I can't find the link right now but there was a writer who helped start the New Inquiry who said in a piece that, I'm not kidding, her not getting the internship she was hoping for out of NYU was an argument for why we need socialism.
I'm a socialist, but... that's not the tack I would take.
You may get a kick out of this anecdote. As English class in a public middle school was stripped of both Jane Austen and writing exercises in favor of flavor-du-jour "authors" and no actual writing, we moved our kid to a private high school reputed for great English classes, i.e. they still taught canon and close reading. At some point they encountered short stores by Hemingway. [Now you see why I needed to introduce that sentence - nobody believes Hemingway is on a school curriculum]. The teacher asked the students, in light of the style of Hemingway's prose, to guess his profession. The guesses were all over the place, wildly imaginative, speculative, but not a single student, smart as they were guessed "journalist". As my kid told me this it struck me that this made perfect sense. None of them have been exposed to journalism in their lifetimes. Gone are the pithy hacks of fact. It's all flowery activism with headlines like "What you must known about X". They could not recognize what they'd never been exposed to.
Wow. This seems to be more on track than any piece i have read. The innate resonance of theory with precieved events is insightful. The problem has always been a failure look beyond ourselves to see that history and our perception of history requires objectivity. The fundamental issue then becomes the value of objectivity. The fools who complain about length or nots are just fools.
I committed my first act of journalism, writing down box scores of high school baseball games from telephone correspondents all over West Central Minnesota, more than sixty years ago. There is no objectivity like a box score. And I've practiced the trade of reporter ever since. So, while I admire the piece on what the trade has become, I would argue that the trend is not new. The recognition that reporting and writing has political power was dawning on journalists as I broke into the professional ranks in the 1960s. Think Ramparts Magazine, slick, devious and self-righteously arrogant. In the 1970s, veteranos of that Long March through the institutions joined forces with newly-recruited members of Black, Brown and Asian cadres in major newspapers and media outlets across the country. These alliances aimed at unseating the Smiths, Joneses and Whites who dominated the field of journalism at the time, with some very beneficial effects but with some questionable impacts on objectivity, factuality and fairness. Maybe that was inevitable but it was the beginning of the end of respect for the broad sweep of human experience that journalism sought to capture, or should have sought to capture. When one of the leading Latino voices at a major West Coast newspaper died at his desk, a state funeral followed with more than 800 mourners, mostly politicos and activists, and as far as I could see, damn few reporters. Today, that newspaper is in the forefront of journalistic activism, although as its subscribers depart in droves, its financial existence is increasingly imperiled. There are, it seems, only so many activist readers out there. So the slightly longer cycle of late 20th and early 21st century leads to the same place that Leighton Woodhouse describes. The seedlings of the 1990s and 2008 were already rooted in the soil of power politics in America a half century ago. That does nothing to invalidate Leighton's thesis; if anything the thesis is validated. I miss the old box scores, though. They told a story of their own.
Yes. There might have been a vaccum in ethical mentorship and selection of journalists; but, I think it was more than that. The leadership of NYT could have still selected young people who cared about those values who were also vying for those jobs. It's been a much slower and more pernicious degradation of values that was propagated in schools around the time these people were young. It happened on TV shows and in movies. It wasn't a sudden precipitation of an economic downturn - it has been a slow, purposeful, and nefarious brainwashing of our youth.
An interesting article. I'm glad Zaid Jilani "liked" it, so it was brought to my attention on Twitter. What is kind of disturbing, however, is that if you can't pin this destruction of objectivity on an intent of a particular group of people, thereby being able to counter that particular group of people, but rather you must accept that it is a cultural movement driven by the insecurities of a bunch of immature, overly educated, overly indulged people who are given more power than their integrity and intelligence warrant, I'm not sure how you even begin to counter that and bring us all back to a healthy balance. And we definitely need a healthy balance. The media as it is is creating a nihilistic environment that does not allow for any kind of shared "truth" and a loss of all faith.
Useless students of useless subjects who are acting as the termites of destruction from within the walls of our shining city on a hill. There's a solution for termites. Let's use it.
I have been trying to understand this Cohort at least for the past couple of years. I am really glad I found your work on Substack yesterday. Thank you Leighton. Interested in your bilbliography and what other reading you might recommend. I listened to your podcast on the PMC with Catherine Liu and it is very profound. thanks
There are two fundamental problems in this analysis, both of them assumptions that are probably false:
1. "Art" is not commercially successful - when art becomes successful, it is a sell out. This excuse for the starving artists stereotype and for why the work of the avante guard is sometimes unsellable is historically flimsy at best. Shakespeare, Dickens and many others were popular in their day. Michelangelo died a multi-millionaire in today's currency. Just because the avante guard produces something that they choose to call "art" does not mean they have produced anything valuable or that will stand up to the test of time. The Old Masters had entire workshops of students, assistants, etc., some of whose work received very light touches by those Masters prior to be sold as the Master's work.
2. There was no golden age of purely objective journalism. Walter Chronkite and many of the so-called "objective" journalists at the time were not truly objective when it came to reporting on Vietnam. They may have taken the position that they were only reporting the facts, but the sad truth is the press has always written that which sells newspapers and often that included straight propaganda (especially during wartime). As you go further back, objectivity did not used to be the goal of the "journalist" of that day. Do they not still teach in schools that the "Yellow Journalism" of the Hearst newspapers was one of the proximate causes of the Spanish-American war (and resulted in a change in control of both the Philippines and Cuba)?
Commercial journalism is a business and when those in the industry fail to realize that, it will fail. This is not surprising and I doubt they will ‘get it.’ As the article points outs, it is populated by disgruntled ‘liberal arts’ graduates who spent tens of thousands of dollars on degrees that were simply not marketable. Spending $200k for a sociology or journalism degree from Columbia or NYU does not make sense from a return on investment perspective but those degrees are easy and hip. Math and science are too hard and those who don’t have the mental horsepower for STEM are unlikely to do that math either. The irony is that when they do enter the real world and are frustrated by their lack of prospects, they fall back on the teachings of the liberal college professors whose philosophy put them in their current predicament in the first place. They wallow in their misery and are determined that everyone else should be down in the mud with them. After all, it’s not their fault - nothing is.
I'm glad you touch on the weird, stubborn urban legend that somehow millennials are economically struggling. It may have been true in 2009, when these kids were in or just out of college. But for a decade at least this generation (at least the college educated sector) has been rolling in money. This was driven home recently talking with my late 20s niece. When I told her my salary as a 25 yr successful professional educator, she burst out laughing. None of her friends would dream of accepting a salary so low even for an entry level job. Each of them has taken a first job that pays a salary I will not reach if I teach 35 years. Their first jobs all exceed my top lifetime earning.
I really enjoyed your explanation of Bourdieu's ideas. But I wonder, while the Parisian artists turned their disadvantage into a badge of honor, how is it that white humanities graduates imagine themselves fitting in with the oppressed classes. As activists for the oppressed? This is some kind of weird new mutation to the "art for arts sake" vs. capital interplay.
Coming across this rather late, but I always felt there was another factor at play here.
Not all millennials suffered in 2008. Many did fine actually. But journalists and media types did suffer, and, from the position they had, they adopt the role of spokespeople of society. They are the ones with the megaphone, the opinion columns, the thousands of twitter followers. When they spoke, apparently on behalf of all millennials, they did so through their own negative experiences. I have no doubt that most of their friends - who probably did similar degrees and came from similar backgrounds - had also suffered, and so they felt they were actually writing on behalf of the entire generation.
Except they are not. I (a millennial) barely recognise the world they talk about. When I look at my friends (also mostly millennials), I still do not recognise this world. Journalists unfortunately represent a minority view, just one that is amplified and taken as representative.
A dazzling bit of analysis. One wants to read more of this gifted author. I believe the thesis stands correct.
I can't find the link right now but there was a writer who helped start the New Inquiry who said in a piece that, I'm not kidding, her not getting the internship she was hoping for out of NYU was an argument for why we need socialism.
I'm a socialist, but... that's not the tack I would take.
You may get a kick out of this anecdote. As English class in a public middle school was stripped of both Jane Austen and writing exercises in favor of flavor-du-jour "authors" and no actual writing, we moved our kid to a private high school reputed for great English classes, i.e. they still taught canon and close reading. At some point they encountered short stores by Hemingway. [Now you see why I needed to introduce that sentence - nobody believes Hemingway is on a school curriculum]. The teacher asked the students, in light of the style of Hemingway's prose, to guess his profession. The guesses were all over the place, wildly imaginative, speculative, but not a single student, smart as they were guessed "journalist". As my kid told me this it struck me that this made perfect sense. None of them have been exposed to journalism in their lifetimes. Gone are the pithy hacks of fact. It's all flowery activism with headlines like "What you must known about X". They could not recognize what they'd never been exposed to.
Wow. This seems to be more on track than any piece i have read. The innate resonance of theory with precieved events is insightful. The problem has always been a failure look beyond ourselves to see that history and our perception of history requires objectivity. The fundamental issue then becomes the value of objectivity. The fools who complain about length or nots are just fools.
I committed my first act of journalism, writing down box scores of high school baseball games from telephone correspondents all over West Central Minnesota, more than sixty years ago. There is no objectivity like a box score. And I've practiced the trade of reporter ever since. So, while I admire the piece on what the trade has become, I would argue that the trend is not new. The recognition that reporting and writing has political power was dawning on journalists as I broke into the professional ranks in the 1960s. Think Ramparts Magazine, slick, devious and self-righteously arrogant. In the 1970s, veteranos of that Long March through the institutions joined forces with newly-recruited members of Black, Brown and Asian cadres in major newspapers and media outlets across the country. These alliances aimed at unseating the Smiths, Joneses and Whites who dominated the field of journalism at the time, with some very beneficial effects but with some questionable impacts on objectivity, factuality and fairness. Maybe that was inevitable but it was the beginning of the end of respect for the broad sweep of human experience that journalism sought to capture, or should have sought to capture. When one of the leading Latino voices at a major West Coast newspaper died at his desk, a state funeral followed with more than 800 mourners, mostly politicos and activists, and as far as I could see, damn few reporters. Today, that newspaper is in the forefront of journalistic activism, although as its subscribers depart in droves, its financial existence is increasingly imperiled. There are, it seems, only so many activist readers out there. So the slightly longer cycle of late 20th and early 21st century leads to the same place that Leighton Woodhouse describes. The seedlings of the 1990s and 2008 were already rooted in the soil of power politics in America a half century ago. That does nothing to invalidate Leighton's thesis; if anything the thesis is validated. I miss the old box scores, though. They told a story of their own.
Yes. There might have been a vaccum in ethical mentorship and selection of journalists; but, I think it was more than that. The leadership of NYT could have still selected young people who cared about those values who were also vying for those jobs. It's been a much slower and more pernicious degradation of values that was propagated in schools around the time these people were young. It happened on TV shows and in movies. It wasn't a sudden precipitation of an economic downturn - it has been a slow, purposeful, and nefarious brainwashing of our youth.
Too long. This should have been pared down to 1/3 of its present length.
An interesting article. I'm glad Zaid Jilani "liked" it, so it was brought to my attention on Twitter. What is kind of disturbing, however, is that if you can't pin this destruction of objectivity on an intent of a particular group of people, thereby being able to counter that particular group of people, but rather you must accept that it is a cultural movement driven by the insecurities of a bunch of immature, overly educated, overly indulged people who are given more power than their integrity and intelligence warrant, I'm not sure how you even begin to counter that and bring us all back to a healthy balance. And we definitely need a healthy balance. The media as it is is creating a nihilistic environment that does not allow for any kind of shared "truth" and a loss of all faith.
Thank you for writing this. It is a piece of the puzzle. A big piece.
Useless students of useless subjects who are acting as the termites of destruction from within the walls of our shining city on a hill. There's a solution for termites. Let's use it.
I have been trying to understand this Cohort at least for the past couple of years. I am really glad I found your work on Substack yesterday. Thank you Leighton. Interested in your bilbliography and what other reading you might recommend. I listened to your podcast on the PMC with Catherine Liu and it is very profound. thanks
There are two fundamental problems in this analysis, both of them assumptions that are probably false:
1. "Art" is not commercially successful - when art becomes successful, it is a sell out. This excuse for the starving artists stereotype and for why the work of the avante guard is sometimes unsellable is historically flimsy at best. Shakespeare, Dickens and many others were popular in their day. Michelangelo died a multi-millionaire in today's currency. Just because the avante guard produces something that they choose to call "art" does not mean they have produced anything valuable or that will stand up to the test of time. The Old Masters had entire workshops of students, assistants, etc., some of whose work received very light touches by those Masters prior to be sold as the Master's work.
2. There was no golden age of purely objective journalism. Walter Chronkite and many of the so-called "objective" journalists at the time were not truly objective when it came to reporting on Vietnam. They may have taken the position that they were only reporting the facts, but the sad truth is the press has always written that which sells newspapers and often that included straight propaganda (especially during wartime). As you go further back, objectivity did not used to be the goal of the "journalist" of that day. Do they not still teach in schools that the "Yellow Journalism" of the Hearst newspapers was one of the proximate causes of the Spanish-American war (and resulted in a change in control of both the Philippines and Cuba)?
Commercial journalism is a business and when those in the industry fail to realize that, it will fail. This is not surprising and I doubt they will ‘get it.’ As the article points outs, it is populated by disgruntled ‘liberal arts’ graduates who spent tens of thousands of dollars on degrees that were simply not marketable. Spending $200k for a sociology or journalism degree from Columbia or NYU does not make sense from a return on investment perspective but those degrees are easy and hip. Math and science are too hard and those who don’t have the mental horsepower for STEM are unlikely to do that math either. The irony is that when they do enter the real world and are frustrated by their lack of prospects, they fall back on the teachings of the liberal college professors whose philosophy put them in their current predicament in the first place. They wallow in their misery and are determined that everyone else should be down in the mud with them. After all, it’s not their fault - nothing is.
I'm glad you touch on the weird, stubborn urban legend that somehow millennials are economically struggling. It may have been true in 2009, when these kids were in or just out of college. But for a decade at least this generation (at least the college educated sector) has been rolling in money. This was driven home recently talking with my late 20s niece. When I told her my salary as a 25 yr successful professional educator, she burst out laughing. None of her friends would dream of accepting a salary so low even for an entry level job. Each of them has taken a first job that pays a salary I will not reach if I teach 35 years. Their first jobs all exceed my top lifetime earning.
I really enjoyed your explanation of Bourdieu's ideas. But I wonder, while the Parisian artists turned their disadvantage into a badge of honor, how is it that white humanities graduates imagine themselves fitting in with the oppressed classes. As activists for the oppressed? This is some kind of weird new mutation to the "art for arts sake" vs. capital interplay.
Coming across this rather late, but I always felt there was another factor at play here.
Not all millennials suffered in 2008. Many did fine actually. But journalists and media types did suffer, and, from the position they had, they adopt the role of spokespeople of society. They are the ones with the megaphone, the opinion columns, the thousands of twitter followers. When they spoke, apparently on behalf of all millennials, they did so through their own negative experiences. I have no doubt that most of their friends - who probably did similar degrees and came from similar backgrounds - had also suffered, and so they felt they were actually writing on behalf of the entire generation.
Except they are not. I (a millennial) barely recognise the world they talk about. When I look at my friends (also mostly millennials), I still do not recognise this world. Journalists unfortunately represent a minority view, just one that is amplified and taken as representative.