Thread by @SethAbramson

In the last five years of following Maggie Haberman, I've never once seen her distinguish between the word "journalist" and the word "reporter." When she does that for the first time, this journalism professor—who teaches 25 genres of journalism—will take her expertise seriously.

The four principles that govern responsible reportage are objectivity, accuracy, transparency and honesty. When you overuse anonymous sources, continue using sources after they've lied to you, and engage in access journalism, you violate the latter three of these four principles.

I encourage people to read widely about 21st c. journalism. This semester I'm teaching a course on the subject at UNH, so I know how complex, subtle and thorny the topic is. Anyone selling you a line about how journalism works that sounds like it came from 1950 should be ignored.

Having said that, I agree that fundamental misunderstandings over what journalism is often lead to not just bad criticism of journalists but bad journalism *from* journalists. I think the current brouhaha over a journalist questioning Lisa Murkowski is a very complicated one.

When a reporter does original research to locate an old Neera Tanden tweet and then confronts a senator mentioned in that tweet with the tweet in order to create a news story, it is reasonable for people to ask whether that is an act of hard-news reportage or advocacy journalism.

Compare that situation to a reporter contacting Murkowski to get her reaction to a tweet the reporter knows she already saw. In both instances, we're dealing with journalism. But we are dealing with two *different genres* of journalism that need to be transparent about their use.

Now imagine for a moment we have a practicing reporter who's never formally studied journalism or taught journalism and therefore believes the genre of journalism she practices is the only genre of journalism that exists. She might accidentally call advocacy journalism reportage.

I abhor, with a level of anger I can't even express, anyone who's currently sending racist or misogynistic abuse to anyone, whether the reporter who presented Murkowski with that tweet or anyone else. I also think that there's a reason to be concerned with the reporter's conduct.

Objection to reporters creating—not reporting—news has nothing to do with wanting reporters to be biased. It has to do with 2 of the 4 OATH principles: objectivity and transparency.

Journalists must be transparent about whether the genre of journalism they practice is objective.

Advocacy journalism exists and is a legitimate genre of journalism if it's practiced transparently and meets the standards of accuracy and honesty established by the OATH principles. Advocacy journalism masquerading as reportage is a problem no matter who does it/when they do it.

I have little sympathy for journalists with such a narrow understanding of their profession they routinely misinform readers about how journalism works wagging their fingers about misunderstanding journalism. There are *very* few people providing a real education in this subject.

I'm working on an essay series at PROOF that takes a university course–level look at journalism. It sounds nothing like either the discourse of partisans *or* the discourse of reporters who don't understand their profession. Here's an entry in the series: sethabramson.substack.com/p/twelve-thing…

Both practitioners of a trade and non-practitioners can be good teachers. In law school, I studied under some practitioners and some academics. By the same token, both non-practitioners of a trade *and* practitioners can have no clue whatsoever how to teach in their subject area.

In journalism we face a third problem: a class of practitioners and non-practitioners who are excellent at teaching the ins and outs of a journalistic ecosystem that no longer exists in the United States since the advent of the internet. They're great at teaching a dead language.

The internet not only gave birth to dozens of new genres of journalism but so profoundly changed existing genres that to teach journalism in 2021 the same way it was taught in 1970 is to do a grave disservice to those being taught. And that's why I use the phrase "dead language."

But in the same way you can study Latin to improve your understanding of the Romance languages, we can draw an *enormous* volume of critical knowledge about how to practice journalism today from how it was previously practiced. I certainly do that in my journalism classes at UNH.

In the PROOF essay below, I give a brief example of how the advent of the internet created new dilemmas for both journalists *and* their readers that journalism generally has not only *not* solved but been aggressively hostile toward the notion of solving. sethabramson.substack.com/p/memory-and-m…

What we find is that we must deconstruct the current state of journalism in order to critique, reconstruct, and innovate within this key sphere. It's frightening how far from being capable of this deconstruction certain practicing journalists are. Their incuriousness is dazzling.

In this audio lecture at PROOF, I approach the question of "What is journalism?" both deductively *and* inductively to show that the premise and the practice are *not* anchored in the specific conventions certain professionalized journalists deem dogmatic. sethabramson.substack.com/p/what-is-jour…

I believe that not only *can* America have a highly complex debate over the future of journalism but that we *must* do so. We need many voices in this discussion—but after 5 years of reading Maggie Haberman's untutored views on what journalism is, I'm not sure we need that voice.

Haberman's access journalism—which depends on a trio of skills: networking; being willing to be lied to by sources and still use those sources; audacity in granting anonymity to sources—can on occasion offer bracingly useful reportage. At other times it provides cover for crimes.

If Haberman were to be honest and transparent about her reporting methods, rather than being one of the foremost proponents of misleadingly equating journalism and reportage and misleadingly failing to distinguish between the many types of reportage, I'd be all good with her bag.

But here's what I think is really happening: I think journalists are actually just having a conversation with one another about how to perpetuate their field in exactly the form it presently takes. I think they find ways of signaling to one another that they're on the same team.

So sometimes Haberman or another extremely powerful journalist will offer a tweet that seems to be directed toward public edification on the question of what journalism is, when it's really aimed at signaling comradeship with other journalists who little understand the practice.

I strongly urge people to follow as many reliable voices as they can in navigating debates over the nature of journalism. But realize too that if you are an avid consumer of journalism, you *do* have a BS detector for when someone describes a phenomenon that breaks with reality.

So if someone tells you every journalist is a reporter, you know that's not true. If someone tells you a journalist who tries to *create* news is merely a reporter, you know that's not true. if someone tells you it's OK to use sources who routinely lie, you know that's not true.

(SOURCE) This was the brouhaha (and the reaction to the said brouhaha) that inspired this thread.

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1365803620151816202?s=19

(PS) The relationship between the word "reportage" and the word "journalism" is the same as the relationship between the phrase "rock music" and the word "music." A reporter is *one type of journalist* in the *same way* a painter or poet or sculptor is one type of artist.

(PS2) That professional assessments of "newsworthiness" allow at least ten different factors to be considered singly or together—and that subjectivity and aesthetics necessarily arise in dealing with certain of these factors—is why reporting is almost never a mechanistic process.

(PS3) By the same token, because journalism is simultaneously a writing, research, communications and ethical practice, any—say—piece of reportage is shaded by ethical decisions a reporter makes invisibly, for instance regarding whether to trust a source and grant them anonymity.

(PS4) I think critiques of Haberman that suppose she has some political bias or conflict of interest are banal and unsupported by the facts. The real critiques of her work involve the ethically suspect methods of all access journalism—hers or anyone's. I'm not sure she gets that.

(PS5) Even between reports from the same subgenre of journalism—say, two articles in the field of fashion reporting—reporters can have such a different understanding of proper reporting protocols that one may be an access journalist while the other "merely" a hard-news reporter.

(PS6) So when Haberman implies repeatedly on Twitter that all journalists are reporters and that all reporters are the same type of reporter, she's so many orders of magnitude away from understanding the complexity of contemporary journalism that I don't even know where to start.

(PS7) When then, in the midst of an elementary school–level course of public education in the nature of journalism, Haberman wags a finger at the internet and says that *it* is the problem in people understanding journalism, it's the sort of diagnosis so bad it kills the patient.

(PS8) Media criticism is a subgenre of metajournalism—a genre of journalism—so no one who's employed fulltime as an access journalist should try to moonlight as a media critic. That should be left to journalism professors and those who freelance across many genres of journalism.

(PS9) In my 27 years in journalism, I've participated in the following genres and sub-genres of the practice:

▪️ Hard-news reportage (sports reporting)
▪️ Reviewing (films, TV, videogames, books)
▪️ Metajournalism (media criticism, fact-checking, curatorial journalism)

{Cont.}

(PS10)
▪️ Opeds (politics, law, higher ed, art, journalism)
▪️ Data journalism
▪️ Investigative reporting
▪️ Journalistic nonfiction
▪️ Editing
▪️ Advocacy journalism
▪️ Service journalism
▪️ News aggregation
▪️ Community journalism
▪️ Interactive journalism
▪️ Citizen journalism

(END) All of which is to say, I'm not sure how much someone who has spent almost her entire career as a political reporter—with a guiding philosophy of "access journalism"—understands about the scope, complexity, nuance, history, theory, and practice of journalism broadly writ.