In Defense Of Substack
UCLA professor Sarah T. Roberts mourns the good old days of gatekeeping and
credential-worship
Matt Taibbi
Mar 1
UCLA professor Sarah Roberts, co-leader of something called the UCLA Center
for Critical Internet Inquiry media critics whose stated goal is
strengthening democracy through culture-making went on a lengthy Twitter
tirade against Substack last night, one that gained a lot of attention. I
should probably respond since, as one prominent reporter put it to Glenn
Greenwald and me this morning, Shit, its like she wrote this for the two
of you.
The main thread:
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts @ubiquity75
Substack is a dangerous direct threat to traditional news media. But more
importantly? It is a threat to journalism.
February 28th 2021
127 Retweets577 Likes
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts @ubiquity75
Great! you say! Journalism needs to be disrupted! But heres the problem.
Journalists make their name doing reporting. This is governed by norms and
practices and by ethics. Flawed and not always achieved, true. But present
and guiding what newsrooms do in every way? Yes.
February 28th 2021
12 Retweets153 Likes
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts @ubiquity75
People not inside journalism or media may not know the specifics, but they
often have a nebulous sense that there are norms independence, disclosure
of compromise, editorial oversight and vetting of the reporting. Thats what
makes them trust enough to buy and read or watch.
February 28th 2021
9 Retweets112 Likes
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts @ubiquity75
What is much less obvious to them is what it means when there is a reporter
who makes her name in a newsroom traditional paper or fully online outlet
and then leaves for Substack (or any analog). Taking that name, reputation
earned from work done in the context I just stated.
February 28th 2021
6 Retweets97 Likes
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts @ubiquity75
In this way, an investigative reporter who has earned her bona fides in a
newsroom and under both strict editorial AND journalistic principles, has
just cashed out and turned herself into an opinion writer. She likes it
because shes finally got her independence from an editor.
February 28th 2021
13 Retweets166 Likes
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts @ubiquity75
Please, do not write for or pay for Substack. I have to say it. I believe
its dangerous. Take heed. You read it here first.
February 28th 2021
27 Retweets113 Likes
A few thoughts in response to what one Tweeter humorously described as the
Tipper Gore of 2021, who incidentally went on to make sure everyone
understood she wasnt talking about Substack for basket weaving or 30 Rock
fandom or whatever. No, Dr. Roberts was talking about stuff purporting to
be serious. Opinion can be serious but I believe lines are being
intentionally blurred BY SUBSTACK.
Roberts is making a stolen valor argument. As its abundantly clear shes
talking about people like myself and Greenwald in particular, shes arguing
that we made our names as reporters in the structure of traditional
newsrooms, taking advantage of norms and practices like fact-checking and
editing that, in her mind, is what first induced readers to trust us. Then
we took that trust, that precious thing nurtured in the cradle of mainstream
media oversight, absconded with it, and fled to Substack, to hoard unearned
profits.
Roberts has things reversed. Greenwald and I (as well as many other
prominent Substack writers) got our start as independents. He was a blogger
and I edited my own print newspapers. We both built substantial readerships
on our own before being scooped up by traditional news organizations, in a
process identical to the one Roberts denounces when done by Substack.
The experience of independent media where I did feature reporting that
ranged from participatory gigs like laying bricks in Siberia to wiretapping
Vladimir Putins chief of staff was where I first learned that audiences
will read you or not based upon how careful and accurate you are. To imply
that trust is a thing that can only be conferred by a mainstream newsroom is
beyond insulting, especially since mainstream news organizations already
long ago started to become infamous for betraying exactly those hallowed
norms to which Roberts refers.
Why did a source like former NSA contractor Edward Snowden choose to come
forward to Glenn Greenwald in particular? He surely wasnt bothered by the
fact that Glenn didnt come up through the ranks of a paper like the New
York Times or Washington Post.
The answer connects to one of the primary reasons audiences are moving to
places like Substack: the perception that traditional news outlets have
become tools of the very corporate and political interests theyre supposed
to be overseeing. Roberts complains about lines between opinion and
reporting being blurred at Substack (an absurd comment on its own, but
thats a separate issue), but the blurring problem at those other
organizations is far more severe. Are newspapers like the New York Times
checks on power, or agents of it?
Why didnt Snowden go to one of the big names at the Times? Could it be
because one of the senior Times editors back then, Dean Baquet now the
chief reportedly once killed a whistleblowers story about a surveillance
arrangement between AT&T and the NSA? Or because the Times had a history of
sitting on damaging intelligence stories, including one about an analyst who
doubted the existence of Iraqi WMDs that the paper held until after the 2003
invasion?
It was bad enough when the traditional newsrooms Roberts so esteems
near-universally swallowed the WMD lie, but the real kicker was when the
worst offenders in that episode were promoted, and given the helm at major
magazines and journalistic supertankers like the Times. What signal does
that send to audiences?
Because this is not a bug but a feature, these same types of errors have
been repeated over and over, to the point where papers like the Times and
the Washington Post eventually became little more than conduits for
anonymous intelligence sources spouting unconfirmable fairy tales like the
pee tape. The major traditional cable networks, as well as many of the
bigger daily newspapers, have for years now been engaged in mad hiring
sprees of ex-spooks, putting whole nests of known perjurers and Langley
goons on their payrolls as contributors, where they regularly provide
commentary on news stories in which they themselves have involvement. And
Roberts wants to lecture us about disclosure of compromise?
In the last four years especially, a rift has formed in the news business,
an argument primarily about method and approach. Some of us were raised to
think the reporters job is confined to gathering information and giving it
to readers, who should then be free to do with it what they will. A lot of
journalists raised in this school were trained to be terrified in the days
(and, especially, the nights) after publication, in case a mistake surfaces,
but to stop worrying after that.
A new approach, symbolized by a Times column four years ago called Trump Is
Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism, stresses choosing and
presenting information in such a way as to ensure that audiences make the
correct political decision with the news theyre given. The fear there is
more about impact: are people taking the news the right way?
This argument over method put many journalists in a bind. Some either had to
get on board with what they considered a perversion of the job, or they had
to find some other place to go. I didnt have this problem to the degree
that many of the other Substack writers did, but avoiding arguments on this
score was certainly a factor in my decision to move here last year. The
situation was a lot more overt with some of the other Substack writers,
especially with Greenwald.
When Glenn wanted to do a story about censorship of the New York Post expose
on Hunter Biden suppressed by Facebook and Twitter like me, he didnt
think the story itself was necessarily that important, but the suppression
of it was he was told by editor Betsy Reed that even if [the story] did
represent something untoward about Biden, that would represent a tiny
fraction of the sleaze and lies Trump and his cronies are oozing in every
day. In other words, in order for the story about Biden to be newsworthy,
it had to meet a bizarre worseness standard vis-à-vis Donald Trump.
Another editor more or less openly demanded that any story Greenwald did on
the subject address the issue of Russias hand. This was a spook-driven
conspiracy theory, for which no evidence has ever existed, that the Post
expose was Russian propaganda. Virtually every reputable outlet ran with
the story of intelligence officials saying the piece had all the earmarks
of a Russian disinformation campaign. Asserting without evidence that even
a mildly damaging article about a presidential candidate is foreign
misinformation is an ethically dubious endeavor in the best of cases,
especially just before an election. But these are the norms whose valor
Roberts believes we are stealing.
Worse, as Ive repeatedly pointed out in reported pieces on this site, the
new norms in the business have disincentivized traditional outlets to care
about accuracy, leading to huge quantities of mistakes. When news agencies
see their jobs as being primarily about politics, they become more concerned
with being directionally right than technically accurate, knowing among
other things that their audiences will forgive them for being wrong, so long
as theyre wrong about the right targets.
As a result, many reporters by last summer found themselves navigating
newsrooms where they were being discouraged, sometimes openly, from pursuing
true stories with the wrong message the health impacts of the BLM
protests, speech controversies in science and media, follow-up news about
once-bombshells like the Cambridge Analytica scandal or Bountygate. Many
of those people werent politically conservative at all (in fact, often
quite the opposite). Theyd just been trained to do the job in a more
dispassionate way, and were being pushed by an increasingly monolithic
newsroom culture to run with simplistic, hot-taking versions of the news (as
one reporter put it, describing the BLM protests, Im sympathetic, but
every story had to be Viva la revolución). The choice for many of these
people was to go along, or get out, and where a lot of them got out was to
Substack.
Lastly, as to the charge that those of us whove moved to Substack have
cashed out on reputations as reporters to become mere opinion writers:
Even when I was given generous deadlines at Rolling Stone to investigate
arcane financial topics, I was doing opinion writing for them online at the
same time, presumably to help them pay the bills. The National Magazine
Award I won there was for commentary, not reporting. Personally, I think
opinion writing is a form of journalism, but even if it were not, its
simply not accurate to say people like me are pulling a bait-and-switch by
moving from the Ivory Tower of Legacy Media reporting to dirtier
commentary on Substack. You want dirty commentary? How about Rachel Maddow
speculating that Russia might turn off the heat in the Dakotas?
Aaron Maté @aaronjmate
@maddow 5/ Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on
life-threatening cold temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill
Americans by knocking out their heat?
April 28th 2019
445 Retweets2,414 Likes
Substack is not all op-ed writing. I wrote two heavily-researched books on
Substack, one (Hate Inc.) about the media business, and the other (The
Business Secrets of Drug-Dealing) a collaboration with a never-caught
dealer. I also published multiple lengthy reported features about the CARES
Act bailout, later wrote up an account from a whistleblower in the
Russiagate story, and collaborated with a stringer in Ukraine to check facts
and do on-the-ground interviews about the Hunter Biden story (which, again,
I concluded was less important than its suppression). Ive been
experimenting with regular reported features about criminal courts, student
loans, finance, and a topic Roberts professes to care about, Internet
censorship where I may be the only journalist in the country with an
ongoing beat interviewing people removed or suspended from tech platforms.
Im bringing in videographers to make short and long features.
In short, Im trying hard to prove that the subscriber concept can work as a
viable alternative to the corporate press, which has become increasingly,
arrogantly dysfunctional as traditional competition in the form of local
newspapers and urban alt-weeklies has died out. None of us has the formula
nailed yet, but the notion that the handful of us who are trying comprise a
threat to journalism is elitist insanity of the highest order.
This is a small island of pushback in a vast sea of hackery, and Id laugh
about it, if I didnt know for certain that sooner or later, these petty
Twitter outbursts and snarky features in places like the New Yorker will
eventually turn into full-on boycott campaigns, to protect the poor artisans
at shops like NBC, CNN, and the New York Times. Its coming, and we should
all prepare for it.
