‘Mister Journalist, I Gave You All the Clues’: How White Journos Keep Getting Punked By Nazis

Fascination with white nationalists who evince normal traits comes from fear of being implicated.

A counter-protester gives a white supremacist the middle finger in Charlottesville, 2017. (Credit: flickr/ Evan Nesterak)

The response to The New York Times’ unaccountable profile of an Ohio Nazi was swift and biting; the paper felt compelled to respond to the legions of people who, correctly, accused the paper of writing a puff piece on a white nationalist.

The reporter, Richard Fausset, wrote a follow-up piece for the Times Insider entitled “I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With?” which is notable for its conspicuous failure to answer its own question. Fausset instead meanders in a kind of literary agony, wringing his hands and acknowledging that his report provides no answers, while reaching to punk rock to pose a rhetorical question, “what causes a man to start fires?” In a piece of his own, Times national editor Marc Lacey took a broad survey of public comment on Fausset’s report, including quoting this tweet from Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer:

“People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that.”

This notion is at the heart of the whole controversy. It sounds smart, even wise, to say this. Are we not deluding ourselves, after all, when we act as if Nazis are these inhuman creatures from another dimension? Does this othering not deny our shared capacity for tremendous evil? Bauer pursues that point for dozens of tweets, even nastily snipping at actor and activist writer Mara Wilson, essentially accusing her of willful ignorance.

What Bauer, and those who make this argument, refuse to see is that the problem with Fausset’s piece wasn’t its assertion of the obvious fact of Nazi humanity; it was that it was about nothing else. It was myopic, and almost obsessive, about the details of an ordinary life to be found in the Nazi’s home; it lingered with fascination over his tattoos, his tastes in television, his shopping at Target.

Bauer insisted that the Times article served to inform, but beyond the banal details of its subject’s life it offers no facts and allows the Nazi to drive the narrative. What’s the Traditionalist Worker’s Party? Fausset quotes their own propaganda and moves on. Did they actually hold Appalachian food drives? No. But Fausset doesn’t challenge his subject on this assertion. Indeed, no fact checking of any Nazi assertion appears to occur. Fausset even left out the non-trivial detail of the man’s name, referring to him throughout as Tony Hovater, a pseudonym he uses for his white nationalist work. His real name is William Anthony Hovater. His wife was also interviewed under a pseudonym, yet this is never once mentioned to readers. So those like Bauer have to be asked: What, exactly, is a person unschooled in these issues meant to learn from an article that allowed Nazis to regurgitate propaganda from behind unmarked pseudonyms?

All context and factual information was shoved aside in favor of drooling fascination over the Nazi’s tastes and suburban lifestyle. And it’s that fascination which constitutes an enormous problem with the modern media — something that Bauer’s own Mother Jones has had issues with as well.

In short, the problem is one of framing and emphasis.

The problem with Fausset’s piece wasn’t its assertion of the obvious fact of Nazi humanity; it was that it was about nothing else.

It’s a fact that some Nazis have good manners and like binge-watching Netflix or eating with chopsticks. The problem is that the media lingers on those facts with an almost pornographic languidness, until they overwhelm every other fact about the person in a story that’s already too personal to begin with. White nationalism and its related forms of right-wing radicalization are a social, structural problem, wired into systems so vast that any narrow focus on one man, by definition, misses what’s most important.

So why the fixation? We can only be blunt here: white, middle class journalists appear to be at once frightened and fascinated by the apparent niceness of some Nazis and white nationalists. Fausset makes this plain with an exasperating question:

“Why did this man — intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases — gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?”

The implication, of course, is that an intelligible Nazi is one who is stupid, socially awkward, and dirt poor — a notion offensive to all three groups, I should add. But it betrays an unfathomable ignorance of history. The original Nazis, after all, counted aristocrats among their number and their sympathizers, and made quite a few businessmen rich through lavish support for corporations that still dominate the international landscape today (you may even use, ingest, or ride on their products).

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Fausset’s question is perhaps the only revealing thing in his Times Insider follow-up, for it shows the horrifying assumptions he made as he embarked on his reporting. Instead of pursuing a structural answer to his questions — by talking to the people most affected by Nazism, say, or doing a wider survey of experts who study and track right wing extremism, or examining the history of white nationalism in the Midwest — he started from the perspective of one man…and stayed there. What remains, then, is just an assemblage of banalities. Look at his cat. Look at his ink. Look at his wedding registry. Oh here’s some books on Holocaust denial. But also look at his Netflix queue.

This perspective — or, really, the lack of one — was satirized by James Hamblin to great effect in the Atlantic.

Whether journalists like Fausset and Bauer want to admit it or not, this fish-eye-lens perspective on Nazi banality, this utter fascination with it, communicates to white readers, “see, a Nazi is just like you, ergo maybe being a Nazi isn’t so bad; you can be a Nazi and be stylish and cool.”

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative

This is a message that the extreme right wants to send, they’ve said as much. Indeed, the Nazi interviewed in the original Times article said as much.

We already went through this with several wretched press cycles of “Newsflash: Richard Spencer Wears Necktie!” The obsession with manners and breeding, unto death, is nauseating, especially when you realize that getting the press to dance to that tune is a deliberate strategy of these Nazis. One tidbit in a news article about Spencer revealed that “[his] office appeared to be begging for respectability. At least five Spencer associates, all male, were hanging around the office, some dressed up. (A copy of Dressing the Man: The Art of Permanent Fashion sat on the coffee table.)” As an aside, this is how you use ordinary detail to tell the truth about these people. The detail of Spencer needing a silly how-to book in order to explain to his cronies how to button a shirt and don a blazer is almost slapstick comedy; by contextualizing it as “begging for respectability,” the journalist, Dana Liebelson, correctly identifies what the banal facts add up to.

It’s a matter of basic ethics. Ask yourself: Does your story coincide with Nazi propaganda? In Fausset’s case, the answer was clearly “yes.” As one historian pointed out, the Nazi interviewed by Fausset used a common bit of Nazi agitprop to explain his disgusting views on the Holocaust, placing blame on Heinrich Himmler for the executions while saying Hitler himself was “a rather chill guy.” Not only is this a common technique for legitimizing Holocaust denial, it’s one that’s advocated by neo-Nazi pseudo-historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, whose books adorn the shelves of Fausset’s subject, one of which appears in a photograph in the story. I can only imagine the Nazi paraphrasing that ridiculous ad campaign for Snowman, “Mister Journalist… I gave you all the clues.”

Ask yourself: Does your story coincide with Nazi propaganda? In Fausset’s case, the answer was clearly ‘yes.’

To be fair, Fausset does recognize that his subject is a Nazi, and even calls him a bigot. But the framing of the story, which emphasizes the man’s ordinariness to the exclusion of almost everything else, including all the context we need to understand racism and white nationalism in America, renders that moot. Contrary to Shane Bauer’s assertions, reporting like this doesn’t enhance understanding, it suffocates it in a confusing haze. What, after all, did we learn? This is not because reporting on the banality of evil is bad; indeed, it’s vital. But there’s a way of doing it well, and to do it well, one need only look to the woman who gave us the immortal phrase in the first place.

Emphasizing the ordinariness of evil can, sometimes, get you into trouble, yes. Ask Hannah Arendt. Her historic report for The New Yorker on the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel earned her the ire and enmity of countless individuals who felt that her “banality of evil” thesis, which held that Eichmann was a miserably ordinary man who nevertheless committed great evil, was morally exculpatory. It was a hard lesson to grapple with, especially with memories of the war and the Holocaust so fresh for so many — including Arendt herself, who spent years in a Nazi internment camp in Gurs, France.

Nevertheless, the report that became Eichmann in Jerusalem was notable for all the ways in which it was nothing like Fausset’s piece. Arendt focused on the manner in which Eichmann carried out his crimes, giving them center stage. She provided an explanation for his conversion to Nazism, explaining the mechanism by which mediocrity can lead to evil. Her contempt for him is transparently scathing. He is a “nobody,” and this seems to actually anger Arendt more than the notion of a towering devil directing those trains.

Emphasizing the ordinariness of evil can, sometimes, get you into trouble.

Eichmann was the archetypal bureaucrat “just following orders,” who oversaw the dispatching of trains across Europe that ferried millions to torturous deaths. Arendt, responding to more hand-wringing explanations for this kind of evil, calls the idea that “the Nazis had simply been lacking in human kindness” the “understatement of the century.”

Her closing words, spoken in the register of what she wished the judges had said, leave no doubt about her views on Eichmann: “We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life.” Still speaking as a judge, she concludes without mercy, “We find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

For Arendt, while she emphasized that Eichmann was a nobody, and an archetypal bigoted little mediocrity, this was merely explanation, not absolution. Obedience to the law and support for it are functionally identical, she argues, and each must meet the same judgement. She was at pains to emphasize this point.

The Ethics Of Doxing Nazis

The Times’ Fausset, meanwhile, finds profundity in emptiness. “What causes a man to start fires?” he asks, quoting his punk song. “Who can say?” he seems to add, as if there is not an exhaustive, decades-old body of literature on fascism and the extreme right, as if the SPLC or Erich Fromm or Exit Deutschland or Hannah Arendt or the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies never existed.

Who can say? We can; we’ve said it many times over; we’ve said it for decades.

As much as men like Bauer want to defend limpid un-reporting like this as somehow vital, all it does is reveal a cavernous ignorance and an unwillingness to fill it. Perhaps because the answers are too scary to contemplate.

In a widely shared essay for the Atlantic, editor Adam Serwer tackles the related phenomenon of the mainstream press’ obsession with understanding the “white working class” who voted for Trump, while simultaneously trying to find redemptive humanity in them. Again, such stories state the obvious, but the emphasis and repetition is notable. In a damning paragraph, he lists how various white, putatively liberal/left journalists, leapt to condemn Hillary Clinton for her now infamous “basket of deplorables” remark:

Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson, in a since-deleted tweet, observed, “Clinton is talking about trump supporters the way trump talks about mexicans,” whom Trump derided as rapists and criminals. Bloomberg’s John Heilemann said, “This comment kind of gets very close to the dictionary definition of bigoted.” The leftist writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote on Facebook that Clinton was “an elitist snob who writes off about a quarter of the American electorate as pond scum.” As New York magazine’s Jesse Singal put it, “Not to be too cute but I have racist relatives. I’d like to think they aren’t ‘deplorable’ humans.”

As Serwer notes, balefully, the reason for this is obvious. For these people to have said anything else would’ve been to implicate themselves, and their loved ones. It would have, in short, implicated whiteness.

The fascination — and I must use that word to describe the phenomenon — with white nationalists who evince normal traits comes from fear of being implicated. Fear that, perhaps, good education and good manners are no defense against belief in the vilest forms of bigotry. Fear that they have the same potential in themselves, and that all white people are therefore — by dint of the drift of power and history in our society — vulnerable to this. They express shock, and that shock is worthy of entire articles themed around nothing but surprise at the fact that a Nazi knows how to tie a Windsor knot, because that sort of thing is supposed to be beyond racists. Perhaps, they fear, we could be racist too, and knowing how to use chopsticks won’t make it otherwise.

Perhaps, they fear, we could be racist too.

Fixation on the mundane both expresses that fear and suggests that there’s something redemptive in their shared (white) humanity. Stories about white nationalists who love “normal” superficial nonsense —Twin Peaks, blazers, XBox, wedding registries, a pet dog — suggest that one’s bourgeois norms are not actually a defense against fascism. As white journalists see, in terror, that these guys look like them, they don’t want to face up to what that means — so instead, they obsessively individualize the story.

In rereading some of Eichmann in Jerusalem for this essay I was struck by how Arendt’s tone would be considered verboten in this day and age. Her scalding observations left nowhere for Eichmann or his enablers to hide. She said he deserved death, even. All this after exhaustive reporting of facts from the trial that she assembled into a terrifying big picture. That so few journalists have the courage to write such analysis for our own time is dispiriting, to say the least. I can only close with another observation from Arendt:

“How troubled men of our time are by this question of judgement… What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Nov. 28, 2017, to reflect new information from this Splinter article.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/what-its-like-to-be-a-female-war-correspondent-in-the-middle-east-6c410e326463/ Mon, 06 Nov 2017 22:59:28 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1894 Read more]]> ‘There are rare moments where you feel like you are privileged to be witnessing history in front of you.’

Castello Road, nicknamed the “road of death,” is the only road that entered into rebel-held parts of eastern Aleppo, and to drive down it meant gambling with your life. The dusty-two lane highway was lined with small berms of earth, in an effort to protect cars from the gunfire being launched by enemy positions on either side of the road. As you arrived in Aleppo, you could see that the once-bustling city was now void of color and sound. Grey dust covered bombed-out buildings, and impact craters from bunker buster bombs pockmarked the ground, giving the illusion that you had arrived on an apocalyptic moon.

This journey into eastern Aleppo was described to me by CNN’s Senior International Correspondent, Clarissa Ward, during a recent interview. In late February 2016, Ward risked her life to travel to rebel-held Syria to film Undercover in Syria. The series, for which she won a Peabody award and was nominated for an Emmy award this year, provides viewers a glimpse into life in war-ravaged Syria.

In the six years since protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad morphed into a bloody civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 400,000 people, Ward has traveled to Syria to cover the conflict over a dozen times. As one of the only Western journalists to have entered into rebel-controlled Syria, she has borne rare witness to the execrable and devastating destruction caused by Russian-Syrian bombardments.

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As you arrived in Aleppo, you could see that the once-bustling city was now void of color and sound.
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In war reporting, which exists as a smaller subset of foreign reporting, women like Ward are producing some of the field’s most courageous and important journalism. Yet despite their obvious skills, women continue to be underrepresented in U.S. media. The Women’s Media Center estimates that in 2015, women produced 34.9% of foreign political news, while male journalists produced 64.2%.

Elmira Bayrasli, co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an organization which seeks to break the barriers that prevent women from being involved in foreign policy, told me in a phone interview that women being disproportionately underrepresented is a systemic problem, stemming from “unintentional bias where we don’t think that women have the expertise or the chops and so we don’t seek out their expertise.”

Christina Asquith — who has been a journalist for 20 years and founded The Fuller Project for International Reporting, which produces multimedia journalism on issues impacting women globally — agrees with Bayrasli’s statement, and questions the types of stories that are valued by editors. Conflict reporting tends to be not only by men, but about men, meaning we rarely get to hear equally important female narratives. Asquith believes that raising awareness about the dearth of stories by and about women — as illustrated by data produced by organizations like The Women’s Media Centre and Nieman Foundation — can lead to change within the industry. She also believes that by reporting “kick-ass stories about issues that impact women,” female journalists themselves can help change the status quo, “because that is something that both men and women in the newsroom respect.”

The sisterhood of female foreign correspondents is small, but it consists of acclaimed and credentialed women, including not only Ward but CBS’s Holly Williams, who often reports while swathed in a flak jacket in Iraq and Syria; Danish freelancer Anne Alling; and Katherine Zoepf, a freelance journalist who spent over a decade reporting from the Middle East.

It is an especially important time to be a journalist, and particularly a female one. The need for impactful, objective, on-the-ground reporting from women has never been clearer — not only because violence, war, and terrorism continue to wreak havoc around the world, but because we live in a time when the President of the United States frequently attacks the U.S. press, issues misogynistic and sexist attack against female journalists, and calls for journalists to be jailed for their reporting.

Ward, Williams, Alling, and Zoepf are renowned for holding powerful people to account and telling stories that would otherwise go untold. Now, more than ever, their work is vital. These journalists show that women are not only capable of delivering hard-hitting news, but that they are capable of doing so in a war zone — while back in Washington, the U.S. president sits behind the gates of the White House tweeting attacks launched at their networks and colleagues.

In exclusive interviews, these four powerhouse journalists talked with me over the phone about what it is like to be a female journalist, the reality of reporting from war zones, how they cope with the aftermath of witnessing death and violence, and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career in journalism.

Some may assume that war journalists enter into combat zones because of bravado or an addiction to adrenaline. But for these women, covering war is a moral imperative. They push themselves into the eye of war so that they can be on the front lines of history, to bear witness to events as they unfold, and to report back so that the public may have a better understanding of the world.

Ward says that she never seeks out danger:

“I am not a frontline or adrenaline junky, I am happiest when I am talking to people and trying to get a sense of what life is like in these places. Some people get a thrill out of [war], but I do not.”

Instead, Ward says, what galvanizes her is the ability to give a voice to the voiceless — to take their stories, frame them with the necessary context and nuance, and deliver them to the public.

This work is not without peril; in fact, death while at work is a very real possibility. Reporting from war zones in Syria and Iraq is a risk that grew more potent as the Syrian civil war picked up momentum and ISIS arrived on the scene. Indeed, the past four years have been especially brutal for war correspondents who report from Syria and Iraq.

On February 22, 2012, Marie Colvin, the preeminent war correspondent, was killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military forces while covering the Siege of Homs. Colvin, who reported for The Sunday Times, is revered for her bravery and fearlessness in the field. In 2001, while on assignment covering the conflict between government forces and Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, she lost her left eye when shrapnel from a grenade ripped through her socket. Yet, months later, she was back at work, reporting from conflict zones with a black eye patch and a reporter’s notebook in hand.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Colvin is just one of the 113 journalists who have been killed in Syria since the start of the conflict in 2011. This includes the August 2014 murders of American freelance journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were both executed by ISIS. The deaths of journalists such as Colvin, Foley, and Sotloff raise the subject of safety when it comes to war reporting: How do media organizations protect their journalists while they are in war zones, and for freelance journalists who do not have the protection of a media network behind them, is war reporting worth the risk?

Both Ward and Williams have the protection of news networks behind them that can afford to provide top-level security for correspondents, and which demand that their journalists develop meticulous logistics for security before departing for conflict zones. Ward says that her trip to Ariha, Aleppo, and Daraat Izza in besieged Syria in February 2016 took months for her plan, and that she only presented the idea to her bosses once she had all the details worked out for collecting the story while remaining as safe as possible. As she told me:

“It’s like cracking a safe. You are thinking about every eventuality, every possibility in terms of security — what is the best job you can do to mitigate all the risks, what risks haven’t I thought about, and what are the rewards for the story that I am going to get?”

Ward confirmed that CNN’s security is “extremely rigorous,” and includes “multiple check-ins, tracking devices, and every possible security precaution you could imagine.” For Williams, who spoke with me via a satellite phone while she was reporting from Iraq, having a trusted network of local staff and contacts in the conflict zones is vital to her safety. “A lot of it is building relationships and being able to trust the people you are with, and how much you can ensure that they also want you to come back alive and in one piece, “ she says of her network of sources in Syria.

Despite the intense security provided to Ward and Williams, attempts at remaining completely safe in Syria are impossible. Most crucially, you cannot mitigate for airstrikes favored by the Syrian-Russian military, which — while ostensibly aimed at targeting rebel forces and terrorists — have often killed civilians.

When she first detects the sound of an airplane overhead, Ward says she is overcome with a sickening feeling of dread and powerlessness, because she knows a bomb is about to drop and her life and those around her are at risk. “The [air strikes] are the scary part,” she says. “You just hear the planes coming and you look around and see where you can take cover and you just hope you are going to be okay.”

War reporting for journalists like Williams and Ward, who are backed by media networks, remains dangerous, even with the support of security teams. But for freelancers who arrive in conflict zones without understanding how perilous war zones are, the danger only increases. Ward’s advice for freelancers who want to report from Syria is simple — “Don’t go,” she says. Ward, who was friends with James Foley, worries about freelancers who do not have the proper first-aid training or body armor, who lack the experience and language skills to safely navigate conflict zones, and who don’t have adequate health insurance to cover emergency care while in the region and services once out. “We as an organization and freelancers, in general, all need to do a better job making sure [reporting] is done in a responsible way,” Ward says.

As The Bombs Fall, A Refugee’s Tale
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With the founding of The War Zone Freelance Project (WZF), freelance Danish journalist Anne Alling is hoping to do just that. Alling co-founded WZF as a way to provide affordable journalistic medical training to freelance journalists. “It is crazy dangerous for journalists to go to conflict zones without [medical] training,” says Alling. Yet medical training and medical kits can costs freelancers thousands of dollars, a price which inhibits many from seeking proper training. To remedy this, WZF provides training for as little as $60.

Even with proper medical training, Alling warns that freelancers must realize that they are responsible for ensuring their own safety. While freelancing, Alling lived in Irbil, Iraq, during the Mosul offensive, during which Iraqi forces fought a battle from October 2016 until July 2017 to retake the city from Islamic State militants. During this period, Alling says, she often weighed the risks and rewards of covering a story before entering a war zone:

“There are times when I don’t want to take the risk and so I don’t go into Mosul every day. I only take assignments that I know I can sell afterward, and even then I will go [to Mosul] with other journalists who have a plan and are medically trained.”

For Williams, being a mother adds extra weight to her decision on whether or not to report from a conflict zone. “I am a mother; I have a family, people in my life who need me and who I love. When there is a good story, I do want to tell that story, but I really don’t want to risk my life telling that story,” she says. Like working mothers (and parents) all over the world, Williams faces the constant struggle to balance her career with her personal life.

In 2012, Williams gave an interview to The Daily Beast about her choice to return to work within weeks of giving birth to her daughter. In the article, she describes pumping breast milk while in the jungles of Burma. “I was sitting in the back of a taxi with a breast pump. I was weeping and telling myself, ‘Don’t cry — that’s dehydrating,” Williams said in the article. The story was then picked up by a British tabloid, and the backlash that followed was fierce. “Women can’t have it all — children are a full-time job, if you don’t want the job, don’t have kids!” wrote one commenter.

Williams says she originally consented to The Daily Beast interview to explain that by going to work so soon after giving birth, she did herself and other women a disservice. “Women have babies and if we want women to be in the workforce we need to accept that women shouldn’t have to go back to work three weeks after giving birth,” she says.

Katherine Zoepf, who worked as a reporter in The New York Times’ Baghdad bureau before her children were born, pointed out that, though the image of the female war correspondent who leaves her children in order to work in conflict zones arouses fascination, it’s one that few of the women who combine motherhood and foreign assignments actually resemble. For most, Zoepf says, the greatest challenge isn’t leaving their children for long periods of risky reporting, but the daily struggles that come with, well, not leaving their children. “Kids are incredibly time consuming, and so is reporting,” she says. For Zoepf, a single mother, getting writing done often requires her to work unsociable hours. “I pull a lot more all-nighters now, more than I ever did in college.”

Zoepf says that some of her female colleagues take their children with them on reporting trips. She has done this, too, on several assignments in the Middle East, albeit quietly:

“Sometimes people have this picture of a region that is uniformly in conflict, and they imagine it’s difficult or irresponsible to bring children. With editors, it always seemed best to avoid mentioning that the baby was coming. You don’t want anyone to worry that you’ll be distracted.”

But when editors at The New Yorker learned that Zoepf’s two-month-old son William was accompanying her on a reporting trip to Saudi Arabia, they surprised her by being not only supportive, but enthusiastic. “I think they found it sort of hilarious,” she says.

In many ways, these obstacles resemble those faced by working mothers in every field. But for war correspondents, there is a crucial added stresser: When they return home from work, they are often returning from war zones having witnessed death and violence. Williams, Ward, and Alling admit that bearing witness to human suffering affects them emotionally, which at times can impact their personal life. Ward says that her heart has been broken “100 times over and over” by what she has witnessed during her reporting in Syria. “It can be difficult to relate to my normal life after spending time [in Syria] because it is so abstract and so different,” she adds. Ward copes with the trauma with the support of her family and husband. “I also like to do silly things like go out dancing, or going to an art exhibition,” she says.

Alling says that the everyday difficulties of living in Iraq, such as the lack of hot water and internet interruptions, coupled with the constant violence and death, have left her feeling deeply tired at times. “There is a constant awareness of this being a horrible place in many ways where lots of horrible things happen.”

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Ward says that her heart has been broken ‘100 times over and over’ by what she has witnessed during her reporting in Syria.
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Prior to our interview, Alling had spent the day shopping in Iraq. On her way home from the mall, she was sitting the back of a taxi and was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. “Why am I so fucking tired?” she thought. “Then I remembered that it’s because I do heavy stuff and that weighs on me.”

Many would assume that female war correspondents must face unique barriers reporting from some of the most violent places in the world for women. And Ward indeed confirms that being a woman is an obstacle if she is seeking an interview with a head of a jihadist faction. “It pisses me off,” she says, “but the world is an imperfect place.”

But interviews with heads of terrorist networks aside, all of the journalists interviewed for this story insist that in many ways, being a woman allows them access to stories and sources that they would otherwise not have had if they were men. Zoepf, for instance, has been able to conduct interviews with women in Saudi Arabia that her male colleagues could not, because women there can’t freely interact with men outside of their own home.

“For the most part I feel like it is advantageous,” Ward says of being a female war correspondent. “I think it allows me to move under the radar; people are not looking at women thinking they must be a journalist.”

War reporting consists of witnessing trauma and danger while attempting to balance a normal family life back on the home front. Yet despite all this, Ward, Williams, Alling, and Zoepf are fiercely dedicated to their work.

Says Ward: “It is not glamorous, but there are rare moments where you feel like you are privileged to be witnessing history in front of you. I think that’s what causes a lot of us to do this job.”

In a matter of weeks, the most unprepared and openly bigoted president in modern U.S. history will take office. And with so many important rights at risk under Donald Trump (abortion, access to health care, and civil rights, to name only a few), now, perhaps more than ever, we need a Fourth Estate with a spine of steel that is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect the interests of the American people and those abroad who are impacted by U.S. policies. After all, the public interest is supposed to be at the very heart of the media’s mission.

And yet, chillingly, at this time when we need the media most — the media is most at risk.

Trump has bashed the press and repeatedly told his followers that the media is a dishonest bunch of liars whenever they do their job by reporting on his past, his policy plans, or his rhetoric. Trump is in fact the liar, but he has sold his millions of followers on the idea that they can’t believe trustworthy news sources; they can only trust him.

Trump’s anti-media views — which, frighteningly, echo those of his buddy and abetter Vladimir Putin — have manifested as a multi-thronged approach to undermining the press and dismantling its crucial influence.

He has attacked individual reporters — from Jorge Ramos with Univision, who Trump had kicked out of a campaign rally in August of 2015; to the New York Times’ Serge Kovaleski, whose disability Trump cruelly mocked at another rally in November; to Fox host Megyn Kelly, the target of his infamous “bimbo” and “blood coming out of her wherever” barbs.

More broadly, the president-elect has gone after virtually every major news source that doesn’t generate revenue solely by kissing his ass. He has nicknamed the New York Times the “failing” New York Times, and canceled a meeting with the publication in November before changing his mind and sitting down with key staff. He further called CNN the “Clinton network,” suggesting that any unfavorable coverage of him by the network was simply a bias for his Democratic opponent.

Beyond the reporters listed above and CNN and the New York Times, Trump has made a sport of maligning virtually every popular news source based in the U.S. He’s ripped apart Meet the Press, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair, among others, and blacklisted several outlets from covering his campaign events in person. Univision, Buzzfeed, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and the Des Moines Register were all banned by the middle of June this year.

As if all of this weren’t enough cause for concern, the president-elect and his transition team still haven’t formally established a protective “press pool,” a rotating group of reporters that travels with the president and is kept apprised of his schedule, allowing the public relatively wide access to the president via the press. When a press pool has been allowed to travel with Trump, he’s been known to ditch them. This is an alarming breach of protocol, as it cuts the world off from what he’s up to.

And this is to say nothing of Trump’s vows to “open up” libel laws in an effort to legally challenge media outlets that deign to criticize his policies.

This behavior is unlike anything we’ve ever seen from a U.S. president in modern memory, and should scare anyone who has something to lose if a free press and free speech are compromised (note: We should all be uncomfortable with this).

So what now? As a businessman with no experience on any level of government or in the military, Trump is about as prepared for the responsibilities of the Oval Office as a parakeet who has Twitter, which means it’s of the utmost importance that members of the press thoroughly and boldly cover his presidency. But how is anyone supposed to accurately cover (much less investigate) someone who hates them and their profession, and resents and fears their ability to expose him?

If it all sounds hopeless, don’t worry, it’s not. The situation is serious, but it is possible to do good journalism under a president Trump; it’s just not going to be even a little bit easy.

Four experts on the media spoke to The Establishment about where we’ve been with Trump and what needs to be done going forward to protect the integrity of the industry and support the kind of journalists Trump doesn’t want: fearless ones.

Our illustrious panel includes:

Dr. Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack University, where she teaches radio production, feminist media studies, and new media and digital communication, among other topics. Her list of fake, misleading, and satirical news sources recently went viral.

Anita Kumar, a White House correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.

Dr. Charlton McIlwain, a professor of Race, Media & Politics in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, and the author of Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns.

Jennifer Pozner, a media critic, public speaker, and founder and executive director of Women in Media and News. She is also the author of Reality Bites Back.

Trump was hostile toward the media from the outset of his campaign. In the last several weeks, we’ve seen reports of continued tough relations between the press and the president-elect. Should the media or the public be concerned about what kind of access to the president the media will have starting in 2017?

Melissa: The public, including those who work in media and news, should absolutely be concerned about what is happening. News organizations have long played an important watchdog role in terms of reporting on our government and public officials. If a president-elect or president limits access to certain media organizations, perhaps because one is being more critical of their actions, it could result in freedom of speech or freedom of the press being stifled. I worry an editor might think twice about publishing something if it means they will no longer have access to one of the most powerful people in the world.

Anita: Yes, I think the media — and more importantly the public — should be concerned. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump limited media access during the campaign, compared to previous nominees, and I think no matter who won we were going to be worried. For example, neither nominee allowed us to form a protective pool, a break from previous nominees in modern history. The president-elect still has not allowed reporters to travel with him and a couple weeks ago slipped out for dinner after telling us he was in for the night.

Charlton: Yes. The media and the public should both be concerned. The media, particularly journalists covering the White House and the president, serve a vital purpose of reporting, interpreting, verifying, and providing context for presidential and administration communications. They mediate public knowledge about politics and public policy. We should be worried about Trump’s penchant to bypass the press because in doing so he also bypasses this critical apparatus that provides, more or less, a sense of shared verifiable facts the public relies on for both information and political debate. Trump’s tendency and perhaps growing propensity to bypass the press by limiting access risks us all further being invited to constantly make political decisions in alternate realities that change from day to day and have no basis in truth, no matter how you define it.

Jennifer: It’s really important to talk about how to do accurate, impactful journalism when you have a person in power who is hostile to the very concept of a free press and who, not only that, is himself a master of manipulating false narratives, and spinning them in his favor. People in the press have been making snide remarks about the “reality TV president,” but people are not talking about what it means that we have a president who was in American living rooms every week for almost a decade, spinning a narrative about himself that presented somebody who has been multiply bankrupt and has stiffed contractors and is known for shoddy business deals as if he were the very model of wealth, success, and business acumen.

People think he’s stupid. He’s not stupid. He is incredibly savvy as a master manipulator of facts and narrative to get people to believe what he wants them to believe, and we can be damn sure he’s going to get people to believe what he wants them to believe about his administration.

It’s going to be extremely important for the media to resist normalizing Trump, a phenomenon that’s already fully in swing. What are the best ways journalists can refuse to normalize Trump in their work for the next four years?

Melissa: I think some of the normalizing we’ve seen is a coping mechanism or wishful thinking that his presidency won’t be as bad as people fear. I think we have to hope that’s the case, but we can’t act as if this is an ordinary situation. The main thing reporters and news organizations can do is continue to be vigilant in drawing distinctions between what he’s doing and who he’s appointing and what has been done in the past. That’s not to say we should look to the past with rose-colored glasses, but rather that we need to acknowledge that he is resisting traditional practices and setting questionable precedents.

Anita: I think we just need to do our job. That means we report what the president and his staff say and do, but we factcheck, hold accountable, and provide context to those actions and statements. It’s what we should be doing everyday.

Charlton: I think it is crucial that journalists don’t sacrifice their critical edge for access. I think journalists have to be willing to tenaciously call bullshit at every turn, when warranted. The more gross distortions go unchallenged — even the small ones — we take one step closer to normalizing Trump’s tendency to say that he is the sole arbiter of reality.

Jennifer: It’s important for the press to get used to being repetitive. We need to get very comfortable with saying “fascism,” and we need to get accustomed to saying it often. We have to get accustomed to calling things by their correct terms even if it’s uncomfortable for people in power or for readers. Instead of calling Stephen Bannon “a member of the ‘alt-right,’” we need to call Bannon and this administration “members of hate groups” and “white supremacists.” And we need to do this every time. Not just every once in awhile and not just in the op-ed pages. It is not opinion that some people in Trump’s administration are white supremacists, it’s a fact. And we need to be reporting that fact.

With the recent deluge of fake news — not to mention the widespread distrust of the media among Trump supporters and those who are disillusioned after the press failed to accurately predict the election — how can the press rebuild trust with the public?

Melissa: The press can start rebuilding trust with the public by examining many of its own practices, and acknowledging that those practices are contributing to the fake and misleading news problem. A recent story reported on by dozens of news outlets turned out to be a hoax based on a tweet. The story was that CNN accidentally aired porn instead of their regular programming. After one outlet reported on this, clearly without really digging into the claim (or contacting CNN!), it spread among media and news websites with no one really “hitting pause” and figuring out the veracity of the story until it was already spreading.

Equally as troubling as this kind of reporting of news like a game of telephone is the fact that when articles were updated to reflect changing information, Facebook descriptions and share attachments weren’t necessarily updated. For example, Vulture’s social media post about the story had the Facebook description “Shocking viewers who’d forgotten people watch porn on their TVs” with the headline “Boston CNN Channel Airs Porn Instead of Anthony Bourdain.” But when you click the article, the headline is totally different, as is the content of the story because it was updated several hours earlier.

Why wouldn’t they also update the now totally misleading social media post? I imagine it’s because such an update would probably generate less clickthroughs, but this is precisely the stuff that feeds distrust with the public.

Jennifer: That’s a complicated question now, after 30 or more years of right-wing organizing and financial investment in creating the myth of the liberal media, intentionally eroding trust on the part of the American people toward media outlets. Then at the same time we will have a president who tweets like a drunk 16-year-old about how the press is corrupt, and his rabid followers believe him.

Corporate journalism outlets have tried to twist themselves into pretzels to get the American public to believe they’re trustworthy when in the meantime, these same institutions have chosen profit over truth, accuracy, and standing up for the little guy. It’s difficult to imagine these corporate news outlets are suddenly going to grow a backbone under arguably the most anti-free speech, anti-media, anti-journalist president in modern times. But in order to protect the last gasps of American democracy, they have to grow that backbone.

Do you feel there’s a renewed importance for investigative journalism in the coming years under Trump?

Melissa: Definitely! My hope is that our current spotlight on fake news, misleading news, and traditional news will encourage and improve sustained and investigative coverage. I think the contemporary moment, which is one of distrust, also demonstrates the importance of alternative and nonprofit news organizations in reaching people. They can be an important place for breaking news and the debate of complex ideas, as well as for digging in deeper to the work of mainstream journalism, but we all need to be more careful with how news and information changes as it moves between these entities via secondary reporting.

Anita: I think there’s a renewed importance in accountability journalism, holding Trump and those in his administration responsible for what they say and do. I always think that’s important, but I think it’s even more so now.

Charlton: Investigative journalism is critical now more than ever. Trump and those he’s chosen to lead his administration have demonstrated they have little to gain by maximizing transparency. Investigative journalists must fill that gap. Investigative journalism may be our best hope — along with activists — for uncovering the implications and harms that will likely follow from the kinds of policies Trump and his administration are set to champion. Investigative journalism is one of our best checks on power and it has waned considerably in recent years. If we let it continue, we risk tyranny’s triumph.

Jennifer: Investigative journalism has always been extremely important. It’s why journalism is the only industry enshrined in the constitution. However, there’s been mass divestment on the part of corporate media from investigative journalism. So people who are still doing investigative journalism need to be equipped with the resources that they need to stand up to and fight the corruption, much of which will be hidden, of this administration. There needs to be more fellowships, grants, and foundations endowing independent news outlets and reporters with proven track records. There needs to be more news companies willing to take risks in what they will spend money on over the long term.

Investigative reporting isn’t going to give you clickbait, but do you want to live in a country that’s free or not? This might be our last stand.

How can the press try to bridge the readership gap between those who critically engage with a variety of news sources, and those who primarily read inside a biased and inflammatory echo chamber (on the left and right)?

Melissa: This is the perennial question among researchers, but I think we need to think more critically about what we mean by “echo chamber.” A lot of us seek out information that we may already agree with, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t exposed to a variety of viewpoints and political orientations during our daily lives. While filter bubbles are definitely a thing, as is the phenomenon of Red Facebook and Blue Facebook, a lot of people exist in a purple area and see content from across the political spectrum in their Facebook feeds. Ultimately, it’s not just up to the media to bridge this gap, although they can by rebuilding trust, it’s up to people exposing themselves to as many sources of information as possible. No one should only read Breitbart just as no one should only read The New York Times.

Anita: I wish that I knew the answer to this. I think an independent media that offers both sides of the story is more important than ever and yet I worry fewer and fewer people have any desire to look beyond their like-minded information sources. All we can do is keep doing what we do and do it well — inform, explain, and hold politicians accountable and hope for the best.

Charlton: I’m not optimistic that the media can do anything to bridge this gap. Perhaps it can, but years of evidence suggests that it may not only be not possible, but may not be desirable for media outlets. There’s lots to be gained financially from echo chambers where one does not have to compete with a wider array of news outlets with varying levels of credibility. Niche markets, even in media, are potentially profitable, and the sound of one’s own voice, bouncing off of every mirror, can be quite seductive.

Jennifer: We have a society that has been trained by Fox News and a poor educational environment (thanks to George W. Bush’s education policies) to be drawn away from critical thinking. Within this climate, we are faced with a conservative community that has decided facts don’t matter and that says wrong opinions are just as valid as facts. If as an industry we’re going to wrestle with how to bridge that divide, maybe we need multiple outlets writing service pieces about how news stories get reported and who our sources are.

We also need to be much better about eliminating false equivalencies. We can’t do a story that is 90% sources from the Trump administration and corporate America and 10% sources who say “they’re wrong,” and consider that a balance. Are we quoting sources from the public interest, or just government and corporate interests?

Women who share their opinions and thoughts online, particularly professionally, are frequently targeted for heightened, often criminal and discriminatory, harassment. They are more likely to start their work days and often end their work nights with graphic attacks on their credibility, intelligence, bodies, sex, sexuality, looks, and more, frequently framed in violent terms. A recent in-depth analysis of tens of millions of comments by The Guardian found that eight of the top 10 writers who got the most abuse were women (four White and four non-White). The other two were Black men. All 10 of the least-harassed writers were men. Sexism and racism combined result in this disparate impact.

Among women journalists, women in sports are encountering some of the most vile resistance to their working. The Guardian’s analysis revealed that the more male-dominated a topical area, such as sports and tech, the more abusive the commentary on women writers’ work.

Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain are two sports journalists very familiar with this problem. Spain is one of three women who host The Trifecta, an ESPNW sports-talk-radio show, and DiCaro is a long-time Chicago sports-radio host. They are both featured in “#MoreThanMean — Women in Sports ‘Face’ Harassment,” the new “reading mean tweets” video, which launched as part of a campaign to raise awareness about what is frequently referred to with the anodyne “online harassment.” In the video, men read messages that have been sent to the women. They have not seen the messages prior to their filmed reading. As the tweets and messages get increasingly more violent and hateful, the men stumble and pause. A typical example: “One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick like the whore you are.” Another: “This is why we don’t hire any females unless we need our cocks sucked or our food cooked.”

As they read, the men come to look physically uncomfortable. They experience the displaced but jarring effects that the women live with every day. “I’m having trouble looking at you when I’m saying these things,” says one man to Spain before he finishes reading: “Sarah Spain is a bitch I would hatefuck.”

It’s not just that people still find women in sports “unnatural,” but that they feel that women should be punished for violating their ideas about masculinity and gender roles.

The video is highly effective in showing that “mean” does not capture what is going on, which ranges from run of the mill gendered insults to rape and death threats to the stalking and sharing of nonconsensual porn in the recent case of sportscaster Erin Andrews. While it’s arresting to see the men reading the tweets come to appreciate the inadequacy of the word “mean,” it is also frustrating. Like many similar or related videos that engage in role reversals to further understanding, there is the very real, frustrating, and unavoidable dimension of having to have male validation before people are willing to take what women say seriously.

In February, the Women’s Media Center launched the Speech Project, which I direct. The purpose of the project is to raise public and media awareness of the scope and impact of this type of harassment on women’s ability to go to school, to work, and to participate in civic and public arenas. The project largely came into being after Ashley Judd, who chairs the initiative, experienced first-hand what hostility toward a woman with an opinion about sports looked like. After she tweeted a comment about a March Madness basketball game, she was deluged with tweets from men calling her a cunt, a whore, and a bitch. They threatened her with rape and other violence. “The volume of hatred that exploded at me in response was staggering,” she wrote of the incident. This level of aggression is, unfortunately, standard for many women.

Many people chose not to understand the difference between trash-talking and the abuse hurled at women, which tends to be gendered, reference historic discrimination, and leverage legitimate threats. Online threats of stalking and rape are easier to dismiss as “just words” if rape or avoiding being raped doesn’t shape your passage through life as it does most women’s. Like Sara Spain, and one out of five women, Judd is a survivor of sexual assault.

Professional sports are hegemonically male, and hostility toward women — as journalists, coaches, athletes, or fans — is hardly new. The culture illuminated in “mean tweets” goes hand-in-hand with the one on ample display in an industry where masculine ideology pervasively makes sports a zone of harassment for women, but is written off as “fun and games.”

As coaches, women have made only scant, hard-fought-for headway. Title IX, ironically, opened the door for male coaches in the growing arena of women’s sports, but has done little to make space for women coaches. The NFL recently hired Kathryn Smith as the first female full-time assistant coach in the league’s history. Smith joins a very small group of women in men’s sports.

Women players and journalists face everyday sexism and sexual harassment, both the institutional and casual fan-based kinds. In March, the director of the BNP Paribas Open Tournament in Indian Wells, California, Raymond Moore, thought nothing of explaining that in his next life he wants to “be someone in the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association], because they ride on the coattails of the men.” He then went on to reference women athletes on the basis of their level of physical attractiveness to him personally.

Women athlete’s uniforms are often designed to sexualize them, a problem that exists more broadly in media. Dress codes that mandate skirts, skimpy shorts, and more ensure that women aren’t simply dressing to perform optimally, but to please optimally.

While top American soccer players are suing U.S. Soccer for wage discrimination, Brazilian superstar Marta struggles to be paid at all in a country where her male counterpart, Neymar, makes $15 million a year. As a soccer player, Karen Gibson grew used to fans calling, “Get your tits out” when she ran onto the field.

It was only in 2002 that 60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney loudly proclaimed, “The only thing that really bugs me about television’s coverage is those damn women they have down on the sidelines who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” Until 2012, when a woman brought it to public attention, ESPN’s online complaint form included the dropdown option: “Commentator — dislike female commentators.” As recently as last October, several women sportswriters were illegally barred from locker rooms after a Jaguars-Colts football game. “It’s still 2015, right?” asked Joey Chandler of the Tuscaloosa News.

All of this implicit bias and overt sexism is evident every day online, where there are very few restraints on hateful expression, particularly against women journalists, who tend to bear the brunt of abuse, from men and women both. Online comments are a symptom of deep cultural misgivings about women’s equality and rapidly shifting gender roles. Their profusion reflects an abiding societal tolerance for this kind of discrimination. However, technology isn’t limiting women’s public participation or workplace opportunities. Sexism is.

Every day, readers and viewers in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, feel sufficiently socially and culturally entitled to send women sports professionals messages meant to humiliate, denigrate, intimidate and shame them because they are women. There are costs: financial, professional, and personal. This culture of abusing women professionals for doing their jobs gains power when we pretend that the people targeted are not materially affected. It gains power when we use words that hide the ugliness and violence of the expression. It gains power when the focus is on the “evils” of tech and not the cruelty of sexism and racism that are clearly manifest. It gains power when there is little or not counter speech from the public or support from employers. It makes no sense to hide what is going on by using family-friendly, homogenizing language, or to minimize the importance, meaning, or effect of the profound sexism at play.

This morning at breakfast, after reading a related article, my daughter asked what Reddit was, and my husband provided an example of how a particular sports subreddit works to build a community where “people” can share information, talk about games, and generally have fun while engaging in sports culture. My daughter is an athlete, but the experience that she would have online, as a participant in such a forum, would radically differ from her father’s if she was identifiable as female. It’s important that girls and, particularly, boys, understand the difference and in those terms.

Women have made major strides as athletes, coaches, journalists, and other sports professionals. But there is a long way to go.

***

This piece originally appeared in DAME magazine.

Lead image: flickr/Esther Vargas