The rise of the personal-public beef
The village square is now everywhere, and thanks to ubiquitous tech we are all of us standing in it most of the time.
It’s no secret: There’s a common and widespread problem in media — the profusion of white, mostly male, voices. But take a quick survey of the web in 2014 and a very clear interest in conversations around race, gender, and sexuality and in feminist perspectives becomes evident. This year, websites like Vox, The New York Times, Vogue, and BuzzFeed joined the discussion with journalistic bombast: intellectualizing terms like “basic,” reporting on the unrest in Ferguson, covering our (apparently new, but not really new) obsession with big butts, and weighing in on powerful woman showrunners in Hollywood.
At times, reading about these and other topics felt incredibly voyeuristic. Most lacked cultural ownership. That’s not to say “black topics” or “Latino topics” or “women topics” don’t deserve interrogation from outside voices, but there’s real substantive value when said stories are filtered through, say, the gaze of a black reporter or a Latina writer who is grounded in the story.
I was taught that journalism should never be personal — that a reporter should always be objective. But that’s a lie. The best stories are personal. This is why the public dispute between The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and New York’s Jonathan Chait was the most exciting and surprising thing to happen to the internet in 2014. It was also a sign of things to come.
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