22
CJR
HARD AN D SOF T
All of It Matters By Sam Sanders
W
HEN I WAS GROWING
up, in the nineties, my father subscribed to a couple of local newspapers in Central Texas: the Seguin Gazette and the San Antonio Express-News. The A section articles on politics and business didn’t interest me much. But every Friday, I’d flip through the pages in search of something more important, and I’d find what I was looking for in a small box in the entertainment section: Billboard’s list of the week’s top singles and albums. I never talked about what I read with my dad, who was absorbed in the front pages. The music charts, even though they were printed in the newspaper, clearly didn’t qualify as real news. “News” was serious. It was for grown-ups, made by men wearing suits and ties. It was boring. And mostly, it just didn’t feel like it was for someone like me. Now, at thirty-six, I see that the Billboard charts nevertheless held vital information about my place in the world. Back then a very glossy kind of hip-hop and rap was rising, and Black voices were overtaking pop. Around 1997 and 1998, when I saw Puff Daddy and the Bad Boy Family doing victory laps on the charts, an integration of Black music into the mainstream that had started decades prior was reaching its zenith. To put it in journalistic terms: the Billboard charts were a business story and an arts story and a race story all at the same time. For years now, I’ve been thinking about why poring over the entertainment section of the newspaper didn’t feel like “news” consumption.
I’ve questioned the strange distinction journalists make between “hard” and “soft” news. Hard news is typically thought of in terms of important people, important issues, and important events. (With “important” being defined by those in power.) Soft news is everything else—and so by definition the unimportant, inessential stuff of daily life. In comparison with hard news, soft news has often been defined as more cultural, personality- driven, and opinionated. In 2000, Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at the Harvard Kennedy School, made a forceful argument against soft news, writing that it is “weakening the foundation of democracy by diminishing the public’s information about public affairs and its interest in politics.” The obvious problem with this take is that for most of the journalism industry’s history, the leaders and institutions that “hard” news most valued left people like me out. Until very recently, hard news was designed to be exclusively for and about a certain kind of man: white, straight, well-educated. Things are somewhat better now, thanks in large part to the journalists of color and women journalists who fought for equal opportunities to provide coverage. Since 2013, Black Lives Matter activists have made stories about police brutality impossible to ignore; the same has happened through the #MeToo movement for reporting on sexual abuse. Those efforts have forced a shift in not only who hard news is written for, but also what’s considered hard news in the first place. Still, white heteronormative maleness is the foundational legacy of major news institutions,
