The culture war will come for us all.
On Sunday, it came for a Washington Post reporter, Felicia Sonmez.
Nine people were killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, Calif., that morning, including the basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. The news rocketed around social media, where mourners shared their heartbreak at the news. As is common with major breaking news, some reports were inaccurate or false, layering anxiety on top of grief.
Into the mix, Ms. Sonmez tweeted the link to a 2016 article from The Daily Beast about a young woman’s accusation that Mr. Bryant had raped her in Colorado. Criminal charges against him were dropped in 2004 and a civil suit was settled out of court.
The tweet highlighted the fact that Mr. Bryant’s legacy is fraught and complicated, and attracted the attention of fans as well as trolls who bombarded her inbox with abuse and posted her home address online. Ms. Sonmez then posted a selection of the threats she received, without obscuring the names of the people who had sent her hate mail. She slept in a hotel on Sunday night, fearing for her safety at home, she said.
We don’t know all the details, but it seems that The Post’s managing and executive editors were not pleased. They chastised her over email and placed her on administrative leave while the organization reviewed whether she had violated the company’s social media guidelines. Their reasoning on Monday: “The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues.” The Post reversed her suspension on Tuesday, roughly 36 hours after the initial tweets, stating that senior managers had concluded that Ms. Sonmez’s tweets didn’t violate company policy.
This, of course, was obvious to almost everyone but The Post’s higher-ups. It was impossible to imagine how posting a link to a story by a different publication on Twitter could undermine the work of colleagues. Just as it was impossible to imagine which colleagues would have felt undermined (more than 300 of Ms. Sonmez’s colleagues expressed solidarity with her in a letter from The Post’s union to management).
There remain glaring questions. Did the executive editor, Marty Baron, inquire about Ms. Sonmez’s safety when he emailed her to criticize her tweets? What, beyond a reflex for online civility, led The Post to determine the reporter was “hurting this institution” by discussing a part of Mr. Bryant’s legacy that appeared in The Post’s own news pages? Why, after years of watching journalists, women and vulnerable individuals being trolled and abused by viral outrage online, are newsrooms still falling for the same Gamergate-style tactics? The Post’s official statement (it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an apology), which included the caveat “we consistently urge restraint” for reporters online, doesn’t begin to answer these questions.
The incident also raises headier questions, including: In the world of online journalism, what specifically do writers owe to their publications via their social media presence? Surely, there’s a bare minimum if they’re collecting a paycheck. Journalists obviously shouldn’t undermine their colleagues with cheap shots or reckless speculation as to others’ work. They should stay professional. After that, things get murky.
Twitter is a Gordian knot of news and opinion that can’t be untangled. Inside publications, news and opinion bleed together; opinion writers report while reporters opine via news analysis. Partisan commentary, once a third rail for objective reporters, is omnipresent on Twitter. In the past, news organizations — and the people who work for them — would never have called the president a racist. Some now do so explicitly. Newsrooms and even the platforms have struggled with finding a new standard in the Trump era of disinformation; meanwhile, journalists are expected to sort it out in real time, while on the job. And to get it right or face consequences.
Journalists who build followings online, in part by being incisive, combative, funny and omnipresent on Twitter, are often hired because of that exposure — because they’re a known quantity.
At a larger organization, though, those same attributes may quickly be seen as a liability. Publications hire diverse outspoken writers and then get anxious when these writers start tweeting about politics. Some outlets ask staffers who don’t cover incendiary beats like politics to refrain from commenting on political goings-on. But what happens when politics touches everything? For those who’ve made a name being outspoken, suddenly saying nothing is a statement in itself. For newsroom leaders the questions get tough, fast. Few if any outlets seem to want to draw exact lines. And so they become blurred.
There’s also a double standard. While few publications would say it, it’s all but required for young journalists to jump into the culture war online. It’s a way to find stories. And in a volatile industry it gets you noticed. Being “part of the discourse” each day means being marketable. It helps writers, but it also bolsters publications, helping promote big stories and creating all kinds of dystopian forms of content like “microscoops,” or breaking news too small to merit its own article but enough to tout to competitors on Twitter.
This exposure is a drug for journalists. The real-time sparring and feedback is seductive, and the endorphin boosts of constant mentions is addictive. But it’s also exposure in the truest sense: great visibility and great vulnerability blended seamlessly together.
Though an argument could be made that all the time-wasting, in-jokes and gaffes from idle reporters and editors on Twitter subtly undermine the rigorous parts of the work, newsrooms benefit greatly from the constant exposure of their journalists. Reporters use Twitter to poke and prod sources. Writers sometimes enhance their stories with long tweet threads that explain the reporting process. And reporters build trust with audiences by including or signaling to their audience perspectives in their online analysis (Ms. Sonmez, who has come forward with details of her own sexual assault, told her colleague Erik Wemple that her tweets were, in part, to make survivors like herself who follow her feel seen). When important news breaks, newsrooms claim credit when their reporters break it first on Twitter.
Which is why The Post’s statement, especially its urging of restraint, is so fraught. The same editors who want restraint from reporters online during a celebrity death would most likely also be furious if their Capitol Hill reporters were slow in live-tweeting a hearing or impeachment proceeding and fell behind the competition. Restraint is a virtue in journalism, no doubt, but so are tenacity and transparency. The message is contradictory: Broadcast everything, but exercise restraint. Twitter isn’t real life, but tweets can and will get you fired or suspended.
But these qualities have been in conflict and competition for long before Twitter and newsrooms understood a journalist's exposure during breaking news and had their backs accordingly. Evidence suggests that’s not always the case in the face of a cascade of online outrage. That’s less a change in the industry than it is a failure of newsroom leaders to understand the information war it sends its journalists out to fight in each day.
While the internet’s culture war dynamics are fraught, they’re not all that hard to understand. They come in the form of intimidation and threats toward journalists and angry campaigns toward advertisers and executives. Some of the responses are posturing and some are real, but all are engineered for maximum virality and outrage. Yes, sometimes journalists make mistakes. Sometimes work will harm the institution or undermine co-workers, but newsroom leaders ought to be trained to distinguish trolls from good-faith criticism.
It’s a weird moment that newsrooms aren’t talking about enough. Just as social media platforms allow celebrities, politicians and influencers to circumvent traditional press gatekeeping, the same thing has happened to journalism’s own practitioners. Despite all the social media guidelines, there’s an unanswered question: Who do those followers really belong to?
Perhaps it’s most accurate to say they’re an asset and a liability for both parties. Everyone’s exposed. But there’s an asymmetry to that exposure. The culture war will come for us all, institutions and individuals alike. One group can weather the storm, the other needs protection. Newsrooms need to get smart, prepare and protect their foot soldiers. It’s the least they can do.
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