A friend of mine got in trouble recently.
He'll be fine. He's got grown-up wherewithal. But he had to resign from a publication with which he's become synonymous and issue a public apology. He's embarrassed and he's being pilloried on social media. I feel bad for him.
I'm not going to tell you his name or too much about the incident that led up to this. I hate it when columnists are coy about these sorts of things, but I don't know much about the specifics of what happened. And maybe those specifics aren't that important to the point I'll eventually try to make.
Or maybe I'm just a little intimidated. Maybe I don't want anyone to come after me on social media. Maybe I don't want anyone calling for my job.
Anyway, it's likely that what happened is pretty much the way my friend's accuser says it happened. He can be stubborn. He can make bad decisions. He can even say stupid, regrettable things.
But he's not a racist. He's not sexist.
He read a story in his publication that he didn't consider up to his standards. He pulled it off the publication's website and told the reporter he was disappointed in her work. He probably shouldn't have done that, he probably should have discussed the situation with the reporter's editor and let the editor decide what further steps should or should not be taken. I can understand why he didn't do that. But that doesn't mean he made a good decision.
I also understand why the reporter's feelings were hurt. What I can't know is what it is like to be her. She is young, a self-described "woman of color" trying to make her way in a lean industry. She routinely faces challenges I never have to face.
I admire her for turning in her two weeks' notice. We've all been humiliated by bosses, but most of us don't quit; we take the chewing out and move on.
That's probably also a symptom of my privilege. I never suspected my superiors were uncomfortable with my ethnicity or my politics. We shared assumptions about the world. Maybe we disagreed on how a story should be pursued, on what detail was important, or which adjectives were superfluous, but I never felt that the argument was about anything other than the work under consideration.
My friend is my contemporary, we came up the same way. In the old days, reporters got yelled at sometimes, and sometimes we yelled back. Newsrooms were boisterous and profane. Most of us were white and male (though by the mid-1980s we were working alongside women, if not under their supervision). And most of us had strong opinions about our work which we were not reluctant to express.
These days we are rightfully more sensitive about a lot of things. We don't tell the sort of jokes in newsrooms that some people told in the '70s and '80s. We don't keep bottles of Scotch in our desk drawers. We don't get in fistfights in the composing room. We try to behave ourselves and respect each other and the worst stuff that goes on in most newsrooms is the same sort of passive-aggressive gossiping that goes on in any office environment. There are consequences to rash actions.
People ought to feel safe in their workplace. People should be offered the same opportunity to succeed no matter how they look or who they love. Yet the quality of one's work should be the determinant of one's success.
This is not always the case. There's plenty of cronyism in the world, and no field is a pure meritocracy. So long as the quality of the work is judged subjectively there will always be cover for favoritism. The best way to keep someone from succeeding is to deny them opportunity. In a business like mine, you don't have to beat out competition to earn your position every season--it's yours until you screw up, retire, die, or get forced out. There are a thousand subtle ways to deny opportunity while presenting as a fair and honest broker.
It's dangerous out there for people who want to talk about the work. You have to be careful about offering criticism. This is not the world my friend and I came up in, when the raising of one's voice was not unusual in a newsroom environment.
And it is incumbent upon us to understand that. What some people call "political correctness" is really just having manners, being considerate of those people who have historically been denied much consideration. It's not an onus; it's a matter of decency. There's no reason we have to persist in the same boorish ways just because we used to know no better. None of us are diminished by kindness.
Still, there needs to be a way to talk about the quality of the work. People need to be criticized and held to standards, and standards need to be high. I miss that part of our business, when peers and editors could call you out for laziness and settling for the easy line. I miss the frank and unfettered discussions we used to be able to have before we worried so much about everybody's feelings.
Given that my cohort has trampled people's feelings for so long, my nostalgia is trivial. I'll shut up and listen now. But we might all be better.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 07/22/2018