An internal investigation by The Athletic found that the relationship between Dianna Russini, its former senior N.F.L. reporter, and Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the New England Patriots, was a “clear violation” of the company’s standards.
In a report released Thursday detailing findings of its monthslong investigation, The Athletic said that the relationship gave the appearance of a conflict of interest and Ms. Russini should have revealed it to the company.
Russini first vigorously defended herself against these allegations, saying everything was taken out of context and she wasn’t going to dignify this non-story with a response.
Dianna Russini’s PR team making it clear that there’s nothing to this story….
RANDOM SIDE NOTE: Can I have her job? According to a story written after the relationship became public, Russini was making bank:
Ms. Russini was not just any reporter. The Athletic paid her an annual salary of close to $800,000, according to a former manager who had knowledge of her salary negotiation. This would have made her one of the highest-paid journalists at the Times Company.
She apparently filed somewhere north of 900 stories during her three years at the publication, along with appearing on podcasts, doing videos and more, so I’m not saying she didn’t work at her job, but damn… At what my kids are telling me they’re making coming out of college, we could staff a decent-sized newsroom out here for what The Athletic was paying the self-described “straight-up MILF.”
HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS INSIDER: First things first for the journalism kids out there: Don’t have any kind of snuggly relationships of any kind with any source if you are a reporter.
If you somehow managed to find yourself with a potentially risky situation (as I once did in getting engaged to a city council rep, even though I didn’t cover city council as my beat), disclose the relationship ASAP and then figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze depending on the rules of your gig and the level of interest you have in your significant other.
But here’s the one question nobody seems OK with asking at any of these major media outlets:
Was the Vrabel situation worse than anything else “insiders” are doing?
I get that Americans are always going to clutch their pearls when sex-like-stuff becomes public and I know that women (particularly women covering sports) are constantly treated less favorably than men.
But let’s not pretend sports “insiders” are anything more than glorified PR agents that get paid way too much and get away with way more than they should.
The reporters tsk-tsking Russini used footage of this party to show that Vrabel wasn’t present, apparently because he was out “running the offense” with Russini or something. Apparently, it was fine for Glazer to set up a day-drinking session with the people he covers, and no one has tried to put a stop to an event older than the incoming college freshman.
Even without the whole “Oh my stars! She might have touched his manly virtue!” stuff, Russini seemed a bit ethically compromised by the spoils of stardom. She apparently bragged about hanging out with the who’s who of the NFL, and even trying to use a coach to get her out of a speeding ticket.
Other sports reporters, whose livelihoods depend on scoops and staying ahead of the pack, see what the “insiders” do and how well they are treated, so they figure if that’s the game, let’s go play it.
This is why we get more and more “anonymous sources” for less and less important content. It’s why we see more grandstanding and brand building from the “big names” in the media instead of following the same rules everyone else has to. It’s why we see people pushing the edge of the envelope in what is acceptable to cover and how much of a jagwad they feel comfortable being in covering it.
Professional sports loves themselves some PR, and basically, that’s what they get when they pick out their favorite mouthpieces and spoon feed them content they want to have in the public.
So, let’s stop pretending that Glazer, Schefter and dozens of other “reporters” who start every sentence with “The general manager told me exclusively that…” haven’t sold their journalistic souls for heavy bank and easier scoops.
They might not be pulling tongue with a coach in a hot tub, but they’re no less ethically compromised than someone in a romantic relationship with a source.
(A brief-and-yet-way-too-accurate explanation of how IU got into this mess in the first place.)
THE LEAD: Indiana University released its “IU Media School Task Force Report” late last week after a five-month process of determining how best to preserve student journalists’ rights while providing the various media outlets with governance and financial support.
CATCHING UP WITH THIS DISASTERBACLE: After Rodenbush was fired, he filed a wrongful termination suit against the university. As that was unfolding, the students at the IDS were prohibited from printing a paper for homecoming, as the university didn’t want any news in it because, God forbid, the alumni returning for homecoming might think something unpleasant might actually occur in Bloomington.
More recently, things have turned around for Rodenbush, as he got a professorial gig at Western Kentucky University:
I have no idea what this is in the photo, but I pray its a mascot of some kind for WKU or a melting wax statue of IU Dean David Tolchinsky performing his “Stayin’ Alive” dance.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I was recently told I’d been getting overly long in my posts, so let’s keep this one short:
The report talks a good game, but let’s see what the media school does in its “refine and implement” stage. We’ve got a long, documentedhistory of the administration here being somewhere between “completely inept” and “ignorantly nefarious” when it comes to student media. I tend to believe that the proof in the pudding is in the eating and IU’s media school brain trust has been serving up a lot of syrup of ipecac pudding lately.
Even if this whole thing comes out as fine as wine going forward, it doesn’t undo the damage done to the people involved here. Jim Rodenbush lost a job, an income and probably a lot of sleep as a result of this. His life was upended because of this, and just because we media folks know he’s a hero, it doesn’t mean this is OK. The staff at the IDS had to fight a fight they weren’t supposed to be in, all while doing the paper and school, which is more than plenty to cause burnout. Advertisers got shook, distribution people had to consider the impact of this and more. Fixing the future doesn’t un-mess the past.
The administration of the IU Media School needs to be held to account for every ham-handed thing they’ve done to this point involving student media. We were talking about the concept of “actual malice” today in class, in which people are held to account for libel when they know they’re doing something wrong and yet they do it anyway. I can’t think of a more apropos term to describe what’s been going on here in regard to the administrative action as it relates to the IDS.
If you are in driver’s seat, you get the ticket for driving recklessly. Same basic concept applies here. Everyone on EARTH seemed to be telling these people, “Stop. What you’re doing here is wrong” and they didn’t seem to really care. If we don’t want to have another mess like this one, IU needs to mete out some punitive measures to make them care about the results of their actions.
Arizona State University soft launched a web app earlier this month that allows anyone, for $5 per month, to create an apparently unlimited number of customized “learning modules” using artificial intelligence. The AI chatbot, called Atom, uses online instructional materials from ASU professors to create a course that’s tailored to the goals, interests and skill level of the user. After asking a handful of questions and processing for about five minutes, Atom debuts a personalized course that includes readings, quizzes and videos from a half dozen experts at ASU.
But several professors whose content Atom pulls from were surprised to learn that their materials—including video lectures, slide decks and online assignments—were being perused, clipped and repackaged for these short online course modules. The faculty wasn’t told anything about the app, ASU Atomic, they said.
(SIDE NOTE: I so DESPERATELY want to use a video clip here from “Ted 2” that smack talks Arizona State right now, given how stupid this situation is, but I think the editors at Sage might pop a brain bleed. The tamest thing said in that exchange was, “Do you say Arizona State University or just HPV-U?” Anyway… I digress…)
BACKGROUND: The university is doing everything to both say that tapping the braintrust of the faculty through this AI thing is the greatest thing on earth while also telling faculty this is just experimental and there’s no real concern here.
As with most things administrators SWEAR aren’t problems, the faculty members refuse to buy this bull-pucky:
As is the case for many AI chatbots still in their infancy, Atom gets things wrong. In the module it designed for Hanlon, it included clips from an old lecture he gave focused on the work and career of 20th-century literary theorist Cleanth Brooks. Throughout the course it called the critic “Client” Brooks.
<SNIP>
Ostling is worried that Atomic “will start being used widely, and I have content on my Canvas shelves that would be very inappropriate to show up without context in a course,” he said. “Not only do I think the students will be poorly served because they might learn things that aren’t true, but it could potentially get me in trouble.”
I’m feeling this as well, given that I often have students interview other students for classroom-only exercises that get posted to Canvas. So, for example, a student talking about their experience at the local Pub Crawl might not be all that thrilled if that info becomes part of a database of content for everyone to see.
Even more, I have to occasionally create “alternative timeline scenarios” for the students. For example, to have my students write an “announcement press release,” I make up the scenario that our current chancellor resigned a while back, the university did a search and today is announcing the hiring of the next chancellor. It’s a logical scenario that would be something students might be expected to do as PR practitioners (hiring news release) and it forces them to focus on what to include in a short space.
However, I obviously have made up the name of the person we hired as well as that person’s background and accomplishments. If AI slurps it up and treats it as gospel, that’s not going to be good for anyone involved.
This all led me to today’s throwback post about our system trying to steal faculty content for what I would assume could be a situation like this. Even if the Universities of Wisconsin folks double-pinky promise not to turn my work into AI slop, I still don’t want them co-opting my life’s work for all the reasons listed below.
I did a check on how this is going and the board of regents hasn’t passed this yet, but I’m always leery of summer months, as that’s a great time for universities to pass these “take out the trash” bills, because nobody’s looking.
The Universities of Wisconsin System is trying to steal faculty’s copyright rights to educational material. Please help fight this stupid power grab.
(The system says, “We would never look to diminish your rights or take your hard-earned work away from you.” What the system actually does is more accurately depicted in the scene above.)
THE LONGER, MORE NUANCED VERSION: Here’s a deep dive on the way the system is trying to recreate its copyright policy in a way that disenfranchises its faculty:
The UW System is proposing a new copyright policy that professors say would eliminate faculty ownership of instructional materials. The revisions are stoking alarm among professors statewide who say such a move would cheapen higher education into a mass-produced commodity.
“This policy change is nothing less than a drastic redefinition of the employment contract, one that represents a massive seizing of our intellectual property on a grand scale,” professors from nine of the 13 UW campuses wrote in a recent letter to UW System President Jay Rothman. “It would allow any UW campuses to fire any employee and nonetheless continue teaching their courses in perpetuity with no obligation to continue paying the employee for their work.”
Aside from owning faculty syllabi, lecture notes and exam materials, UW would also have ownership rights over the scholarship faculty create:
A draft of the new policy, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, would eliminate existing copyright language and replace it with the assertion that UW System holds ownership of both “institutional work” and “scholarly work.”
<SNIP>
“Scholarly work” includes most of what professors produce, such as lecture notes, course materials, journal articles and books. The UW System transfers copyright ownership to the author, as is customary in higher education, but notes that it “reserves” the right to use the works for purposes “consistent with its educational mission and academic norms.”
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Given that I’ve got about a dozen textbooks in the field, I edit a journal that needs scholarly work to keep it running, I spent seven years crafting hundreds of blog posts and that I’ve built a ton of courses over my nearly 30 years of teaching, this was basically my calm, metered reaction:
I’ve already sent a copy of the proposal to Sage for its team of lawyers to go over, so I’m hopeful that I receive an answer along the lines of, “Calm down… Have a Diet Coke… This isn’t going to destroy what you’ve spent decades creating…”
In the meantime, let’s lay out how stupid and problematic this is:
The quality of your courses depend on the people you’re pissing off: We essentially went through this in my media-writing class today and a collection of sophomores and juniors understood it, so I’m hoping it might make sense to the Board of Regents.
I proposed the following scenario to one kid in the class: Let’s say you turned in a really good story as an assignment for this class. In fact, I thought it was so good, I took your name off of it, put my name on it and submitted it to the local paper. The paper then paid me $50 for the story.
I then asked the kid, “So, given that every time you turn in something good, I’m going to take it, put my name on it and make money from it, how likely are you to put forth your best effort in this class?”
The kid said, “There’s no way I’m going to do anything good for you anymore.”
Right. So, let’s play that out here: If every time I work REALLY hard on making good stuff for my class, the U is just going to claim it as its own, why would I bother to do anything more than the bare minimum to make my class work?
I guess you could make the argument that pride in our work and a desire to make things better for our students could inspire us to do great things, even in the face of a naked power grab by the system, but if you’re going to treat us like mercenaries, we’re going to behave that way.
This will stifle innovation, limit interest in developing new courses and create a general sense of animosity among faculty. It will also likely inspire professors to find new ways to hide stuff from the administration folks, as one person on social media suggested to me:
This stuff isn’t a product, but rather a process: Inherent to the system’s argument is the basic premise of work product: You built this stuff while you were employed by us and required to do so. Therefore, since we paid you for this, the stuff is ours.
That works in the private sector, where we’re tasked with specific outcomes and granted special provisions to create this kind of work product. For example, I know that when I worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, I wrote a lot of articles that the paper published. Implicit in my employment agreement was the premise that I was acting on behalf of the paper, writing things that the paper tasked me to write and publishing those things in a copyrighted publication. They own that stuff and I’m cool with that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to republish a weather story I wrote in 1996, and if I did something cool I wanted to show my students, that’s acceptable use.
However, when it comes to my media-writing class, I didn’t get hired to write lecture notes and syllabi for that class. In fact, what I wrote was a tweaked version of something I’d been working on for decades. I’d drafted some of this conceptual stuff when I was working at UW-Madison, improved upon it when I was at Mizzou, reconfigured it at Ball State and then adapted it here. This isn’t like you hired me to bake a cake for your birthday. This is a tree I’ve been growing and tending for years and years.
The material might not be UW’s to steal: Even if you don’t buy the argument above, the instructors might not own the material they’re using in the first place.
Textbook publishers aren’t just sending out desk copies of a dead-tree books and telling fledgling professors, “Vaya con Dios.” They actually build a ton of back-end stuff into the educational packages they provide these days, which includes a lot of the stuff the system is trying to get its grubby little paws on.
I know for my books at Sage, we have sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides for lectures, notes for instructors, exercises and test banks crammed with questions. I might even be forgetting some of the stuff we provide.
(Shameless Plug: Sage really is amazing when it comes to this kind of stuff. If you ever need a book, check these folks out first, especially if you need some help with the shaping and molding of the entire class experience.)
These things are available to instructors because Sage built them to go along with the authors’ textbooks. The professors can use them as they are, add stuff, cut stuff or otherwise tweak what they receive. That said, it’s not theirs to sell or give away. Sage holds the copyright for this stuff and I imagine Sage and the other book publishers who pour a ton of time and resources into building these things would be more than a bit peeved if the UW System tried to claim it as its own.
The Coy and Vance Duke Theory of Education: When I was a kid, I loved “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show, which ran every Friday for about seven or eight years. The show involved two cousins, Bo and Luke Duke, getting into scrapes with the corrupt law enforcement of Hazzard County and doing amazing car chases in their 1969 Dodge Charger. Along with patriarch Uncle Jesse Duke and the lovely cousin Daisy Duke, the boys were “makin’ their way, the only way they know how,” to quote the theme song.
It was a simple show that drew a good audience and it seemed to work well. However, around the fifth season, John Schneider and Tom Wopat (who played Bo and Luke, respectively) got into a contract dispute with the studio over salaries. Rather than pay them and move on with life, the studio had the idea in its head that the car (the General Lee) was actually the star of the show, so it didn’t matter who was driving it and that they didn’t need these two pretty boys at all.
If ever there was a knock-off of a brand name, this was it. Like the original Duke Boys, one was blonde, one was brunette. They essentially wore the same wardrobe, had the same catch phrases and did the same insane driving stuff. That said, the ratings took a dump and after one season, Bo and Luke “returned from driving the NASCAR circuit” and Coy and Vance ended up fading from memory.
What the universities are doing here is essentially the same kind of thing. They figure, “Well, hell, if we have the notes, the syllabus and the PowerPoint slides, we don’t really need the professor who created them at the front of the room.” These folks assume that once we decide to leave, retire or whatever, they can just plug in an adjunct at a fraction of the cost and things will run like a Swiss watch. And that’s not just me being paranoid, as other folks see it as well:
I pretty much know my notes aren’t going to be helpful to other people as I wrote them based on a lot of my experiences in the field. Notes like (BUS FIRE STORY GOES HERE) or (EXPLAIN DRUG DEALER SHOT THING) probably won’t work for a random Coy or Vance they bring in to teach my class after they decide they don’t need me anymore.
HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: One of the biggest reasons I’m worried about this is because it impacts what I can do with my materials. That’s also the main reason why I think you should care about it, too.
I never took this job to get rich and I certainly don’t like the idea of coming across like Daffy Duck when he found the treasure room:
However, when I know stuff is mine to do with as I please, that tends to benefit a lot of other people as well. Whenever someone shoots me an email and says, “Hey, how do you organize your class?” I’m always happy to give them a copy of my syllabus. When someone needs an assignment I’ve built, I’m glad to share it with them or on the blog.
When we went into COVID lock down, I basically dumped everything I ever did that I thought would help people into the Corona Hotline section of the blog for free. All those goodies remain there to this day, so feel free to help yourself.
If this policy passes, I might not be as free to offer that kind of generosity any more, and that would really tick me off.
A reporter and a source getting way too close for ethical comfort. Also, for all the times people have told me that sources and journalists NEVER hook up like this, I keep seeing a lot of sources and journalists hooking up like this…
THE LEAD: Here we go again….
Longtime NFL reporter Dianna Russini has resigned from her role as a senior insider with The Athletic, according to the Associated Press. Her departure comes amid an investigation by The Athletic into Russini’s conduct and her relationship with Patriots coach Mike Vrabel. In photos published by Page Six last week, the two were seen spending time together at the Ambiente resort in Sedona, Ariz. ahead of the NFL’s annual owners meetings in Phoenix last month.
In her resignation announcement, Russini made the case that this was a set of cherry-picked images that took a totally innocent vacation involving multiple people and turned it into a tryst of some sort. Rather than actually showcase that, she said she refused to dignify the story and resigned instead:
“Moreover, this media frenzy is hurtling forward without regard for the review process The Athletic is trying to complete,” she continued. “It continues to escalate, fueled by repeated leaks, and I have no interest in submitting to a public inquiry that has already caused far more damage than I am willing to accept. Rather than allowing this to continue, I have decided to step aside now—before my current contract expires on June 30. I do so not because I accept the narrative that has been constructed around this episode, but because I refuse to lend it further oxygen or to let it define me or my career.”
That statement has the same effect as trying to put out a fire with gasoline. As a journalist, she has GOT to know that if ANY of her sources made a similar statement, she’d crawl so far up their rear end, they could taste her hairspray.
If there’s one common thread among these situations, it almost always mentions three things:
Who was or wasn’t engaged/married in whatever entanglement is going on
Any age gap between the male and female participants (This time its about seven years, which isn’t bad when you’re 50 and 43, or at least it’s not this. In most situations like this, we get an ancient guy and a woman 20-50 years younger)
A loud and immediate statement of support for the journalist that ages like milk in the sun.
(This case has yet to be fully explored, so it’s unclear if this is more of a “Kathy Scruggs” situation of unfounded sexual accusations or a full-on “Nuzzi-gate” situation that will be used in an emergency when syrup of ipecac is not available. The Athletic says it will continue its investigation to find out what happened, which it had to do regardless of Russini’s employment status if it wanted to have any credibility in journalism.)
What’s ridiculous is that in trying to pull a single “Throwback Thursday” post together, I found myself with almost too many examples of how gender, media, ethics and entanglements led to bad outcomes. Thus, here are some links to previous posts that might have some value to consider:
I built this about 15 years ago for the cover of a student media helpers guide for a high school news conference. Other than a few language tweaks, I don’t think much has changed…
On April Fools’ Day, the paper published a series of satirical articles, including one with a subheadline that said the paper had rebranded as The Daily Woke Heel. Others read “UNC brings back DEI—for whites,” and “A new way forward for the Dean Dome: a two-stadium solution.” Another, published on the website, said “Satire: Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents.”
The jokes did not go over well with some students, and the paper’s editor in chief immediately issued an apology. She wrote that the paper heard students’ “critiques and outrage.” She added, the paper’s “insensitive decisions and oversights” were “made by a newsroom and leadership team that undoubtedly exist in positions of power and privilege on this campus.”
JOKE’S ON YOU: Every April Fools’ Day, I thank the Lord I’m no longer a student newspaper adviser. When I was one, I found myself begging, pleading, cajoling and griping in hopes of keeping the students from making a colossal error in judgement by thinking they were funny.
To be fair, it wasn’t always just the April Fools’ Edition that led to problems and UNC is not alone in the “Oh… So, THAT happened” moments of dumbassery that have advisers going gray and bald before our time and strongly reconsidering truck-driving school.
One year, we did a bracket for “Bar-ch Madness,” in which we listed off the top 16 best places to get hammered around campus. The chancellor wasn’t pleased at our idea of promoting problematic drinking, but he was even less enthusiastic about us including one of the freshman dorms as a “dark horse” candidate.
Year-end issues are also a major concern, as students are usually either burnt to a crisp or at that punch-drunk level of euphoria that comes with nearing the end of the year. In one case, the student newspaper at the University of Utah reminded us that using drop-caps in design isn’t always just an aesthetic choice:
If you noticed the “more” in the headline and wondered if the other staffers’ columns had a more dignified and direct approach… well… not quite…
I could spend days showcasing stuff like this but as the opening graphic seeks to demonstrate, but that would be hypocritical at best. It isn’t like we were so great back in “my day” and now “these damned kids” are somehow sullying the greatness that was present back when typewriters clicked in newsrooms and everyone wore their Sunday best to cover the news.
(One piece I cannot find from “my day” ran here at Oshkosh, in which the staff photoshopped the chancellor’s head onto the famous Demi Moore pregnancy photo. He was not amused, I’m told.)
Instead, here are three reasons that might help prevent the next disaster, which is already on the clock, if that graphic is right:
YOU ARE NOT THAT FUNNY: Humor is one of the greatest talents in the world, in that to make someone laugh can be among the most amazing feelings we have as humans. Someone once explained that if you can tap into something funny, you force people to have an involuntary response to it that creates true joy within them.
Taking that talent and honing it takes years, and even then, it requires a deft touch and a lot of failure. When Richard Pryor died, his family found thousands of reels of tape in his home that provided a timeline of his efforts work-shopping his act.
He’d be at one club one night, trying to see if this bit would land or if tweaking this accent would improve the audience reaction. It took him days, weeks, months and sometimes years to tweak and improve little things that led to those epic, uproarious moments on stage.
If a guy with that level of talent and skill had to work that hard for that long to make even half of his stuff work, what are the chances that a group of college students, trying this on the fly is going to pull it off on the first pass?
As much as I have laughed in newsrooms over the years for a variety of reasons, I can assure you, nobody I’ve met is good enough to pull off humor on a mass-media scale like this. Trying it publicly is going to lead to more harm than good.
HUMOR IS A PERSONAL TASTE: If you don’t believe me, listen to the following comedians:
Richard Pryor
Taylor Tomlinson
Sam Kinison
Ali Wong
Jeff Foxworthy
Nikki Glazer
At least one of them will probably make you laugh and at least one of them will likely offend the hell out of you. Some of them are throwing out bits that you can completely relate to while others are likely not landing a single joke for you. Some feel too tame while others are dropping more F-bombs and slurs than a drunk Boston sports fan after watching an ESPN Hot Take show that gives the Patriots no shot at the playoffs this year.
Newsroom humor, in particular, is a special kind of humor. It’s a mix of sarcasm, mortician’s humor, snark and insult comedy. It’s also full of inside jokes and other things that make people still laugh 20 years after they’ve graduated. I’ve seen newsrooms post weird things on the walls, engage in meme-battles and develop quote books as survival-level defense mechanisms.
(To this day, I’m still somewhat scarred by the humor fight that happened at Ball State between my features desk and my design desk. It started when someone in design left a presentation for a class open, and someone on features stuck some weird images into the design kid’s PowerPoint.
The design kid then stuck a photo of a morbidly obese female adult film actress on the side of the monitor at the features desk. The features kid then responded by essentially iron-gluing an inappropriate image to the side of the design computer, something nobody noticed until the head of the Indianapolis Star came down with my boss for a tour of the newsroom.
The guy paused while visiting the design pod and then asked no one in particular, “Hey… Is that monkey blowing itself?”)
The point is, humor is in the eye of the beholder and few people outside of newsrooms really are beholding what we behold in there. If you want to amuse yourself, turn the place into your own little den of wiener jokes, dank memes and memorable quotes. Just keep it out of the paper (and the public eye in general).
YOU NEED TO TREASURE YOUR CREDIBILITY: Student journalists take on all the risks associated with journalism at any level. They can be attacked, threatened or arrested, and many already have been subjected to these measures.
They can be sued for any one of a dozen reasons, including libel and invasion of privacy. They also suffer the same insults and mistreatment all journalists receive for merely doing their job.
The one thing that makes it suck so much more is that they are often treated as second-class citizens in the field, even by those folks who should know better. I’ve heard of numerous examples of student journalists being told by professors and even professional media operatives that they’re “just playing journalist.”
Like they broke out a “Fisher Price ‘My First Reporter'” kit and asked Nana for an interview about her chocolate-chip cookies or something.
As student journalists, you have to fight so much harder to be taken seriously. You have to defend your work more vigorously than “professional” journalists when you break stories that upset people.
You also have those same “professionals” trying to swipe your stories, bogart your sources or otherwise treat you like some sort of minor-league baseball affiliate that they can raid when the “big team” needs something.
You earn your credibility a grain of sand at a time, knowing that any mistake can wash the whole sandcastle away and force you to start over. It’s so damned important, as it truly is the coin of the realm.
Doing “humor” like the things we showcased here is like dousing your reputation with gasoline and lighting a match, just to watch it burn.
And you’re not just burning down your own house, you’re making it impossible for the next generation to live there or even build on the ashes. Sources (particularly professors) have long memories.
Don’t give them a reason to think poorly of you if you can help it.
The rapper Afroman did not defame seven sheriff’s deputies or invade their privacy when he put out a series of catchy, flamboyantly insulting music videos about them after they raided his home in 2022, an Adams County, Ohio jury ruled on Wednesday.
In a three-day trial that pitted two very different notions of personal outrage against each other, Afroman, whose legal name is Joseph Foreman, successfully argued that he had a First Amendment right to mock the deputies, as public figures, and that the over-the-top lyrics of his viral songs could not reasonably be taken as literal statements of fact.
BACKGROUND: The 2022 raid was based on a warrant seeking evidence that Afroman was engaged in drug trafficking and kidnapping. The rapper’s house had multiple cameras recording the raid, one of which captured a deputy doing a double take of a glass cake dish containing a loaf of lemon pound cake.
Meet Officer Pound Cake, who did not put down his gun and grab a slice and thus cannot testify if Mama’s recipe was, in fact, so nice.
The raid produced no evidence of either allegation in the warrant, but it did lead to a lot of video footage of deputies looking through Afroman’s property, breaking down his door and other miscellaneous actions.
Afroman used the footage in several music videos to mock the law enforcement officials. After the videos went viral, merch began to arrive in the form of “Officer Pound Cake” T-shirts and the like. At that point, several deputies sued for defamation and image appropriation, claiming the rapper used their images without their consent and that his album of songs and subsequent videos caused them significant harm.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: What people who sue in cases like this fail to realize is:
A) You’re essentially trying to put out a fire with gasoline. The minute this thing began, people started paying more attention to Afroman, his videos and even Officer Pound Cake. I haven’t thought of Afroman in more than 20 years, but now the guy is all over my feed thanks to this lawsuit.
B) Unless you can prove (and I mean REALLY prove) that you were directly defamed in a clear, obvious and serious way, You have absolutely no shot of winning a suit like this, which means all your doing is what we outlined in Point A.
Case after case involving rappers, parody artists and other similar entertainment-based performances has demonstrated that this kind of stuff is protected speech. It also does nothing more than draw people to the very thing you didn’t want them to see.
When the PMRC put out its list of the Filthy 15, the artists and albums listed there spiked in popularity. When Jerry Falwell sued over a spoof ad in Hustler magazine, he targeted a publication that would be here one month, gone the next and likely only seen by a few hundred thousand people. However, now his name is associated with a Supreme Court case that every student in media law has seen, along with seeing the ad.
I get that it’s not fun to be the butt of the joke (believe me, after 12 years of Catholic school as the awkward kid in class, I get it.). That said, mockery is protected speech and pretty much everyone in public life gets their turn in the crap-barrel. The sooner you learn to let it go or embrace it, the less likely this will come up every day of your life.
This is a photo of me at a high school journalism workshop, apparently trying to explain something that I hope isn’t what it looks like I’m trying to explain. If I can handle this photo of me existing, Pete Hegseth can handle whatever the hell photos they’re taking of him these days.
THE LEAD: The folks in the government are getting grumpy about the way the media is treating them to the point of threatening and banning outlets and coverage they don’t like.
The chair of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has threatened to revoke broadcasters’ licences after US President Donald Trump criticised their coverage of the US-Israel war with Iran.
Brendan Carr told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that broadcasters’ licences were not a “property right” and warned they can be revoked if stations did not serve the public interest.
Carr’s threat came after he accused broadcasters of “running hoaxes and news distortions”, saying they can still “correct course” before their licence renewals.
Some Democratic lawmakers called Carr’s comments unconstitutional. The FCC issues licences to individual broadcast stations, but does not license TV networks.
In a “hold my beer” moment, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went one step further, barring photo journalists from his Pentagon briefings for not making him look pretty enough:
The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed “unflattering,” according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
I FEEL PETTY, OH SO PETTY: The media and the government have long had an adversarial relationship, with many political figures badmouthing and blaming on the fourth estate for whatever ails them. We’ve had politicians literally beating up reporters as well, with one “bodyslamming” a journalist in Montana, and yet still winning the election anyway.
This isn’t the standard fare of one saber-rattling chucklehead with limited power and an unlimited ego. This is the head of the FCC basically issuing a mob threat, which Democrats immediately rebuked him for making. Even Republicans who generally view the media as somewhere between a swamp rat and the crud that grows on your teeth when you forget to brush for two days are not having it:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Sunday rebuked Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over TV networks’ news coverage.
“I am a big supporter of the First Amendment,” Johnson said on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing.” “I do not like the heavy-handed government, no matter who is wielding it. … I would rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible.”
“The federal government’s role is to protect our freedoms — protect our constitutional rights,” the Wisconsin Republican added.
Johnson is my senator and I can’t remember the last time I fully agreed with him on anything, so to have us both on the same page might be as rare as seeing Jesus riding a unicorn. (You’re welcome…) Johnson’s essential position of, “I might not like what you are saying, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it,” is good to see, given that too few people tend to think about how life might look if the shoe were on the other foot.
The backlash against Hegseth isn’t as loud or strong, but the underlying concern of controlling the media shouldn’t be any less alarming. As much as his staff is now backtracking and claiming there’s a “space and fairness” issue driving this, I tend to believe the first report a little more for obvious reasons.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Let’s start with Hegseth because it’s easier. I’m a guy who has had his picture taken at a number of podium-based events and I swear to God, I never look good. I either look like I’m gesturing in hope of winning a game of Charades or my mouth is in some sort of position that looks like I’m eating rotten food or about to spit on someone. I’m also old and bald with bad neck hair, so that’s not helping anything either.
So, from that perspective, I can honestly say: Grow up, dude.
You were once on TV and you considered yourself a journalist, so it’s not like you don’t get the idea of how freedom of expression works. I can pretty much imagine the general outrage you’d put forth if a Democratic administration had tried to crack down on whatever you were doing on Fox News. For you to punk slap the media over a couple photographs you didn’t like when this photo of you exists seems a bit stupid:
As for Brendan Carr, his lack of understanding and his use of threats makes more sense. Carr got a bachelor’s in government before getting a law degree. He was a private practice attorney before being brought into the governmental machine in 2012. He never worked in the media, nor is his expertise in that field.
Carr reminds me of a number of school district attorneys and college counsel-folk I’ve dealt with over the years when school media got censored. They had this vibe like, “I’m a lawyer, thus I know everything and I’m way smarter than anyone else in the room.”
I remember one case in which I had to keep correcting a school lawyer about cases he claimed supported his position. Finally, I outlined several reasons he was wrong before turning to the superintendent and saying, “Ma’am, with all due respect, you’re getting terrible legal advice and likely overpaying for it.”
When governmental people come from the business or legal world, they fail to understand that they don’t have as much free reign as they used to. Being “in charge” back there meant they had unfettered power over anyone or anything within their fiefdom. In the government, we have rules and laws that constrain people from acting on their stupidest instincts.
People love the police blotter, because it includes tiny nuggets of drama, intrigue and joy. For instance, in Gillette, Wyoming, cars get “cheesed,” meaning people will cover them with slices of American cheese. Who doesn’t love reading about a good cheesing?
But along with the weird and wacky things that show up in a police blotter are numerous inaccuracies that follow people for life.
“There’s a lot of problems with blotters in general,” Secrest told me. “An initial charge can change really easily. They can up the charge, they can lower it, they can dismiss it entirely. Things can get challenged pretty quickly. Also, people can be acquitted.”
COP TALK 101: For those uninitiated in crime news, the blotter is a list of all the incidents law enforcement officials within a department deal with in a day. It usually lists a mix of things, including the time of the incident, the name of the person involved, the place where the incident occurred, the date of birth of the person involved and any criminal charges associated with the situation.
The blotter only represents what the law enforcement officials are doing at the front end of a situation, not the resolution of the case or any changes made later that day (or week or month).
So, for example, let’s say I’m driving to the aluminum recycling place to turn in some beer cans when I hit an icy patch on the road and skid into the ditch. The cop sees beer cans all over my car, notices that I totaled my vehicle and wants to check me for drunk driving. However, I’m too woozy and messed up from the crash to do field sobriety and the ambulance takes me to the hospital, where instead of a breath test, they do a blood draw.
The officer might list Operating While Intoxicated as an expected charge, pending the results of the blood test. So, it goes into the the blotter as an OWI. However, it turns out I’m as sober as a judge, so the charges eventually get dismissed.
If all the paper is doing is publishing the blotter info and not really following up, that can lead to several problems, like one noted in Poynter’s story on the Wyoming situation:
Although the staff received some pushback when they announced the change, “now that it’s gone it doesn’t seem to be missed,” Secrest said. “Also, this week we had a man call us and tell us that his booking sheet incorrectly designated his charge as a felony and our publishing of that, prior to this policy, caused him to lose his job. We will be able to correct that once he provides the court document confirming the charge. But that was published about 10 days before this policy took place. It felt like a good reminder of why we did this.”
A CHECK OF THE INTEREST ELEMENTS: One of the things we always talk about is balancing people’s right to know something versus people’s right to be left alone. A key way we do this is looking at the FOCII elements (Fame, Oddity, Conflict, Immediacy and Impact) to figure out if we should be doing something or not.
The blanket publication of the blotter tends not to showcase any of these elements other than Immediacy, but as we note in the book, Immediacy always has to be tempered against accuracy. In short, fast and wrong is worse than slow and right.
That said, the Oddity element often shows up in the blotter, which means checking it for information still merits value. The Fame element can also come into play, as people who are well known often end up on the wrong side of the law.
Here are two examples I remember from working with the crime beat:
At UW Oshkosh, the Advance-Titan used to run blotter items under the heading of “Busted!” In looking at the revelations put forth by the Wyoming paper regarding accuracy, that probably wasn’t the best of titles.
In one case, Busted! featured a brief bit of news in which two students were caught having sex in the middle of the day behind the giant UW-OSHKOSH sign on the main drag of campus. When the officer began to write the students up for this tryst, the guy begged the cop not to do this, because he said he knew it would end up in Busted! and thus his girlfriend would find out about his “extra-curricular activities.”
At another place and time, we had a blotter item that really tickled our irony meter. A local radio personality who went by the moniker “The Altar Boy” got busted for OWI. He apparently also gave the cops a bit of a rough time in arguing with them over the bust, noting he was someone of great import.
The folks in Wyoming noted that in cases like these, obviously, the information would be covered, but done so in a more complete way. Meanwhile, minor incidents involving regular folks would not make the paper.
DISCUSSION TIME: Does your media outlet have a blotter section of some kind and how popular is it? What kinds of things do you think are fair game and what feels like a bridge too far? Also, how would you feel if the minor indiscretion you committed in college suddenly became something anyone could find on the first page of a Google search? A lot of student newsrooms have struggled with balancing this, so it’d make for an interesting classroom discussion.
The University may record a class or access existing classroom recordings without the permission or knowledge of the instructor being recorded for the following purposes:
To gather evidence in connection with an investigation into alleged violations of University policy, when authorized in writing by the Provost and the Chief Human Resources Officer; and
For any other lawful purpose, when authorized in writing by the Provost and the Office of University Counsel, who will consult with the Chair of the Faculty.
BACKGROUND: The university had run into several issues related to recordings of professors over the years, only to figure out it really had no policy in place to deal with such things.
When called to account for this surreptitious move, the U fell back on the “well, we’re a one-party consent state” thing, which is true but a bit wobbly at best.
A FEW BASIC OBSERVATIONS: I found myself thinking about a couple aspects of the policy that either people haven’t considered very well or they just hope they won’t have to deal with in the future. Consider the following:
Rules for student recordings:I’m not sure exactly how this came into play, but the document makes it against UNC law for students to record in the classroom, except under specific circumstances:
Students may not record classes, including online classes, without express advance permission from the instructor teaching the class they wish to record. Students approved for recording as a University Compliance Office (UCO) accommodation to address a disability, pregnancy, or religious accommodation must notify instructors of their approved accommodation by sending an accommodation notification plan in advance of any recording. The approved accommodation plan must indicate the means by which the recording will be accomplished and any other details pertaining to the recording or its use.
Well, for starters, how are you going to monitor that, given students carry about 97 digital devices on them at any point in time? I guess if I’m in my computer lab at UWO with 20-some kids, maybe I might notice a kid’s phone set to record, but most likely not. In a UNC pit class, though? Not a chance in hell.
Add that to the lack of a specific “or else what” in this policy and I’m thinking this thing is going to be relatively toothless when it comes to enforcement. I’m not an expert on university policy or UNC’s policies in particular, but I don’t see a “If you do X, you will suffer Y” in this document. The document also doesn’t say, “See POLICY X for punishments” so I’m left to wonder if the kids will record anyway depending on how strict the policy and problematic the punishment.
Martyrs to the cause:Most of the kerfuffle I’ve seen in relation to classroom recordings getting out into the world is related to students trying to “expose” professorial bias. We’ve covered a few of these here, and there are dozens more cases elsewhere in which a student records a professor doing or saying something that upsets a large group of the perpetually offended. Once that match of outrage hits the kerosene of social media, the professor’s goose is cooked.
With that in mind (and the previous point in mind as well), I somehow doubt this kind of thing will stop. Even more, I imagine that a kid who “exposes” a professor via an illicit recording at UNC will now be hailed as a martyr to the cause if any punishment befalls that kid.
(“Let’s all remember the brave sacrifice of Jimmy, who recorded Professor Jones misgendering a piece of wicker in Underwater Basketweaving 385. That ‘stern talking to’ he got from the dean will haunt him always…”)
We have a world in which social media rules, “gotcha fame” is aspirational and people are way too full of themselves around the academic world. Recordings are going to happen.
To Chill or Not To Chill: I’ve studied the concept of the Willingness to Self-Censor for a number of years and found that many people have an innate sense of how willing they are to speak out or shut up when faced with controversy. Certain topics tend to spark this more in all people, but many topics spark it in specific people. In short, there are a lot of reasons why people will hold their tongues and it’s not always because they don’t have something to say.
Conversely, I’ve dealt with academics all my adult life and I found that many of them apparently have some sort of condition that makes them think everyone should hear what they have to say about everything, regardless of the circumstances.
Michael Palm, president of UNC’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors and associate professor in the UNC Department of Communication, said faculty members are aware they may be monitored by the University or even outside groups.
“My sense is that most faculty, at this point, just assume they’re being watched,” Palm said.
<SNIP>
“I think it is unquestionable that there has been a chilling effect on campus and that many more faculty now than at any other time that I’ve been a faculty member — and I’ve been at UNC for 18 years — are self-censoring out of fear for what might happen if the wrong people disapprove of the content in their classes,” Palm said.
If I’m being honest, there are days I have a “come at me, bro” vibe going on when it comes to my classroom. If you think I’ve said something stupid, childish, offensive or whatever… well… take a number, I guess. Then there are other days where, if I think about all the potential ways something like this could screw me, you couldn’t pull a needle out of my keester with a tow truck.
What I foresee here is that the students are going to lose a lot, thanks to this policy. The professors who really SHOULD be curbed a bit in regard to their histrionics and side-rambles will be the ones thinking, “Well, that’s for other people…” The folks who are more like academic prairie dogs, popping their little heads out of their holes juuuuuusssst enough to see if the coast is clear, will stay under ground for fear of getting whacked.
The opening of the story about “your children” and “your” experience watching one of them die from the measles.
DISCUSSION STARTER: This is a good opportunity to have students read the story, “This is How a Child Dies of Measles,” before digging into this post to see how they feel about the approach, particularly if they are unaware of the truth of the story.
(The story is behind a paywall, so you might need to get creative to gain full access to it. Some school libraries have it on file, while some of you might have your own subscription. Maybe it’s even worth it to pay the $1 for six months thing and then cancel after the class. Just a head’s up in case you hadn’t planned for this.)
We did this a couple times over the years in my features classes, where they read the standard “almost journalism” stories of “Hack Heaven,” “Jimmy’s World” and “A Rape on Campus.”
Once they read through it and you make the reveal, a discussion about their thoughts, their concerns and maybe their willingness to do or not do something like this could be good. Then, if they want to pick through the blog post and argue with me, that could be fun, too.
When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story.
THE BACKGROUND: The story is written in second person and provides excruciatingly detailed information about everything from the way in which the illness can be passed among children, to the scene-setting elements of propping a kid up on a couch to watch “Bluey.”
Each paragraph provides the reader with a more and more desperate sense of inevitability in terms of “your” children suffering from to something we thought we had eradicated.
Given your son’s fever, runny nose, and evident discomfort, you feel a grim sense of resignation when his measles test comes back positive. You are, however, alarmed when you discover there’s nothing his doctors can do about it. Had he been seen by a doctor within 72 hours of his first exposure, they could have given him a prophylactic dose of the MMR vaccine to protect him from infection. But it’s too late for that now.
(SIDE NOTE: Few writing approaches are more jarring and risky than the use of second person. That’s true when it comes to simple things like, “UWO is hosting a blood drive and you should donate,” but even more so with big, complicated stories.
I love Jay McInerney’s work from soup to nuts, but his novel “Bright Lights, Big City” is a massively painful read for me because “you” are the main character and “you” are doing stuff that, quite frankly, I can’t really imagine “me” doing, not the least of which is referring to a woman as “the sexual equivalent of fast food.”)
The finality of the piece is like one of those “Friday the 13th” movies: Just when you think this is all over, the terrifying specter rises again to finish off its victim:
For roughly eight years, you will believe that your family made it through this crisis without suffering a tragedy…
As the neurologist examines the results, she will note the presence of Radermecker complexes: periodic spikes in electrical activity that correlate with the muscle spasms that have become disruptive. She will order a test of his cerebrospinal fluid to confirm what she suspects: The measles never really left your son. Instead, the virus mutated and spread through the synapses between his brain cells, steadily damaging brain tissue long after he seemed to recover.
You will be sitting down in an exam room when the neurologist delivers the diagnosis of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare measles complication that leads to irreversible degeneration of the brain. There are treatments but no cure, the neurologist will tell you. She tells you that your son will continue to lose brain function as time passes, resulting in seizures, severe dementia, and, in a matter of two or three years, death.
After all that, you get kind of a semi-disclaimer that doesn’t exactly disabuse of you of the notion that this is real:
This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.
THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS: In a Q and A with the folks from the Nieman Lab, Bruenig walks through her approach to the topic and her decisions that led to the piece. She then makes kind of a sweeping statement about the greater good she feels she is doing with this fact-based fiction:
Owen: Where do you expect this piece to be shared and who do you expect to read it? Do you think people who choose not to vaccinate their kids will read it, and if so, how will they come across it? Have you heard any reactions from readers so far?
Bruenig: I have heard from several readers, one of whom had a heartbreaking experience with measles involving a family friend who died of the virus. People have been generally very encouraging! I have no doubt that there are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with the story or reject its premises, and they are entitled to their interpretations. I get it.
But my job is to report the truth about the world — and I use all kinds of literary, and narrative devices to do that. I do it because telling the truth is important in its own right, whether or not anyone finds it persuasive.
A FEW OF THE 932 REASONS THIS APPROACH WAS A BAD IDEA: First, let me say, I’m a huge fan of vaccines. Got all of mine, my kid got all of hers, my wife is a nurse who gets shot up like a dart board every year… This isn’t about the ethics or efficacy of vaccines, but rather the ethics and efficacy of this kind of journalism.
First Problem – Deception: Journalism is about fact-based reporting, which this piece has, but it’s also about providing information to the audience in an honest and trustworthy fashion. When we deceive the public, even if it’s for a good cause, we destroy the credibility we need to survive.
Bruenig says she’s reporting “the truth about the world,” which to me sounds both self-aggrandizing and disingenuous. She did rely on the facts as they related to the illness and she did draw from experts to understand how the illness works. However, and it bears repeating, WHAT SHE WROTE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HAPPEN TO A KID IN THIS WAY.
This reminds me of when politicians would tell stories about “regular folk” who brought up dire concerns or who were traumatized by something specific. When journalists couldn’t find that “regular Joe Farmer” who lost everything thanks to a terrible government plan or that “regular Jane Business Owner” who had to give up her life savings to keep her staff paid, the politicians would always backtrack it and say it was an “amalgamation” of the stories they’d heard over the years.
In other words, they were lying, but hey… it’s the bigger picture that counts!
Then there’s this weird thing Chuck Schumer did, creating a fictional family based on the types of people he felt he represented:
I mean, yes, those kinds of people exist, and yes, those kinds of concerns are real, but again, you can’t just Frankenstein a bunch of pieces of people together and call it good.
Also, the supposed “disclaimer” doesn’t come right out and say, “This didn’t happen to one kid, but rather is a collection of all of the terrible stuff that can happen to an unvaccinated kid.” It’s almost like the author is trying to avoid accusations of writing fiction while doing as little as possible to make it clear that this literally did not happen.
When we are deceptive, we end up doing more harm than good. As I made the point in an earlier post, when my students read stories like “Jimmy’s World” and “A Rape on Campus,” they were angry, hurt, scared and otherwise emotionally wrought. When it came to light that Jimmy didn’t happen and that the attack on Jackie did not happen, they were really, really ticked off. They also felt less likely to trust the pieces they would read in the future.
As much as I prefer “non-denominational skepticism,” I definitely don’t want to prod it along with some borderline fraud.
Second Problem – Hyperbole:This comes back to the whole amalgamation of potential impacts issue, and how piling it all on to this one hypothetical kid is really overkill.
A number of the things she lists as symptoms of measles happen in many cases, ranging from the spots and fever to the cough and pain. However, when we get to the areas of pneumonia, we’re down to about 6 percent of all cases that end up here. Even more, the degenerative brain disorder that flares up years later happens to about 1 in 1,000 measles victims. In justifying the conclusion where “this is how your kid eventually dies,” Bruenig said:
I wanted to highlight this complication specifically because I sense that there’s widespread belief among anti-vax parents that since most healthy children will survive a measles infection, there are no important long-term consequences. But that’s simply not the case. Measles can seriously damage the body, and in rare and tragic cases, can result in death many years after the symptoms pass.
OK, but that’s a massive outlier for this disease and, again, that’s on top of the 83 other things that could or couldn’t happen that you saddled “your child” with in this story.
It would be like me stating, “I laid in the hospital, facing the grim specter of death. As the pain shot from my gallbladder, time ticked away in the day, each moment a chance I might die. Surgery, hours away, I pondered what would happen when my light was extinguished by an organ I’d long forgotten I had.”
Well, yes, I was in the hospital and yes, that gallbladder hurt like hellfire. And yes, if a person’s gallbladder ruptures, there is a chance the person goes septic and dies. However, that’s somewhere between 2 and 11 percent of all cases. I could make the argument that it was for the larger good that I painted this hyperbolic picture, hoping people will take gallbladder attacks seriously. However, I think most people would just say I was being a drama queen.
Third Problem – Laziness:I wholeheartedly believe in telling stories in journalism for the greater good of society. I also know there are an unfortunate number of children who have died after contracting measles. Telling a story about these deaths might inspire people to vaccinate, to change their minds about the severity of the illness or otherwise impact a broader discussion on the topic.
So, don’t be lazy. Go find an ACTUAL story of a measles death that happened to a REAL kid and tell that story.
Here’s one that even involves that rare illness that killed Bruenig’s hypothetical child:
That’s not to say you need to tell the story in this kind of staid news format. You can do more of the narrative work, using the parental recall, photos, medical records and expert interviews to paint a more vivid picture.
Strong interviews with the parents of a child can give you that emotional angst of anxiety, fear and despair. Spending time looking at photos can give you the “favorite blanket” and “watching Bluey” details that paint a picture in the readers’ minds. The experts can walk you through the files so you can describe in detail how each cough wracked the child with pain or how the fever created a mix of burning and chills that couldn’t be sated.
This takes a ton of work. You have to find a case where a kid died, you have to find parents willing to talk, you have to find experts who understand what happened to the kid and you have to spend time gathering granular-level elements through observation. Doing this also puts the reporter at risk of some significant emotional trauma, as they relive the death of a child in such a gut-wrenching way.
So, I can kind of see how it’s more appealing to just go to a handful of experts who can give you the clinical stuff and then just whip together a “Hypothetical ‘You’ Mom” character to tug at the emotional heartstrings of the readers, without fully acknowledging that’s what you did.
However, if you want the reward of the tough story, you really have to take the risks associated with the tough story. Doing it this way only codifies the certainty of people who don’t already believe you and undercuts your standing with people who do.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote disgraced political reporter Olivia Nuzzi an outrageously raunchy “poem,” which was dramatically revealed by her ex-fiancé and reporter Ryan Lizza in the second part of his series exposing the secrets of his ethics-challenged ex.
“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, wrote to Nuzzi in undated texts recounted by Lizza in a piece published on his Substack early Saturday.
The poem was included in Lizza’s second part of his series about the affair between his former fiancee and the current Health and Human Services secretary. The post titled “Part 2: She did it again” is available on Lizza’s Substack.
I’m not linking to it here for three specific reasons:
The piece is behind a paywall and I can’t in good conscience promote this as journalism or something worth spending $10 on. I would rather set fire to a ten dollar bill than pay for whatever the hell is back there.
The teaser paragraphs alone introduced enough “explicit content” that would have my editors at Sage literally having aneurysms.
My mother reads this blog and I don’t know what would be worse if she clicked that link: Having her asking me what certain sexual terms Lizza uses mean or having her tell tell me she completely understood everything and didn’t need a translator.
Either way, it’d feel like this:
THE BACKGROUND: Oh, hell, where to begin?
Nuzzi was booted from her job with New York magazine after her “inappropriate relationship” with RFK Jr. came to light. Nuzzi had written a glowing profile of the Kennedy offspring, while also finding herself infatuated with him to the point of having a long-distance-messaging-with-sexy-photos-but-we-pinky-swear-we-didn’t-bang relationship.
Both mercifully dropped off the map until this month, when Nuzzi’s “American Canto” book hit the shelves, leading to a “little girl lost” style profile on her by the NY Times. In response to some of the stuff in the book, Lizza took to his Substack to publish a response titled, “Part 1: How I found out.” In that post, he pulled a “Sixth Sense” twist at the end to reveal his whole “I can’t believe she’s cheating on me” build up wasn’t about RFK, but instead about former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
Meanwhile, Nuzzi is now working for Vanity Fair, and media folks are a-flutter discussing this situation.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: It’s too easy to crap all over Nuzzi, Lizza and everyone else involved in this situation. Right now, this feels like staring at a multiple-vehicle car wreck on the interstate. Instead of taking the easy path, consider the following difficult advice:
BASIC ADVICE TO FELLOW EDUCATORS AND MEDIA PROS: We need to be honest with ourselves, the public and our students, even though it really sucks.
Whenever a situation like Nuzzi-gate (as we’re apparently calling it now) pops up, a common refrain that emerges is, “Female journalists don’t sleep with sources.” I know a number of professors, former journalists and current journalists who hate it when this kind of thing happens, because it reinforces thread-bare stereotypes about women and it debases the work quality female journalists have done.
Here’s the problem: Lousy examples exist in almost every field and they create misery for the rest of the folks in that field. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s the reality of our surroundings.
Trust me, every time some jagwad professor decides to treat his undergraduates like a sexual charcuterie board, I want to die inside a little. I hate that I find myself second-guessing every interaction I have with students for at least two weeks, wondering if they think I might be “one of those.”
That said, I can’t tell students, “Professors don’t sleep with students,” because despite the ever-present blank stares they give me in class, I know they aren’t completely unaware of reality. I’ve even overheard students I know talking among themselves about skeezy professors hitting on them or their friends.
I also can’t just say, “Well, I don’t do that…” because that’s just really creepy to make them think that I’m thinking that I have to tell them that and too damned specific to make anyone feel better about it. It’s usually why I just shake my head and say, “What the hell is wrong with people?”
In regard to journalism, I’ve met multiple former and current journalists who “engaged in inappropriate sexual relationships” with people they cover. In one case, a local reporter who also worked at a local university was accused of sleeping with someone she had profiled. A friend told me that his wife worked with her years earlier, so I asked what she recalled about the reporter. The response: “Tell Vince she was a whore who occasionally wrote stuff.”
Another friend who worked with this journalist in another newsroom told me the majority of the staff knew about multiple similar indiscretions, so they referred to her by a nickname that merged part of her last name with the word “rabbit.”
In another case, one guy confessed to me that as a student journalist he “accidentally” slept with a student athlete while he was a sports reporter and editor at the student newspaper. The following is my recollection of the conversation:
Him: “Um…” Blank stare. “This is not good, right?”
Me: “Well, I wouldn’t add it to my resume… I don’t get how you “accidentally” slept with her. Did you trip and fall on something?”
Him: “No, I mean I didn’t know she was on the team until just before we… you know…”
Me: “I’ve got so many questions, not the least of which would be, ‘How did her athletic affiliation come up at that exact moment?’ ‘How little did you know about her before you decided to sleep with her that this nugget of information didn’t come up?’ and ‘Did you maybe think about not doing this when you became aware of this situation?'”
It went downhill from there…
I don’t think I’m that special that I knew at least a handful of people who had violated this basic tenet of journalism, so I imagine more than a few other folks reading this have a “Hooo boy…. not good…” story of this nature.
We need to stop pretending that this kind of thing doesn’t happen and be more on point about what we want to say here:
Most journalists do not sleep with sources period, let alone to gain special access for stories. A small number of journalists are bad actors, but to paint all journalists with a wide brush because of them is unfair to those who aren’t.
None of us who don’t violate the rules are thrilled by the people who do, particularly when their actions reinforce negative stereotypes against people who have already had to work harder than they should to make it in the field.
Those of us who take this job seriously are not going to pretend that those people don’t exist, but we are going to make damned sure you know we aren’t like them.
I’m sure there’s a better way to say this, but at least we’re being honest and letting people we aren’t thrilled by this, either.
BASIC ADVICE FOR STUDENT JOURNALISTS: I can’t stress this enough, but for every situation like this, where it seems like the world turns out great by flouting the rules, there are dozens more that are just god-awful disasterbacles that never get a book deal.
Colby Hall of Media-ite made the case that Nuzzi, his DM buddy, really just learned how to play the game based on the way the system has shifted, so we can’t really hold it against her:
The glamorous photo shoots, the Lana Del Rey cosplay with the white Mustang convertible on PCH, the literary ambiguity about Kennedy’s identity in her book, the defiant framing that positions her as a victim bearing witness to power.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: This isn’t tone-deaf. It’s the only move that makes economic sense in 2025.
Nuzzi has correctly read our current media ecosystem. There is no path back to institutional credibility for her—those institutions are dying anyway, and they were never going to reward rule-following in the first place. But there IS a path forward through celebrity, through controversy, through the monetization of scandal itself.
The Vanity Fair job. The book deal. The rehabilitation tour that’s a Klieg light away from what it really wants to be. She’s not trying to rebuild her reputation as a journalist—she’s building a different kind of brand entirely, one where being interesting matters more than being ethical, where attention is the only currency that still spends.
As much as it might seem like a great idea to be that rule-breaking, cool-as-hell rebel in the moment, these things don’t end well. As someone who has watched almost every VH1’s “Behind the Music” episode, I can pretty much guarantee short-term career thinking leads to some long-term misery. And unlike video games, you can’t just hit the reset button once things start going bad.
Follow the rules, behave better than the attention-seeking toddler at the grocery store and do the job to the best of your ability. You might not become famous, but that’s likely to be a good thing.
BASIC ADVICE TO PROFESSIONAL MEDIA OUTLETS: Watching Vanity Fair hire Nuzzi is like watching pro sports teams picking up troubled players who have talent, arguing that, in their system, the player will thrive. What they fail to realize is that even if the talent is in there somewhere, the human foibles are going to massively undercut it and you’re essentially just buying trouble.
With that in mind, I’m begging you. Stop buying trouble.
First, the juice is rarely ever worth the squeeze. Everyone is out there thinking they are buying the next Hunter S. Thompson. Instead, they’re buying the next Ruth S. Barrett. Hiring people like this has the same internal logic of cashing in your 401K and using it to buy lottery tickets to secure your retirement.
Second, you’ll make my job a lot easier as a professor because I won’t have explain to students that to get their dream job, they should work hard, play by the rules, and then pray they don’t lose out to someone who banged a source and now has 2.3 million followers on Instagram.
I’m having a hard enough time getting them avoid bias in their writing, abide by grammar rules and attribute the hell out of things, what with all the god-awful crap that’s passing journalism these days. I don’t want to have this conversation:
ME: You can’t write a profile story about your best friend. It’s not ethically sound.
STUDENT: So, why can (REPORTER X) sleep with a profile subject and land a job with a six-figure salary?
ME: Go read your AP style book.
Third, you need to understand the “Cockroach Theory of Terrible Behavior.” When you see one cockroach in a house, rest assured it’s not the only one around, like he’s on vacation or something. For every one you see, there are several more just waiting to show up.
I remember being at my college newspaper during an editor election, where one candidate was trying to justify some bad behavior, explaining, “Oh, that was an isolated incident.” Once we retired to debate his candidacy, the one guy piped up with, “I counted 10 or 11 ‘isolated incidents.’ How many does it take to make a trend?”
Vanity Fair is already playing defense on the hiring, as they were “take by surprise” at Lizza’s accusations about Nuzzi’s nuzzling with Sanford. The magazine is “looking at all the facts” in this situation as it decides how the hell it’s going to get out of this situation before another cockroach comes crawling out of the corner.
If you want to see the best of journalism, hire good quality people. Promote and showcase them as what’s worth doing in the field. Let us in the classroom highlight the good work done in the right circumstances.
None of this will stop another Nuzzi situation, but at least you can help us point to this as a cautionary tale and not a smooth career move.
