Is Reporting on Hate Good for the Haters? A big part of my job is reporting antisemitism – from the filth spilling out of the sewers of white supremacy, to the never-ending debate over when anti-Israel activity ends and Jew-hatred begins, to the isolated graffiti scrawled on a synagogue door.
It’s a job that comes with some responsibility, but frankly one that can be abused. Does reporting on antisemitism only amplify it? Like the “if it bleeds it leads” journalism of local TV newscasts, does our reporting end up suggesting the world is more hostile to Jews than it actually is?
I fret especially over the “one-offs” – the kinds of incidents that show up in annual tallies of antisemitism that do not discriminate between antisemitic ideas spread by major bad actors and the swastika painted on a highway overpass. By treating the latter as newsworthy, do I end up empowering a 16-year-old with a Sharpie?
Digital media expert Whitney Phillips takes on these dilemmas in her brand-new study, “The Oxygen of Amplification.” Using case studies, she contends that journalists have accidentally propagated extremist ideology out of a well-intentioned impulse to expose manipulators and trolls. Her paper is a catalogue of Trump-era hate-mongering: the rise of the alt-right here and the far-right in Europe; the ascendancy of social media trolls and the social media sites, like 4Chan and parts of Reddit and Twitter, where they lurk.
Reporting on these trends, even critically, also gave the subjects a wider audience. The journalists Phillips spoke to tell themselves that it is better to turn over the rock and expose what’s underneath. But they also worry that by, say, amplifying a fringe politician’s musings about Jewish space lasers, they inject a new antisemitic idea into the public bloodstream.
“The basic understanding that one’s reporting could end up benefiting extremists, or otherwise contribute to the spread of misinformation, was deeply concerning for almost every person I spoke to,” she writes.
Phillips cites an example from 2016, when Time magazine reporter Joel Stein shared his email exchange with avowed neo-Nazi Andrew Auernheimer, which ended when Auernheimer declared that Jews deserved to be murdered.
“Even if a particular article takes an overall condemnatory tone toward its subject, as does Stein’s, the manipulators’ messages are still amplified to a national or global audience, and the manipulators themselves still get exactly what they want”— that is, wider attention and greater recruitment power.
“The Oxygen of Amplification” is a helpful guidebook for a treacherous landscape. Journalists should be out there exposing and challenging the trolls. We should be careful about providing microphones to those who are already the loudest voices in the room. We should put antisemitism in perspective, recognizing its dangers even as we acknowledge the relative security and safety most Jews enjoy today.
Those are a lot of “shoulds,” and they can even cancel one another out, like a game of rock, paper, scissors. The best we can do as journalists is to weigh our decisions carefully. In a section on “tips for establishing newsworthiness,” Phillips provides advice from April Glaser, technology writer at Slate. “When weighing the question of newsworthiness, she considers whether the reporting will have a positive social benefit, if it will open up a new conversation, and/or if it will add weight and exemplars to an existing conversation,” writes Phillips. “If the answer to these questions is yes, the story is likely worth reporting.”
In the Frame
The past week was the 30th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots, when the tragic, accidental death of a Black child led to three days of unrest during which a Hasidic Jewish man was stabbed and killed. Nearly every word in the preceding sentence, after “when,” can and has been parsed and disputed by various sides in the three decades since the events. Did Blacks and Jews “clash,” or were the riots a “pogrom” in which Jews were targeted? Was this a story about racism and antisemitism – or merely antisemitism?
Such debates were crystallized on the 20th anniversary, when Ari L. Goldman wrote a piece for The Jewish Week looking back on his reporting of the riots for The New York Times. Goldman wrote that the “city’s newspapers, so dedicated to telling both sides of the story in the name of objectivity and balance, often missed what was really going on.” He describes his fights with his editors, who insisted on framing the story as “blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions,” when Goldman and other reporters “never saw — or heard of — any violence by Jews against blacks.”
Nothing in Ari’s piece denies the Black community’s frustrations with law enforcement and, at times, their Jewish neighbors. But the article is and was an important acknowledgement of how even great newspapers get it wrong, and how journalistic instincts about fairness and objectivity can actually distort a story. Give it a read. Photo, top: John Evans/Flickr Commons Thanks for reading. Reach me at editor@jewishweek.org. Follow me on Twitter, and don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your friends. |