KILL LIST
Setting absurd expectations for complex problems Political change is a slow brew, but news outlets tend to suggest otherwise in headlines, as in June, when the Washington Post summed up the first meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin like this: “Biden, Putin hold ‘positive’ summit but divisions remain over human rights, cyberattacks, Ukraine.” See also last year, when the Post asked, atop a story on Black Lives Matter, “America convulses amid a week of protests, but can it change?”
CJR
currently no mandates that assigning editors, for example, think at all about whether they are selecting stories that reflect the diverse population of the country, much less if they’ll be stories that will be of interest to diverse audiences.” The report also described how Ebony Reed, the new-audiences chief at the Journal, met with the National Bar Association, the largest group of Black legal professionals in the country, and followed up by sending story ideas to editors; none was acted upon. Weeks later, similar stories ran in other major news outlets—including the Times. Story’s team advocated transforming the paper’s coverage and culture. The recommendations were presented as a means of securing the Journal’s financial future. “In the past five years, we have had six quarters where we lost more subscribers than we gained,” the report stated. The bottom line: “If we want to grow to 5.5 million digital subscribers, and if we continue with churn, traffic and digital growth about where they are today—it will take us on the order of 22 years.” Within a few months, the findings were leaked to BuzzFeed. Story did not comment for that article or for this one, but a Journal employee, seeing the audit for the first time, gave BuzzFeed a direct reaction: “Oh fuck, wow,” the employee said. “It seems like the organization is having a come-to-Jesus moment.” A person who worked on the survey told me, though, that the Journal’s leaders didn’t seem eager to self-reflect. “We were genuinely surprised by the level of hostility we encountered,” the person said. “The recommendation wasn’t to change the focus of the Journal, or to water down content, or to pander. The recommendation was to be more inclusive and representative while telling the same stories we are telling. We had data that shows there are plenty of business reasons to support content that is more reflective of the population of the world. There was no political or social agenda. So to have it labeled as a ‘woke strategy’ was surprising.” To be sure, other outlets have struggled with matters of editorial judgment, objectivity, and race, and there have been plenty of conflicts between news and opinion departments—including at the Times, where things came to a head last year when reporters took a stand against an inflammatory op-ed and James Bennet, the section’s editor, was forced out. But for the most part, where leaders at those news organizations have engaged with employees (however unsatisfying or incomplete those discussions may have been), the Journal masthead has largely resisted. On a call with staff last summer, Murray told them he found it “inappropriate” to talk about the opinion page and said, “I don’t think my personal views of it or my political opinions are relevant.” When I asked Murray how he steers news coverage, he replied, “I always think of objectivity as being like salvation. It’s always a good thing to strive for, but it’s a hard thing to achieve. So I like words like fairness, balance, a certain sense of neutrality.” He continued, “You’ve got to reflect as accurately as you possibly can the situation as you see it. We’re not to be advocates. We’re not to push our hand or have opinions. I don’t think that’s the role of a news article.” Emma Moody, the Journal’s editor of standards and ethics, told me that editors are trained in “neutral language” and encouraged to take out “loaded” modifiers. “We want to be impartial,” she
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