What you need to know about the Harper's letter
The return of the Traditional Left to journalism signifies a greater change American media and the beginning of a new stage in the culture war.
Hey there! This has been such an exciting week! When I started writing this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d talk about my weekend, or the growing chasm on the political aisle fueled by fundamentalists, but Harper’s Magazine has dunked hope and possibility into the basket after a long but quiet dribble down the court.
More than 100 authors, scientists, professors, and creative professionals, including the likes of: Malcolm Gladwell, J.K. Rowling, and Noam Chomsky, have signed an open letter published on July 7th taking a stand for the liberal values of a healthy democracy. The letter’s mostly an inoffensive take on cancel culture from a wide berth of the new counterculture’s most prominent individuals. And, as anyone who’s been following this conflict probably guessed, there was Twitter backlash. Most of it was air; the offenses you see these far fundamentalists cry that only work in their realities. But there were some valid criticisms. One is that the signatories include canceled people. Individuals with a vested interest, the complaint argues, in resuscitating their career. Now, this might hold water if everyone who’s been canceled has faced a catastrophic disruption in their lives, but their people who have been canceled and come back stronger than before. Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog were both canceled for their coverage of trans-rights and trans-people and now have a very successful podcast. The signatories are also not all counter-establishment figures. Matt Yglesias, an American editor and columnist, is one of the more surprising signatories giving that he works for Vox Media. A media network that’s defined itself by politically tinted reporting and explaining how to think to readers.
Anyhow, the story is still developing. Is a letter in Harper’s Magazine with 153 signatures is going to change the American political space? Absolutely not. But it is symptomatic of a growing desire across the media industry and from readers to get a more diverse pallet of content produced and distributed.
One of the biggest issues facing modern media today is a lack of profitability. Over the past 20 years, nearly every revenue stream in journalism has drastically shrunk. Google and Facebook have become robber-barons of the digital advertising market, and subscriptions are only so sustainable for a large journalism organization. Yet, in defiance of common logic, the prominent publications that used to be staples of traditional journalism objectivity, the Washington Post and New York Times, have continually shored up to a progressive market. Which is highly cosmopolitan and engaged on social media (much like their staff), but is too small to build a sustainable business around. This has left a huge number of American’s displaced politically and without a home for high-functioning political debate and thought processes. The best I’ve found has been The Wall Street Journal, which to me still produces relatively unbiased objective news stories uninfluenced by their opinion sections. The Wall Street Journal has also been deeply affected by the decline of revenue in the journalism industry, but comes from a different political market, and therefor doesn’t factor into the progressive side of the conversation we’re talking about in this post.
These displaced Americans, like myself and possibly you, have been looking for alternatives in media consumption since the beginning of this downward spiral. Now, nearly five years later, with the publication of this letter, we may actually see results. Yascha Mounk, a German-American journalist and author, has just this week launched his new liberal (that’s a small “l”) publication: Persuasion. You can hear more about it in an interview of Mounk by Jesse Singal on Blocked and Reported or on The Dispatch Podcast.
Hopefully, readers interested in diverse perspectives and that practice tolerance can go out of their way to check out Mounk and his team. There are not only four major publications anymore, and if backed by an educated and talented staff, a publication of any size can be just as effective, and world changing as the institutions we see failing us now.
In fine sumus
I’ll be writing more about this topic in the up-and-coming weeks as it’s important to touch light on more sides of modern digital journalism, as well as who’s talking outside of the industry. I might also miss next week’s newsletter as I’m going on vacation (Yes, I will be safe and socially distant.) for my birthday and the gift I’d like to give myself is a week without the world’s drama in my head (Realistically, I’ll probably be working during my vacation too). I leave you with a number of good reads to help put the state of our country in your perspective, and a book that has put much of my life in perspective this past week:
If you want to understand the minds of those who are so sure they’re right: read David French on The Dispatch
If you want to understand the state our country is in: read The Story of Us by Tim Urban on his site: Wait But Why
What’s put my life in perspective this past month: “The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win,” by Maria Konnikova
P.S.
I’ve been working on building my own solutions to the Substack platform’s problems. If you’re programming inclined or interested in seeing if anything I’ve built might improve your use of the platform: see the GitHub.
Have an opinion on this? Shoot me an email at tristan@hamtyped.com or on Twitter: @TristanIsham
American flag photo byMichael Tuszynski on Unsplash.