Saturday, December 31, 2016

Step Aside Times And Post; Make Way For Teen Vogue And Vanity Fair


There's some honest journalism going on out there, and the temporizers and weaselworders in the news divisions of the New York Effing Times and once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle could stand to learn a few things about reporting, say, on the fact that our new emperor is wearing no clothes.

On Teen Vogue:
When Lauren Duca’s excellent Teen Vogue op-ed on Donald Trump’s psychological manipulation of America went viral last Saturday, social media exploded with praise—and with baffled reactions. The piece, one Twitter user noted, had “big words for a magazine about hairstyles and celebrity gossip.” Another user expressed pure astonishment: “Who would have guessed @TeenVogue might be the future of political news. Unreal coverage of the election.” Others were less kind, and a lot less subtle: “Go back to acne treatments,” one man snapped. 
Teen Vogue deserves credit not just for Duca’s op-ed but for the entirety of its political coverage, which has provided sharp, impassioned coverage of everything from gun control to Black Lives Matter in 2016. Much of this is due to Teen Vogue’s editor, Elaine Welteroth, who graduated to the position last May, and Phil Picardi, the magazine’s digital editorial director...
Vanity Fair's Abigail Tracy reporting on neo- fascist bag o' wind Donald "Rump" Trump's latest manipulative interaction with the largely supine press:
Six months after Donald Trump last held a formal press conference, during which he called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, the president-elect finally spoke with reporters Wednesday during two impromptu, largely fact-free press conferences outside his gilded Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. In his signature stream-of-consciousness style, the president-elect—at one point flanked by boxing promoter Don King—offered up a series of misleading, disjointed responses, during which he falsely claimed to have created thousands of new jobs, dismissed alleged Russian interference in the presidential election, whitewashed his sprawling financial conflicts of interest, and offered up word salad in a rambling defense of Israel. 
It has not escaped our notice (and likely not yours) that women journalists (and bloggers!) are front- and- center in standing up to the "firehose of falsehoods" being sprayed into your lives every day by Rump, his minions and large segments of the media.  Normalizing a misogynist monster like Rump fits the business model of the amoral establishment media, which hungers for access to this Russo- Republican train wreck of an incoming administration. Others with courage, a conscience and a moral compass will honestly report facts and let the facts form the truth.

Ms. Duca and Ms. Tracy are just two more examples of honorable people doing their jobs as reporters and journalists. We're happy to support them, and hope you do too.

BONUS:  See additional worthies noted by Pinku-Sensei in the comments.

1 comment:

Pinku-Sensei said...

Another journalist to watch is Rebecca Traister of New York Magazine. She has had some very insightful things to say about the election just ended.

On the topic of unusual sources of journalism, I'd add GQ, which is giving Keith Olbermann a platform on its YouTube channel. As a fan of Keith's going back nearly 30 years, I'm grateful for it.

Finally, fashion magazines becoming sources of good political journalism isn't any more unusual than a music magazine, Rolling Stone, doing the same thing decades ago. In the case of Rolling Stone, it showed it was also not afraid of its advertisers. I wonder if Teen Vogue and Vanity Fair are able to say the same thing.