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This last week, something happened in journalism that set me on the path to this episode. I don’t want to dwell on it too long, because the person who wrote the initial blog/complaint has had enough happen as a result that me adding to the pile would not help. Plus, per the discussion we’ll be having, it’s not and should not just be about one instance and one complainant. That’s not fair, particularly to the complainant, who has to bear the metaphorical weight of Journalism Ethics; so I won’t do that here. I’ve included the relevant links in my show notes to both the complaint (http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/what-its-like-sharing-your-metoo-with-kotaku-a-cautionary-tale) and the response by former Kotaku writer Cecilia D’Anistasio (https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sr4erf?new_post=true), so you can read those for the context needed if you want to.
The short version of the story is that a developer, Nathalie Lawhead, came forward and said she was the victim of an rape by Morrowind-among-other-things composer Jeremy Soule. We covered this briefly on Patch Notes at the time, and perhaps cited the article written about it – by Cecilia D’Anistasio for Kotaku. Lawhead says – and let me get this out of the way, yes I do believe her – that D’Anistasio published details of the rape that she expressly assured Lawhead were simply for legal coverage and would not be published. Upon Lawhead (very politely) asking she remove these details, D’Anistasio said that a journalist never deletes things they believe are true. Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo has since taken down the complained upon sections, but insisted he believes D’Anistasio’s account that she got full participation; effectively, reading between the lines, Totilo said Lawhead lied. At the very least, we are working with a “many truths” kind of moment.
This is obviously important for many different reasons – not least of all the selective “belief” of women happening – but I want to talk about the ways that this kind of response reflects on a kind of journalism that has grown out of blogging. Deadspin/Gawker/Kotaku is a big emblem of this type of journalism, but I’ll happily admit to supporting and enjoying those websites. Other people whose work I truly do not enjoy – Devin Faraci, the Film Crit Hulk guy, Moviebob – employ this sort of rhetoric as well. So it isn’t about a style that indicates a type of writer I like or dislike. It’s about an approach to journalism that centers the idea of social ameliorative justice while simultaneously centering the author of the piece as opposed to their subject.
And let me interject one last time – this isn’t a screed against social justice, nor is it a screed against social justice in journalism. Thousands of good essays, published and otherwise, have been written with the goal of bringing attention or action to an egregious issue, and these to me are social justice in the most palpable sense. I like social justice. I like the work and brave journalism that brought attention to the Desaparacidos of Ciudad Juarez; I like the muckraking of Ralph Nader, who made cars safer for all of us; I even enjoy the classics of the journalism bombshell genre, your Jungle et al. I even appreciate the ways that journalists use their connections and abilities to shine a light on the neo-fascists in power across the world. It’s good to have a sense of social responsibility in your writing; I don’t want a bunch of dour Edward R Murrows, even and especially in gaming.
The issue for me is the way that work like D’Anastasio’s “revelation” of Soule’s crimes operate as a method of self-valorization and cultural capital climbing masquerading as a kind of social sympathy and justice seeking. And if that’s too harsh for you, let me put it this way: the work that D’Anastasio published bears much in common with the Faracis and Moviebobs of the world, who use their impeccably cherry picked opinions on cultural politics to put their own biases and blind spots above all reproach.
This of course goes back to why you can’t critique Marvel movies or Star Wars films without getting a barrage of why they’re Important And Here’s Why. But more importantly, this attitude allows for journalism without risk. I’ll explain what I mean. D’Anastasio’s article, written with a particular eye towards a claim or a reason would have necessarily been different than the one she wrote, if only because her defended method ex post facto is not “this is what the piece needed” but rather “I was within my journalistic rights to write the piece as imagined.” In fact, the apology note she has written effectively argues that Lawhead does not understand the journalistic method, or made a mistake on some Byzantine on/off the record distinction. Nowhere is there a defense of why this would have been included; nowhere is there a moment where D’Anastasio makes an argument that justifies her being unwilling to take down something incredibly damaging to an person who trusted you in an interview. It’s just that the work followed the rules.
Following the rules of something as alien as journalistic method when doing journalism that attempts to give voice to people who do not have a voice is, to be frank, unrealistic and irresponsible. (Not to mention, where do you think those rules came from? I expect the dusty grand men of journalism did not much care about the project of social justice) When friends and collegues of mine have worked to unionize precarious working communities – staying vague so as not to endanger anyone – the rule was flexibility. You come to where they are and you earn trust; you cannot assume that you, the brave college educated leftist, know more than the people you are trying to unionize. People are not dumb because they are mistrustful of people and groups we see as acceptable; it isn’t a rigid unchangeable offense to not know exactly what is and isn’t on the record, and while I truly do not believe that Lawhead was confused about what she did and didn’t give permission to publish, I also think if she was, she should still be respected enough to be given the chance to redact the work she is uncomfortable with.
But Trev, you say, that’s how we whittle away at free speech! No it isn’t, stop it. Free speech is important, but if your goal is to speak for the speechless, then your goal should be to produce speech that respects them and where they’re at first and foremost. And if your goal is to get the reporting out by reporting standards, then that goal is going to necessarily be at odds with the former goal. Blogs rode this odd line early in their existence, where their identity as not-quite-newspapers was enough to make people trust them when they wouldn’t otherwise trust major media. The rules also felt fast and loose. But now that we are firmly in the world Gawker built, where serious journalism is being done on what were formerly blogs, bloggers need to start asking the same questions that journalists have been asking for years: namely, what does the journalist’s code of ethics leave out when it comes to your very human subjects, and what does basic empathy have to do with reporting?
At its best, Gawker – Deadspin and Kotaku above all – grappled directly with this question. And people took advantage of them for that grappling, Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan above all. But the work people loved from these sites was personal, careful reporting and it had a goal and a heart. When I say heart here, I don’t mean the generalized positive aphorism you see in sports – this could be good or bad heart. It’s instead a core component to the work that lets it exist without being “a scoop.” Or rather, lets it exist beyond simply being a scoop.
From the very interesting – Schreier’s work on Rockstar in RDR2 comes to mind – to the least – just like, I dunno, Film Crit Hulk doing a 5000 word piece on how being nerdy is the same as being black or w/e – the problem with this kind of journalism is that it doesn’t have a clear sense of its purpose. Schreier comes close, and does at times have a clear argument to his reportage – but the cold reporting of workplace atrocity by way of employment abuse is what encourages the kind of rubbernecking as opposed to actual material or emotional aid we see. No one is saying you can’t see cultural or social justice motifs in Star Wars or whatever; but you also can’t assume that anyone who disagrees is clearly a racist (or, in the case of Moviebob, should be eradicated with all other red staters). Writing journalism with the heart of “journalism hard stop” means that this latter kind of writing is all that ends up being produced, for well or weal. The conclusion to years of blogging professionalization is a more intensified corporate ladder to climb, and I find that tragic.
Now I have not a lot of good employment based reasons to say this! I like to write for a living sometimes. I also have friends who work at Kotaku, Polygon, Deadspin (RIP). I would not really be as thoughtful about this work without them though (especially David Roth), and I’m thinking through this not to put Cecilia D’Anastasio’s head on a pike or whatever, but because there’s something so troubling to me about an industry that prides itself on social justice or voicing concerns of the voiceless relying simply on the idea of “a big article” as the lodestar of their work. When the article becomes more important than the people you claim to represent – when your opinion as author drowns out theirs as subject – then you’re doing no more than the new age version of classical anthropology. And done right or wrong, we have no need to revise the stories of other people for our own comfort anymore.