; where the product’s weight would normally appear, she wrote, “100 yrs. suffice.” Working with art students and sign painters, she turned the tomato can label into a massive mural.

The Del Montte campaign appeared in galleries around the world. When it reached the Guggenheim in New York, in 2014, the show included more than a hundred cans of tomatoes—a hundred cans of

What Cuevas had done was at once surgical and immense; a single letter connected Del Monte to some of the worst horrors in the history of the continent. pure murder. The effect was journalistic: while few news outlets had covered Del Monte’s labor and land practices (with a feature in The Guardian a notable exception), Cuevas drove attention to the story—in the arts pages, on gallery walls, in grocery aisles. (Del Monte did not respond to my requests for comment.) Once I’d been exposed to Del Montte, I began seeing the label everywhere—in the Central American market where I did most of my shopping at the time; in Safeway and Mollie Stone’s. I found canned Del Monte tomatoes in my pantry; I would have never given them a thought, if not for Cuevas.

T

he conceptual art that Cuevas produces can be ambitious and absurd and is frequently ambitiously absurd. Her work infiltrates and provokes, compelling people to stop, look, and think.

“In all these situations—Del Montte in Guatemala, the billboards in Slovenia—it’s a way to spread the perspective of the people who have been repressed,” she said. Then she added: “The international newspapers don’t pay that much attention to those kinds of cases. Art, in public, becomes a way to reach the public.”

Her observation conveyed a sense of frustration—with what goes unreported, and also with what doesn’t land where it needs to make impact.

Reporters tend to feel the same way, whenever they cover an important story that seems to gain no traction. Confined to exposition and reflection, while competing against misinformation and distraction, we too often fail to reach people. Cuevas has worked through this problem as an artist by breaking form and convention; the physical presence of her projects eludes the pitfall of so much news coverage: unlike dour headlines, her interventions are impossible to ignore. I began to wonder what it would be like if service journalism involved direct impact on people’s lives—even if they didn’t know who had done it or why, exactly. The result, I imagined, might look something like a Cuevas project: caffeine pills taped to an MTA sign to highlight the exhaustion of the overworked and underpaid; an op-ed in situ.

Cuevas admires journalists who experiment.

When we spoke, she cited Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who pushed vital national security information into the public eye. “I don’t think it’s about him,” Cuevas said. “It’s more about a totally different culture for journalism and the way it’s released.” And, she continued, WikiLeaks set a precedent for how alternative sources are used.

“Beyond collecting the data, he worked outside the institutional digital culture—the TV, the newspapers, the magazines, the traditional mediums,” she said. “They are still very much in control of information, and that is power.” And if it was hard to picture Assange, an unscrupulous character reliant on encrypted leaks, as a model of news coverage in the Cuevas style, she also saluted Andalusia Knoll Soloff, an independent multimedia journalist based in Mexico City. Best known for her investigation into the disappearance of forty-three teaching students in the Mexican state of Guerrero—an instance of kidnapping and violence that shook the country— last year Soloff produced Vivos se los llevaron (They Were Taken Alive), a graphic novel about the search for their bodies. “She was very involved, very close to the families,” Cuevas said. “I guess my mode of journalism would be very similar: just going and becoming very familiar with the people, with the community.”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J ack

H errera 4 1

Where the press tends to make complicated truths simple, Cuevas is inclined toward abstraction and uncertainty. “I try to connect with open questions and let the public use their own filters to finish the project,” she told me. “And I think that’s the difference with journalism—if you’re posing as the authority, reporting and evaluating a context, or making moral statements about a situation.” She is interested in challenge and expansion.

Ultimately, what gives her art its impact is where she delivers it. Much of her work has wound up in galleries—she has an exhibition in the upcoming Korean biennial, a mural; and a collection of posters called “Utopista / quiauitl,” which opened in March, in Mexico City. But many, if not most, people who have seen Cuevas’s work do not realize they’ve seen an art piece. There is a cost to that choice, of course, in terms of both money and prestige, but it’s a trade-off that delivers on a key premise of her approach, which is that art—and journalism, too, she believes—should be a means of “articulating resistance.” McKee told me about a piece Cuevas did outside of Warsaw: The area was known for UFO sightings and, playing with conspiracy and spectacle, she invited locals to release hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky. They floated up and eventually out of sight. “People loved that, but many of them had no idea that it was an art project,” McKee said. “They just really enjoyed it.” cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

A le x andria

N eason 4 2

Viewers Like You Public access programming, past and present

by Alexandria Neason Illustration

by Richard A. Chance

L

ast summer, people across the United States flooded out of their homes, which had been converted to quarantine bunkers, and into the streets, risking one crisis in protest of another. It was not the first time that demonstrations against state-sponsored anti-Blackness had consumed national attention, our screens all tuned to the same channel. I found myself straying away from journalistic coverage, however. I preferred, instead, to watch the protests unfold in real time on videos and livestreams—first via Instagram and Twitter, then on Twitch, where surveillance-like footage flowed for hours on end.

As the summer wore on, I found Twitch to be the ideal place to follow the demonstrations. I spent

days watching things happen, or nothing happen at all. I remember seeing a protest in Portland; the camera was hitched up high, on a light pole, I think, or the corner of a tall fence. The lens was pointed down, offering a bird’s-eye view of an intersection, where it captured protesters marching, running, and chanting; there was never any commentary. Unlike videos shot by a reporter, a protester, or a bystander, Twitch footage seemed to hold no specific outlook; some videos came from accounts using pseudonyms, and there could be no way of knowing who had placed the camera. The experience of watching wasn’t quite the same as being there—the fixed position of the shot meant that my line of sight was reduced to whatever fit in the frame, so I couldn’t

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

A le x andria

N eason 4 3

turn to see what was happening, what was coming, what had passed. But it reminded me of a kind of viewing that I hadn’t thought about in a long time: public access television.

The earliest public access broadcasts appeared in the sixties, during that period of protest for Black liberation. In 1967, in response to “the long, hot summer” of unrest, Lyndon Johnson established the Kerner Commission, which determined, among other things, that the press disproportionately favored white perspectives; that year, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act. But the true spirit of public television was forged before the government got involved: “It was programming produced prior to the passage of the 1967 act that better fit a progressive, ‘cutting edge’ description,” as Laura R. Linder wrote in Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox. Erik Barnouw,

Over the decades, an idealistic new genre of television emerged, one that was designed explicitly to serve the interests of a racially diverse public. the historian of American broadcasting, cited an early example: the Public Broadcast Laboratory, a newsmagazine show that debuted in 1967. “Mindful of its function as an alternative voice, it dipped into the work of fringe theaters, cabarets, and underground films, and inevitably reflected the angry subculture,” Barnouw wrote in The Image Empire.

“The thrust of the message was anti-war, anti-racist, anti-establishment; the techniques, sometimes drawing on the absurdist theater, were strange and seemed outrageous to many television viewers.”

At the time, a new wave of Black media was proliferating. Black Journal and Say Brother, both newsmagazine programs, debuted in 1968; when the camera was positioned by Black people, for Black people, it allowed for discussion and examination of one’s own world without the interpretations of others. “Hard reports were gorgeously, patiently rendered, frequently trailing off onto a sensual plane,” as Doreen St. Félix wrote last summer for The New Yorker, when Black Journal became available to stream. William Greaves, the filmmaker and host of Black Journal, wrote for the New York Times, “For the Black producer, television will be just another word for jazz.”

The Public Broadcasting Service, funded by “viewers like you,” was established in 1969. Over the decades, an idealistic new genre of television emerged, one that was designed explicitly to serve the interests of a racially diverse public. Its shows were a vast array—some produced by local talking heads expounding on otherwise ignored subjects of community interest; some filmed inside halls of government, sans host, allowing Americans to witness their elected representatives at work. The result was by turns strange, unwatchable, and entertaining. Occasionally, it was momentous.

O

n the day C-SPAN debuted, in March 1979, three million American households tuned in to watch the House of Representatives in session.

The broadcast began with the camera fixed on a door.

A white-haired Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill—Democrat from Boston, then the Speaker of the House— emerged, eyeglasses in hand; he sauntered toward his podium and called the room to attention with the wrong end of a gavel: a tiny slip of impatience on display. The shot was tight, the picture grainy. James David Ford, the House chaplain, began the session with a short prayer. Al Gore, then a congressman from Tennessee, spoke next. “Television will change this institution, Mr. Speaker, just as it has changed the executive branch,” he said. “But the good will far outweigh the bad. From this day forward every member of this body must ask himself or herself, How many Americans are listening to the debates which are made?” It’s not exactly inspiring, from today’s vantage—all suits and neckties and formalities, background chatter and important people whose names you don’t remember, moving about. But the broadcast lifted a veil, granting access not merely to reporting or commentary about politics; viewers could see the enactment of it in real time.

As public broadcasting grew, this kind of footage became available across the country; local municipalities invited the general public to tune in to what had always been public meetings. The footage was not always as lively as, say, the BBC’s Question Time— the great British public show, on which prominent figures, including politicians, are asked questions by a studio audience of constituents. (“What do you think of what they’ve said?” the host asked a member of the early-years crowd. “Do you think they’re a lot of smug fuddy-duddies?”) Still, American public access television had an appealingly quirky sensibility, characterized by an earnest rejection of “news value.” (That is also what has made public broadcasting such a ripe target for pop culture ridicule, as on Saturday Night Live parodies like “Bronx Beat,” in which punditry is refracted through the characters of two moms complaining.)

Crucially, public access television seemed to strip away the veneer of commercial TV, which almost

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

A le x andria

N eason 4 4

always trained the camera on a tiny sliver of people: the white men who overwhelmingly served as producers, directors, and on-camera hosts. George C. Stoney, known as the father of public access television and a cofounder of NYU’s Alternative Media Center, advocated different priorities; through the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers, for instance, he lobbied for cable providers to share the broadcast spectrum with the general public, with the goal of using television for community building.

In Public Access Television, Linder describes Stoney’s sensibility through a particular broadcast: a New York Times story had described Black and Latinx people in conflict; after a fight, the Alternative Media Center sent over an employee with a camera who, instead of interviewing police about what had happened, passed a microphone around to those who had been there. They reported what they knew, correcting

Media that is truly for the public must be accessible to people in disparate places and commit itself to the exploration of alternative possibilities. one another on the fly. “When the tape is through you have a feeling,” Stoney said, “not that you have learned exactly what happened the night before, but that you have learned so much about the dynamics of this neighborhood that you know it’s a neighborhood worth keeping.”

By the time I was growing up, in the nineties, public access television had come to represent, in my mind, a kind of unfiltered version of what I usually saw on air. I remember my dad watching C-SPAN, which struck me as radically different from network news, with its strange deadpan vocal intonations and blown-out hair. A lot of the time, nothing of particular interest was captured onscreen. But as I got older, the dawn of the internet allowed public access footage to achieve moments of notoriety that radiated far beyond the intended audience. Take the 2016 video of a town council meeting from a place called (no joke) White Settlement, Texas, that featured a debate on what to do about Browser, a cat who lived at the public library. A couple of council members spoke against keeping Browser around, citing allergies and renovations. But many more spoke in favor, sounding off on the history of cats in libraries; a little boy complained that he’d only gotten to pet Browser once. When, in spite of the

community’s pleas, the council passed a motion evicting Browser, the video went viral. Thousands of letters from all over poured in to the mayor’s office, petitions circulated, and the council was forced to reverse its decision—during a session broadcast live on a streaming app called Periscope.

E

ventually, the ubiquity of phone-cameras transformed our relationship to “public access” viewing. Those who have been historically shut out of politics—and of the political press—grew dissatisfied with watching news media that centered elected officials as the primary drivers of change. This discontented audience observed that progress, instead, has been catalyzed in the streets, in communities, through daily organizing; by the time a bill is being debated on the floor of the House, the news cameras are too late to capture the full arc of the story. By contrast, the dispatches streamed on Twitter, Instagram, and, especially, Twitch move the camera away from political officeholders and turn the focus on the people. The evolutionary offspring of public access broadcasting, this footage reflects a value system based on public empowerment—and the ways in which commercial news media fail to meet the needs of their audiences.

News outlets, which have traditionally directed much of their attention toward the halls of power, now find themselves with stiff competition; streaming gives viewers more directions in which to look. With endless images and videos at our constant disposal, people are entirely able to form their own understanding of events—and of the narrative choices involved in crafting newspaper articles and cable network broadcasts. If journalists deal in the currency of truth, and set limits as to who can obtain it, members of the public now have more resources with which to collect the facts for themselves, and they have found that the “truth” depends on who is doing the seeing, the asking, and the answering—and where.

Placing the camera in the hands of constituents delivers a new dimension of public access to perspectives that would otherwise remain unseen.

Last year, for example, in Louisiana, the school board of East Baton Rouge Parish met to discuss the renaming of a public school honoring Robert E. Lee; Gary Chambers Jr., a local activist, came to speak in support of the renaming. While he waited for the public comment period to begin, he noticed Connie Bernard, a school board member, shopping for jackets on her laptop. He pulled out his phone, took a photo, and, when it was his turn to speak, held up the evidence to show the rest of the room.

“I had intended to get up here and talk about how racist Robert E. Lee was, but I’m going to talk about you, Connie,” he said, his tone thick with righteous indignation. “Sitting over there shopping while

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

A le x andria

N eason 4 5

we’re talking about Robert E. Lee. This is a picture of you shopping while we’re talking about racism and history in this country.” Someone else at the meeting recorded the exchange, which was soon uploaded to the internet, where it made witnesses of us all: to the shopping; to Chambers’s frustration; to Bernard’s indifference, as she is seen walking out. The video quickly inspired a news cycle, a story told from the position of a source, inviting viewers not only to decide for themselves, but to feel for themselves, too.

Perhaps it’s impossible to ever get the whole picture of a story—how a narrative forms depends so heavily on the lens through which any one of us sees the world, our vantage points dictated at least partly by structures we had no hand in creating, by biases of which we are often unaware. To an extent, the camera of any individual is fixed in its position.

Journalists inevitably come up against this challenge.

But what if our goal, as producers of news coverage, wasn’t to revert, again and again, to the same angles, and instead to be coconspirators with those out of frame, to imagine a better future? What if our aim were not, actually, to answer questions, but to enable and inspire others to ask them—to place the camera somewhere new? Media that is truly for the public must be accessible to people in different, disparate places and commit itself to the exploration of alternative possibilities. It must investigate and explain, invite audiences in—and, when appropriate, it must step back. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

Chapter 3: How

Rethinking the means of production

Much of what makes journalism what it is, really, is how it’s made: the ethical standards, labor arrangements, reportorial methods, packaging, and distribution.

Contracts must be agreed upon, terms with sources set. There are rules of engagement for filling one’s notebook, but tricky ethical questions inevitably arise; how a story comes together is, in many ways, as important as what it contains. So, too, is how journalism is presented: while one news item flashes in a pop-up alert, another may get lost—absorbed into the endless stream of digital “content” and rendered inaccessible to those who need to see it most. —The editors

46

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 4 7

On the Edge The ethics of going undercover

by Joshua Hunt Illustrations by Tim McDonagh

A

few years ago, on a July afternoon in Shanghai, I descended an escalator at the Science and Technology Museum, headed to a vast underground market, and switched on my iPhone’s video recorder. I placed the phone in the breast pocket of my shirt, lens facing out, so that the camera captured the world as it appeared before me: one long, brightly lit hallway after another, lined with shops selling everything from NBA jerseys to iPads—dozens of storefronts stocked with thousands of products, all of them counterfeit. Knockoffs have been estimated to be a four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry in China and Hong Kong. I was shadowing a pair of agents from Pinkerton, America’s oldest private

detective agency, which helped pioneer the field of “brand protection.”

Azim Uribe, a thirty-year-old American Pinkerton agent, was working on behalf of some corporate clients to trace and disrupt the illicit supply chains fueling Shanghai’s black market. Uribe had told me that he was relying on a network of informants, often criminals themselves, who sold him information on rival operations. I was relying on Uribe. He and his boss, Angelo Krizmanic, an Australian, had invited me to tag along with them for the day. “We’re going to meet a guy named Kevin,” Krizmanic said as we entered the mall. “He thinks Azim and I are just a couple of expat businessmen, so be careful not to call us by our real names.”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 4 8

Like the counterfeit items themselves, the shops that sell them tend to look a bit off: an overabundance of stock, signage with silly fonts and strange punctuation. Kevin’s store looked like the real thing, though, with handsome wood-paneled walls and tasteful lighting. When the Pinkerton guys and I arrived, he greeted us with a smile. The “Gucci” and “Louis Vuitton” handbags he was hawking looked pretty nice to me. “Shit,” Krizmanic said. He told Kevin to stop messing around and show us the good stuff. This, I learned, was standard practice when shopping at fake markets, which keep their lowestquality merchandise out front to foist on tourists.

It was also a ploy to find Kevin’s secret storeroom, which could lead to any number of illicit warehouses and factories after just a few days of surveillance.

Instead of taking the bait, Kevin surprised us by revealing some better merchandise closer at hand:

It’s easy to question your judgment—and whether your ethical standards are truly the consensus view. with the click of a button and a light push, a section of the wall gave way to reveal a hidden room filled with more knockoff bags. The four of us piled in.

When the door closed behind us, Kevin activated a magnetic lock. I checked my phone, found there was no reception, and realized we couldn’t leave until Kevin let us out. Uribe poked around, trying to catch a glimpse of something; Krizmanic asked to see some bags in different colors and sizes. Kevin made vague reference to having bribed police: “I pay every month, so no trouble.” I made nervous small talk.

Feeling claustrophobic, I considered the stakes.

Though the Pinkerton agents had adopted false identities, the rules of my profession demanded that I use my real name. I’d agreed to surreptitiousness—I could pass as just one of the guys—but I’d stipulated that if Kevin confronted me, I’d be honest with him about what I was doing there. If he’d paid the police well enough, the consequences of my getting found out could include deportation or other legal trouble; I might be asked for a bribe. My phone was still filming; I hoped Kevin wouldn’t notice.

It was hard to know whether Uribe and Krizmanic would stick to our agreement under unforeseen circumstances—or, for that matter, if I would. In such moments, when professional diligence must be weighed against personal safety, it’s easy to question your judgment and whether your ethical standards are truly the consensus view. I had graduated from journalism school only a couple years earlier and

then taken an overseas posting at Reuters, where restraint and rigor are codified as “trust principles.”

But traditional newsrooms were disappearing, and my classmates had taken divergent paths: Many had gone to upstart operations like Vice, where transgressive provocation was the norm. Others entered the world of podcasting, where even the New York Times has found it challenging to maintain consistent editorial standards. Some filtered onto the production staffs of documentaries produced for Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, which have tremendous appetites for true-crime stories and, frequently, murky reportorial ethics. A few joined the ranks of The Daily Show and its diaspora (Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Wyatt Cenac), which have made fake news a viable career option for real journalists. The latest hit of the not-quite-documentary genre, How To with John Wilson, a combination of vérité filmmaking and personal narration, conducts oddball investigations of the sort familiar to any journalism student with access to no one important and a deadline looming.

Trapped in Kevin’s closet of counterfeits, wondering if I’d wind up in a Chinese jail cell, it occurred to me that the glories of skirting ethical rules while undercover have been many—outnumbered, perhaps, only by the tragedies of punctilious journalism’s eroding impact. And I thought the same again last year, when I watched Sacha Baron Cohen’s turn in the Borat sequel, which managed the novel trick of producing news without producing journalism: Cohen engages in a kind of undercover project of his own, engineering real-world headlines by luring Rudy Giuliani into a compromising position, a hand down his trousers in a hotel room alongside a young female interviewer. The Borat footage was played, over and over, by reputable outlets.

It struck me as strange that, for all the constraints journalists put on ourselves as we go about our work, news organizations are evidently willing to amplify salacious, genre-bending stunts. Press institutions are struggling now more than ever, and it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about the rules of reporting we’ve inherited while the world around us changes. The ethical rules we’ve got, it seems, can only take a story so far.

B

efore I became a journalist, my sense of how reporters ought to behave was shaped largely by the work of Ted Conover, the author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. To research it, Conover spent nearly a year as a corrections officer, which provided him an unprecedented look at the toll of prison life on the incarcerated and their jailers. When applying for the job, he used his real name and employment history; throughout his time at Sing Sing, he told no lies. “It colors how you read the story if the reporter was actively deceiving a

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 4 9

subject,” Conover told me recently. “I think the kind of reader I want is going to ask herself, ‘Well, was it worth fooling that person or deceiving them in order to elicit the greater truth you were after?’ ” The tension between small deceits and great truths in undercover journalism dates back to a classic of the genre: For her 1887 exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, Nellie Bly deprived herself of sleep to feign symptoms that got her committed to a women’s lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), in New York’s East River. Once there, she experienced firsthand the abuse and neglect that patients had been forced to endure; that October, she shared what she’d learned with readers of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. It was a sensational stunt and a tremendous public service, prompting much-needed change to mental-health care and giving powerful figures a new kind of investigative

If the resulting story is big enough, and the public service substantial enough, readers will forgive dubious methods. reporter to fear. It also established a standard with which undercover reporters have grappled ever since: Bly showed that, if the resulting story is big enough, and the public service substantial enough, readers will forgive dubious methods.

Many followed in her path, with greater or lesser degrees of nobility. Starting in 1965, Hunter S. Thompson immersed himself, gonzo style, in the ranks of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. While chronicling their violent exploits, he grew so close to his subjects that he wound up defending reprehensible crimes, including rape. As the decade went by, Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and others of the emergent New Journalism movement sought to resolve the ethical conundrums of reporting by making the author central: deception and self-delusion are not abstractions, after all, but universal problems, and by addressing them in full view of the reader, using first-person prose, a writer could build trust alongside moral tension.

In 1977, the Chicago Sun-Times, seeking to investigate allegations of corruption among city employees, went so far as to open a bar, the Mirage Tavern, staffed by journalists and filled with hidden cameras. The result was a twenty-five-part series on Chicago officials engaged in everything from tax fraud to shakedowns, sometimes over health and safety code violations that posed a clear danger

to the public. (The “Mirage” series was nominated for a Pulitzer, though it didn’t win; Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post and a Pulitzer board member, couldn’t get past the unorthodox undercover methods.)

Over time, form surpassed function. By the nineties, programs like NBC’s Dateline blended reality television, tabloid journalism, and crime drama; under its umbrella, MSNBC’s To Catch a Predator used hidden-camera sting operations to bust alleged pedophiles. (Eventually, To Catch a Predator became the subject of its own exposé, when 20/20 investigated the death of an assistant district attorney from Texas who killed himself after the camera crew and police showed up at his house. The show eventually faded from the network’s lineup.)

Starting in 1994, Vice reduced the New Journalism’s procedural transparency to a kind of pantomime.

Video producers, in particular, seemed to relish stunts: they sent Dennis Rodman, the basketball star, to North Korea, where Kim Jong-un, the dictator, became his “friend for life”; staffers bought enough marijuana (for a story) to qualify Vice as a distributor.

At one point, a boss at Vice asked a female journalist to go undercover as a sex worker for a segment on prostitution; she declined.

In that context, journalism became fully inverted as performance: The Daily Show premiered in 1996.

“We did it all just like any newsgathering operation would,” Beth Littleford, one of the original correspondents, told me. Locations had to be scouted, local crew members hired, sources vetted.

“The questions were just a little more ridiculous.”

The Daily Show became a cultural phenomenon, spawning an entire universe of programs that reported information without taking themselves too seriously—and that bent rules their progenitor hadn’t.

Before long, the pileup of infotainment crashed into the arrival of the internet, and the ubiquity of phone-cameras changed the rules of engagement.

Once anyone on the street could document events as they saw them, every moment, everywhere, was a potential story. Casual, surreptitious recording became commonplace among a public largely unaware of professional journalistic ethical code.

Expectations of privacy shifted. “We need to rethink what we mean by ‘undercover’ in an environment in which you have people being taped at fundraisers they think are off the record by people with handheld devices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. That may be why, in Kevin’s Shanghai market, I didn’t hesitate to film without his consent.

Things got even more fluid online, where one could freely observe the virtual lives of others with a level of intimacy that surpassed even that of the

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 5 0

Mirage Tavern. Sometimes what people cop to on social media—in the forums of right-wing extremists, say—reveals more than a journalist might ever hope to see in person. By lurking, or creating a burner account, one can be entirely invisible—an anonymous “user,” able to conduct close surveillance under the cover of normal internet behavior, simply the way my generation has lived since adolescence. For a reporter, the truth is out there to be clicked through, with no press pass required, no sources to coax, no checkpoints for small deceits. As Jamieson told me, “I don’t think we know where the boundaries are right now, even in normalized institutional journalism.”

I

n 2006, Ken Silverstein, who was the Washington editor for Harper’s magazine, bought himself a tailored suit, a leather briefcase, and a cellphone with a UK number, and began introducing himself to some of the most prominent lobbyists in town. Over email, he told them that his name was Kenneth Case—a fictitious character representing an invented consulting firm, “The Maldon Group,” which, he claimed, had a financial stake in Turkmenistan and wanted to improve that position by enhancing the public image of its government. His goal, he wrote the following year, was to find out how many American lobbyists would jump at the chance to represent the interests of a regime “only slightly less Stalinist” than North Korea.

“It wasn’t a rogue operation, obviously,” Silverstein told me. He’d arranged a plan with his editors.

“We discussed whether it was appropriate and concluded that it was.” Silverstein had spent years reporting on DC lobbyists, but their limited disclosure requirements prevented him from learning much more than which firms were willing to work for repressive dictators and how much they got paid for doing so. To learn what sorts of promises these lobbyists make, and how they go about keeping them, he decided that he would need to go undercover.

I first read Silverstein’s story before I became a journalist, and, as with Conover’s book, I found its revelations compelling and its methodology reasonable—especially since Silverstein clearly explained his motivation for going to such lengths to get the story. Some felt differently. (“No matter how good the story,” Howard Kurtz wrote in the Washington Post, “lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.”) “It created a controversy within the journalism world,” Silverstein said.

“But I think there’s a huge disconnect between the journalism world and most Americans.” For the most part, readers care more about lobbyists’ working for dictators than they do about the undercover means taken to report that fact.

Brooke Kroeger, a journalism professor at New York University and the author of Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012), has for

years advocated “a restoration of honor and legitimacy to the discomfiting techniques” of the practice.

She supports clandestine methods mainly because of their sheer effectiveness. Around the time that Silverstein was on the trail of lobbyists, she told me, the Washington Post published an undercover series exposing the poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: Dana Priest and Anne Hull spent more than four months reporting there, absent official permission; they’d shown up at the front gate without identifying themselves as journalists and asked sources not to reveal what they were up to. “I mean, short of putting on white coats, they did everything to obscure who they were and what they were doing,” Kroeger said. “And I thought it was fine.”

The Post got results: “Within a day after the series began, work crews were on-site upgrading the moldand rodent-infested outpatient facilities,” Kroeger wrote in an essay, “Why Surreptitiousness Works.”

“Within weeks, the hospital’s commander, the secretary of the Army, and the Army’s surgeon general had lost their jobs. Congress scheduled special field subcommittee hearings on-site at the hospital, inviting testimony from some of the reporters’ named sources. Three blue-ribbon panels began investigating how wounded U.S. soldiers who had served their country so valiantly could be treated so badly under the Army’s own watch. Praise was universal.” That included a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Kroeger doesn’t think undercover work should be no-holds-barred: “The rule of thumb is that when confronted, you give up and tell,” she said. But it would be a shame, she argued, if journalists limited themselves to covering only the stories to which they are granted formal access. And to the extent that the rules of conduct were designed to function within a framework of “press relations”—a world of people and institutions dominated by white, heterosexual men—the resulting journalism elevates and reproduces that perspective as the default. Of course, those best able to recede into the background of American institutions tend to be the likes of Conover, Silverstein, Priest, and Hull—all of whom are white.

Journalists from marginalized backgrounds, by contrast, are well acquainted with the risk of being confronted.

Following the conventional rules, there’s a lot the press is likely to miss. (I’m Native American, and even I tend to assume a white perspective when reading American newspapers and magazines.)

Stepping outside the default view can mean getting labeled an “activist,” but being ethically minded won’t save a reporter from that perception. It commonly falls to small, upstart journalism organizations to challenge accepted modes of practice and framing. “For us, the idea that someone’s identity would put them too close to a story to report on it just

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 5 1

seems foundationally absurd,” Ashton Lattimore, the editor in chief of Prism, a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet, told me. “I think quite the contrary— you know, bringing your own identity into your understanding of what you’re reporting on can only, in many cases, deepen your ability to report with empathy and with accuracy.”

Often, that’s the only way to get the real story, as was the case when the writer Suki Kim went undercover as an instructor at an elite school in North Korea. She did so at great personal risk: historically, Americans born in South Korea, like Kim, face harsh penalties when caught engaging in subversive activities. It took her three years just to get the

“It’s kind of a complex calculation. Just make sure that the joke isn’t cruel.” position, at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, where she spent six months meticulously documenting the experience for a book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (2014). She wound up with a knowledge of North Korea that may be totally singular—unlike the work of journalists from outlets like CNN and the Associated Press, who see only stage-managed glimpses of life approved by the regime, hers was a vivid, unvarnished firsthand account.

“It’s hard to explain, but just because you go undercover doesn’t mean you’re lying,” Kim told me.

“I mean, you have to wear a guise of something else in order to get an invitation to a closed world that is closed for a reason, often because it’s corrupt and unjust.” Once you’ve put on that guise, she added, it’s important to wear it with care—to do your job well as you play your role. That is, after all, prudent source management. “For you to actually experience that life and bring that life into words, you need to put your heart in it,” she said. “That’s also how you protect yourself and protect them.”

I

n some cases, the best storytelling comes from resisting categorization, letting sources guide you, and seeing what you can get away with.

John Wilson is not a journalist, exactly, though How To may be considered reportage on the mundane and occasionally absurd, as he wrests poetry from quotidian footage and visual gags (an empty pair of shoes waiting for a subway; a man dragging an air conditioner down the sidewalk by its cord). Last December, he appeared as a guest on a YouTube variety show, Office Hours Live, hosted by the surrealist comedian Tim Heidecker. Wilson, who is thirty-four, streamed via Zoom from his home, in

Queens. He wore a white T-shirt, round eyeglasses, and a short-cropped beard. His head was shaved and bare; while out in the field, he sometimes covers it with a cap that reads PRESS. For a while, the interview stuck to the expected fare: two entertainers admiring each other’s work, talking about mutual show-business friends, discussing How To’s origins and popularity (Vanity Fair named it the best thing on TV in 2020). Then a producer sitting behind Heidecker jumped in with a question: “How are you allowed to show all these people?”

Anyone who has seen How To knows that “these people” could refer to one of two categories: First, the random individuals filmed shirtless, sour-faced, or otherwise not at their best on the streets of New York, where the production is based. “If you’re not really saying anything bad about them or suggesting they’re doing something they’re not,” Wilson said, “then you can usually get away with putting their image onscreen.” Second, there are the characters who factor into an episode’s conceit, often tragicomic figures who, it would seem, want to speak before the camera even if they might be better off avoiding it.

The latter group can’t be explained solely by the fact that New York is a state of single-party consent when it comes to audio and video recording. In the pilot episode, Wilson travels to Cancún for spring break; he meets a young man named Chris, who, across multiple interviews, appears drunk and rarely says a word I could imagine wanting to have preserved on film. Chris not only signed the necessary release forms to appear on How To but volunteered himself in the first place: Wilson had been filming somebody else when Chris approached and asked to rap for the camera.

Like any smart journalist, Wilson had set himself up in the right place at the right time to meet the right subject, and kept the tape running. He’d honed that instinct after college, while working for a private investigator. “I had to watch hours and hours of PI video and try to find a single incriminating moment in a sea of nothing,” he told me. “It made me more perceptive, and I started to notice bizarre little details everywhere.” That job also influenced Wilson’s shooting style; he realized that “filming people from a certain distance felt so much more natural.” The space between him and the speaker, ultimately, serves the same purpose as an undercover reporter’s false identity or hidden camera: leaving room for those truths that might otherwise remain unrevealed. (“I want to do the antithesis of what you usually see on any kind of broadcast reality show or documentary interview,” he told The Believer recently. “I keep the handles on it to let people speak in their own words, even if it is awkward, because you don’t get a good sense of who people are anymore in the media we consume.”)

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 5 2

Wilson and his producers maintain a set of ethical standards, though a lot of judgment calls are involved: “It’s kind of a complex calculation with every single shot,” he explained to me. “You just have to put the visuals and the voice-over together and just make sure that the joke isn’t cruel.” Occasionally he’s talked out of using certain material, if the participants aren’t enthusiastic. “These subjects of ours believe very strongly in the strength of their message,” Clark Filio, an associate producer for How To, said.

That philosophy can lead How To in unexpected directions. On a whim, Wilson hung around the parking lot at MetLife Stadium ahead of WrestleMania 35. He brought with him an icebreaker written ahead of time: Do you think Mankind is going to make a comeback? (Mankind is the name of a retired pro wrestler.) Eventually, after he’d posed the question to dozens of strangers, he handed his microphone

“Short of putting on white coats, they did everything to obscure who they were and what they were doing.” to a man holding a can of beer, who proceeded to talk about how he spent his free time catching child predators. “Our show is cool because we can kind of stop everything that we’re doing and just be like, ‘Well, let’s go hang out with this guy,’ ” Filio said.

In the finished episode, Wilson arrives at the man’s home, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

“Well, we’re going to go catch us a predator today,” the man tells him, apparently inspired by To Catch a Predator and delighted by the prospect of a camera capturing the capture. “We were prepared to do it,” Filio said. “It didn’t end up happening.” When Wilson was around, the amateur pedophile hunter had no luck. But had the opportunity presented itself, Wilson would have gone along with the sting operation, undeterred by its evident ethical quandaries—and unsure whether the result might be grossly exploitative, irresponsible and dangerous, or, improbably, lyrical and revealing. “It’s a good example of the differences between our show and, like, actual sort of capital-J journalism,” Filio said.

“We’re attracted to kind of, you know, morbid, like, potentially problematic sort of areas.”

T

he reign of Donald Trump presented a new moral paradox for journalists to puzzle over: while reckoning with the ways in which our profession was ill-prepared for a president who lied so openly and so often, we entertained obvious

fictions about those enabling and supporting him. In Washington, the press allowed anonymous White House sources to tell readers, over and over, how they were more decent than their actions might suggest; in rural diners across the United States, reporters dispatched from the coasts gathered stories from white men who insisted that their support of Trump had nothing to do with racism. After four years of Rust Belt theater, the genre revealed little more of American life than how hard it is to get the whole truth over a cup of coffee—and, ironically, how badly people crave a type of “positive proof ” that is often inaccessible.

In January, a few days after Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection at the Capitol, I spoke with Conover about how journalists might better confront the breakdown of political and journalistic norms we’ve seen in recent years. “There’s a whole universe of possibilities that traditional journalists are locked out of because they have to declare their status,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if some up-and-coming journalist, whether with or without an assignment, decided to go to the Trump rally?”

They did, in fact: reporters like Luke Mogelson, of The New Yorker, were on the scene, documenting the carnage from the inside. At the same time, there was ample footage shot by the seditionists themselves, as well as by rioters who later claimed to be documentarians, seeking absolution for criminal behavior. In this context, what distinguishes a journalist is intention as much as methodology.

Before it exploded into public view, of course, the truth about Trump’s extremist supporters was hidden in plain sight; traditional reporting, which had granted unearned dignity to violent people, mainly served to obscure, rather than reveal, the brutishness and coded racism apparent among the right wing online and at rallies. Producing effective journalism, Conover suggested, might depend on expanding our sense of where journalists can go, and how; when stepping over a line, reporters may well find prescribed rules less useful than their own judgment.

There is reason to believe that breaking from the existing ethical code will do less harm than good.

Our assumptions about what readers expect from us, after all, may not be quite right: according to Gallup, over the past two decades, trust in American mass media has declined from 55 to 40 percent; a third of those polled don’t trust the media whatsoever.

Readers either don’t share our standards or don’t care—and perhaps some might find they’re better served by a deeper commitment to the truth and a willingness to deviate from convention if the whole story depends on it.

Back in Shanghai, Kevin tried to sell me a watch.

It was a knockoff, of course, but a nice one, he said— good enough that a few NBA stars had bought them from him in bulk to give away as gifts. Before I could

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

J oshua

H unt 5 3

express my skepticism, he smiled and waved me over to his side, where he scrolled through photos on his phone to show me pictures of athletes. At that point, I decided not to dig in further about his business. We chatted about American celebrities.

In the end, I left without a watch and told Kevin no lies—they’d done me no good in my personal life, and I expected they’d do no good for me professionally. But I did include Kevin in my story, and I’m sure he would feel no less deceived reading it than if I had used some false identity. Somehow, the slipperiness of that distinction doesn’t bother me much; without some level of dishonesty, I could never have seen Kevin clearly enough to portray him truthfully.

Where I draw that line now remains determined by my past—shaped by the mentors, educators, and colleagues who taught me how to do what I do. Five or ten years from now, however, it’s easy to imagine a world in need of something different.

Plus, there’s this: months after meeting Kevin, when I reached out to the athletes I’d seen on his phone to verify what he’d told me, each denied it. That was not especially surprising: one had just signed a sponsorship deal with the watch company TAG Heuer; the others, if they admitted to such a thing, would forever draw sideways glances when giving a gift. And the fact was that Kevin had an incentive to lie—businessmen, like professional athletes, ditchdiggers, and members of just about every profession, have no code of ethics that might encourage others to give them the benefit of the doubt. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M aya

B inyam 5 4

Passion Projects What’s the difference between freelance writers and gig workers?

by Maya Binyam Illustration

by Richard A. Chance

N

early forty years ago, in the fall of 1981, more than three thousand writers gathered at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel for the American Writers Congress. They had traveled from as far away as Florida, California, and Texas, and had arrived at the opening ceremony so early and in such great numbers that the event’s organizers, fearing overcrowding, linked arms to deny them entry.

Panelists included Edward Said, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrea Dworkin, and Philip Agee, who phoned in from exile. Toni Morrison delivered the keynote address. Her speech served as the bellwether of a shifting labor force: something, in her estimation, was “very wrong.” A culture of individualism had

inculcated in writers a false sense of imperviousness; although they were treated by publishers as “toys, things to be played with by little kings who love us while we please, dismiss us when we don’t,” writers believed themselves to exist outside of market logic.

“We may be dreamers or scholars, we may need tranquility or chaos––we may write for posterity or for the hour that is upon us,” Morrison said. “But we are all workers in the most blessed and mundane sense of that word. And as workers we need protection in the form of data: Who are we? And how many?

What do we earn? What is earned off us? What are we entitled to?” Morrison’s questions had no obvious answers, but her message had been clear: writers would need to take stock. During the final days of

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M aya

B inyam 5 5

the assembly, a group of delegates vowed to endorse the National Writers Union, which would take up the mantle of defending writers’ rights.

Over the next two decades, freelance writers achieved a great deal of autonomy, in part because the NWU so effectively advocated for them as a collective. At high-circulation general interest magazines, alt-weeklies in most major cities in the country, and a number of book publishers, the NWU brokered agreements that enhanced and protected the working conditions of freelancers, including stipulations for minimum rates, schedules that described how those rates would increase over time, and guidelines to ensure that writers were given additional pay for changes in the scope of the assignment or excessive rewrites. Although they were self-employed, the journalists took up the methods of collective bargaining to ensure they

Freelance journalists, thrust into shared employment conditions, have banded together as a creative class but rarely as a working one. were protected as workers. Writing for the New York Times, Albert Scardino described the eighties as “an era of high-style, high-gloss consumer publications,” and rates rose to the occasion. Under Tina Brown, Vanity Fair adopted a standard rate of $2 per word, and The Atlantic was known, on occasion, to pay more than $50,000 for a single article (the equivalent of two or three times that today). The industry was flush, and its fictional representations were flusher––in the final seasons of Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw, the problematic patron saint of a pre-digital media economy, trotted out Vogue articles with titles like “Men: The Newest Neutral?” for a rate of $4.50 per word.

These successes, however, were short-lived.

By the early aughts, the NWU’s original administration had been voted out, inducing a fallow period. Membership dwindled, and the publishing agreements expired, becoming vestiges of a lost history. (There exists no record of these agreements online; most are housed within New York University’s Bobst Library.) Despite inflation, freelance rates stagnated, even as the first decade of the new millennium ushered in the big-buying power of digital media, which manufactured a constant state of crisis to justify chaotically reshuffling the

industry’s staffing infrastructure. Between 2008 and 2019, US newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent, with jobs at newspapers cut by 51 percent.

From 2004 to 2019, more than one in five newspapers shuttered completely. Journalists were excised, companies snatched up like candy: Vice Media acquired Refinery29, Vox Media acquired New York Media, and BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost. Mergers stoked the fantasy of better jobs—“If BuzzFeed and five of the other biggest companies were combined into a bigger digital media company, you would probably be able to get paid more money,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told the New York Times two years before the HuffPost acquisition—but instead of materializing with higher salaries, those apocryphal jobs were dissolved and shunted to contractors. (In early March, Peretti laid off 30 percent of HuffPost’s US staff.) Meanwhile, work essential to the production of journalism––fact-checking, copyediting, Web production––reemerged as tasks assigned to “permalance” workers, freelancers who provide contract labor for regular, ongoing, and sometimes full-time positions, but who nevertheless aren’t granted benefits. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 63 percent of writers worked freelance in 2019.

Even as the industry continues to swap traditional employment structures for contract labor, freelancers persist in the belief that our status as independent contractors provides us with a high degree of choice. Technically, we are self-employed.

As independent contractors under law, we can control the conditions of our work. And as contractors engaged in creative thinking, we are often believed to own the means of production, because the means of production reside within our imaginations. But the fact that we can work at any hour eclipses the fact that we often work at all hours, and the possibility of exponential pay veils the growing reality of no pay at all.

While media companies have been assigned the qualities of an ailing populace, freelance media workers have been cast into go-getting enterprises.

When their plights are made public––and sometimes go viral––they tend to be presented anecdotally, with solutions taking the form of better business management: smarter pitching, shrewd contract negotiation, and industrious follow-up. “I was owed about $5,000 from late paying publications. I tried to hold them all accountable. Here’s what happened,” begins freelance writer Wudan Yan’s widely shared step-by-step quest to chase down an income. But even the most indicting testimonials maintain a do-it-yourself attitude. Freelance journalists, thrust into shared employment conditions, have banded together as a creative class but rarely as a working one. As isolated instances, their predicaments are often chronicled through the bootstrapping rhetoric of diligent entrepreneurship. But as a collective set

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M aya

B inyam 5 6

of problems belonging to a labor force that provides an increasingly significant share of the industry’s market surplus, they’re best described in blunt terms: exploitation.

S

ince the heyday of the NWU, grievances have been so individuated in part because journalists, many of them freelancers, have published stories touting the assumption that independent contractors are legally precluded from collective bargaining. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which originated as a “comprehensive charter of economic liberty” aimed at preserving free trade, attempting to monopolize a market is a felony punishable by law. Because freelancers are self-employed, some fear that collectively setting minimum rates would constitute price-fixing and could carry penalties of up to $1 million in fines and a prison

It will always be to the financial advantage of media companies to treat employees as proprietors and our service as a labor of love. sentence of up to ten years. Despite the fact that there exists little precedent for freelance journalists being criminally charged for collective bargaining— and that there does exist a precedent for collective bargaining among freelancers in the eighties- and nineties-era NWU contracts—this interpretation of the act is peddled as common sense.

Freelance workers occupy a vexed position within labor law. Should they be understood as having the capacity to engage in price-fixing, they must first be understood as small-business owners who control the means of production and therefore maintain a share of the market’s surplus value. But, as Nicole S. Cohen, a scholar of communication, points out in Writers’ Rights, most freelancers are in a “position of disguised or misclassified dependent employment.” Unlike traditional businesses that sell a service (e.g., internet providers), freelance media workers sell labor that might otherwise be completed by full-time––and sometimes unionized––employees. Like shop owners, they are said to experience a high degree of self-control, arranging their work environment, hours, and clients as they please. But as artists engaged in a creative process, they’re also presumed happy being compensated in units of personal growth. As the economist Fritz

Machlup wrote in 1962, the “psychic income” experienced by artists is “so large that [the artist] continues to supply his services at earnings rates far below what persons of similar qualifications could obtain in other occupations.”

In the past three years, however, a growing body of freelance journalists have been attempting to renegotiate their place within the industry. In the spring of 2018, following a wave of unionization among staff writers in digital newsrooms, a group of around twenty media workers—many of them former staff employees who had recently been laid off—began discussing how the principles of collective bargaining could benefit freelancers. They subsequently formed the Freelance Solidarity Project, a division of the NWU that has injected new life into the organization’s long-lost publishing agreements. This past December, The Intercept and Defector announced a set of principles for freelance contributors, including commitments for timely pay.

Pipe Wrench­­, an online magazine launched this year by former editors of Longreads, followed suit.

These announcements aren’t legally binding, unlike the NWU agreements of previous eras (though they were never actually challenged in court—publishers abided by them willingly). But despite their modest provisions, they mark a significant shift in the collective capacity of people who are self-employed by law. “We shouldn’t accept as a given the idea that, as freelancers, we don’t have certain rights: that we can’t collectively bargain, that we can’t have unions, that we can’t have contracts,” David Hill, NWU’s vice president, told me. As far as Hill is aware, “nobody ever had any real legal fight to decide once and for all whether we’re truly independent small businesses engaged in price-fixing, or whether we’re temp workers who are being fucked over, and who are collectively trying to improve our lot in life via the people who are exploiting us.”

D

isagreement over the classification of freelance work continues, including among workers themselves. In January 2020, California enacted Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), known as “the gig worker bill,” which required companies that rely on independent contractors to reclassify those workers as employees. The bill was designed to target tech companies like Uber and Lyft, but it also applied to media concerns: publications would be limited to commissioning thirty-five articles per year from a single writer, or else would be obligated to hire that writer as an employee. In response, Vox cut about two hundred California-based freelance sportswriters from its site SB Nation, which was already engaged in a class action lawsuit over unpaid wages: freelancers had been tasked with finding contributors, assigning stories, and breaking news in return for a monthly stipend of around $600. Nevertheless, writers

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M aya

B inyam 5 7

opposed AB 5 in droves. “Freelancers never asked for relief from the ills that AB 5 purports to cure,” Kim Kavin, a cofounder of Fight for Freelancers, wrote. “Most of us aren’t being exploited, and most of us aren’t ride-share drivers. We are hardworking people who are trying to live the American Dream.”

Alexander Lewis, writing for The Startup, put it more bluntly: “Sorry, California, the gig economy is not the same as being a freelancer.”

The NWU supported AB 5—and was besieged by aggrieved freelancers in California who believed their income would be immediately jeopardized. As a tool for curbing exploitation, the bill was imperfect. The specific conditions of freelance media work weren’t fully represented in its provisions—which were better suited to the nature of app-based gigs— but supporting it gave those same media workers the opportunity to advocate for their inclusion in a rapidly evolving arena of labor law.

Perhaps the most significant drawback of AB 5 was that it existed in isolation: without similar regulations in other states, companies that hire workers across the country could simply cut Californians out of their labor pool altogether. But freelancers have been quick to oppose federal legislation as well. In early March, the House voted to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would revise the National Labor Relations Act to protect the rights of contract workers to strike and collectively bargain.

Because the pro Act classifies employees using the same distinctions outlined in AB 5, many freelance writers are asking their senators to vote no when the pro Act reaches the Senate––even though it would not immediately change their employment status.

“We want to be a union that’s in solidarity with labor unions,” Hill said, “but the folks that we represent are people who have been conditioned to not see themselves in solidarity with not only the rest

of labor, but even with staff writers in their own industry.” As a class of laborers, freelancers had effectively been turned into a temporary workforce, but they simultaneously contested their resemblance to gig workers, who, like them, were paid piece wages that bore minimal correspondence to the time they’d spent laboring. Presented with the prospect of a collective, many carved out an exception that was becoming increasingly niche. What they won in personal passion, they’d lose in protections, even as they continued to indulge the fantasy that it was enough for them to love their jobs.

Last November, after companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash spent over $200 million in a campaign to protect their profits, California residents voted to pass Proposition 22. The law effectively stripped laborers of the protections won in AB 5, reclassifying app-based workers as independent contractors and relieving their would-be employers of the obligation to pay them employee benefits, such as sick leave or unemployment. It had no specifications for freelance media workers—though a previous bill had exempted writers, editors, and copy editors from the article limits imposed by AB 5—but nevertheless serves as an omen of our contested fate. According to liberty-first advocates like Kavin, the bill was a victory for freelancers, who had “demanded the freedom to keep their careers.” Within unions in California, though, there was a sense, Hill said, that they were writing their “death sentence.”

Like all artists, freelance writers see ourselves as special. But so long as we see ourselves as uniquely special, we will fail to win the protections we are entitled to as workers. It will always be to the financial advantage of media companies to treat employees as proprietors and our service as a labor of love. But passion projects aren’t designed to pay the rent, even if they pay the landlord. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

Chapter 4: When

A day in the life of news

There comes a point when a journalist’s work is done, and news enters the view of its audience. Sometimes people follow coverage deliberately and purposefully; just as often, we engage haphazardly or inattentively. There is a sense of mystery in how information is received and how what we learn influences our thinking. To clock the ways journalism informs us, I asked six Americans to log their news consumption over the course of a day and, in doing so, to probe their habits and perceptions. In many cases, participants viewed outlets as representing opposing political “sides” that ought to be sampled in equal measure; they made an effort to find the center and avoid the “extremes.” All shared a general sense that every news source is, to some degree, untrustworthy. And all believed—as most of us do—in their own power of critical thinking, arriving at six distinct conclusions. —Lauren Harris

58

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 5 9

Jarred Irby 35 years old Missouri Recorded Dec. 31, 2020

9:00AM I wake up and check the iPhone notifications from a group chat with friends. One of my friends has texted “RIP Joe Clark.” I Google this and learn that Joe Clark, a New Jersey principal, has died.

My friends and I share a lot of news in our group chat.

We talk every day. It’s been an ongoing conversation for four and a half years.

We’re nerds, kind of, and pretty left-leaning. I’m Christian. There’s another person who’s Jewish.

Another person who’s Hindu. I think everyone else is mostly atheist/agnostic. I generally trust what people share in the chat. Usually someone’s vetted it. Mostly. We all pretty much think the same, but we will let each other know if we’re being stupid.

9:05AM I get an email notification from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on my iPhone. I’m a subscriber.

Josh Hawley, one of my senators from Missouri, is in the news for announcing that he will object to the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Illustrations by Agata Nowicka

10:00AM At work, I scroll Twitter occasionally on my phone to see what people are tweeting about Josh Hawley. I search Josh Hawley mentions in the search bar, checking to see how the conversation is going in the wider Twitter world.

That’s the nice thing about Twitter, that you can see the broader conversation happening in real time.

Although I don’t think it’s the best representation of what’s factual, it often tells you how people are thinking and reacting. Most people aren’t going to go, “Well, I did a lot of research about this subject.”

More like, “I saw this, and I’m mad.” I had a friend who had his very evangelical, right-wing parents over, and they’re like, “Joe Biden’s gonna put us in cages.” Well, I don’t know how you got to that

conclusion. I would at least like to understand the process of people getting to conclusions like that.

10:30AM I see a Facebook post about a shooting of a high school classmate that happened over the weekend. Surveillance video has just been released

by KSDK, a local news station.

I found out a few days ago on Facebook that Rico had been shot. Many times, especially in St. Louis—just because it’s a small city, and everyone knows each other—people will act out over this sort of stuff happening. There’s been a significant social media outcry about Rico getting shot. He was really well-liked, especially in the Black community.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of conversation going on in the city about the incident. From the general public, you’d assume it was a terrible situation. But I’ve heard that there were some premeditated aspects of the shooting. I’ve been getting updates from friends, but I’ve been looking up a lot of articles to be able to follow the news story. St. Louis is a very old city, and we have old-city problems. So I follow a lot of local news.

11:00AM I log in to Yahoo News to read a few articles while working and preparing for a Zoom court hearing I have to attend in a few hours.

Yahoo aggregates things that are of interest to me.

It’s scary—they probably have like eighteen years of consumer data on me. But it’s also clickbaity, which I kind of like. You can see what’s a buzzing topic. It’s mostly mildly interesting, like, “I’ll click on that.”

12:00PM A friend who watches wrestling sends me a link to a YouTube compilation: a year of “takes” from Jim Cornette, a wild wrestling personality. I listen to this while cleaning up and making lunch.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 0

12:30PM A friend in my group chat mentions that his antibody test for COVID-19 came back negative.

Another friend, who works in healthcare, sends an article that says a taste test might be able to indicate people who are more susceptible to COVID-19.

3:00PM I see on social media that people are talking about another round of stimulus checks. I Google-search for a few articles on the issue. I send an article to my wife from Advance Local media that says the second round of stimulus checks should be appearing in bank accounts soon.

3:30PM I turn on NBC Sports to watch the last thirty minutes of Liverpool versus Newcastle. I browse Twitter mentions of the game and see people ribbing at Liverpool for not being able to win and at the team’s manager, Jürgen Klopp, being really emotional and not taking the blame for the draw.

5:30PM While making dinner at home by myself, I open the Stitcher app to listen to a podcast about the Tottenham Hotspur football club. If I’m in the kitchen, I’ll listen to something for sure, usually a podcast.

on a main thoroughfare in the city. If I hear sirens going down the street, I’ll look at a few local sites and see what’s going on. Like, “Oh, that was too many police cars.”

8:00PM I do a workout. I listen to a Logic album, and I think I hear the voice of Solid Snake from a video game. I Google it and skim an article from DualShockers.

9:00PM I watch Tenet with family and read a few things online about the film. It’s my third time watching the movie, so I browse a few articles from a Google search while it’s on.

I don’t like watching news on TV; I do like reading it online. I’m definitely not an anti-news, anti-journalist person. I know some of that’s creeping up. I know of some of the movements to help get good journalists into different spheres of influence, whether that’s in small rural areas, places that can’t afford a good journalism publication. I know that that’s extremely important.

I do worry about, you know, everyone’s grandma, who gets wrapped up in conspiracy theories because she’s online.

7:00PM I see a post on the Nextdoor app about an accident that happened near my house today. I live

Reid Barden 17 years old North Carolina Recorded Jan. 8, 2021

9:00AM I wake up and sit in bed for a while to scroll through Instagram. I see several interesting posts from Fox News, Prager University, and Newsmax.

I get almost all of my news from Instagram, probably because it’s on my phone, which is almost always in my pocket, so it’s accessible. Also because Instagram is not solely based on news. I follow friends as well as news accounts. Even if I’m not specifically trying to learn about current events, I’m bound to see news on Instagram. I don’t watch too much TV, and I think it’s fairly important to stay up

to date on topics that impact myself and others.

Since I’m on Instagram quite often, I might as well get something a little bit more beneficial. I think I could definitely be a little bit more open to other news sources. But I pick the ones that I pick mainly just because they align with my views the most.

9:30AM I came across a video post from PragerU with the title “Do College Students Believe in God?” The video was shot around the campus of Arizona State University. In the video, students are asked for their thoughts on religion and how they think

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 1

religion impacts their life. I find it interesting that some of the students said they were open to the idea of a god, but that they personally weren’t big believers in this theory. They also said that they didn’t believe having God in their lives would impact them in a positive way.

I also see a post from Fox News stating that the woman killed in the US Capitol was identified as an Air Force veteran.

In the second paragraph it states that she was “a strong supporter of President Trump.” I find it interesting that Fox decided to include the woman’s political affiliation.

10:30AM Later in the morning, I come across an Instagram Story from @itsnotthebee claiming that Twitter has just banned President Trump from posting and may completely remove his account. I started following the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire account, because other people that followed them reposted their articles and whatnot. It also came up on my “suggested” posts fairly often. Not the Bee is a spin-off.

I’m a little half-and-half in being convinced about this topic, because I’m not really sure how Twitter is run and if it’s constitutional for them to censor someone like this. One thing I am positive of is that this is 100 percent censorship of someone who does not agree with Twitter’s political agenda, and that I completely disagree with. I think the First Amendment is absolutely one of if not the most important amendments in the Constitution, and no one should be denied this right regardless of their political affiliation, race, gender, or religion.

The same account posted a second story, which I view directly after, that has a post from NBC News stating that President Trump has been banned from Facebook and Instagram.

It states that he will be locked out of each account for at least twenty-four hours. President Trump being censored is pretty hard for me to believe, considering that free speech is one of our amendments and one of the reasons that the US was founded. I just can’t believe that people are actually censoring the president of the United States because of a Twitter post. But multiple different accounts and

news stations from both political sides have stories on this topic, so it must be true. The only reason I’m not completely surprised is that so many people truly despise our president.

I see a Fox News post about an NBA player that stood for the national anthem while every other one of his teammates kneeled. I read that this player’s name is Meyers Leonard and he plays for the Miami Heat. I am glad to see some professional athletes who are not afraid to stand up for their beliefs and the national anthem. I have a tough time understanding how someone standing for the national anthem is considered “news,” but I’m not surprised, based on the world we’re currently living in.

3:00PM After I have finished the majority of my schoolwork, I scroll Instagram again and see an update regarding President Trump’s Twitter account. It’s a post from Fox News stating that President Trump has deleted the necessary tweets and will receive his Twitter account back. He should be reviving his account in about twelve hours.

I see a few comments on the same post stating that Twitter is a private company, so it has the power to do as it wants. But I don’t do any more research on this.

8:00PM After dinner, I scroll Instagram yet again and find another post from Fox News, stating that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants President Trump to be impeached via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

She claims that he needs to be impeached for inciting a riot at the Capitol. She also urged the vice president and the cabinet to remove Trump, it says.

Lastly, she stated that Trump is “a very dangerous person” and he committed an “act of sedition.” I was not surprised to see this, but I do think it’s a little odd that she would call for the removal of President Trump if she’s so confident in the results of the election that she says he lost.

One thing that bothers me on Instagram in general is that I feel like everyone takes celebrity opinions and puts them over an average person’s opinion. Just because this person has access to followers, their opinion matters more—they’re taken as news over an actual news source.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 2

Ainslie Vandersluis 53 years old Michigan Recorded Jan. 13, 2021

7:30AM I wake up to WCSG, a local Christian radio station. I listen to the morning news, the weather, and the traffic report.

8:15AM On my phone, I open my email app and see a newsletter from MLive, a local Michigan news site. It has headlines from Michigan and the US. I clicked on a report on the weather and an article about Michigan’s best beer.

8:45AM I glance at Google News on my phone.

Most days, I scroll through, picking and choosing the articles based on their headlines. I wouldn’t say that I pick one publication and follow it, though I like Bloomberg or Reuters or BBC, something that’s a little more credible. Just don’t send me people’s blogs. I don’t care. When I’m on Google News, I cannot tell you how many times I think, Don’t show me stories from a blog. Now that I’ve watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, I’m extra careful. I’ve had discussions with my phone lying nearby, and then later, I’ll see an ad about the conversation, or a story will come up about it, and I’ve done zero searches on it. I don’t like that at all.

At times, I see stories that are being pushed, like by a PR firm. A couple years ago, there were all kinds of stories about measles and anti-vaxxers. I said to my husband, “You wait and see, some drug company’s got a vaccine that they’re gonna start advertising.”

Sure enough, there was a new vaccine soon after. That makes me not trust journalism. I appreciate more investigative journalism. But this is a personal peeve.

9:15AM I open the WZZM 13 app on my phone.

Michigan’s dine-in restaurant ban is expected to continue for two more weeks. WZZM has also released a photo of a man holding what looks like a fire extinguisher at the Capitol last week, who is suspected to have been connected to the death of a Capitol Police officer. Today, Michigan’s old governor Rick Snyder has been charged for his role in the Flint water crisis. I glance at the weather again.

If there’s breaking news, the WZZM app will send me an alert. I’ll glance at it and think, Was this worth my stopping what I’m doing and looking at it? Do I care?

Or do I not care?

9:30AM I open the Apple News app. I read a Washington Post article about an FBI report days before the riot that warned violence at the Capitol was possible. I feel like that’s a pretty solid publication, somewhat balanced on both sides.

I have a conversation with my youngest son, who is in the room with me. He’s much more liberal in his views than I am. I wouldn’t call myself a conservative anymore, but I still lean more that way, whereas he’s very socialist. We were talking about the FBI: Should they be watching out for the people who were at the Capitol? How does that affect free speech?

There’s tension between the FBI protecting us and them keeping tabs on people and communication. When does the FBI start spying on everything that we do? I don’t know that I have any answers, but trading safety for privacy is certainly something to be aware of.

On the Apple News app, I read a Fox News story about how Betty White plans to spend her ninetyninth birthday in quarantine and a CNN story reporting a new daily record of COVID deaths. I go to covidactnow.org to see updates on COVID in Michigan. And I read a Quartz article about whether or not you can spread COVID after being vaccinated.

I take Fox with a grain of salt, always. I guess I probably view every news organization with a grain of salt. I try to suss out where it falls on the spectrum.

I wouldn’t say that I exclusively follow either liberal or conservative journalism. It depends on the topic.

I want to try to expose myself to both sides, wherever possible. I don’t have a lot of patience for extremes.

1:20PM I read the Sunday edition of the Grand Rapids Press in print. I read through Parade, Life & Culture, Perspective, Obituaries, Business, and the advice columns.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 3

I love paper ads. I just do. I don’t know why—I use the Meijer grocery store app and I order my groceries. But I like to look at the paper ads for the sales. Looking through the Grand Rapids Press, Menards had an ad and Aldi had an ad. All of that’s available online. But there’s something about paper.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just old school.

trying to be somewhat aware of what’s going on in the world. My husband will start off—because he knows it will get my goat—he’ll say, “Your president said on Twitter… ”

3:30PM I listen to an episode of The Dropout podcast from ABC, about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

7:00PM My husband and I watch NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.

I’m most struck by a story about twenty thousand National Guard officers who are asked to secure the inauguration, and photos of them sleeping on hard marble floors in the Capitol building. I wonder how this compares with the transfer of power from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.

It also reminds me of a podcast by Dan Carlin that I listened to in September, about why Carlin was going to vote Democratic for the first time since 1992. He pretty much laid out the scenario that actually ended up happening: that Donald Trump would say that the vote went against him, that it was not accurate. Carlin talked about how this would cause civil war and how dangerous Trump was. He called that already back in September. Just amazing.

4:30PM I listen to an episode of NPR’s Wait Wait…

Don’t Tell Me! I listen to podcasts infrequently. My husband will recommend them, and if we drive we’ll listen to podcasts, say, on the way to and from the beach.

It’s something that we enjoy together. Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History is one that we’ve always listened to. It has all these really deep dives and details. It’s just so good.

5:30PM My husband reads me an alert from Yahoo News about Trump’s impeachment.

Having Donald Trump in office, I avoided as much news about him as I could. I just cannot—I can’t hear what he says, I can’t, and yet I’m still

6:00PM The WZZM News app sends an update about COVID restrictions.

Hung Nguyen 63 years old Virginia Recorded Jan. 20, 2021

7:45AM I look at CNN.com on my iPhone for news updates. I note an article reporting that some Trump supporters think he’s about to declare martial law—and they’re excited.

First thing in the morning, this article is an eye-catcher. Today, we have an inauguration, and we still have people who don’t believe that Biden won. The events of January 6 already showed that, but even a few weeks later, there are still people believing that Trump is in charge, still believing in something that isn’t true. I’ve been more and more worried about this recently. There are many people out there who are not catching up to reality.

In general, I look at daily news online, on websites or Facebook, starting first thing in the morning. I like to know what’s going on; what’s happened in the US in the past twenty-four hours is of most interest to me. Often, I use Apple News. It puts together many different sources in one place. I click whatever headline is most interesting to me. Some sources require subscriptions, so I don’t read those. Some news sources I don’t recognize—Vox, I’ve never heard of them. Washington Post or CNN are more trustworthy to me, or Bloomberg, because I’ve heard of them and followed for a long time.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 4

8:15AM I drive to work. On the way, I listen to an NPR news story about Trump’s departure from the White House. The story describes how Marine One circled over the Mall and US Capitol. What comes to my mind, hearing this, is that Trump is having a last look. I know how hard it is for him to admit that he lost the election. It is interesting to note that he still wants to look at DC one last time. Maybe he still doesn’t want to leave all this. Maybe he’ll be missing this place.

8:45AM At work, I turn on CNN.com to see Trump’s live send-off. I also see Biden’s convoy driving to a church service with congressional leaders. For work, I spend a whole day in front of a screen. It makes it easy to have the news on for big moments like today.

9:00AM On Facebook, I tune in to NVR Channel, a Vietnamese-speaking radio show, which makes comments about Trump’s legacy, the pardons he made, and the inauguration ceremony.

I emigrated from Vietnam. Recently, this channel has become one of my favorites. The sources they have are verifiable; they quote the AP or Reuters.

The speakers are very seasoned. It’s live, and very convenient. Their mission is to bring recent news updates to a Vietnamese-speaking audience in the US and abroad. There are a huge number of Trump supporters in the Vietnamese community. This channel may work against that. My impression is that news channels in the Vietnamese community, on Facebook and YouTube, are more in support of Trump than not.

10:30AM I tune in to CNN live again for inauguration coverage. I keep an eye on it. Seeing all the former presidents except Trump walking in together… George Bush is smiling. Obama is smiling… this is really big for me. This is a sign of unity. It’s very significant, a tradition that has been happening for a long time.

11:45AM I stop to watch Biden being sworn in. I turn the captions on. This moment is very emotional for me. After all these problems that Biden has had to go through with Trump, this is the moment. It’s

more emotional for me than previous inaugurations, because it’s really happening, after so much resistance.

12:15PM I see fragments of captioned speeches.

12:45PM I turn off CNN and switch to ABC to watch Pence depart in front of the US Capitol.

6:30PM Back at home, I watch ABC World News Tonight on the television, which mostly has coverage of the inauguration today. I jump around a lot between ABC, CNN, NBC. I trust them all pretty interchangeably, but not everybody reports the same thing. I’m trying to jump around to get as much as I can.

In general, I don’t have time for local news.

Sometimes I’ll tune in to ABC a little early just to catch the weather. For the most part, what’s on ABC is the same as what I see online. But it’s a lot more complete and more interesting. Reading, you don’t get the action, the movement, the field reporters’ comments. I prefer that.

7:00PM I switch the television to NBC Nightly News. My wife and I watch ABC and NBC news pretty much every night. It’s dinnertime, and it’s convenient. They’ve been my most trustworthy news sources since the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s.

When we started watching, we had a TV antenna.

We never subscribed to cable. The point is, I’ve been watching this a long, long time. I don’t watch Fox News because I find them too cheesy.

9:00PM I watch the inauguration celebration hosted by Tom Hanks on network television while I Skype with a friend and talk about the inauguration.

I turn down the volume and turn on the captions.

The Skype is a celebration, a last-minute thing. Tom Hanks is a big name, of course. I catch a moment where Biden is talking in the Lincoln Memorial. The whole thing is so carefully put together, with songs.

The picture is very crisp and clear. The color is great.

The big moment is the fireworks. It’s a great thing to see. Between watching this and talking with my friend, it’s a great moment of celebration for us.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 5

Daniel Sanders 42 years old Florida Recorded Jan. 21, 2021

5:30AM I get up, consume a little caffeine, and sit for fifteen minutes while that kicks in. I shake the cobwebs out, then peruse the National Review app on my phone. I read an article that’s sort of a “Good riddance!” to President Trump called “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter.” The first line is “Well, that sucked.” It’s funny. The writer is Kevin Williamson—I like him. He’s one of the better writers in the country—that I’ve bumped into, at least.

I scroll Facebook and click on a Forbes article about how QAnon followers fell apart after the inauguration. I give it credence because what’s reported feels like a believable response for such desperate people. I eventually see other sources reporting the same thing. From the 2016 election on, I found myself obsessively diving into as many different perspectives as I could find. Somehow life turned into a real reality show, and I was obsessed.

The day after the inauguration, though, finally, I’m no longer frantically scrolling through Facebook for the dopamine hit of the latest incendiary comments.

I’m actually able to kick back. I’m curious to know if this is a honeymoon period.

7:45AM Most of my car time is dedicated to NPR or other types of podcasts. While driving this morning, I listen to a thirty-seven-minute talk with David Blight about “The Spirit of Democracy” from the New-York Historical Society. I saw a link for it on Facebook.

I don’t get as much news from Facebook as I did in the past. Friends would share these big splashy headlines, and then I would read the articles and they’d be nothing like what they seemed. So now I try to avoid that. My Facebook is a professional DJ page, not a personal one. It’s mostly people that I run into through DJing or people that follow me. As much as I would like to believe that my fans and followers are well-read and discerning people, history has pointed against that.

But I love things like this program. David Blight in particular has the kind of voice that I can listen to forever. He’s a history professor at Yale, and his

course on the Civil War and Reconstruction is free.

It’s astounding. He can tell a story like few other people I know.

9:45AM I read a few articles from The Dispatch, primarily about the new Biden administration and upcoming strategies and actions. I’m curious to see what things are getting done—what’s happening, as opposed to what’s being said. I spent the last four years really angry. I probably lost some of my ability to debate and think well. The Dispatch—at least the things that I’ve read—tends to be within reason.

I tend to like Jonah Goldberg and David French.

The first time I encountered Jonah Goldberg was probably on Bill Maher. The things he had to say were reasonable. And when you can back things with the Constitution, okay, great—hard to argue with that.

I try to find educated but generally less incendiary news sources. On the right, I’m looking at The Dispatch, David French, or his old colleagues at National Review. I also read stuff from the Times, The Nation, and more standard things.

11:00AM I tune in to C-SPAN on my internet browser to listen to some of the Buttigieg confirmation hearings. I liked Buttigieg back in the Democratic primaries. I thought he was the right kind of intelligent, and boring. That would be nice to have. And he’s smart. He never says anything wrong.

Boring is good—I think we can use a breather.

12:45pm I read a story on my PBS NewsHour app about the Biden administration’s approach to COVID-19. I find it hard to believe that the Biden team is starting “from scratch” on vaccines, which I’m seeing pop up in a few places. Most hyperbole rings false to me.

I have a few news apps. I have one for the National Review. The New York Times. I’ve got PBS NewsHour and BBC. Al Jazeera. Obviously Apple News. I have AP. The Economist. Cyprus Mail, too—my wife is Cypriot, and we were close to moving to Cyprus a

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 6

few years ago. We’re still considering retiring there someday, and I find it interesting to follow what’s happening.

2:00PM I listen to the Washington Post’s Presidential podcast on my Apple Podcasts app. For an hour and forty-five minutes, I listen to the episodes on presidents James K. Polk through Abraham Lincoln.

The present is nothing new. This gives me perspective. Politics, and the divisiveness of the media—especially around Lincoln, the antebellum period, and through Reconstruction, my gosh, some of the most racist, horrendous stuff that our nation’s gone through—it’s as heated now as it was then.

Maybe even a little less now. The ubiquitousness of information now, I think, is probably the problem.

We’ve gotten away from the classical model of education. People haven’t learned to discern what

is good information and what is not; they don’t have that ability. I get in arguments with people all the time about why we need to learn trigonometry, how high school should teach more than balancing a checkbook and how to make a bed. You need trigonometry, you need philosophy, because they teach you how to solve problems. They teach you how to evaluate data. You need history; you need to be able to write a research paper so you can look at something and say, Okay, well, Wikipedia is probably not the way to go.

The first thing I learned in English composition is that everything has a bias. Absolutely everything.

Even news that’s written by an algorithm. But some biases are less hidden than others. Things that use hot words, these days, like “destroy,” “eviscerate”—I don’t even give stuff like that the time of day.

Sumari Barnes 25 years old California Recorded Feb. 9, 2021

6:30AM I check today’s stocks on the TD Ameritrade app around the time the market opens. I scroll below my own portfolio to see if any business news catches my eye. I don’t wake up for the stock market, but I try to check up on it every morning. It’s one part of my morning routine. My partner works in finance, and from dating him, I’ve gotten a lot more into it.

I Google ENZC, a penny stock that I purchased.

It’s a short-term investment. I saw someone tweet about a week ago that it was rising, like twenty cents or something. I asked my partner about it, and he said that you can make good money on penny stocks, but it’s like gambling. One day the stock will be, like, seventy cents, and then it could drop down to twenty. So it’s important to check it every single day—I need to know when to get out. From Google, I choose one of the first articles I see, which is from Yahoo Finance. I trust stock news as long as there’s an established news source. I’ll look for comments, what people are saying about the stocks, to compare

what people are saying with what professionals are saying.

I check my email and see a story from Travel Noire about the man behind the first Black-owned online Korean language school. I subscribe to Travel Noire’s newsletter, and I get emails at least daily.

I don’t open their emails every day, but as a Black person that has traveled to South Korea, the headline caught my eye. That’s pretty much how I navigate those emails. If something pops up that’s interesting to me, I’ll read it.

I really only consume my own personal media early in the mornings, and I am primarily concerned about my stocks. Almost all of my other news comes from my partner, who is a news junkie and has to stay informed for work. I don’t consume much news myself, which is partially intentional. I’d consider myself relatively informed, but news is often very sad. Sometimes, I believe, ignorance is bliss.

If something comes up during the day, my partner

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

M edia

D iaries 6 7

will screenshot it and send it to me. He generally will text me what he just learned, and I trust him as a news source. Sometimes, I’ll Google it so I can read more in detail. I started screenshotting and sending him stuff, too, if anything rolls around me, but he’s more of “the real news”—CNBC, Fox, CNN—and I’m more pop culture. As far as watching the news on television, he taught me to watch all of the stations, because the media can misconstrue stories to get you to believe their narrative. I never watched Fox News before this, except when one of the families I nannied for in college watched it and I judged them for it. Watching Fox was particularly interesting during the presidential election—I’d flip between CNN, CNBC, and Fox; they were all commenting on the same debates and had completely different understandings of what they watched.

1:45PM I haven’t been able to find podcasts I like to listen to while driving, so I text my friend and ask him to send me recommendations. He recommends Joe Budden and a podcast called The Brilliant Idiots, two podcasts that primarily cover pop culture. I listen to the Brilliant Idiots episode “Port of Miami,” because I am not a big fan of Joe Budden, although he is podcast royalty. I knew of him when he was a rapper. I heard that he had punched his girlfriend’s teeth out or something—he was a terrible guy, abusive—so when I found out he was on the rise as an influencer, I was pretty disgusted. With the few things I know about him, the fact that so many men truly believe in him and follow him is weird to me.

I used to follow the Shade Room, but I found it to be negative. Today, I’m pretty busy, so I’m not scrolling as much as I usually would. I also follow something called Remixd Magazine, which talks about new artists and things going on in their life, whether it’s a new album or just a nice picture they recently posted. It’s a pretty small publication, but the founder went to school with me. It began during COVID and had a pretty fast rise.

2:15PM I listen to the Snacks Daily podcast from Robinhood, the financial services company.

Apparently Hershey has done a great job at

target-marketing s’mores in areas that have more strict lockdowns, because it is something families can do outside together, and they’ve seen great revenue increase because of it. I also learn that Tesla transferred $1.5 billion into Bitcoin and it gave the currency a lot more validity. Interesting.

4:30PM I arrive at my partner’s house and join him in watching CNBC. He watches it pretty much throughout the day, and I am there at least two days a week. So I would say I watch CNBC frequently now but don’t have much choice. Today, it’s mostly updates on the coronavirus. They also report that Kobe Bryant’s crash investigation has been closed, and the pilot is definitively responsible. The crash was due to foggy weather. I thought Kobe Bryant’s case had already been closed, and I thought it was quite evident it was the company’s fault.

They also report that COVID most likely did not come from a lab in Wuhan, China. It may have come from an animal, but they are still researching. I feel like there have been so many different stories on where it came from that I’ll never believe anything.

I also don’t care where it came from at this point; I only want to hear about the solution.

When I was in school, I was a journalism minor, and I was also studying political science. It was much more natural to stay up to date with everything. But as I’ve gotten older, the news isn’t really telling good news. I don’t go out of my way to watch the nightly news, because it’s almost always bad. I live in Oakland, and it’s like, “This person just died from COVID, this person got shot over here.” I know it’s important to be aware and informed about what’s going on around you, but I just can’t deal with so much negativity. I know what’s going on, so I’ll just let it be, and the major stuff I get through social media. I don’t need to sit there and indulge every day, because it just kind of takes over your mental state sometimes. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021

Chapter 5: Why Bother?

Carrying on in the face of uncertainty

Report all the news you want. The reality of our media ecosystem is such that any story—no matter how consequential and well-vetted—is liable to come up against suspicion, or outright dismissal. Trust in the press is at an all-time low, which means that journalists must grapple with frustrations of purpose. How can we move forward amid all that undermines journalism, from the attacks by elected officials to the misinformation that clogs social media? How do we work through an atmosphere of profound skepticism about the nature of truth itself? And how can we be so sure that we know what the truth is? —The editors

68

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 6 9

Avatars of Anxiety Falling into the deepfake-industrial complex

by Simon V.Z. Wood Illustration by Sam Mason

I

n February 2020, there was an unsung development in the realm of dystopian technology, upon the release of the music video for the Strokes song “Bad Decisions.” The video begins with a shot of a woman, bored at home, who amuses herself by pushing a button that allows her to clone the Strokes.

The clones proceed to sing “Bad Decisions” until their heads fall off and the song ends. In the YouTube comments, some viewers remarked that Julian Casablancas, the frontman, looked more showered than usual. Others observed that the song sounded remarkably similar to Billy Idol’s 1981 hit “Dancing with Myself.” It does. So much so that Idol is credited as a writer on the track. Which makes sense when

you consider that Idol wrote “Dancing with Myself ” after playing a mirror-filled Japanese discotheque in which people danced with their own reflections.

It makes even more sense when you consider that, while all five members of the Strokes starred in the video, none of them acted in it.

It happened like this: A production company called Invisible Inc hired five actors who kind of looked like the Strokes and filmed them performing “Bad Decisions.” Invisible Inc then sent a bunch of old video footage of the actual Strokes to a guy from Canada who calls himself The Fakening. The Fakening proceeded to junk the old stuff, pull better clips he found on YouTube, train a machine-learning algorithm on the faces of the real band, and digitally

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 0

graft those faces onto the actors. So there it was: a “deepfaked” music video, featuring synthetic doppelgängers of flesh-and-bone rock stars. He’d cloned the Strokes.

The creation of “Bad Decisions” hinted at tantalizing possibilities. “They didn’t have to spend a day on set to shoot their own music video,” The Fakening—a/k/a Paul Shales, age forty, who used to work a boring marketing job in Toronto—told me. “I’m sure Hollywood is hot on the trail of, ‘Can we just license Tom Cruise? He won’t have to show up.’ ” He likened the idea to the 2002 movie Simone, about a fading director who creates a computer-generated actress.

Except, in this case, studios could use someone who is already a bankable star. “Hire a better-looking body double with his shirt off. You just need Tom Cruise’s face.”

Funny he should say that. A month after “Bad Decisions” came out, Shales was summoned to Los Angeles by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park. Stone and Parker wanted him to join

In our incipient deepfake era, what seems to be stoking much of the anxiety is the power of suggestion. an A-Team of deepfakers, among them other viral hitmakers such as DerpFakes, Ctrl-Shft-Face, and Dr. Fakenstein. They had plans for a secret project called Deep Voodoo. Shales signed on. Shortly thereafter, the pandemic arrived, pushing the world’s white-collar laborers onto online grids of their own disembodied heads.

As Deep Voodoo got to work (remotely), the presidential election grew nearer, and worries about deepfake technology mounted. Ever since late 2017, when a Reddit user calling himself “deepfakes”—as in, creating digital fakes of people using the artificial intelligence technique known as “deep learning”— was spotted uploading manipulated video to the internet, the potential for next-gen ratfuckery had been obvious: release a clip of a politician saying something she didn’t, wreak havoc. What distinguishes deepfakes from other forms of digital manipulation—whether amateur Photoshop jobs or sophisticated special effects—is the AI; not unlike a social media algorithm, deepfakes mimic you by studying you.

In May 2019, without any technical expertise whatsoever, a guy from the Bronx slowed down a video of Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker. “Drunk Nancy Pelosi,” a so-called cheapfake, went viral.

The crappy quality of that effort, combined with

the American predilection for believing anything, drove panic over the damage that could be inflicted by someone with an actual grasp of deepfake technology—especially in a QAnon-ified political atmosphere already losing its grip on consensus reality. The implications were ominous not only for politics, but for basic epistemology.

Shortly after the Pelosi video came out, Adam Schiff, congressman of California, convened a hearing on deepfakes. A couple months later, New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a report on disinformation that deemed deepfakes a primary threat to the integrity of the coming presidential election.

Soon, Facebook banned non-satirical deepfakes, and California passed a law designed to do the same. The Department of Defense’s DARPA branch disbursed millions of dollars in grants to develop deepfake-spotting technology, as well as tools to track down the identities and intentions of creators. By late last year, Sensity, a deepfake detection firm, had catalogued more than eightyfive thousand deepfakes, up from about seven thousand two years earlier.

Two weeks before the presidential election, a very good deepfake dropped. Not from some troll farm, but from Deep Voodoo. Called Sassy Justice, it was the studio’s first product. At fourteen minutes, it is probably the longest and most sophisticated piece of content ever made using only deepfakes. Shales said that an NDA prevented him from telling me how it was made, so I’ll just try to describe it. It stars Fred Sassy, a deepfaked TV journalist based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who patrols the city in a white van with a jumbo gavel on its roof, uncovering consumer scams.

Earnest, dogged, and perplexed by technology, he has Donald Trump’s face; the white, curly hair of a retirement-age Harpo Marx; and a wardrobe of ascots and zebra print.

In this particular “episode” of Sassy Justice, Fred Sassy reports on the threat posed by deepfake technology. “As human beings, we all rely on our eyes to determine reality,” he begins. “Except for blind people. I’m not sure how they do it.”

He conducts Zoom interviews with deepfakes of Michael Caine, Al Gore, AI researcher “Lou Xiang” (actually Julie Andrews), and a toddler version of Jared Kushner, whom the White House has put in charge of the “Anti-Deepfake Club.” (Sassy: “All of this has to have a cost. What is the taxpayer paying?” Kushner: “He said it never happened.”

Sassy: “Who did?” Kushner: “My daddy-in-law, Trump. He said the Holocaust never happened.”)

There is a deepfake of Fox News’s Chris Wallace interviewing a deepfake of Trump, who suffers a stroke on camera and then repents for his sins, as well as a deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg, cast as the “Dialysis King” of Cheyenne.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 1

In other words: the most well-realized deepfake on the internet is not political propaganda, but an absurdist news segment satirizing the hysteria around deepfakes. The catch is, the video’s premise is undercut by jarringly good execution. Sassy Justice is an almost uncategorizable form of entertainment, and—save for an article about it in the New York Times—it received little press coverage, as though the culture didn’t know what to do with it. When I called the City of Cheyenne, the mayor’s press secretary told me he’d never heard of it and would have to check it out.

What’s more, the Times story seemed like a potential stunt, in which a square newspaper was hoodwinked into promoting a nonexistent deepfake studio. In the article, Parker described Sassy Justice as the “most expensive YouTube video ever made,” which made me burst out laughing and was, I assumed, uttered in the fraudulent spirit of the project. Others took their skepticism further.

Recently, I called Hao Li, a decorated computer scientist now at work on a DARPA-funded deepfake detection project. (Hedging his bets, he’s also the CEO of a firm that creates “photorealistic virtual humans.”)

“Deep Voodoo—I don’t think it’s a real company,” he told me. “I’m pretty sure it’s just one guy.”

O

n December 31, 2018, the government of the western African nation of Gabon released an enigmatic video of its president, Ali Bongo.

Bongo had been in charge since 2009, when he took over for his father, Omar Bongo, who had ruled the country since 1967. For a few months, Ali Bongo had gone quiet; it was reported that he’d suffered a stroke and was convalescing in Morocco. The video, a New Year’s message, is two minutes of pablum. “My dear compatriots,” he says, in French, “I’ll continue to put all my energy and power in the service of our country.” What made it odd was his appearance: Bongo hardly blinked and rarely seemed to move.

It looked like a cross between a hostage video and a Weekend at Bernie’s situation.

Seven days later, citing the embarrassing “spectacle” of an unwell president, a faction of the Gabonese military calling itself “Operation Dignity” staged a coup attempt against the Bongo regime.

Two of its members were killed by Bongo’s security forces, and the threat was quelled. But as the dust settled, journalists and Bongo’s political adversaries began to wonder if the video had been a deepfake, released by the government to quiet criticism of the president’s absence, while the real Bongo was dead or hooked up to an IV. Because it can be hard to find footage of people’s faces in profile, a common deepfake form features a seated figure, perfectly still, looking head-on into the camera, as Bongo had been. Realistic audio is hard to synthesize, so Bongo’s somewhat slurred speech felt like another

potential tip-off. I was following the story at the time, struck by the prospect that a deepfake had instigated a military uprising.

Eventually, the video was run through a deepfake detection algorithm, which concluded that it likely hadn’t been manipulated. Bongo returned to the capital, Libreville, and settled back into power. In January, two years after the failed coup, I reached out to a couple of journalists who cover Gabon. Neither found the deepfake theory remotely credible, and one compared it to a contemporaneous rumor that Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, himself frequently out of the country to receive medical attention, was in fact being played by a body double named Jibril. (“On the issue of whether I’ve been cloned or not, it’s the real me, I assure you,” said Buhari—or Jibril—addressing the rumors.) Looking back on it, the journalists weren’t even sure that what took place two years ago could be called a military coup at all.

The Bongo video remains a telling document of our incipient deepfake era: what seems to be stoking much of the anxiety is the power of suggestion. In April 2018 there was a deepfake of “Barack Obama” calling Donald Trump “a total and complete dipshit.” The clip was commissioned by BuzzFeed, voiced by the actor and director Jordan Peele, and created using a popular open-source software called FakeApp; it was explicitly labeled as a public service announcement about deepfakes. In June 2019, “Mark Zuckerberg” asked viewers to imagine “one man with total control” over “their secrets, their lives, their futures” in a video created by the artists Daniel Howe and Bill Posters. A few months later, just before the UK election, Bill Posters (whose real name is—I think—Barney Francis) released more deepfakes, these of “Boris Johnson” and “Jeremy Corbyn,” in which each candidate endorsed the other, then revealed himself as a case study in misinformation.

As the US election approached, the pace picked up.

In July 2020, MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality completed one of the more conceptually interesting projects to date: a deepfaked Richard Nixon giving a speech about a botched moon landing—which had, in fact, been written for him in case the astronauts of Apollo 11 did not return to Earth. At the beginning, a disclaimer read, “This is not real.” At the end, another read, “This project shows the dangers of misinformation.” In September, new deepfakes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un were commissioned by a good-government group called RepresentUs, to warn of the dangers of misinformation. In October: a deepfake of Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman, commissioned by his opponent in order to link Gaetz to the threat of misinformation. In December: a deepfake of the queen of England, created by an Oscar-nominated special effects studio, intended to be a “powerful reminder that we can no longer trust our own eyes.”

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 2

Of these examples, none was designed to deceive; all were intended to raise awareness about the potential to deceive. Searching for evidence that bad actors were weaponizing artificial intelligence for political gain, what I found instead was an emerging field of detection firms, government grantees, startups, academics, artists, and nonprofits that seemed to depend on one another to sustain interest in deepfakes. Call it the deepfake-industrial complex—or, perhaps, a solution in search of a problem. In January, a trio of academics, from Harvard, Penn State, and Washington University in St. Louis, released a draft paper studying the efficacy of a deepfake in which “Senator Elizabeth Warren” called Donald Trump “a piece of shit.” The video, framed as a “leak,” persuaded 47 percent of 5,750 study participants. Okay, that seems a little alarming. But in order to run the experiment, the

The winners in this ecosystem of constant possible delusion are the people who exploit fears of deepfakes to create plausible deniability about real-life events. researchers, of course, had to create the deepfake. To do that, they contracted a firm called DeepFakeBlue, which makes “ethical” deepfakes to “raise awareness.” The paper, summarizing the threat posed by the technology, cited the video of Ali Bongo.

Given the disproportionate ratio of “awareness” deepfakes to “real” deepfakes, it’s hard not to wonder if artificial intelligence nerds simply enjoy the rush of designing synthetic humans but feel duty-bound to couch their monstrous creations in the language of public service. As in, say, Jurassic Park. (There is also a thriving genre of excellent, if less convincing, absurdist deepfakes—Donald Trump as Honey Boo Boo, Brazil’s Lula as Mariah Carey—that tend to be created by apolitical face-swapping wizards.)

According to an academic paper about deepfakes, the number of academic papers about deepfakes has risen from zero in 2017 to sixty in 2018 to four hundred fourteen by July 2020.

Journalistic attention to deepfakes has followed a similar arc. In 2016, before the term “deepfakes” existed, a team of academics created a seminal “real-time facial reenactment” software called Face2Face. One of the researchers on that team, Dr. Matthias Niessner, is now the cofounder of a

London-based firm called Synthesia, which creates deepfakes for corporate clients. (Think training videos, using the cheap, and COVID-free, labor of virtual humans.) Recently, I Zoomed with Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia’s CEO and a former student of Niessner’s. I asked him where the demand for deepfakes was coming from. He pulled up a running tally. “So far, we’ve had 487 journalists contact us because they want to make a deepfake of Donald Trump or Putin,” he said. That represented 98 percent of his requests.

B

rief technical interlude: How are deepfakes made? The roots of the technology date to 2014, when a Montreal-based postdoc named Ian Goodfellow was at a bar with some grad school friends. Their field was artificial intelligence, and they were puzzling over how to improve on the computer-generated faces they’d been creating.

Thus far, they’d been using a deep-learning algorithm, or neural network, trained to study and mimic real-life images. Goodfellow’s breakthrough was to create two neural networks—one to synthesize images, and another to test their accuracy—and pit them against each other in real time. The result was a Generative Adversarial Network. Goodfellow, in AI circles, became known as the GANfather. And GANs became the backbone of deepfake technology.

Within a few years, the sophisticated free software tools Faceswap and DeepFaceLab appeared. The field grew. Eventually, three distinct deepfake genres emerged: First, there is the simple “face swapping” version, in which you can, say, blend your face into that of a celebrity. People got into that technique last summer using Reface, a Ukrainian app that rose to number one on the App Store. Second, there are mouth-manipulation deepfakes, in which only lip movements are synthesized. BuzzFeed used this technique for the Jordan Peele video. Third, there are “puppet master” deepfakes, in which digital personas are overlaid onto footage of hired performers, as in Sassy Justice. (The “puppet” in that case was Trump; the “master” the actor voicing him and moving his body.) Rather than manipulating footage after the fact, a puppet-master deepfake brings to life a new character altogether.

Anyone who has a pretty good PC and a graphics card can learn to make a deepfake. That includes the Russian government: ahead of recent protests in Moscow defending the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin appears to have geotagged #redsquare with GAN-generated still images of random people, as a means of reducing the overall proportion of pro-Navalny content. But creating a convincing deepfake takes money and artistry, without which chins blend into necks and eyes fail to blink. “There’s still not a push-button technology to create a compelling deepfake, particularly if you

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 3

want to have audio,” Matt Turek, who oversees DARPA’s deepfake detection grants, told me. (Turek promised me that DARPA isn’t helping the US government create deepfakes.)

That hasn’t stopped journalists from embracing the drama, as we are wont to do, especially when the drama involves technology that distorts people’s perception of the world (something that the press used to have more control over). A few years ago, anxious coverage about the rise of creepy augmented-reality tools (e.g., Google Glass) wound up far outpacing the technology’s real-world impact. The same has been true thus far of deepfakes. In early 2018, BuzzFeed labeled the advent of deepfakes “a potential ‘Infocalypse’ ” and a “fake news Manhattan Project.” Countless alarmed headlines followed, in both the tech and mainstream press. In March 2019, The Verge ran a piece, “Deepfake Propaganda Is Not a Real Problem,” yet continued to publish regular warnings about deepfake propaganda. Cut to the present: zero known propaganda deepfakes were weaponized during the 2020 election.

In the meantime, all the awareness-raising stories have effectively seeded the notion that our eyes are constantly betraying us. “They imply we’re surrounded by deepfakes,” said Sam Gregory, the program director at a Brooklyn nonprofit called Witness, which focuses on the “threats and opportunities” presented by emerging technologies and itself occupies a key position in the advocacy wing of the deepfake-industrial complex. “They imply the scale of visual deception around us is far greater than it is.” (Unless, of course, deepfakes have gotten so good that we are in fact surrounded by them at all times. In which case, we live in Plato’s cave, and the problem is beyond solving.)

The winners in this ecosystem of constant possible delusion are not the technical creators of deepfakes, but the people who exploit fears of deepfakes to create plausible deniability about real-life events. There’s even a handy new academic term for this principle: “the liar’s dividend.” On January 7, Trump delivered an address from the White House, condemning the mob that stormed the Capitol the day before and signaling to his supporters that he would no longer contest the results of the election. The next morning, there was rampant speculation on Twitter, Parler, and 4Chan that the address was a deepfake, released against Trump’s wishes. “This is a terrible #deepfake,” wrote Parler user @OldBear. “The head movements, his cadence, he never went off-script.”

I

n 1985, Donna Haraway, the scholar and critic, published an influential essay called “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In it, she argued that the advent of machine-human hybridity created a framework for women to escape prescribed gender norms. Since a

cyborg had no biological origins and bore no innate physical characteristics, it was liberated from expectations about reproduction, parenthood, and sex.

“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” Haraway asked. “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”

As one might have predicted, things veered in another direction. Roughly 95 percent of the known universe of deepfakes, according to a report published in 2019, consists of the heads of celebrities being grafted onto the bodies of porn actresses.

Put another way, female cyborgs are now all over the internet, but created by men to star in bespoke video fan fiction, for the purposes of masturbation. And none of this should come as a huge surprise, given that the original Reddit user known as “deepfakes” was the guy who put Gal Gadot’s head on the body of an adult-film star to make “her” do a scene with “her” “stepbrother.” That pornography is already a performed version of sex further underscores the warped fantasia of the deepfaked version.

In the deepfake universe, there are two main forums where creators congregate to trade tips and content. There is a “SFW” (safe for work) chat room used by devotees of the Faceswap software, hosted on the message board platform Discord. Then there is a porn site, whose name I see no good reason to publicize. (A couple of years ago, Vice ran an investigation about an AI-powered app that “undressed” women. The app’s server crashed after the article came out, due to increased demand.) I think of myself as fairly thick-skinned, but the deepfake porn site was one of the most disturbing places I’ve visited on the internet.

The site is divided into two sections. First there are the videos themselves, searchable by model (“celebrities” or “pornstars”) and category (there is, for example, a “gay” section, though it has only about forty videos); the most popular have a hundred thousand or more views. The second section is for the “community,” where its more than three hundred ninety thousand members talk to one another and request to buy custom deepfakes from creators. Many of their posts are incongruously innocent, suffused with technical chatter about deepfake production. Others are not innocent. Here is a comment from a user who is also a prolific poster of deepfakes: “As a long time porn addict going back to the golden age of porn, I will say this: Deepfake Celeb Porn trumps all other porn for me. I rarely fap to the real thing anymore.”

Dpfks, the site’s administrator, told me that he started the site after Reddit and Pornhub announced bans on deepfake porn, in 2018. He figures there are around a hundred “talented creators” of pornographic deepfakes, a third of whom are active.

Commissions for a ten- to fifteen-minute video, he

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 4

estimated, run about two hundred dollars. There are a few rules—dpfks maintains a ban on child pornography, bestiality, and images of noncelebrities—and an important stipulation: “We do not tolerate people trying to pass deepfakes as ‘real’ videos,” he told me. The zero-tolerance policy on deception seems to underscore a critical misapprehension about the risk that deepfakes pose: It’s not their supposed veracity that is causing trouble. Nobody on the porn site, or any other, seems fooled. It’s unreality that people are after.

There are other problems, however, notably that of consent, and the potential for deepfaked revenge porn. Shales—The Fakening—told me that he gets a ton of requests for adult “commissions.” They all start the same way: someone sends him an image of a woman, claiming that she is their wife or girlfriend, and asks him to put her in a porn video. Then Shales asks the person to send him a video of the woman agreeing to be in the deepfake. “They all vanish,” he said. “Every single one of them. No one is looking at it on the legit level.”

In this subterranean realm, the distinction between deepfake and real collapses under the potential for harassment. It is also the realm in which, maybe, the first actual political deepfake was weaponized. In April 2018, Intidhar Ahmed Jassim, a professor at a university in Baghdad, was running for a seat in Iraq’s parliament when an explicit threeminute video of a man and woman in bed went viral; the footage was blurry, but social media users suspected from the voice and appearance that it was her. Jassim ended her campaign, though she insisted that the video was fake. International coverage followed; The Economist suggested that the video was posted to discredit her candidacy. (Jassim could not be reached for comment.)

Yousif Astarabadi, who had recently started a company called NotEvil, which analyzed and debunked deepfakes, caught wind of the video and contacted Jassim, offering to analyze it. NotEvil’s report, which Astarabadi forwarded to me, concluded with 95 percent certainty that the video was deepfaked. It pointed to the appearance of a third eyeball, evidence of a “replacement face,” and a missing left earring. Still, there was room for doubt.

In February, when Sensity released a free public version of its software, I dropped the video in and, after five minutes, was notified that it did not exhibit evidence of a face-swap. But that result couldn’t be trusted as certain, either, and it belied a larger truth: the firm’s own research has tracked the abundance of deepfake porn that features women without their consent; the deepfake porn site displays several female politicians. As for Jassim, the damage is already done—a potential voter would have a hard time dissociating her from the invasive footage, whether it was real or forged.

In 2019, Astarabadi gave up on NotEvil. Now he’s got a new startup: The Oasis, which uses deepfake technology to create live avatars for people to use on video chats. The company’s slogan is “Be who you really are.”

I

n December, Sassy Justice released a second video. This one featured an uncannily good “Donald Trump” in a Christmas sweater, reading aloud from a children’s book about a reindeer who dies after an election has been stolen from him. It was well done, but I still couldn’t shake the suspicion that Deep Voodoo was less a studio than a high-concept joke. I asked Shales. “We’re all real,” he replied. Shales then connected me to his boss, a certifiably authentic South Park producer named Frank Agnone. Over numerous phone calls, Agnone promised me exclusive clips of forthcoming content and a Zoom call with Matt Stone and Trey Parker. But they kept pushing me off, and the footage never came. I had to wonder.

What I gleaned about Deep Voodoo is this: Sassy Justice evolved from Sassy Trump, a character created by a British actor and South Park collaborator named Peter Serafinowicz, who had been playing around with deepfakes on his own. When he, Parker, and Stone teamed up, they originally envisioned a full-length film, in which Fred Sassy somehow bumbled his way into Trump’s orbit. The project was apparently self-financed as a proof of concept; Stone and Parker were banking on a distributor to pick it up. When the pandemic hit, they scaled down their ambitions and settled for the short version, promoting it cryptically on TV and radio stations in Wyoming. Stone and Parker did most of the writing and Serafinowicz much of the voice work, with assists from his wife, an actor, and Parker’s seven-year-old daughter, who played the role of Jared Kushner.

In a way, it’s fitting that I never got the chance to interview the comedians behind Deep Voodoo. After all, Sassy Justice spoke for itself, capturing deepfake technology’s muddled implications better than any of the reporting thus far published on the subject. If press coverage about deepfakes has tended toward earnest alarmism—which paradoxically winds up flattening the experience of watching a deepfake— Sassy Justice performs a kind of anti-advocacy, refusing to take a position on how threatened we should feel.

At one point in the original video, Fred Sassy (Serafinowicz) conducts a Zoom interview with deepfake Michael Caine (also Serafinowicz). What gives a deepfake away, Caine tells him, is sound.

“The human brain is a very clever thing, and it can detect the difference in what is a real voice and what is a fake voice,” he says, in his trademark Cockney. “A perfect impersonation. It can’t be done.” Even in the oversaturated market of Michael Caine impressions,

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 5

Serafinowicz’s is about as perfect a Michael Caine as you’ll hear. Which is to say: In almost any other circumstance, deepfake Michael Caine would have a point. Except in this scenario, he’s being voiced by a guy who specializes in impressions, rendering the deepfake utterly convincing.

If the success of your deepfake depends on something as analog as the caliber of your voice actor, maybe technology itself is beside the point.

It’s easy enough to spread misinformation without fancy videos; the same study that created the Elizabeth Warren deepfake, for instance, found that manipulated video was no better at fooling anyone than faked headlines or audio clips. (When I asked Hao Li, the computer scientist, why he thought Deep Voodoo was bullshit, he said he couldn’t remember, but thought he read it somewhere.

“Wikipedia,” he said. “Or something.”) Besides,

If the success of your deepfake depends on something as analog as the caliber of your voice actor, maybe technology itself is beside the point. who says we don’t want to be duped? The average cable news junkie is searching for narratives that confirm her priors; the person who buys into a politically damning deepfake may, on some level, be embracing the reality she wants.

Where Fred Sassy goes from here, I do not know.

But in late February, something almost as impressive appeared on the internet. A TikTok account called “Deep Tom Cruise” posted perhaps the most realistic celebrity deepfakes yet: Tom Cruise doing a magic trick, Tom Cruise golfing, Tom Cruise telling a joke. I recognized them as puppeted deepfakes, à la Sassy Justice: someone had hired an actor to impersonate Cruise, then grafted on Cruise’s deepfaked features. The tech was seamless, the impersonation pitch perfect. The videos instantly went viral—and generated countless bemused clickbait headlines.

A BuzzFeed journalist plugged the deepfakes into Sensity’s test system: “No faceswap detected.”

Seeking to find the videos’ creator, I messaged Shales and another Deep Voodoo deepfaker named Chris Ume, a thirty-one-year-old Belgian. Shales didn’t answer me. Ume did: “Im not doing any interviews about it.” Of course it was him. I should have known; just weeks earlier, Ume had posted a nearly identical Tom Cruise deepfake on his YouTube page, working with an actor named Miles Fisher,

who already resembles a Jerry Maguire–era Cruise.

Ume seemed surprised that he hadn’t received more inquiries from journalists about the provenance of Deep Tom Cruise. “Most of them don’t have a clue, but keep writing articles, just copying them from another newspaper,” he messaged me. “And of course, ‘it’s the end of the world’ in caps.” Eventually, Ume’s name got out, and the real Tom Cruise created a TikTok account.

S

cience fiction brims with anxiety over our inability to distinguish between real and synthetic humans. The most famous example is Blade Runner’s replicants, but there are countless others, from the robot Maria of Metropolis to the pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the fembots of The Stepford Wives. In the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man, the United States government grafts images of wanted fugitives onto footage of actors, to pretend the bad guys have been apprehended. Now art just imitates life.

Deepfakes are a sinister feature of both the recent BBC drama The Capture and the Netflix hit Lupin.

In the real world, however, the deepfake-industrial complex has a strong utopian streak. Lisha Li, the CEO of a San Francisco startup called Rosebud AI, has a vision that’s not far from Donna Haraway’s.

Rosebud made the Matt Gaetz deepfake, but its main suite of products includes AI-generated stock photos (think: custom appearances to suit targeted demographics) and an app called TokkingHeads, which can create a video-and-audio representation of a person using only one photo. The promise there, especially intriguing in the remote-work era, is to decouple people’s talents and personalities from the way their bodies look. Imagine appearing on Zoom in the form of a deepfaked avatar, Li said: “You’ve actually opened up a huge amount of opportunity for a lot of people who just don’t want to be out in the public sphere using, say, their own identity.”

We’ve already seen similar technology grow popular on social media: last year, the talent agency CAA signed a freckled Instagram star named Lil Miquela, who has several million adoring fans— and is not a real person. When Miquela arrived on the scene, with a sexy-CGI persona, Instagram was already ground zero for people altering their images to achieve a uniform, synthetic kind of beauty. Lil Miquela took the medium to its logical end point.

As Emilia Petrarca noted in an enthralling New York “profile,” Lil Miquela started off looking distinctive, then gradually began to adopt the robotic mannerisms of human influencers. “The effect is twisted,” Petrarca wrote. “Miquela seems more real by mimicking the body language that renders models less so.” At the same time, Miquela’s pixel DNA has granted her a cyborgian form of personhood, by which she can evade labels altogether. “I’m not sure

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

S imon

V.Z.

W ood 7 6

I can comfortably identify as a woman of color,” she posted at one point. “ ‘Brown’ was a choice made by a corporation. ‘Woman’ was an option on a computer screen.”

The scariest kind of AI dystopia is the one where the machine acquires a mind of its own. When I spoke with Bill Posters, the deepfake artist, he suggested that we were already living in such a realm. “Most images today,” he said, “are being shared by machines, between machines, with no human oversight or intervention at all.” The data extracted from our images, in turn, is what social media companies sell to advertisers to make money.

In general terms, he’s right. But deepfakes are reliant on a Pygmalion-like human touch. We’ve created them to elicit reactions from other humans— negative, positive, hateful, creepily titillated, whatever. For the moment, we’re in control. cjr

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

H aley

M lotek 7 7

Looks Authentic The aesthetics of conspiracy

by Haley Mlotek Illustration

by Richard A. Chance

1.

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter, writing about what he called the “Paranoid Style in American Politics,” observed that its distinguishing trait was a “curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events.” On January 6, as I watched the Capitol riot unfolding, I knew that I was seeing as much as I reasonably could and also nothing close to the full picture. For weeks, I had been touring the websites and social platforms of far-right extremists, noticing how recollection lends itself to flourish, and how certainty, in the same way, tends toward oversimplification. The violence of the day—five people died—made widely visible what had, for years, metastasized across online forums.

Right-wing extremist media—the fractured, disparate representation of communities with various degrees of fascist sympathies—has an essentially reactionary aesthetic, in that it presents a distorted reflection of mainstream outlets, which are held up as a standard to be subverted, a threat to be eradicated. “I think the people who are attracted to these sources very often believe their legitimacy comes from what they are not,” Matt Goerzen, a researcher at Data & Society, a research nonprofit, told me. Theories and “information” appear in a discussion thread, where they proliferate anonymously and are disseminated atmospherically, negating credit and creation. This encourages a reading that tries to reconcile contradictions: the

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

H aley

M lotek 7 8

amateur becomes authentic, the cryptic confident.

The content, to a certain extent, doesn’t matter.

“Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content,” as Hofstadter wrote. This is a truth that every form of media must reckon with: what matters is that the material produces a mimetic effect, which gains power with every repetition; what matters is that someone clicked through.

There are two primary aesthetic modes of far-right extremist media. The first is an exaggerated austerity, which suggests an urgent message from the underground. Sometimes this style appears unassuming, like the work of just one person taking on the establishment. Elsewhere, austerity looks like blunt claims to authority—bright contrasting colors, oversize headlines with emphatic punctuation, nods to a former internet (e.g., a tagged-word

What matters is that the material produces a mimetic effect, which gains power with every repetition; what matters is that someone clicked through. cloud). Drudge Report, which launched as an email newsletter in 1995, is a prime example of this style.

“It’s the undesigned aesthetic, which became its own thing because it worked,” Irwin Chen, the design lead at The New School’s Journalism + Design program, told me. That imposed a certain aesthetic uniform.

“Once you start saying This is the color we’re using, this is the typeface we’re using, it doesn’t matter if there is a lack of a style or a lack of design discipline,” Chen said. “It’s just that you’re being consistent.”

This aesthetic mode has proliferated since the nineties, as media conglomerates have largely destroyed independent alternative outlets in the United States—local newspapers among them— assuming control over both the substance and design of information; these behemoths now hold a monopoly over the look and functionality of most every website. The same period has delivered a loss of trust in mass media, according to Gallup, particularly among Republicans, for whom it’s now the lowest on record. Far-right outlets—Breitbart News, One America News Network, Newsmax—have, in turn, managed to take on a kind of legitimacy in part by adhering to a recognizable aesthetic standard.

“The more you buy into this idea that the mainstream media—and all these polished websites—are fake

news, then the things that look the opposite gain a sheen of legitimacy by default,” Goerzen told me.

“This transvaluation happens where something that is scrappy, plucky, and maybe a little rough around the edges seems more authentic.”

The second aesthetic mode of far-right extremism is imitation to the point of invisibility. There may be no more prolific forum for this than Facebook, where unofficial fan pages of mainstream conservative hosts (Candace Owens, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson) push links to far-right blogs—a means of distribution specific to a platform that is largely devoid of context clues, verification, and accountability. “This cuts to the heart of the technology itself,” Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, told me. QAnon theories appear in the same news feed as baby announcements and beach-vacation photos. “It doesn’t show us the dangers in that content, because it’s all wrapped together in the same very mundane platform.”

Donovan views that as an important aesthetic dimension of white supremacy and its associated movements. “The very characteristics that allow them to be identified in public have propelled a movement to blend in,” she said. “To wear button-down shirts.

To look the same as everybody else. And so we see that start to happen not just in style and manner of dress, but in websites.” Cloaked in normalcy, rightwing media appears disarming, palatable, shareable.

“I think it’s easy for people who care about design to dismiss bad graphics—to be like, Oh, that’s just unskilled design,” Chen told me. But that would be a mistake. Looking at the aesthetic strategy of far-right extremist media is like observing a chameleon in existential crisis: How, after all, can one receive notice for achieving an almost perfect disguise?

2.

There is a common liberal assumption that QAnon theories spread—and far-right extremist ideologies attract new followers—because of “media illiteracy.” But those who become immersed in the media of conspiracy are more likely to be hyperliterate. It is the very fact that these readers are not passive, uninformed consumers of news media that makes them ideal members of a far-right extremist community. They are expert readers of languages beyond text—which is another way of defining an aesthetic sensibility. In a paper called “Searching for Alternative Facts,” Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist and media scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described a practice called “scriptural inference”—a compare-and-contrast method of digging into sacred texts in order to facilitate individual interpretations—that is used to delegitimize reality-based news and assert a sense of sophistication defined by skepticism.

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

H aley

M lotek 7 9

Extremist groups exploit scriptural inference for their own purposes, manipulating Google and YouTube searches that individuals might use to conduct (their version of ) a fact check on something they’ve read, as a way to draw in potential followers.

The Q “drops,” those cryptic missives, also encourage researched interpretation. (“Decoding” is, notably, both a popular term within far-right extremist movements and a suggested practice for those who aim to understand them.) More than reading the words, the sensory experience of finding and situating a text becomes its own end: a frisson of understanding. “It feels empowering, because you are ultimately the one who gets to interpret it as a reader,” Goerzen told me. “It’s participatory expertise.” Anyone can come up with a theory about what a particular post means and then persuade other readers to come along in their thinking—drawing the

The fact that certain readers are not passive, uninformed consumers of news media is what makes them ideal members of a far-right extremist community. analysis deeper, adding more layers. “By latching on to these ideas, they feel that they become the gatekeepers of a special esoteric knowledge.”

Forums like 8chan, where one can scroll further away from reality and enter new levels of commentary and conspiracy, were deliberately designed to suit an audience interested in this kind of hermetic textual study. Now known as 8kun, 8chan was created to allow what even 4chan, its eighteenyear-old predecessor, wouldn’t. Under a list of topic headers, chan image boards and text threads are blank slates for posting. In considering the way they enable endless annotation and reinterpretation, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s observation, in 1967, that the art of her time was “noisy with appeals for silence.” The aesthetics of our time are often similarly confused with attempts to make sense. “These are the kinds of aesthetics that are really powerful here,” Goerzen told me. “They contribute to making people feel like they are invited to participate.”

Goerzen’s research has looked at the conscious efforts of white supremacists to seize cultural influence through memes and “start-over monikers,” the use of new words and labels to share old ideas: “It

wasn’t something that spontaneously happened,” he said. In 2012, contributors to the 4chan board / pol/ discussed plans to “redpill” users of other 4chan boards, persuading them to embrace white supremacy by appealing to niche interests and railing against “political correctness.” The design of forums accumulates meaning in a boundless, endless network of shared references and allusions—a system that, like The Matrix, the origin of the red-pill concept, promises to be obvious to those who choose to open their eyes.

3.

We live in a time of intuition and osmosis, our worlds created through influence and imitation.

“I’m afraid that it’s going to be harder to separate propaganda and reporting,” Chen told me. “You could argue that the motivating forces are really destabilizers; in a sense this ground will always be shaky.” Those motivating forces—that the government doesn’t care about the people it represents, that democracy rests on an unsteady foundation, that communities can be turned against one another through a mix of fear and rage—are ever-present, felt without being named. In media criticism, one has to concede: Yes, there are conspiracies everywhere we turn. Yes, the powerful act in concert to consolidate power. Yes, there is something sinister to so much sameness—of ideology, of language, of aesthetics. Hofstadter’s text has become a necessary guide for understanding what we see, but in many ways, it fails to account for limits of perspective. To assume that we all approach information from a detached, “centered” standpoint is to see without looking. “In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, an essay that critiques Hofstadter, “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant.”

It is the plot of science fiction that we find ourselves thinking thoughts that aren’t our own, through outside forces seeking to control us. But information does often travel that way, for reasons that are neither sinister nor calculating. Every journalistic outlet wants to claim history; their differences come down to direction. Institutional and accredited news sources usually seek to determine what did happen, whereas alternative and extremist sources more often have a predictive quality, interested in claiming what will happen. Sedgwick wrote that paranoia is an anticipatory style—the imperative is, above anything else, to avoid surprise. That may illuminate why so much far-right media appears, to the uninitiated or unbelieving, as purely reactionary: it is a defensive pose that builds a future from what is past. They seek, with explicit doomsday visions,

COLUMBIA

JOURNALISM

REVIEW

SPRING

2021:

H aley

M lotek 8 0

to shore up power against that which may be used against them.

Like many historical moments of paranoid style, far-right extremism is a movement made up of converts. Redeemed just in time, they worship an anonymous leader or the collective control as a proxy for self-respect; after all, before anyone else could save them, they’ve had to save themselves.

Many people are born or indoctrinated into this way of thinking; many more might see an idea online and find, simply, that to them it rings true. The primacy of faith in their media—above all, including fact— cannot be discounted.

There is another aesthetic element at play here, one that transcends the visual. Recently, a friend remarked to me how lucky I was to be focusing on the design of far-right media in this essay, rather than the sounds. “Imagine if you had to listen to hours of Alex Jones,” she said. For a moment I did, the better to experience my gratitude that the opposite was true.

In the abstract, to look seems safer than to listen.

An open tab might disturb my peripheral vision, but there is no equivalence between something hovering in the corner of my eye and what can be heard; to tune out is not anything like redirecting my view. Yet the more I thought about it, and the more I looked or watched or scanned or saw what might reasonably be considered a cohesive aesthetic understanding of far-right extremist media platforms, the more I forgot the feeling of that relief, or what that relief represented. Conspiracies, gossip, and misinformation always seem to have an auditory quality. In the same way, far-right extremist media—with its codes, camouflages, guarded yet widely circulated symbols—is designed to be absorbed rather than observed, a form of seeing that hides in plain sight.

It is an aesthetics of eavesdropping. cjr

The Columbia Journalism Review is the leading voice in journalism and media.

Read by the nation’s top editors and reporters, CJR shapes the ideas and conversations that guide the media world. Through its fast-turn analysis and deep reporting, CJR is an essential venue not just for journalists, but also for thousands of professionals in communications, technology, academia, and business.

Read more of our coverage at cjr.org