Janet Malcolm has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When I first came across it I loved her article “Forty One False Starts” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/11/forty-one-fals...
it's astounding
>"One of the through lines in her work was a merciless view of journalism, never mind that she was one of its most prominent practitioners.“Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it trades,” she wrote in “Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial” (2011). “Malice remains its animating impulse.”
I actually think this is how journalism ought to be. I occassionaly think of Hunter S. Thompson's obituary of Nixon in which he described how one had to get subjective and leave behind the standards of so called 'objective' journalism to get to the truth. I think this kind of competitive malice is no worse than say, the malice in business to outcompete.
What I personally don't like is not that kind of inquisitive writing but a moralistic attitude denying it. If journalists pursue this kind of writing they should hold themselves to that same standard, but they should nonetheless not shy away from controversy. One place where I think it's really relevant today is tech. You have companies like a16z trying to produce these soft propaganda alternative media outlets in response to 'toxic' journalists, but I side firmly with the journalists here even if part of journalistic writing is notoriety and fame or 'malice', they just ought to admit it. I'm often kind of sad to see how uncritically people, in particular here on HN, eat up these calls for civility, which is simply power trying not to be questioned.
I think it matters that the goals of journalism are ostensibly different from the goals of business. The goal of business is to get people to buy something, maybe with some sideline in getting them to keep doing it over a long time. The goal of journalism is, I think, to show people important things that are happening. Optimizing engagement/acquiring customers is the goal for business, optimizing readership isn't supposed to be the goal for journalism. If it is, you run into, well, the things people complain about in modern journalism (and not-so-modern yellow journalism). And I think journalists whose primary goal is notoriety are more likely to optimize for controversy and readership, not showing people important things.
That's sort of orthogonal to "civility", I guess. But I question the idea that adversarial journalism is the way to go. My understanding is that good journalists have excellent people skills and can write critically and truthfully while cultivating relationships in an area that enable them to keep understanding what's happening in that area. Probably the number of journalists who are genuinely able to do this is not high, but we should hope for more of them.
And yet somehow the idea of all journalism being a form of individuals’ perspectives of situations seems equally disquieting. With the hand of outstanding writers this blatantly personal journalism produces writing of the highest quality. But lesser writers - I’m thinking of the likes of Tucker Carlson and Owen Jones - it becomes nothing more than second-rate preaching at the Sunday pulpit. Nothing new is said, nobody learns anything. It’s just stories that make a certain audience feel good.
Malice is the intent to do evil, or in a law sense it means to have a wrong intention. Why would you think that journalism ought to be like that?
> I'm often kind of sad to see how uncritically people, in particular here on HN, eat up these calls for civility, which is simply power trying not to be questioned.
The ability to convey malice and incivility is proportional to power. Anyone who can criticize without fear of being silenced has true power, and anyone who is truly powerless will be silenced one way or another. Civility in discourse is one means of allowing the truly powerless to criticize the truly powerful.