Choosing the Stories We Do

And whose voices get to be heard

Photo: Pat Spearman, The National Black Justice Coalition

In 2017, I did a story for NPR on Nevada passing the Equal Rights Amendment.

At the time, I was hosting a talk show at Nevada Public Radio. 

It was a fraught place to work. 

First, we had a CEO who didn’t see other women, unless she perceived them as a threat. Then you had to watch your back.

Second, my editor and co-host turned to me a few months into my tenure and said, a propos of nothing, “I think you’re autistic.”

The man had no medical or psych degree and, I would come to learn, no emotional intelligence. But he diagnosed me. Out of the blue.

“An autistic savant,” he would say. “Like Rainman.” Then he would do an unfortunate impression of Dustin Hoffman - a cringy performance of a cringy performance.

I realized, after this went on for a few months, that he was trying to put me in my place to salve his insecurity. One morning, as we were about to tape the show’s opening, he again told me I was autistic.

“No,” I answered wearily. “I’m just smarter than you.”

The woman in the control room laughed.

My co-host never said it again.

Also… I shouldn’t need to say this, but “autistic” isn’t an insult.

She’s Crazy

I had heard the ERA was coming up again in the 2017 legislative session after its sponsor, Senator Pat Spearman, pulled me aside at an event just before the 2016 election and told me to look at the bill draft requests.

“This time, we’re going to pass it,” she said to me.

I brought the story up in our next pitch meeting. My editor/co-host dismissed it out of hand.

“She’s crazy,” he said of Spearman. “She brings this up every session, and it never passes.”

Pat Spearman is not crazy.

Pat Spearman is a Black woman, who grew up in the Midwest and South in the period after Brown v. Board of Education was passed; as civil rights activists were staging sit-ins and bus boycotts to force the decision to be acted upon.

She’s queer. With a penchant for wearing men’s suits.

She’s a pastor, and her speeches often have Sunday sermon overtones.

She’s former military, and has stories to tell about misogyny in the armed forces.

She does not look or sound anything like the man who told me she was crazy. Nor, likely, like the people he grew up with or worked with in his 20+ years as a journalist.

Moreover, nothing she had put forward during her previous sessions in the legislature smacked of anything out of the ordinary. She focused a lot on veterans. And education.

Also, the dismissive, “She brings this up every session,” made it sound like Spearman had been in the Senate for over a decade. In fact, she first served in 2013, then again in 2015.

It was in 2015 that she led the first ERA vote. Which failed.

So… once. She had brought the issue up once before.

I’m gonna digress for a second here, because two of Spearman’s four co-sponsors of that failed first attempt on the Equal Rights Amendment were a man who would be forced to resign from the Senate later in 2017 after a wide-ranging sexual harassment investigation; and a man who had moved up to Congress, but ended up serving only one term, and ignoring calls from Nancy Pelosi to resign… because of a number of verifiable sexual harassment allegations.

I do love irony.

I ended up bringing Spearman into the studio before the 2017 legislative session started, and talked to her about a bunch of of issues, including the ERA. Then, a couple of months later, when it was clear the ERA was going to pass, I pitched the story to an editor at NPR. It got on Morning Edition.

But not before this exchange happened in the editing process:

White Male Midwestern Editor: Wait, is something wrong with the audio? What’s up with her voice?

Me: That’s just her voice.

Male Editor: Cool!

This should tell you a lot about how pre-existing assumptions affect what gets chosen to be put on the air, and what stories get told.

Without me there to answer that question, I have often wondered if the entire audio might have been tossed because the tape was “bad.”

You’re Just Partisan

On Friday night, Molly Jong-Fast, who writes for Vanity Fair, relayed her recent staff meeting experiences on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, hosted by Stephanie Ruhle.

“The pundit industrial complex… the mainstream media… the New York Times… they all ran 57 pieces about how Biden was old. I was like, ‘The guy is pretty sharp. I’ve been in this White House, I’ve talked to people, I’ve seen what they’re doing,’ and everyone was like, ‘No, Molly, you’re just partisan.’”

Then Biden ad-libbed his way through the State of the Union, and no one could credibly argue anymore that he wasn’t sharp.

This reminded me of my conversation with my former editor about Spearman, and numerous other conversations I’ve had with colleagues and editors who refuse to hear anything that challenges what they already think they know.

The media’s embrace of the “doddering old man” trope has always confounded me. We are an industry that relies on sources. And well-placed sources who had met with the President were telling journalists that Biden was on top of things. But they were dismissed, with the excuse that these sources worked for the White House or were somehow biased because they got a meeting with Biden to begin with.

And yet, these same journalists would credibly report other “scoops” the same insiders gave them. As long as those scoops comported to a line of thinking the journalists - and their editors - already had.

The overriding culture that pervades almost every newsroom in the U.S. is “I’ve never experienced this, so I’m skeptical it happened.”

Because as much as our editors and publishers talk about the importance of objectivity, we all grew up on the idea that we should trust our guts.

And then we use objectivity as a shield to prevent us from questioning the conclusions our guts give us.

Every story we write… every front page that is mocked up… every idea that is greenlit by an editor, are choices. Choices made by people, with preconceived notions, about the weirdness of someone’s voice, or the idea that you can’t see truth if you agree with it.

So many of the (mostly) men who run journalism dismiss ideas brought to the table that conflict with their preconceived notions. And so many (mostly) women who work in journalism - like Jong-Fast and myself - are mistrusted for pointing out truths that don’t comport to those pre-conceived notions.

We do this with the economy, when we opine about how Social Security needs to be cut, without acknowledging that this is part of the Reagan economic agenda that has been disproven since the pandemic.*

We do this when we perceive someone as too angry or too crazy or too Black or too female.

We are not an industry that is open to a variety of worldviews. Except, we think we are. Our entire identity rests on our “independence” and lack of partisanship.

But the journalism industry is a system - a system that has been set up to work a certain way, within certain rules. And those who work in it generally accept the rules of the system. Without question. So, while we may be calling out the wrongs in systems journalists are meant to cover, we do not call out the wrongs in the system we are part of.

Most of the time, we are too close to see it.

And we don’t call out the wrongs - like racism and sexism - as much as we should in the systems we cover, because they echo too strongly in our journalism systems.

When #MeToo happened in October of 2017, most women who had worked in newsrooms were not surprised that half the men implicated in sexual harassment charges were journalists.

My editor, the one who called me autistic, didn’t want to cover #MeToo at all. And when he finally acquiesced, he assigned a man - who had two harassment complaints lodged against him earlier that year - to cover it. Luckily, half the people in the room were women, and we vetoed that.

That rarely happens. The people who argue against the common wisdom that the system dictates are usually not half the room. They are often ostracized. Called “crazy.” Called “partisan.” Called “angry.” And, at least in one instance (I give him props for creativity), called “autistic.”

It’s the outsiders who are calling out the misuse of the idea of objectivity. It’s insiders, like Marty Baron and A.G. Sulzberger, whose entire careers were bolstered by systems that were slanted toward them, who are dismissive of the criticism.

This hurts journalism. More to the point, this hurts democracy.

*In fact, the Washington Post not only pushed forward the old, tired trickle-down agenda, it blamed Social Security for the debt crisis - which is a totally manufactured political move by Republicans to not pay our bills as a hostage tactic.

Thanks to Dan Froomkin for sussing out the Sulzberger speech.

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