[Freddie deBoer] The Tribe Still Comes First

In the fifteen years I’ve written for public consumption, this is the topic I’ve returned to most. I have argued that people who work in the media are in great majorities unduly concerned with being popular among their peers, and that this desire distorts our newsmedia and what it covers in destructive ways. I also believe that the most important site of this kind of social conditioning is Twitter. A corollary to this is that the industry, which will give the most trivial subjects immense amounts of coverage (like, say, the “Try Guys”) avoids talking about the powerful impact of the desire to be popular, a kind of within-industry omerta that prevents anyone from looking too closely at how the sausage gets made. I told this story my first year of writing, I’ve told it most every year since, and I’m telling it again now. Because nothing ever changes.

There are, of course, many people of both talent and integrity within the industry who do their best to avoid this social capture. Many of them are open-minded about who they read and what they’ll engage with. Indeed, the median writer is (unsurprisingly) more thoughtful and willing to challenge consensus than the crowd. But even the most independent of them tend to at least maintain the code of omerta, refusing to publicly question the in-crowd dynamics even if they won’t play into them with their own behavior. And I do get it; they have to live and work in that industry and coexist alongside the peers that they might be criticizing in aggregate. It would, though, make me feel slightly less crazy if more people would say, even occasionally, “people in the industry really want to be well-liked, and they change their public personas and their work to remain so.” What’s frustrating for me is that, while they may not share my level of disdain for this condition, many individual writers have privately conceded the broad contours of what I’m saying. But they don’t do so publicly. Like I said. Omerta.

Of course, the disciplinary action taken against people who speak the way I am is exactly what you’d expect: insiders accuse critics of insiderism of merely being jealous that they aren’t insiders themselves. It can’t be the case that someone like myself could genuinely, organically observe the ways in which media cliquishness distorts the practices of journalism and commentary and advocate for something better. Any such critics must necessarily merely want to be a part of the hierarchy they criticize, sour grapes. Again, it never changes.

What I never understand is why no enterprising media reporter doesn’t ever try to report this out. There are no industries where insiderism and patronage don’t impact the labor market to some degree, so why not try to explore that influence? How does the insiderism of elite media Twitter influence the industry and thus our national story? This topic would seem to fit perfectly for several people who have undertaken career-long investigations of media and online culture. I don’t know how anyone who works in professional media can fail to understand that what gets covered and who gets advanced within the profession is deeply bound up in who’s perceived as cool among peers, especially as expressed on Twitter. But my sense is that if any particular media reporters were to see this post, they would likely just make fun of it - and in so doing, take part in precisely the kind of social capture I’m critiquing. Because the way that people assert their status as insiders is with the ritualistic rejection of outsiders. Part of the reason I rarely take media insider criticism personally is because long ago I realized that, a lot of the time, I was being invoked only opportunistically; I was merely a convenient symbol of what a given critic didn’t want to appear to be.

Often the media is accused of being too solipsistic, generally unafraid to report on itself. But while we’ll get a newscycle out of the idea of a “vibes shift” we won’t get a single New York magazine feature about how there’s a high school-like popularity hierarchy on Twitter that enforces consensus and helps determine who becomes a big deal in the industry. Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that many of Twitter’s most passionate users feel compelled to dismiss the idea that they’re attached to it, as this would be uncool. Thus you have people who have tweeted hundreds of thousands of times but performatively deny that they care about their position in the network. But the entire media industry talks to and about itself on Twitter all day, every day. How could this not be worthy of serious and critical analysis?