Maybe it is because I'm a black journalist who was raised by a black journalist father, but…
I've never had particularly rose-colored view of the press.
The people themselves are hard working, mostly well-intentioned, humans. But the product (and process by which it is produced) is often a mess. We often paint pictures with big holes in the scenery. We publicly fret about declining trust without truly grappling with how often what we produce is untrustworthy.
Too often people look at the version of the world we’ve painted and see something incongruent with their reality. The more you or your areas of expertise are covered by the press, the more you learn to distrust it.1
Anyone who has read me over the years is familiar with these views. All of it is what, in the roughly 15 years I've reported for and published in major news outlets, I've attempted to counteract through my work: by telling stories that would otherwise have gone untold. It is a point of pride that when I left the Washington Post in 2020 that my editor toasted me as having been the reason the paper's pages had included stories it would have otherwise missed.
That, more than five years ago, was the last time that the primary form of my journalism was writing. It's not that I haven't written since then -- I have written a whole lot -- but I've also spent a fair amount of time in broadcast, audio journalism, teaching and working within various parts of the non-profit journalism world. At the moment, most of my time goes toward a handful of longer term projects I've been working on for the last few years. Still, I get a fair number of phone calls and emails from people hoping I might tell their story.
While often I’ve directed would-be sources to trusted colleagues and friends, the number of journalists doing this work, much less doing it well, are fewer, and the places willing to publish it vanishing. We're in a moment where the types of stories I most often tell -- at the intersection of race, politics, justice, and culture -- are not what most of our media is prioritizing. To be fair, most media organizations are struggling to survive. And also, to be honest: they were never that good at telling these stories well, even during the best of times.
None of that changes the essential nature of such stories and perspectives, though. I wrote this a few years ago, as part of a larger piece articulating my beliefs about the role of media in a multicultural democracy:
Journalists are often taught to go after “the story.” But that terminology can be misleading. Every story is, in fact, many stories. Despite our best efforts, very rarely does any one journalist or media organization tell any of them completely. The same question, asked several times, can yield different answers. Some sources eager to speak with you will refuse to talk to me. Our eyes are connected to our bodies, which often shape the way we experience the world and how the world experiences us. My eyes will see some things that yours never will.
The “story” we seek to tell is in fact a mosaic that must be filled in piece by piece. While one journalist may supply many tiles, seeing the entire scene requires others to fill in the rest. Thus, understanding objective reality requires a diversity of contributors. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar observed: truth is symphonic—the only way to hear its totality is if each instrument contributes its distinct part.
In short, my theory of media has always been of a mosaic: more storytellers, telling more stories that collide and crash into each other in ways that allow us to see more clearly a sum greater than their individual parts. Stories that seek out all of the relevant actors and grapple honestly with how doing so challenges simple narratives. A world in which we proactively seek out underrepresented stories and perspectives. Not because theirs are the only legitimate ones, but as a means of broadening our ability to see the totality of the truth.
This isn't intended as a manifesto about what does and does not work about our media (I've already written that piece). Neither is it an announcement of a major venture. One of the reasons that the media fails to tell such stories is because doing so is both unpopular and not profitable. When Substack and other newsletter platforms exploded in popularity a few years ago, I decided I couldn’t see it as a sustainable means of paying my bills while writing what I write about, the way that I write about it. That view hasn’t changed.
But it is fun. A decade and a half ago, as a college student, I published a blog that was a mixture of reported analysis, media criticism, cultural writing, and whatever else I was interested in at the time but that didn't fit squarely within my early newspaper jobs. I see this space as a return to that. Late-stage digital media has brought us all back to our humble blogging roots.
I may publish some more personal writing here. To be honest I haven't decided. As someone who has lived, relatively publicly, at least at the media industry level, since I was 18 -- and who has always been relatively unpopular among its most powerful people, institutions and gatekeepers -- I've got complex and contradictory feelings about how much of that I owe and to whom I owe it. Maybe I'll end up working some of that out in these pages. All of that TBD.
No promises at this point of how often I'll be in this space, other than that my intention is for it to be somewhat regular, with a few things lined up for the coming weeks. In the meantime, let me point you to two pieces I published earlier this year with Contraband Camp, which is one of my favorite places on the internet at the moment. The first, marking the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby, was a full-throated articulation of the theory that, if you've interacted with me in person anytime in the last decade you've likely heard: that Jay Gatsby was supposed to be read as a passing black man. Going with the theme of writing about things that I am obsessed with, I went long on Luther Vandross (and Kendrick Lamar, and SZA and black artistry, etc). Truly, I would have been happy to have that Luther essay be the last thing I ever published!
Alas, there will be more soon.
Wesley
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” — Michael Crichton https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/