It’s the men that serve both god and devil that you have to fear
Detail of an illustration from a prose adaptation of Pèlerinage de la vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguileville, late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Via Rabih Alameddine.
There is a lot of debate in journalism right now about the extent to which a writer or news outlet should strive for balance or impartiality, and how far journalists often go to conceal their perspectives even at the expense of saying what they know to be the truth.
I think a lot about this thing I once heard Jason Isbell say about being a country music singer who doesn’t try to conceal his own political beliefs, in his music or otherwise:
What your politics are is a subjective term. If you’re in prison, and you’re trying to get out, the rights of inmates are not your politics. That’s your breakfast and your lunch and your dinner, and the time in between.
Very often the term politics is used to make beliefs more manageable and even more compatible in a lot of ways. It’s hard to say, “You believe the wrong thing sir, what’s in your heart is wrong. You have a bad heart.” But it’s real easy to say, “I disagree with your politics,” and very often when somebody says the latter, they mean the former, they’re just not brave enough to say it out loud.
In many corners of mainstream journalism, and certainly when I was starting out in college and daily papers, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to bring a certain balance to everything you cover and leave your opinions at the door. So for example a lot of journalists don’t participate in any public political action (or get suspended if they do) and some don’t even vote, in pursuit of neutrality. This is what media scholar Jay Rosen refers to as “view from nowhere journalism,” where the person presenting the news adopts a posture of “viewlessness,” positioning themselves as the sage center between two polarized views. This is the kind of thing that drives a lot of people bonkers, myself included, like when newspapers fail to label racist ideas as racist, or give equal weight to two sides of an argument when one side is clearly nonsense.
It also denies the reality that we’re all out here just sizing up what’s in front of us and making a personal assessment as best we can with what we have. In fact, going out of the way to hide a point of view often yields a more imbalanced, intentionally skewed presentation of the facts, as in the case of elevating an incorrect or fringe opinion alongside an accurate or widely accepted one.
From Dias de Consuelo #1, 2015, by Dave Ortega
This model of journalism has been busting at the seams in the past oh I don’t know trump or so years, as presenting balance in this political moment necessarily means amplifying objectively foul and dangerous views. Or maybe calling out the really bad stuff, but then saying things like, well you know the other side is also very bad in their own email server-related ways, etc.
But its failures are perhaps most apparent in climate change coverage where, because those on the political left are largely concerned about the issue, and those on the right largely deny or say they deny its existence, both sides for years were presented with equal weight, despite one being demonstrably incorrect. Coverage has definitely improved in this regard since the early days of climate reporting, but outlets still have a reluctance, for example, to proactively state when impacts on our lives like extreme weather are connected to climate change out of fear of appearing biased.
I do not think it will come as a big surprise due to my constantly sharing them to hear that I haven’t subscribed to the idea of concealing my opinions in writing for quite some time. I guess that’s in part because for years I worked in progressive nonprofits so you know that ship has kind of sailed. These days I try my best for what Rosen calls “here’s where I’m coming from” journalism, where you stick to the facts and strive to be fair, but still acknowledge that you have a certain point of view.
That’s not as easy as it sounds though, and there’s always a danger that in owning your opinion, you can lean too heavily toward a sense of conviction, allowing it to undermine your interrogation or the discovery of things you hadn’t considered. This danger of course extends well beyond just journalism, in the way we all engage with complex problems like you guessed it climate change.
We all bring our ideologies to the table. And while some things should not be equivocated or compromised, a sense of certainty can also be folly. In the news, we see this mistake in headlines that declare, “Sorry, [this thing] won’t solve climate change” as if any one thing ever will. Don’t click on articles like that.
My own ideology, for example, tends to favor the importance of climate justice, movement building, grassroots action, and public sector solutions, and some aspects of that I consider non-negotiable. But I’m also aware that my perspective doesn’t represent the entirety of the problem or its solutions. Climate change and similar complex global problems and their solutions are rife with blind spots and contradictions.
So how do we deal with this conflict between holding to our convictions and acknowledging complexity and unknowns? Increasingly, the voices out there that I admire are dealing with this tension, not by clinging to the false balance of always presenting both sides, but by acknowledging both their own perspectives and their uncertainties—maybe a more honest kind of balance.
I just started reading a book by Elizabeth Anderson called Private Government and I like the way she begins to frame her argument with an analysis of what exactly an ideology is for:
An ideology is an abstract model that people use to represent and cope with the social world. Ideologies simplify the world, disregarding many of its features. An ideology is good if it helps us navigate it successfully … Ideologies also help us orient our current evaluations of the world, highlighting what we think is already good or bad in it. Finally, they are vehicles for our hopes and dreams.
But:
…our cognitive limitations give rise to the danger that our models of the world may be ideological in the pejorative sense of this term. This occurs when our ideologies mask problematic features of our world, or cast those features in a misleadingly positive light, or lack the normative concepts needed to identify what is problematic about them, or misrepresent the space of possibilities so as to obscure better options, the means to realizing them, or their merits.
It’s not always easy to walk this line. But I think if you go into each endeavor with a decent starting inventory of what’s in your heart, what you know and you don’t know, I think you can make your assessment of the way forward with good faith and humility. And then just try to be brave enough to say it out loud.
Reading
A lot of this line of thinking was prompted by an excellent book that I just finished, Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino. The New Yorker writer and former Jezebel editor sets up the collection as a series of essays, each one taking on one difficult question that she struggles with. She makes a point of the fact that she does not come to very satisfying conclusions, and that she tries to never write with a sense of certainty because that usually doesn’t ends well. Her sense of humor and intellectual precision make the book a joy to read, and the first essay is maybe the best thing I’ve ever read about the internet.
Here’s one relevant passage from the book:
I wish I had known…that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.
You can listen to a lot of great interviews with Tolentino about her book and her comfort with uncertainty, including a nice short one with David Remnick, and a longer one on Longform that is more media-focused but basically a masterclass in writing for this moment in history.
Links
- Construction materials are a much bigger emissions problem than we thought, in some cases making up more of a building’s overall carbon footprint than its operations.
- In the Marshall Islands, there’s a huge concrete dome that holds 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of nuclear waste, a result of 67 nuclear bombs the US detonated. Sea level rise now threatens the waste dump.
- Boston’s lower-income and majority non-white neighborhoods are evicting “many orders of magnitude” more people than other neighborhoods, 1 in 10 units in Roxbury.
- Cities with protected bike lanes are safer for everyone on the road, with 44% fewer deaths than the average city. Painted bike lanes have zero benefit. Shared painted lanes are worse than nothing.
- A popular used bookstore on Newbury Street shut down in 2003. The owner recently reopened it inside of the barn next to his house in New Hampshire. Update: the barn in New Hampshire just become the hottest new Boston suburb studios are going for $3000 and there is a new craft brewery opening up in the spring.
Watching:
Schitt’s Creek has a very good ensemble cast but come on we are all here for Catherine O’Hara. I have watched her character’s drunken performance of a fruit wine commercial approx 100 times.
What I Wrote:
This week the article on that building I wrote about in this issue of the newsletter published. Here is a little piece of it in case you missed that issue or you just want to read something that has been properly edited for once:
You could view this single building as something of a boutique project fueled by a rare level of philanthropic backing.
But in addition to carving out pathways for advanced green building practices, there’s a kind of value in philanthropy supporting something that requires a lot of imagination, something that is more transformative in nature than the vast majority of builders would do of their own volition—it can then inspire others to take something away from it.
…
“Our goal was not for everyone to come to the building and say, ‘I have to go build a Living Building.’ We would love for that to happen, for sure. But we think that our goal was more for everyone who comes to this building to be inspired to do something on their next building,” Creech says.
“There are literally hundreds of ideas that are on display in this building.”
Listening:
This band Svalbard (which wikipedia informs me is a Norwegian archipelago although this band is from England) is sort of metal sort of hardcore but even if that’s not your thing give it a shot you guys I think you will enjoy it. Serena Cherry writes lyrics, plays guitar, sings, and does the band’s artwork and I love how some of their song titles are just a thing they don’t like, sometimes followed by question marks or question marks and exclamation points as if to say “what about this thing come on are you kidding me.” Their latest album title, It’s Hard to Have Hope is very on brand for Crisis Palace. The drums on this song oohwee.
OK that wraps up this issue of Crisis Palace. Even though I’m now in my 40s and I don’t go to very many hardcore shows I really feel that bouncy kid’s vibe. He’s like you know I’m having fun and everything but I’m also starting to get worried about when the band I came to see is going to start because three more are supposed to play and it’s already 11 and I have to get up early. But you know what? He still made it out to the show and that is worth something. Keep bouncing everyone. Never. Stop. Bouncing.
Tate
P.S. I started to number these as you may have noticed how do we feel about it yeah or nah? Either way, hit that heart button below and to the left and then tell all your friends. Peace and love peace and love.