CNN: Where a hard man is good to find

 After eight months all by himself, Jeffrey Toobin is back, he's jacked, and he's got the world in the palm of his hands.

Yesterday, CNN officially welcomed back its disgraced Chief Legal Analyst with a well-rehearsed public mea culpa and seemingly no repercussions.

 

Lest this development rub people the wrong way, CNN has recently unbuttoned its ethical standards for its on-camera talent, allowing Chris Cuomo to continue pretending he R SRS REPORTERMAN despite counseling his governor brother on his numerous misdeeds. And because Toobin's takes are on the right side of history, CNN is happy to look the other way.

In this friendly interview with a woman dressed as a banana (pure coincidence, I'm sure), Toobin assures the audience that, other than masturbating in full view of his horrified colleagues, there are no other "skeletons in the closet." I'm sure that's very reassuring for the young lawyer he knocked up, then pressured to have an abortion, only to end up failing to pay child support.

Unlike the New Yorker, CNN clearly feels that the damage to its already-foundering credibility is outweighed by the keen legal insights Toobin is apt to whip out, such this one from the clip above:

Q: Do you think that the punishment fits the crime?

Toobin: You know, I am the worst person to ask that question. No. I loved the New Yorker, I loved working there. ... And I thought this punishment was excessive, but look, that's why they don't ask the criminal to be the judge in his own case.

They sure don't, Jeff. They sure don't.

Time to update the Commenteriat style guide

A few months ago, I began to notice something odd in news articles of media organizations, both major and niche. In headlines, hyperlinks and bodies of text, the word "black" -- both as a noun for people of non-Arab African descent and as adjective for people fitting that description -- had begun to appear with the "b" capitalized.

It has been many years since I cracked open an AP Style Book, the de facto standard for most American news organizations, so I thought faulty memory had led me erroneously to believe that both "black" and "white" had always been lowercase. Additionally, one of our esteemed Commenteriat colleagues pointed out to me in an unrelated thread that "Black" had appeared on government forms for as long as he could remember. I have no reason to doubt that that is true. Yet, it turns out many media outlets have in fact very recently made this stylistic change:

AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person.

We also now capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place.

These changes align with long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American. Our discussions on style and language consider many points, including the need to be inclusive and respectful in our storytelling and the evolution of language. We believe this change serves those ends.

 In my opinion, if the capitalized "Black" supplants the ungainly and potentially confusing "African-American," then good. When I think of all the awkward line justifications and jumps the latter has caused, a vein pulsates on the temple of my inner copy-editor. As for "Indigenous," I find it a mild improvement over the too-precious "Native American."

At the same time, the change raises uncomfortable questions about what want we believe the purpose of standardized language is. Is it to foster clear understanding between speaker and audience? Or is it to affirm the values of a political moment and apply different rules to people in the news based on their race? Proponents of the style change argue for the latter.

For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

But in addition to being in accord with the logic of the style guide of the Daily Stormer, just with the colors reversed, this rationale runs into problems when one remembers that in many parts of the world, black people form distinct identities that may have little to do with their skin color. Does a black person from Brooklyn share a sense of "identity and community" with a black person of Nigerian heritage who grew up in a French banlieue more so than he does with a white person from Brooklyn? Perhaps, but probably no more so than a white person from Chevy Chase, Maryland, shares a sense of identity and community with a white person from Lapland.

Per this understanding, it is a kind of orthographic injustice to lowercase the B: to do so is to perpetuate the iniquity of an institution that uprooted people from the most ethnically diverse place on the planet, systematically obliterating any and all distinctions regarding ethnicity and culture. 

 In other words, if you're still using last year's AP Style Guide, you're a racist.

When Kafka met Kaufman

Of the many uncertainties facing this country in these tumultuous times, among the least pressing is, have we reached peak meta yet?

With a 3,000-word, Charlie Kaufman-esque account* of an awkward blackface moment at a staffer's Halloween party from two years ago, the Washington Post seems to be saying from within its own collective rectum that the answer is SHIDD, NUH.

Here are the key points:

• White liberal Nobody attended the Post's political cartoonist's personal Halloween bash in 2018 as "Megyn Kelly but in blackface," only to leave in tears after some unsophisticated people failed to appreciate the irony.
• Incident went unreported and was mostly forgotten for nearly two years. Until...
• Two people who, as of last week, still felt "harassed" by Nobody complained to the host, Post political cartoonist Tom Toles.
• Toles lied to them both about knowing that the incident happened and about knowing Nobody. He nonetheless apologized for the incident.
• Complainant 1 deemed the apology insufficient, deriding Toles's failure to offer up Nobody's identity for further public humiliation as "a deliberate act of white privilege and cowardice."
•  Nobody, seeking to get ahead of the story, discloses the imminent publication of the Post article to her employer, who summarily fires her.
• The Post publishes a 3,000-word Kaufman-esque account to serve as both didactic tale of the evils of white privilege and cynical CYA for one of its own.

The whole thing is a glorious trainwreck of media virtue-signalling, self-indulgence, and unintentional humor.

The actual news value is nil. I probably should have mentioned that at the top.

(It's worth noting for those unfamiliar that Toles is no stranger to self-referential humor: He carries on the proud hack-political-cartoonist tradition of drawing into the corner of each offering a tiny version of himself reacting to his own joke or providing an obvious punchline where none is otherwise available.)

Update: New York magazine dug into this mess and came up with some interesting inside details that, while not entirely responsive to the important questions raised by the debacle, shed light on how one of the pillars of the influence media views its role in today's environment. Among them:

• The Post story engendered the same confusion among its staff as it did its readership -- namely, why was this a matter of public interest? The Post's designated p.r. muppet claims the presence of newsroom employees at the incident "impelled" the paper to publish the piece: "The story is a microcosm of what the country is going through right now." Sure, it is. I mean, who among us doesn't work for one of the most influential media institutions in the country and hasn't thrown a Halloween party where people wear obnoxious Beltway-themed costumes like Brett Kavanaugh-with-a-beer-helmet and haven't had that blow up in our face when someone showed up in "ironic" blackface?
• The fact that even the two bylined reporters -- both 20-year Post veterans -- seem more than a little embarrassed by their own story suggests they were under direct or indirect orders by editors who are no more than one or two rungs under top editor Marty Baron. The New York follow-up doesn't name who it might have been, which doesn't speak well for them.
• Along those lines, it's clear the Post absolutely will NOT hold anyone accountable for this mess. If they weren't going to return the Pulitzer they got for their role in promoting the now-discredited Russiagate conspiracy theory, they sure as s___ aren't going to walk back this one.
• As the reporting for the Post story was unfolding, senior management were being subjected to intense pressure from within about the Post's own "racism and discrimination" problems. One former reporter quoted in the New York piece infers that "someone complained to the Post about this stupid incident[,] and rather than handling it as an HR matter, they decided the best thing for public relations would be to project transparency by reporting on it themselves." [Emphasis added.]
•  Finally -- and most deliciously -- New York interviewed Complainant 1 after the Post crapped the bed. She expressed "shock" that the reaction to the story she harangued the Post into reporting led to people wanting to cancel her. Where before she claimed the failure to publicly shame a private person to be "an act of white privilege and cowardice," she now preaches the gospel of can't-we-all-just-get-along:

  But truth is — we’re ALL racist, that’s the problem. And we all deserve the grace to learn and change. Let’s use these moments to change hearts and minds, not publicly shame. 

*For those paywalled or too lazy to read the whole goddamn thing, Reason's writeup provides more than sufficient excerpts and analysis.

Commenteriat Commune, Where Journalism Still Exists

As I am sure many colleagues have noted in the past, seeking "media" status recognition for Internet reporting and discussions can be a hit and miss proposition.  This was shown perhaps most cogently by the Supreme Court screwing with SCOTUSBLOG over press credentials and admission to the gallery.

Notwithstanding the consistent snubs from such quarters as ABAJournal.com's "BLAWG 100" (now, ironically, passed from this plane of being in its own right), our volunteer contributors have sometimes been the first on the Internet to break particular news tidbits.  Further, in my opinion, the writing here is equal to or better than what is to be found today at many of the big-name media outlets.

For this reason, I wanted to share the outcome of my media fee-waiver request (in connection with my FOIA submission seeking documents on DOE's oversight of and correspondence with Florida Coastal School of Law):

You have asked for a waiver of all fees, including duplication fees, associated with processing your request based on your requester category as a(n) Educational/News Media use requester and the information requested will be disseminated to the public. That request is granted.

Colleagues, at least someone recognizes and appreciates what we do here.