Who Are the Rules of Journalism For?

Every vocation has its own set of rules and norms. Most of the time, these norms aren’t formally codified, and no central body exists to enforce them. But in the case of a few high-status professions — doctoring, lawyering, etc. — the rules are written down, and violating them can cost you your license to practice.

In any profession’s code of conduct, there are rules that govern the professional’s obligations toward the general public. But there are other rules, more often unwritten, that are purely self-interested and self-protective. Navigating the ethical dilemmas of the white collar office job often consists in distinguishing between rules that exist for the good of society and rules that exist to protect the guild.

Journalism occupations a strange position among white collar professions. You can get a graduate degree in journalism, but it isn’t mandatory.1 There is no licensing body out there that decides who is allowed to practice. But violating the rules can result in pretty severe social and professional sanctions. As for the content of those rules: they consist of a few universally acknowledged precepts — e.g., thou shalt not make shit up — and a bunch of fuzzier precepts endorsed by some media outlets and rejected by others. All of this, I think, makes journalists particularly vulnerable to motivated ethical reasoning.2 Which brings us to The New York Times.

Last week, a number of New York Times contributors co-signed a letter expressing “concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.” They pointed to a few recent articles as examples, referring to the authors of those pieces by name. I encourage you to read the letter in full.

Obviously, the signatories are venturing into delicate territory; no journalist likes to be publicly accused of malpractice, especially by colleagues, and especially when the topic is civil rights. But for all that, I found the letter remarkably measured and reasoned. More to the point, I found it convincing; the contributors cite some pretty damning examples. For example, while I can’t claim to know very much about gender-affirming therapy, I’m proficient enough in the English language to know that when you call someone “patient zero,” you are implying that they have an infectious disease.

It’s important to note that many of the letter’s signatories were showing quite a bit of courage in speaking up. Most of them are freelancers, meaning they do not enjoy the job protections in the Times News Guild’s collective bargaining agreement. And the loss of a regular gig at the paper of record can be devastating for a freelancer’s income. Yes, there are other publications out there, but the Times increasingly commands a quasi-monopolistic position in the national press.3 Not every signatory to the letter was taking a risk in signing it — Lena Dunham will be fine even if she never writes for the Times again — but plenty were.

But this post isn’t about the contributors’ letter, which speaks for itself. It’s about how the Times responded. A day after the contributors published their letter, Times executive editor Joe Kahn and “Katie” — presumably Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury — circulated the following memo to their staff.

For the rest of this post, I’m going to refer to the original open letter as “Letter A” and the Times editors’ response as “Letter B.”

There are a few things to say about Letter B. The first is that it is far more hostile than Letter A — even threatening. When Kahn and Kingsbury write that they “will not tolerate” public critiques like Letter A, the clear implication is that the letter’s signatories may get blackballed from the Times. Hardly a proportionate response, especially given that Letter B includes some implausible boilerplate about how Kahn and Kingsbury “have welcomed and will continue to invite discussion, criticism and robust debate about our coverage.”

Similarly, the last paragraph of Letter B is nothing but false piety. The first sentence — “We live in an era when journalists come under fire for doing solid and essential work.” — draws an implicit connection between the reasoned journalist-to-journalist critiques in Letter A and the far right’s violent threats against reporters. If the Times thinks so little of Letter A’s signatories — some of whom have produced truly spectacular journalism — one wonders why it hired them as contributors in the first place.

As for the substance of Letter B, there’s very little of it. Kahn and Kingsbury do not respond to any of the specific critiques in Letter A. Instead, they make a procedural argument, writing that Letter A’s signatories violated “the letter and spirit of our ethics policy.”

The violations in question? “That policy prohibits our journalists from aligning themselves with advocacy groups and joining protest actions on matters of public policy. We also have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such attacks.”

Like I said, I’m no expert in gender-affirmation therapy. I do, however, happen to know a thing or two about journalism, having worked as a reporter and editor in a few newsrooms back in the day. And Letter B’s procedural argument is, to use an industry term of art, a big crock of shit.

Because it’s the easiest to dismiss, let’s start with the paper’s “clear policy of prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly.” That would surely be news to Nikole Hannah-Jones and every other Times staffer who contributed to the Times magazine’s 1619 Project; their colleague Bret Stephens didn’t just attack The 1619 Project, he did so in the very pages of Times Opinion.

Picking apart the Times’s prohibition on contributors “aligning themselves with advocacy groups and joining protest actions on matters of public policy” is a little more complicated, but only because the language here is so tortured and imprecise. First, “protest actions on matters of public policy” must be a pretty broad category if it includes open letters on the practice of journalism. One wonders if the infamous Harper’s letter — drafted by a Times contributor and signed by other Times contributors, including two staff columnists — fits the bill. I certainly don’t recall Kahn and Kingsbury making public threats against anyone who put their name to that missive.

Second, I’m not entirely clear on what Kahn and Kingsbury mean by “aligning themselves with advocacy groups.” They seem fixated on the fact that Letter A’s signatories coordinated the release of their letter with the advocacy group GLAAD, which published a letter of its own on the same day. But I don’t see what the big deal is supposed to be. If coordinating publication is aligning yourself with an advocacy group, what is the Times doing when it honors an embargo? Or did Letter A’s signatories sin by tacitly endorsing the perspective of an advocacy group? If doing that is impermissible, then it appears that the Times Opinion editor has agreed to a near-total ban on opinion journalism.

So much for the text of Letter B, with its empty hectoring and specious legalisms. But the real content is in the subtext. Yes, the ethical standards that Kahn and Kingsbury cite are both weirdly vague and inconsistently applied; that’s the point. How those standards are applied tells you everything that you need to know.

The real message of Letter B is that the Times’s code of content varies depending on where one sits in the Times pecking order. Kahn and Kingsbury are not articulating a universal set of ethical principles; they’re cynically using the language of journalistic best practices to insulate powerful members of the organization against accountability.

You might wonder why I’ve dedicated a relatively long post to close-reading an internal Times memo. First reason: as a former journalist who has occupied positions of both relative powerlessness and relative power within a handful of different news organizations, this shit pisses me off. Clubbishness, elitism, and rank-pulling all go against the ethos of the profession at its best.

Second reason: The internal pathologies of the Times offer an especially good example of how bourgeois professional norms can be mobilized to protect hierarchies instead of encouraging professional excellence. Partly that’s because so much of the Times’s office politics spill over into public channels; us wannabe kremlinologists have plenty of material to work with.

Third reason: The internal dysfunction of any given newsroom can have a big impact on the quality of its output. And the Times is not just any given newsroom. As mentioned above, the paper’s imperial position in American journalism is larger and more unassailable than ever; what the Times says on a subject affects how every other outlet covers it. That’s what makes its lack of internal accountability particularly disturbing.

Our politics would no doubt be healthier if the Times had more serious competitors. Failing that, Times contributors and readers have every right to demand better, fairer coverage of trans health care. I’ve added my signature to Letter A, and I hope you will too.