By the time the 130,000 regular readers of the New York Review of Books picked up their new copy of the literary journal last week, the cover story had already cost the editor Ian Buruma his job. In a spectacularly ill-judged essay, the Canadian former radio presenter Jian Ghomeshi provided a lengthy reflection on all the bad things that had happened to him as a result of allegations arising out of his behaviour towards women.
Incredulous and angry that the NYRB would provide a platform for public rehabilitation of an alleged sexual abuser, journalists and subscribers expressed anger and dismay at the publication. Seemingly unable to stop digging, Buruma responded to the criticism through an interview with Slate’s Isaac Chotiner in which he demonstrated an embarrassingly shaky grasp of the background to Ghomeshi’s story. The quote that ricocheted around the web showed a cringeworthy lack of awareness about how the story was perceived “The exact nature of his behaviour – how much consent was involved – I have no idea, nor is it really my concern,” said Buruma. And with that, he was gone.
Journalists are meant to be experts in context, in joining the dots between facts and circumstance and synthesising them into, if not teachable moments, then certainly saleable narratives and thoughtful analysis.
It is very difficult to imagine what would have made publishing a “Fall of Men” edition of the NYRB at this particular moment more acceptable. Maybe if John Hockenberry, another radio presenter who lost his job over allegations of sexual harassment, had not been featured in an identikit essay in Harper’s that week; maybe if the NYRB essay had been fact-checked or just better written; maybe if the women involved with Ghomeshi had been consulted, or the internet had never been invented, then Buruma would still be in post.
His own analysis of the situation was that he had been “convicted on Twitter”. He told the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland: “As editor of the New York Review of Books, I published a theme issue about #MeToo-offenders who had not been convicted in a court of law but by social media. And now I, myself, am publicly pilloried.”
Making heinous mistakes of fact or opinion is not an option for editors in a subscriber-driven world. Upsetting readers and sponsors in economically perilous times weighs more heavily on editorial decisions, or the reversal of same.
After the New Yorker Festival puzzlingly decided to depart from its usual warm bath of celebrity-infused whimsy to book the dyspeptic extremist Steve Bannon as a headliner this year, the editor David Remnick then changed his mind and disinvited Bannon.
Public shaming for what are perceived as poor decisions can have serious financial consequences for a newsroom. At the New York Times, the editorial pages have become an unlikely focus for regular reader outrage. When it ran the infamous anonymous op-ed from the White House a couple of weeks ago, it smartly offered readers the chance to ask questions about the piece and its decision to run it. A surprisingly high 23,000 questions were logged.
The political environment in America, and the bullhorn of social media amplification, is changing how people think about freedom of expression. Free from the type of laws which patrol speech elsewhere, America has, in the past, relied on the strong social norms and the first amendment to keep order in the public sphere. Now, both journalism organisations and platform companies are feeling the pressure to exercise the right not to publish or amplify certain types of content.
Social media and platform companies in particular say they are experiencing much more pressure to remove, restrict and take down certain types of content than to uphold free speech. The recent furore over the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose Infowars channels propagated ridiculous theories but also caused harassment and harm, demonstrated that even the largest companies who host the public sphere are not immune to public pressure or, indeed, rational editorial decision-making.
How decisions are made about what reaches the public and what is suppressed is becoming a critical part of a wider political struggle between what many see as an over-amplified far right and what the right would describe as a liberal elite. Stories emerged last week that Google search engineers discussed how they might counter search results with offensively racist terms in them after Donald Trump issued a travel ban in January 2017. With midterm elections approaching in the US, the way news and information, and even opinion, circulates could not be more closely watched or hotly contested.
In a report from the thinktank Data and Society last week, the researcher Rebecca Lewis collected information from a number of channels on YouTube to describe what she called an “alternative influence network”, comprising what she categorised as libertarian and right-leaning vloggers and YouTubers who employed the same marketing and search engine optimisation tactics as commercial influencers.
Many of those linked in the report quickly rejected the findings or suggested the political categorisations were off base. However, the report’s identification of new types of network that operate outside the norms of mainstream media is undeniably true. Lewis highlighted the promotion and optimisation practices of such networks and suggested that the platform was designed to help exactly this type of activity, even if it did not initially imagine it would be supporting such content.
Lewis’s conclusion included the idea that platforms such as YouTube should “govern content and behaviour for explicit values, such as the rejection of content that promotes white supremacy, regardless of whether it includes slurs”.
The operation of YouTube channels promoting rightwing agendas might sit at the opposite end of the spectrum to the NYRB when it comes to editorial decision-making. However, the pressure from a networked public sphere is going to continue to reshape both, perhaps at a pace and in a direction for which neither are quite prepared.