Morning Belz, Feb. 18

The urgency trap.

I listened to a podcast yesterday where Will Wilkinson gave a good defense of the New York Times for its piece on Slate Star Codex. His argument is that reporters and editors at the Times are being lied to and spun all day long, and the job of even doing basic journalism at that level is as a result pretty difficult. Though the work is inevitably imperfect, there’s no reason to think there was any malice on the part of the Times when it came to the piece about Slate Star Codex, Wilkinson said. I agree with a lot of that, and have experienced some of the lying and spinning in my own career, and so I should walk back the word “vindictive,” which I used to describe the piece in yesterday’s letter. Not fair.

Slate Star Codex was (and now is again) a blog by a guy named Scott Siskind, who went by the pseudonym Scott Alexander. If you want to read his response to the Times piece, it’s here. I wasn’t a regular reader before he took down the blog in a fit of privacy-seeking, but I did come across it occasionally and liked it. The posts were long and thorough, very readable, and written with a straightforwardness that I found refreshing, even on complicated topics.

I won’t rehash the whole story of Siskind v. NYT (his response does that pretty well), but I do think there are still a couple of unhealthy things about newspaper journalism illustrated by the Times piece.

First, the work it does trying to show that Siskind is “aligned” with Charles Murray. Siskind seized on this too, and it does seem to be thinly-veiled mudslinging that fails to deepen the reader’s understanding of Siskind or his blog. There’s nothing inaccurate about the paragraph in question, but this talk of “aligning” one’s self, or being “so-and-so-adjacent” is not great. It’s a big step toward discrediting someone based on an association that means almost nothing. Adolf Hitler and Serena Williams both spurn cigarettes. Are they aligned? That’s a ridiculous example but putting Siskind in a bucket with Murray because they agreed about something isn’t much less ridiculous.

I don’t know if that was vindictiveness on the part of the reporter and editors at the New York Times. It didn’t have to be, which brings me to my second and primary point. When a piece like this is in the works, the biggest challenge for the reporters and editors is to come up with something urgent to say, something that hits the reader between the eyes with the sense that this is important, now, and it’s something new. That’s news! And it forces journalists to round some edges and sharpen others. The point of this piece about Siskind was that he was a leading light for a type of thinking popular in Silicon Valley and shared on the fringes by people with troubling ideas. Shade was thrown.

Is that the essence of the story of Scott Siskind’s blog? Not really, it seems to me, but it’s the story that Times journalists felt would make the greatest impact on Feb. 13. I sympathize with them too. They’re trapped, in a sense, by the requirement that they report something that feels urgent. Cade Metz, the reporter, after spending probably several weeks on this story, couldn’t come back and tell his editor “there’s no larger meaning here, it’s just an interesting blog and the guy didn’t want his identity revealed because he’d rather his psychiatric patients not know his personal views on such a wide range of topics.” An article laying out that relatively anodyne story would have been...boring. So we get vague nods to Charles Murray and white supremacy and neo-fascism, casting the blog in a nefarious light, because, you know, those are things people are talking about right now.

It’s tricky! For everyone.

—
China’s population to shrink by half by 2100 — Lancet
Ebola resurgent in West Africa — Reuters
Author-preacher Ravi Zacharias was a straight-up creep — CT
How to treat long-haul COVID — Experience Life
Rush Limbaugh obit from the Associated Press — AP
Ted Cruz in Cancun amid Texas crisis — The Hill

Quotes
“There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed.” — Duke Ellington, 1962

About: I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years, most recently at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now we live just outside Chattanooga and I work on Scuffed News, a project that either succeeds by July or will have to be abandoned. Please subscribe. Please share this newsletter with anyone you think might enjoy it. You can support this work with your money on Patreon.