Q&A: changes in journalism, cancel culture vs. accountability, and pastors not speaking up
A first round of reader questions, plus: My post-election take
Hello again—as promised, it’s time for Q&A about topics in Untrustworthy. I’ve got three answers for you today and would love to cover more questions in upcoming emails if you send them along.
But first, it is election week, and I do have a post-election take, so here’s my piece at The Daily Beast if you’ve not seen it already:
Ok, on to questions.
Q. Has the role of journalists and reporters shifted from the past? Ex: fact-checking in-article.
Yeah, I think so, though maybe not the way many imagine. I go over this at much greater length in Untrustworthy (ch. 2, if you’ve already got your copy), but journalism as an industry is in a pretty intense time of transition, particularly on the business side of things. It’s still an open question how journalism will work in the internet age.
Competition for ad revenue has dramatically increased, and most of the reading public seems to take personal offense at paywalls. Substack and the subscription-focused model that’s working so well for The New York Times may be shifting that latter dynamic, but a lot remains unsettled.
This uncertainty on the financial side of things creates a strong incentive at most outlets to pump out a high volume of enticing (if not outright sensationalized) content all the time. It also coincides with a strong demand for opinion and—contrary common complaints about how the news should be more objective and fact-focused—comparatively less interest in plain reporting.
This is part of why I don’t see Substack alone as a solution to the media’s woes: The way it should work is that the big attractions on the opinion page subsidize less glamorous but vital reporting by other, often more junior, journalists at the same outlet. On Substack, the big attractions are mostly solo subscriptions, so they don’t subsidize anyone. If that severance between opinion and reporting continues, I’d expect to see reporters paid less and given less time and resources at all but the biggest and richest outlets, like the Times. I don’t know what to do about that.
As for fact-checking specifically, I don’t think it’s terribly novel for a journalist to research, say, the substance of a politician’s claim and note in an article if the claim is demonstrably false. What does feel new are fact-checks of viral memes and other content not made or propagated by public figures. Did newspapers fact-check chain letters and urban legends? I don’t remember it if they did.
It also seems new to call this sort of thing “fact-checking,” and the more I see the term in use, the less I think it’s the best choice. For many readers, I think there’s a ring of smugness in the phrase. It can come off as patronizing, less a helpful explanation than a correction from someone who ought to be a peer but is behaving like a superior. And that’s unfortunate, because this research can be a truly useful genre of service journalism.
Q. What are your thoughts on this take on cancel culture in light of your recent Holy Post interview?
This clip was making the rounds on Twitter a few weeks back and was widely held to be sensible, refreshing, etc. It didn’t strike me that way—in fact, in Untrustworthy I shared arguments from two other writers who’ve already ably addressed the video’s basic idea.
One is Kat Rosenfield, who makes the case at Arc Digital that the fundamental confusion in takes like this is about the meaning of “accountability.” She writes:
When [many] say “I want to hold you accountable,” what they mean is, “I want to interpret what you’ve said in the most uncharitable light, attach a snarky comment to it, and disseminate it to an audience of similarly uncharitable people who will take my word for it that you’re an a--hole, so that they will heap abuse upon you until you (a) shut up, and (b) decide in the future that it’s easier to stay silent than to say things I disagree with.” […]
But accountability is not a synonym for punishment; it’s better and more nuanced than that. […] Being accountable means you have to answer for the choices you make—but it doesn’t necessarily mean that your choices were bad and deserve punishment.
So no, “accountability” is not the right word for the phenomenon “cancel culture” tries to describe. Moreover, as Graeme Wood argues at The Atlantic, cancel culture is an “impulse not to critique one’s enemies”—which might be fairly called “accountability”—“but to make them go away, shut up, or seek employment elsewhere. It is not critique; it is the absence of critique.” This is a distinction comments like Norton’s miss.
However, I do agree with Norton that sometimes “canceled” isn’t quite the right word either. He’s correct that it’s a bit different when someone is able to complain about their cancelation to a large and sympathetic audience. But John Cleese and J.K. Rowling, who are given as examples in the video, have a protection provided by fame and money which 99.99% people do not have. I’m more interested—and I think most people who see a problem with this phenomenon are more interested—in the 99.99%.
Q. Why do evangelical pastors and leaders who see other evangelicals getting into conspiracist thinking or white supremacy or other disturbing patterns of media and political engagement not simply condemn that behavior? Why don’t they call it by its name?
I’m paraphrasing this question from memory from the audience Q&A portion of the event I did in Chicago last month with David French and Russell Moore. It’s a question I suspect a lot of people outside evangelicalism have—in fact, it was by far the most popular question of the evening, drawing applause from the rest of the audience—so I wanted to share my answer here, too. It has three main points:
Jokes about C.S. Lewis aside, it’s not like there’s an evangelical pope, and many evangelicals are in churches with few or no meaningful authority figures outside the local congregation. Maybe your church likes some well-known pastor or author, but you’re not bound by what he says. In many of the cases the question envisioned—big public statements from widely respected leaders—this kind of commentary could simply be dismissed at will.
The pandemic saw Americans leaving and switching churches at an unusual rate, often on political grounds, and more than half of American Protestants say they already go to a church where other congregants share their political views. That means the pastors inclined to, say, condemn conspiracism may not have conspiracists in their pews.
For those churches where the pastor does differ from the congregation on this stuff, however, there’s no “simply” here. Last week I mentioned what happened to Greg Boyd when he refused to tout Republican candidates from the pulpit in 2004: A fifth of his congregation left. For some pastors, “simply” naming and shaming congregants’ political misdeeds would mean a similar loss—or worse. It might mean they aren’t the pastor anymore. Churches have split, closed, and ousted pastors over much less. That’s not to say keeping quiet is the obviously right choice. Do you seek long-term influence, recognizing you necessarily minister to sinners—or do you take a bold stand and risk being written off forever? I don’t know. I do know that I don’t envy pastors in this position, and that this kind of “why don’t the evangelicals just get their house in order?” question misses how complicated and personal it is even for those who agree the house is in bad shape.
If you’ve got further questions as you read Untrustworthy, reply to this or any of my emails to send them along. And, as always, feel free to leave a comment or reach out on Twitter, too.
Best,
Bonnie
