Shaky Truths, Sh**** Men, Shakin’ Sixties
This Week — Nothing But the Truth— with James Risen and Errol Morris. You can listen at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
In the aftermath of the Fire and Fury bomb cyclone and every other little storm coming from Washington, it can be challenging to keep your eye on the ball. Fake news and post truth rule the day. James Risen and Errol Morris earn our respect as pro skeptics and old school gum shoe investigators. Risen won a Pulitzer for his book covering the NSA domestic spying story that his paper, the New York Times, didn’t want to publish. Errol Morris makes documentaries like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War which are about the suppression of truth. He’s also used his famous Interrotron camera rig to scrutinize everyone from Donald Rumsfeld to Donald Trump. For a glimpse into the Morris style, check out this strangely revealing short he produced with a pre-presidential Donald for the 2002 Oscars ceremony:
Morris’s latest series, Wormwood, dives into the story of Eric Olson—a man who believes his father was assassinated by the CIA. (For more on the Olson story, read Michael Ignatieff’s 2001 report on what the CIA did to his father.)
You’ll hear connections running through both of this week’s Open Source interviews. Both Risen and Morris root their reporting in Shakespearean themes; namely Hamlet. Risen compares his CIA sources to the protagonists of Tom Stoppard’s absurdist Hamlet rewrite, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Morris lifts the title of his series from Hamlet’s muttered exclamation of his own existential bitterness. The ghost of Hamlet’s father crying out “remember me” becomes a kind of mission statement for Eric Olson in his investigation of his father’s death.
Both Risen and Morris show, in their work, that truth is never absolute. Collaboration—or “collusion”—between mainstream media reporting and domestic government agencies can often distort reality. Instead of trusting institutions as “the voice of truth”, we should trust the voices of the brave individuals who come forward to tell their own stories.
“The source is more important than the story,” says the veteran muckraker Seymour Hersh at one point in Wormwood, “always.”
Read: Moira Donegan — “I Created the Shitty Media Men List”
Zach Goldhammer: It was hard to listen to Seymour Hersh’s impassioned defense of his sources in Wormwood and not think of the #MeToo movement. Many of the women who have come forward this year to discuss their experiences of sexual assault and harassment have had to risk public backlash—jeopardizing both their future prospects of employment as well as their own private security. While much of the backlash against #MeToo has focused on the lack of due process for male perpetrators, little attention has been paid to what happens to the female whistleblowers.
That narrative began to change this week, due to a forthcoming piece from firebrand essayist Katie Roiphe. Roiphe’s unpublished Harper’s essay had threatened to reveal the identity of the woman who created the Shitty Media Men List—an anonymous, crowdsourced document detailing various forms of male misconduct in the media biz. Many contemporary feminists objected to having the list’s creator outed or “doxxed”. The potential publication of Roiphe’s story briefly inspired a “spartacus” moment in which various women came forward claiming responsibility for the list in order to protect the original whistleblower. On Wednesday night, however, Moira Donegan—a former assistant editor for the New Republic—came forward as the person responsible for the list’s inception. Her piece in The Cut is remarkable and worth reading in full, particularly for Donegan’s honest and thoughtful accounting of the list’s intended purpose as well as its shortcomings:
In the beginning, I only wanted to create a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault without being needlessly discredited or judged. The hope was to create an alternate avenue to report this kind of behavior and warn others without fear of retaliation. Too often, for someone looking to report an incident or to make habitual behavior stop, all the available options are bad ones. The police are notoriously inept at handling sexual-assault cases. Human-resources departments, in offices that have them, are tasked not with protecting employees but with shielding the company from liability — meaning that in the frequent occasion that the offender is a member of management and the victim is not, HR’s priorities lie with the accused. When a reporting channel has enforcement power, like an HR department or the police, it also has an obligation to presume innocence. In contrast, the value of the spreadsheet was that it had no enforcement mechanisms: Without legal authority or professional power, it offered an impartial, rather than adversarial, tool to those who used it. It was intended specifically not to inflict consequences, not to be a weapon — and yet, once it became public, many people immediately saw it as exactly that
[…]
A lot of us are angry in this moment, not just at what happened to us but at the realization of the depth and frequency of these behaviors and the ways that so many of us have been drafted, wittingly and unwittingly, into complicity. But we’re being challenged to imagine how we would prefer things to be. This feat of imagination is about not a prescriptive dictation of acceptable sexual behaviors but the desire for a kinder, more respectful, and more equitable world. There is something that’s changed: Suddenly, men have to think about women, our inner lives and experiences of their own behavior, quite a bit. That may be one step in the right direction
Last year, I wrote that women just recounting their experiences of sexism did not seem like enough. I wanted action, legislation, measurable markers of change. Now I think that the task at hand might be more rudimentary than I assumed: The experience of making the spreadsheet has shown me that it is still explosive, radical, and productively dangerous for women to say what we mean.
Moira Donegan’s description of the the media industry overlaps with similar issues in higher ed. As the English professors Julianna Spaahr and Stephanie Young detail in The Chronicle of Higher Education, many college students as well as their academic advisors rely on a “broken system” for reporting sexual abuse:
Women who have navigated the risk of sexual harassment and gone on to careers in the academy understand intimately how broken the system is. Perhaps they themselves have been broken by it. They, like us, may have seen firsthand how a complaint can hurt the person who complains far more than it does the harasser. That is why female professors laugh in fatigue when colleagues make cynical jokes about a colleague moving in with a student. That is why they do not encourage students to rush to Title IX offices. That is why we attempt to work around the system to the best of our ability, often taking on more work, and still failing the students we try to support.
The need for alternative means of reporting incidents of sexual abuse is vitally important now to the conversation about media and truth-telling. The New York Times may be advertising itself as “the voice of truth”—applauding its own investigative reporting on Harvey Weinstein—but its record is far from unblemished. Oprah Winfrey similarly suggested, in her deservedly praised Golden Globes speech, that we must trust the press and its “insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth.” But the person at the the heart of Oprah’s speech—a black woman named Recy Taylor who was abducted and raped by six white men in Abbeville, Alabama, 1944—represents a narrative that went untold in the press for years. Her story has resurfaced today thanks in part to the historian Danielle McGuire—a guest on our own #MeToo program—as well the work of Rosa Parks and many black female organizer who fought against the dominant narrative of what women’s stories were about.
In order for these stories to deepen and develop, we shouldn’t just renew our newspaper subscriptions. We should protect the actual sources of these revelations and create new platforms for their voices to be heard. This doesn’t mean abandoning traditional reporting or due process adjudication. It does mean recognizing that our existing institutions are often insufficient, and that no existing truth is ever “absolute.”
Coming Up: Revisiting 1968
At the end of our Otis Redding show, we promised that we would produce a series of 1968 anniversary programs. We have a few now in the works. One is a program on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam—the subject of a new book by Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden. Another might be John Carlos’s legendary black power salute at the 1968 Olympics—a story retold in John Carlos’s new memoir; co-authored with our new favorite sports reporter and podcaster, Dave Zirin.
But the anniversary I’m most excited about is the release of Van Morrison’s classic album Astral Weeks, a mystic masterpiece which turns out to have a strange Boston connection. That story is told in a sprawling new book by musician Ryan Walsh—Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.
If you have a suggestion for another ’68 narrative we should explore, send us a note: info@radioopensource.org
Misc. links:
Errol Morris on “umbrella man” and the JFK assassination. Attica historian Heather Ann Thompson reviews The Post + LitHub on the behind the scenes story of the Pentagon Papers. Brandon Terry on MLK’s radicalism. Nicole Aschoff on Oprah’s capitalism. Jamie Loftus on Dave Chapelle’s shock-jock-ism. Dave Zirin on activist athlete and Celtics star, Jaylen Brown. Union Square developers want you to be able to throw axes while you drink beer. And after a decade, new tunes from The Breeders (finally).
Stay groovy,
The Open Source Whistleblowers
