The Case for Cancellation
I believe that cancelling subscriptions to The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post in the wake of their cowardly decisions to override the editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris is the right thing to do.
This is not an easy thing for me to say, because I’m a journalist. I understand in theory that divorcing these publications from your dollars may harm employees more than they may harm the billionaire owners of The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Dow Jones media, and too many others to name. But I also believe that unsubscribing is the only course of action we have left to hold these organizations accountable — even if, god forbid, Trump wins.
For the better part of a decade, I have railed against the antiquated notion of objectivity, which frequently prioritizes a White, male gaze above all else; the asinine “both sides” framework that ultimately leads to reporters criticizing Democrats for far less while writing off Republican craziness as merely another day at the office rather than a four-alarm fire; and the withholding of important information for the books rather than report them in a timely manner, i.e., when they find out. I have read my fair share of great reporting in this time, from the Times and New Yorker investigations into Harvey Weinstein, to The 1619 Project, to Jen Senior’s heartbreaking profile of a grieving family whose son died in 9/11 in The Atlantic, to the videos recorded by the brave men and women who went into the Capitol and followed the rioters.
Journalism will always help us through hard moments. But too often, journalism, and journalists, use their power to harm by committing to narratives that may not reflect reality but which, through constant repetition, shape reality for the worse. We saw this when the political press ran endless stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server while burying the revelations of Trump’s connections with Russia in the back of the paper. We saw it again with the endless drumbeating of Biden’s age. God hope we do not see it again if Kamala Harris so much as breaks a fingernail in front of a camera.
I know that my ranting about the media will not change anything. The problem is that it’s not just me. It’s millions of people like me — journalists of my generation, press observers, activists, or some combination of the above — who have demanded that our elders do better; that they take responsibility for their errors; that they have some understanding of why what they did was wrong. We’ve made our cases in good faith. We’ve supported these papers numerous times, even as we criticized their coverage. We are not alone in our criticisms, and we know it.
And every time we bring it up, they refuse to listen. Every. Single. Time.
Nobody is more thin-skinned than your average journalist at a major publication. Find a flaw, any flaw, in their reporting, and no matter what it is they’ll insist that you don’t know how hard they work, or that you don’t understand journalism, or that you just think everyone at the paper should be in the tank for Democrats. At a certain point, isn’t this just the language that abusers use to make you think you’re the problem?
And now some of these same reporters who have pushed the BS narratives that brought us here and/or lashed out at their critics are begging people not to leave:
I don’t like saying any of this. I recognize that we need great reporters now more than ever, especially if things get worse. But with our nation on the precipice of fascism, we shouldn’t be gaslit by people who went into journalism to make a buck for our demands that they make a difference.
