Sure, I'll Bite.

A response to the Center for Consumer Freedom's hit on me

The Center for Consumer Freedom, a corporate front group that does opposition research on political activists for a living, just put out a hit piece on me. In it, they claim that the past reporting I’ve done on industrial animal exploitation for The Intercept is “propaganda,” because of my affiliation with a radical animal rights group called Direct Action Everywhere.

They get a few key points wrong: I was never arrested for animal rights activism. I was arrested many years ago for protesting the World Trade Organization. I could have clarified that for them if they’d contacted me for comment. Also, I have not been an animal rights activist for nine years. Rather, I read the book Animal Liberation nine years ago, and it awakened me to the moral urgency of the issue; the activism came much later. And most of the time I reported for The Intercept I was not, in fact, a member of Direct Action Everywhere. That also came later. (I stopped reporting on the organization’s activities for The Intercept after I joined it.) If CCF thinks I’ve tried to hide my association with the group, they should look at my April story for Glenn Greenwald’s Substack, in which I disclaim it in plain English.

The main point of the piece, however, I pretty much agree with. Far be it from me to deny that journalism these days is largely propaganda; that premise has been a staple of my writing here on Substack. CCF seems to be stuck on a nostalgic view of the media business that went obsolete decades ago. The final sentence of CCF’s post is so earnest it’s almost endearing:

It’s another example of how not everything labeled “news” is coming from an objective point of view.

I’m not sure there’s anyone left in the country who actually believes the media “is coming from an objective point of view.” The whole premise is a relic of the past. The media long ago abandoned the aspirational virtue of political neutrality, and I’m no exception. I seek, always, to be accurate in my reporting, but I’ve never claimed or believed myself to be “objective,” especially when it comes to what I consider to be the most pressing moral issue of our age, the mass suffering of domesticated animals.

So, yes, CCF is correct: I’m not an “objective” chronicler of the meat industry, in the same way a war reporter who objects to the war she’s covering isn’t “objective,” and in the inverse way a tech reporter who lionizes entrepreneurs isn’t “objective.” The fact that those reporters have points of view on the subjects they cover doesn’t make their work any less valuable (I would question their intelligence if they covered a beat while managing to generate no opinions of it at all). But let’s be real, CCF’s problem with me isn’t that I’m not “objective,” it’s that I don’t share the view they’re paid to have on animal exploitation (i.e., that it’s totally fine).

Objectivity is a stupid thing to aspire to in journalism. Rather, one should aspire to self-awareness of one’s own interests and biases, fair-mindedness toward opposing opinions, and accuracy in one’s factual reporting. If CCF has examples of my failing to live up to any of these standards in my past work, I’m happy to respond to them.