Show Your Work: Journalism-shaming, Spotify's secrets, climate coverage hoax
What's cooking at Fourth Watch this week...
Welcome to another edition of “Show Your Work” — where I give you a preview of what I’m working on, that might, in the near- or long-term, become part of the broader Fourth Watch newsletter, a TheHill column, or something else (or… not). It’s a behind-the-scenes look into the process, what I’m thinking through, in its unfinished form.
Free subscribers get a peek, paid subscribers get the full thing. Here we go:
Journalism-shaming: There’s this guy named Dan Froomkin who used to work at The Washington Post and HuffPost, among other outlets — he was always ‘of the left,’ but he was ostensibly a press critic that relied on journalistic integrity and ethics to critique his business, and the political world.
That was until somewhere around 2015 and the rise of Donald Trump, and now he’s just hilariously insane — one of those previously fairly normal journalists who have had their brains broken thanks to our current political landscape. Last week he wrote this incredible rant on his “Press Watch” site that pilloried the recent welcome interview of The New York Times’ new “On Politics” newsletter correspondent, Jess Bidgood, who came to the role from the Boston Globe where she served as a political reporter. To give you a sign of the purview of this Froomkin guy, here’s an early paragraph: “We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution. And yet political journalists seem to think this is just fine.”
He’s serious! Anyway, go read the whole loony article because it’s instructive about where our industry stands. He’s mad about Bidgood saying things like how covering the 2024 election will be “an adventure” or “fun” — this sort of cavalier talk is unacceptable for Dan Froomkin.
Now, I have no idea about Bidgood’s past work, and certainly am open-minded to her work now for the NYT and this widely-read newsletter. We’ll see. But I will also be anxiously watching to see whether the exercise of this targeted attack from a fairly prominent figure leads to a form of “journalism-shaming,” that has an effect on Bidgood and the Times itself. Someone refuses to toe the specific #Resistance line that democracy must be saved by our media members, and these losers attempt to shame them out of doing basic journalism. And it’s a trend.
Which brings me to a new terrible sign of the journalistic apocalypse and something called “Courier Newsroom.”