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F E AT U R E S C O L U M N S

B&A
14
1 4 The Musk Brand of 7 Class Notes B O O K S the
Media Dominance What the new biopic A R T S

S i v a Va i d h y a n a t h a n on Bayard Rustin
The attention-starved CEO’s global leaves out. 50 More Than a
Internet power grab. ADOLPH REED JR.
Natural Function
1 9 The Big Unfriendly Tech Giants 8 The Front Burner The politics of birth.
Z e p h y r Te a c h o u t Anti-Black policing is MOIRA DONEGAN
How they choose media winners and losers. deadly for Black women
2 2 The Algorithm Oligarchy and girls as well as men.
K A L I H O L L O W AY
Colleen Tighe
EDITORIAL
The rise of monopoly platforms. 4
Squeeze Play 42
2 6 And Then There Were Two D.D. GUTTENPLAN
61
Thomas Schatz
Once upon a time, six companies controlled 5 COMMENT 56 Bookworms and
the media. That was the good old days.
Biden’s Failed Fieldworkers
Bear Hug How did Marxism
3 0 The Media, Disability, and Me Appeasing Netanyahu become Marxism?
Vilissa Thompson has been a disaster. PETER E. GORDON
A shrinking industry has made being a JEET HEER
disabled writer harder than ever. 61 What About
11 Subject to Debate Black Life?
3 2 One Big Cookout These causes need— The art of everyday
Gene Seymour and deserve—your Black experience.
From the “Negro press” to Black Twitter. assistance. OMARI WEEKES
3 6 Anti-Monopoly Power K AT H A P O L L I T T
Bryce Covert
12 Deadline Poet
Lina Khan and the FTC’s turnaround.
The Death of Henry
4 2 Build Back Better Kissinger
John Nichols 22 C A LV I N T R I L L I N
We must revive local news. Here’s how.

“
TOP: JEENAH MOON / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

4 6 Start the Presses! Starlink’s stranglehold on the 14

56
Kelsey McKinney and global Internet gives Elon Musk a
Aleksander Chan Cover illustration:

VOLUME
Leaving the corporate shackles behind. market desperate for what he offers.
” BRIAN STAUFFER

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 E D I T O R I A L / D . D . G U T T E N P L A N FOR T H E N AT I O N

Squeeze Play
n 1960, when THE NEW YORKER’s press critic a.j. liebling famously observed
that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” New
Yorkers had seven daily newspapers to choose from. And that was just in
English. The city also boasted dailies in Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Japanese,
Russian, and Spanish—and two in Yiddish. By the time The Nation first
surveyed the publishing industry in 1996, New York was down to four
English-language dailies and seven publishing houses. Our anatomy that year of what we
dubbed “the national entertainment state” focused on the four
corporations that, between them, controlled what Americans and Facebook), and content—also explains why
saw on television. Thanks to the rise of the Internet, when we the underlying corporate structures have become
revisited the topic in 2002, our chart of the “Big Ten” media so big that we’ve had to give up trying to capture
companies spanned four pages. Yet when we returned four years everything in one neat graphic.
later, the roster had shrunk to six: Disney (which owned ABC), Instead, in the pages that follow, we of-
CBS, General Electric (NBC), News Corp (Fox), Time Warner fer a multitude of perspectives, from Zephyr
(CNN), and Viacom (MTV, Paramount, and DreamWorks). Teachout’s rogues’ gallery of “Big Unfriendly
Consolidation has only accelerated since then, with book pub- Tech Giants” to Gene Seymour’s personal his-
lishing now down to a Big Five. After Simon & Schuster found tory of the rise, decline, and enduring relevance
its sale to Penguin Random House blocked on antitrust grounds, of Black media. The brilliant graphic journalist
the private equity firm KKR snatched it up for $1.6 billion earlier Colleen Tighe offers an illustrated Internet pil-
this year. Given KKR’s overall portfolio of $86 billion, publishing grim’s progress from the utopian hopes of the
is a minuscule part of its business. And as Tom Schatz, a historian early information age to the brutal exigencies of
of Hollywood’s Golden Age, reports in this issue, the fabled Big the attention economy, while Vilissa Thompson
Six movie studios have been whittled down to two: Disney (with laments the toll our incredible shrinking indus-
a market capitalization of $169 billion) and try has taken on efforts to
Netflix ($198 billion) now dominate film increase diversity and to in-
and TV production. But, Schatz explains, clude marginalized voices.
thanks to the rise of cord-cutting and the Corporate behemoths And this wouldn’t be a
continuing decline of both film studios and have the muscle to Nation special issue with-
cable, those two—along with competitors influence not just what out some common-sense
like Comcast and Sony—find themselves gets made but even radical solutions. Starting
fighting over a shrinking portion of a media at the grass roots, Kelsey
landscape dominated by Apple ($2.9 trillion) whether it gets reviewed. McKinney of Defector
and Amazon ($1.5 trillion). Now that these Media and Aleksander
behemoths have the corporate muscle to influence not just what Chan of Discourse Blog offer founders’-eye-
gets made but also how it gets distributed and marketed, and— view advice on how to start your own media
given Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post—even how company. John Nichols, who has a fair claim
(or whether) it gets reviewed, we felt that a return to the scene of to being Liebling’s successor in covering the
the crime was long overdue. carnage of local newspapers—and who notes
Because this time the big squeeze on independent voices isn’t in these pages that the term “news desert” now
just a result of corporate mergers involving the means of produc- applies to some of our biggest cities—outlines
tion. Elon Musk may be widely known—and justly reviled—for an ambitious Marshall Plan for journalistic
what he’s done to Twitter. However, as Siva Vaidhyanathan reports, renewal. Not to mention Bryce Covert’s com-
the reason Musk really matters is that, thanks to the satellite In- pelling close-up portrait of FTC chair Lina
ternet company Starlink—a side project of his aerospace company Khan—a woman with the power to actually do
SpaceX—he controls the digital access of a substantial portion of something to break up media monopolies. But
4 Earth’s inhabitants. Vaidhyanathan’s three-tiered analysis of the then we think of this entire special issue of The
current media landscape—infrastructure, applications (like Google Nation as a call to action. N
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

C O M M E N T / J E E T H E E R But this rhetorical emphasis on civilian life

amounts to little in practice, because on a policy

End the Bear Hug level the Biden administration refuses to put any
conditions on aid to Israel. There is absolutely no
incentive for Netanyahu’s government to heed the
President Biden’s strategy of holding Netanyahu close as a way
pleadings of Austin, Blinken, or even Vice Pres-
to try to contain Israel’s wrath has been a disaster. ident Kamala Harris, who has spoken in similar
terms. On December 2, Harris said, “Too many
he so-called humanitarian pause between
innocent Palestinians have been killed. As Israel
Israel and Hamas, which was always fragile, is pursues its military objectives in Gaza, we believe
now over. Even during the brief break, Israel Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.”
continued to kill Palestinian civilians, albeit The true nature of the Biden administration’s
in smaller numbers than before the hostage approach to Israel was caught in the subhead of a
exchange with Hamas started. On December 1, the Israeli Wall Street Journal article: “After sending massive
government cited a Hamas rocket attack as one of the reasons bombs, artillery shells, U.S. also urges Israel to
for ending the pause. As of this writing, more than 700 civilians have limit civilian casualties.” This is Biden’s bear-
been killed since Israel resumed its bombardment, adding to a death toll hug strategy in its essence: Send bigger bombs,
of more than 15,000—the vast majority of whom have been civilians. leavened with humanitarian platitudes.
The high civilian death rate brings to the fore the fundamental The bear-hug strategy has failed in the most di-
policy contradiction that has bedeviled the Biden administration rect way possible. Far from being restrained, Israel
since the start of the conflict: how to reconcile its stated desire to is fighting one of the most ferociously murderous
minimize civilian deaths with the full-throttle support of Israel that wars of the 21st century. It’s a war that, as Austin
the administration is committed to in practice. notes, makes little strategic sense. And far from
Speaking on December 2 at the Reagan Foundation’s annual defeating Hamas, it will radicalize a new genera-
National Defense Forum, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin added tion of Palestinians. In apparent acknowledgment
to the chorus of public rebukes the Biden administration has recently of this reality, Netanyahu is now shopping around
begun making of Israel’s treatment of civilians in the current conflict. a proposal to “thin out” Gaza’s population and
“I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and expel the surviving residents into neighboring
to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the countries—a proposal that he is pitching to the
West Bank,” Austin told the audience. leaders of both parties in Congress.
As befits his position as the cabinet official overseeing the Pen- This policy, amounting to a second Nakba,
tagon, Austin’s criticism of Israel focused not just on its violation of would not only be a moral atrocity; it would
international law through its indiscriminate killing of civilians, but destroy the reputation of Israel and the United
also on the fundamental incoherence of its military strategy. “In this States around the world for decades to come. The
kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And consequences, in terms of future terrorism and also
if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical the loss of international credibility and fraying of
victory with a strategic defeat,” he noted. alliances, would be incalculable.
Austin’s caution is sober and compelling, but it ignores the fact that Politically, Biden is also undermining his
Israel’s incoherent policy is paralleled by the Biden administration’s own chances for reelection. Public support for
equally incoherent handling of Israel. Since the Hamas massacre of Israel continues to sink, particularly among key
October 7, Joe Biden has followed what has been called a “bear hug” demographics that make up the Democratic coa-
strategy of holding tight to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lition: the young, people of color, and women. If
as a way to contain and channel Israel’s response. As Stephen Wertheim, these voters remain demoralized a year from now,
a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie En- Biden’s chances for a second term are bleak.
dowment for International Peace, sums up the strategy: “Bear-hugging The only way for Biden to stop this catastrophe
America’s ally, [Biden] apparently figured, was the surest way to restrain is to reject the bear-hug strategy and openly set
it—or the only way he was willing to try.” forth the consequences to Netanyahu of pursuing
In recent days, that bear hug has been accompanied by louder ethnic cleansing. Such consequences would include
public criticism of Israel’s disregard for civilian life—sharp words that cutting off US military aid and diplomatic protec-
previously had been uttered only in private. At a press conference in tion in the United Nations. Unless Biden does this,
Tel Aviv just hours before Israel broke the humanitarian pause, US there will be no change in Israel’s actions.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that, during a meeting with The Biden administration is now becoming more
Netanyahu, “I underscored the imperative of the United States that vocal in criticizing Israel. That’s a welcome
the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale that we
saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south.” own failed strategy. N
5
shift. But it also needs to start criticizing its
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  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

as a demand for jobs and then broadened it to accom-

Class Notes modate the Southern movement’s concern with Jim

Crow. But the economic motive remained at the fore

Adolph Reed Jr. of the planning, Dargis notes, quoting Rustin him-
self: “The dynamic that has motivated Negroes to
withstand with courage and dignity the intimidation
and violence they have endured in their own struggle
against racism may now be the catalyst which mo-
bilizes all workers behind demands for a broad and
Hollywood Ending fundamental program for economic justice.”
Ending the film at the march sidesteps Randolph
The new biopic about Bayard Rustin stops at the March and Rustin’s prime commitment to full employ-
ment and a social wage policy, which three years
on Washington. What is it leaving out?
later they crafted and agitated for in the Freedom
hen i learned that barack and michelle Budget for All Americans. Some of Rustin’s most
significant political interventions occurred after the
Obama had announced a biopic on the socialist march, in particular his Commentary essays of 1965
organizer Bayard Rustin through their produc- (“From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil
tion company Higher Ground, I shuddered a bit. Rights Movement”) and 1966 (“‘Black Power’ and
Rustin was committed to a vision of egalitarian Coalition Politics”). The first argued that, with
social transformation and sought to alter the terms of polit- the legislative victories of the mid-’60s, the Black
ical debate toward that end; Barack Obama is not and never movement had crossed a threshold that called for
has been. After the movie’s release, the reports were no more promising. collaboration with labor and liberals to advance a
“It’s far worse than even you could imagine,” a friend told me, while broadly social-democratic agenda. In the second,
another bemoaned its “malicious presentism.” Yet another friend, who contrasting the Black Power sensibility to the Free-
was a politically active adult through the period the film covers, said, dom Budget, Rustin noted that “advocates of ‘black
“The trailer was enough for me, and I couldn’t get through that.” But power’ have no such programs in mind; what they
in the interest of service to my readers, I subjected myself to the whole are in fact arguing for (perhaps unconsciously) is
thing. After it ended, I had to put on The Battle of Algiers as a purgative. the creation of a new black establishment.” It might hit
Rustin opens during the high period of activism in the Southern too close to home for the Obama vehicle to reflect
civil rights movement, with a montage of staged reconstructions of on that assessment nearly 60 years down the road.
what the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis aptly describes as “sto- Those elisions reflect the film’s “malicious pre-
ic protesters surrounded by screaming racists.” This historical kitsch sentism” in its desire to create an exalted Rustin more
goes so far as to include a live-action version of Norman Rockwell’s amenable to contemporary neoliberal sensibilities.
painting of Ruby Bridges, surrounded by US marshals, walking to This line of criticism is certainly the tack readers
school in 1960. What follows, Dargis observes, “seeks to put its sub- would expect me to take. There never was any rea-
ject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which son to believe that a production with the Obamas’
he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he nihil obstat would come within a zip code of Rustin’s
challenged both convention and the law.” That’s the film in a nutshell. own working-class-based, social-democratic politics.
Rustin’s politics and his role in the crucial debates over ways forward But the movie’s problems run deeper, baked into
from the legislative victories of 1964 and ’65 don’t come up in this its Oscar-bait formula. Standard-issue Hollywood
story, which conveniently ends with the 1963 March on Washington. biopics perpetually fail to capture how movements
In its effort to establish Rustin’s importance, the film falsely attri- are reproduced as mass projects, from the bottom up
butes to him the principal responsibility for proposing and executing and top down, in a constantly improvised trajectory
the march, which actually originated with A. Philip Randolph and was plotted in response to and in anticipation of layers
largely organized by his Negro American Labor of internal and external pres-
Council. It also downplays the role of the labor sures. But that’s not their point.
movement in organizing the march, treating the Rustin isn’t interested in illu-
unions offhandedly as obstructionist and instead Ending the film at minating the intricacies of the
attributing their initiative to smart, energetic the march sidesteps civil rights movement; it wants
young people. Yet two months before the march, Randolph and Rustin’s us to recognize his place in a
the United Auto Workers were central in organiz- prime commitment to pantheon of Black American
ing a 125,000-strong Detroit Walk to Freedom, Greats. Toward that
full employment and a
JOE CIARDIELLO

essentially a trial run for the later event. Randolph

and Rustin originally conceived the march’s focus social wage policy.
end, it keeps telling
us—over and over—
7
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

how close Rustin was personally to Martin

The
Luther King Jr., as though propinquity to
Universally Recognized Greatness cements
his place in the pantheon.
Front Burner
Rustin was a brilliant organizer and
strategist, not least because he was moti-
Kali Holloway
vated by a practical utopian vision of the
society he wanted to realize. That vision,
and his recognition of the path toward it,
helped him to parse in a distinctively clear
way the tensions and contradictions within
Invisible Victims
the movement, particularly as it faced ma- Anti-Black policing is also deadly for Black women and
jor crossroads in the mid-1960s. Rustin was girls—a reality that is far too often ignored or dismissed.
probably not, as the movie has Randolph
say to Roy Wilkins when discussing the
imberlé crenshaw coined the term “intersec-
march, the “one person who can orga-
nize an event of this
tionality” in 1989 to describe how intertwined anti-
scale.” He was in- Blackness and misogyny consign Black women to
strumental in orga- the social, political, and economic margins, often
Rustin’s nizing it, though, as erasing their existence altogether. When Crenshaw
vision well as in other im- was marching against deadly anti-Black policing more than two
helped him portant initiatives in decades later, in 2014—as she recounts in her most recent book,
to parse the the period. He was
also the consummate
#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence—
she witnessed how racial patriarchy renders even Black women’s deaths
tensions and staff person, who un- invisible. Along with the chanted names of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and
contradictions derstood his role as Mike Brown, Crenshaw shouted the lesser-known names of Black women
within the executing collective- killed by police or in police custody—women like Tanisha Anderson,
ly defined objectives. Shelly Frey, and Ahjah Dixon. “Several people were enraged,” Crenshaw
movement. That’s typically not told me. “There was the sense that we were being interlopers.”
the kind of role that In response, Crenshaw launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2014,
leads to an assignment in the pantheon of seeking to honor and recognize Black women, girls, and femmes whose
larger-than-life greats. Unfortunately, in lives have been stolen by racist policing and to protest their state-backed
the hegemony of a culture that looks for killings. The need for the campaign, which includes the #SayHerName
The One—from John Galt to Neo to Mar- Mothers Network of surviving sisters, mothers, and other loved ones,
tin Luther King Jr. to DeRay McKesson— reflects the failure of the anti-racist and feminist movements “to grasp that
an appreciation of Bayard Rustin requires Black women, like Black men, are subjects of anti-Black state violence,”
attempting to shoehorn him into the Justice Crenshaw writes. #SayHerName documents how even at the 2017 Wom-
League, not grappling with him as an agent en’s March on Washington, which rightly included as speakers the mothers
within the history he lived. N of sons killed by anti-Black police violence, the murders of Black women

FROM TOP: ANDY FRIEDMAN; JIM WATSON / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; LEV RADIN / GETTY IMAGES
all too often remained an afterthought.
“They ignored our daughters and they pushed forward the names of
MORE ONLINE the men. And this is in the middle of a Women’s March,” Gina Best, whose
Th e N a t i on . com/hig h l ig h ts
daughter India Kager was killed by police, said in a 2020 interview on Cren-
i It’s Time for shaw’s podcast, Intersectionality Matters. “We didn’t even get an invitation.”
the Series Finale “We had been fighting all day to get to that stage to hear our babies’
of the George names being uplifted and remembered in front of hundreds of thousands
Santos Show of people,” Vicky Coles-McAdory, the aunt of India Beatty, who was killed
FAITH BRANCH in 2016 by Virginia police, recalls in #SayHerName. “So that left us to feel
like our babies were sacrificed.”
i Why Don’t #SayHerName, written in partnership with the African American Policy
Americans Forum, the social justice think tank that Crenshaw cofounded and leads,
Believe in offers nine intimate portraits of Black women, girls, and femmes who were
Science? killed by police, each painted through the words of their loved ones. These
P HIL IP E I L 8 surviving narrators, all members of the #SayHerName Mothers Network,
have borne what Crenshaw calls “the loss of the loss”—an immense grief
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  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

compounded by the lack of attention given to obscurity the lives of Black women killed
to cases in which Black women lose their by the state.” Women such as Korryn Gaines,
lives because of police violence. Best’s daugh- The book’s whose fatal shooting by police—as she made a
ter, a violinist and visual artist, was unarmed narrators have sandwich for her 5-year-old son—was such a
when Virginia Beach police put her and her miscarriage of justice that a jury awarded the
4-month-old son in the line of fire to get their
suffered the family $38 million in a civil suit. “I’ve heard all
intended suspect, leaving her dead as collateral “loss of the kinds of evil things, mean things, said about my
damage and her son deaf in one ear. “It feels loss”—grief daughter,” Rhanda Dormeus, Gaines’s mother,
almost as if [Black men’s and boys’] murders compounded states in #SayHerName. “It’s a nightmare that we
were more important, because…their names will never wake up from. We have grandchildren
are spoken,” Best says. “I have to be sensitive
by a lack of ac- that won’t know how wonderful she was, and
to the other mothers, again cognizant of how knowledgment. family that will forever be broken because of
they feel, because that was their son. But that someone else’s split-second decision. It’s life-
was my daughter, [and] I want them to say her name too.” altering, shattering. I know all the moms feel like this…. I
Crenshaw’s book makes clear that anti-Blackness carries don’t know whether I’m coming or going sometimes, and
the same risk of violence and death for Black women as it I just gotta get a grip, because I have responsibilities.”
does for their brothers, fathers, and sons. Motherhood and In between the family testimonies, Crenshaw offers his-
womanhood, which offer white women protection, provide torical and cultural analyses of police and societal violence
no sanctuary in gender for Black women; the damsel-in- against Black women. She notes that Black women make up
distress trope is racially nontransferable. Nor does age protect one-third of all unarmed women killed by law enforcement,
the victims—police killed 93-year-old Pearlie Golden and despite being just 10 percent of women in the US. What’s
7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. The families that Crenshaw more, Black women are the only race-gender group in which
interviews tell us who these Black women, girls, and femmes the majority of its members killed by police are unarmed.
truly were, upending the dehumanizing stereotypes used Including stories of state violence against Black wom-
to justify their murders and, as Crenshaw writes, “relegate en, girls, and femmes, Crenshaw writes, is the only way to
“confront, contest, and dismantle the
interlocking systems of state power that
O P P A R T / P E T E R K U P E R continue to routinize and normalize
these killings.” In other words, feminist
and anti-racism organizing and advoca-
cy requires intersectionality, a term that
right-wingers have assailed. In Florida,
Governor Ron DeSantis has sought to
ban the term from library stacks and AP
curricula. The latter effort has apparent-
ly led the College Board to remove near-
ly every mention of the word from its AP
African American studies framework.
Crenshaw argues that it’s difficult
to imagine solutions to the systemic
problems she outlines without the con-
cept of intersectionality. “The College
Board [commented] that it’s no longer a
useful concept because it’s been so ‘polit-
icized,’” Crenshaw told me. “When the
right wing goes after intersectionality,
we understand it’s because the concept
illuminates aspects of social inequali-
ty that demand remediation—changes
they don’t think should be taken up. It’s
certainly still useful to those of us who
care deeply about understanding what
happens to those who fall in the margins.
And #SayHerName shows intersection-
ality as people experience it.” N
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

the contents to them.) It’s a big project, so please

Subject Debate to give generously. afghanwomensfund.org
5. Wisconsin Democrats. You probably know
Katha Pollitt that many state Democratic parties are barely
functional, but that’s not true in Wisconsin. In
that crucial battleground state, the Dems have
scored big wins. In April, they elected liberal Janet
Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court, tipping
the balance, and subsequently forced Republicans

Look for the Helpers to abandon attempts to impeach her on spurious

grounds as soon as she took her seat. The secret:
It’s been a turbulent year. If you can lend a hand, these relentless year-round organizing. Help them keep
it up in 2024, when Trump may be back on the
causes need—and deserve—your assistance.
presidential ballot. He won Wisconsin in 2016—
t’s hard to think about the holidays this don’t let it happen again. wisdems.org
6. Black Voters Matter. Black voters led the
year, with so many terrible things happening charge in defeating Trump in 2020, and the same
around the world. Still, Mr. Rogers’s mother told will hold true this time around. But Republican
him to look for the helpers, and she was right. state officials are making it harder for people
There are always helpers. Here’s my annual list in Black communities to access the polls. Black
of groups that are doing their best to bring help in a dark time. Voters Matter does the long-term deep grassroots
1. American Near East Refugee Aid. So many groups are asking organizing needed to register, engage, and support
for donations to alleviate the appalling humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Black voters—not just on Election Day, but every
it’s hard to know which ones are effective or even legit. I’m going with day, and in every election up and down the ticket.
a recommendation from my friend, the award-winning Gazan poet blackvotersmatterfund.org
Mosab Abu Toha. ANERA, which says it has no religious or political 7. Health in Harmony. Global heating is driv-
affiliations—a definite plus in my book—works on relief and devel- ing us toward irreversible disaster, and the world
opment in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan. Right now, it isn’t doing nearly enough about it. HIH works with
is seeking donations to support blood banks in Gaza and to provide Indigenous communities in Indonesia, Brazil, and
displaced families with nourishing meals and hygiene kits, with more Madagascar to end illegal logging, provide greatly
help to come as the needs evolve. anera.org needed healthcare, and generate sustainable ways
2. The Brigid Alliance and WRRAP. Right after Dobbs, outraged of earning a living. They do this by listening to the
pro-choicers rained gold on abortion funds, those energetic local communities themselves—their deep local knowl-
groups that help low-income women and others arrange and pay for edge, their histories, their needs and desires. It’s
their procedures. Now many donors have moved on, but you can help called “radical listening”—the opposite of the top-
fill the pot by giving to the Brigid Alliance, which helps people in down approach of so many NGOs. HIH projects
abortion-ban states travel to clinics, and the Women’s Reproductive are mostly women-led, which is also great. This is
Rights Assistance Project, which helps women all over the country. the crucial decade to stop global heating, so don’t
brigidalliance.org; wrrap.org wait—give now. healthinharmony.org
3. Secular Rescue. There are some 14 countries in which apos- 8. Canadian Harambee Education Society.
tasy or blasphemy is a capital crime, and more in which open atheists This secular-humanist volunteer project funds
risk violence and persecution from families, neighbors, and commu- school fees and support for girls in rural Kenya
nity. Secular Rescue arranges and funds their escape—to another and Tanzania who have passed the admissions test
country or a safer place in their own land. A lot of them are Afghans for high school but cannot afford to go. You can
under threat from the Taliban. You remember Afghanistan, don’t you? sponsor a girl for $40 a month, follow her prog-
secular-rescue.org ress via letters, and change her
4. Afghan Women’s Fund. I put this small life forever. You can also make
but effective group on the list every year. With a donation of any size, which
the Taliban in power, AWF’s work is harder, more Many groups will be combined with others.
dangerous, and more necessary. Now that girls are are asking for canadianharambee.ca
banned from school after the sixth grade, AWF has donations to alleviate 9. Alice’s Kids. So many
developed “school on a thumb drive,” an entire the appalling children today don’t have the
self-guided curriculum that can be accessed on a basics—decent shoes
humanitarian crisis
ANDY FRIEDMAN

computer or smartphone. (Most Afghan girls don’t

have these devices, but AWF has ways of getting in Gaza.
and clothes, a warm
coat, a backpack—let
11
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

alone fees for sports uniforms, after-school activities, and other First on your list should be The Nation, of course. If you’re reading
“extras.” Alice’s Kids works with teachers, social workers, and oth- this, you know what a valuable resource the magazine is, and how
ers to provide the things that let kids feel like they belong, in a way much we need your dollars as the price of postage and everything
that is discreet and respectful. You’d be surprised what a difference else goes up and up. But I also want to put in a word for the Texas
even a $50 to $100 donation can make in a child’s life. aliceskids.org Observer, which nearly went under some months ago but was
10. The print magazines you love. Even if you don’t read saved by a fierce GoFundMe campaign that raised over $270,000.
every article (I promise I won’t tell), keep them going by donating Now it needs to be put on a stronger footing going forward. It’s a
and sending gift subscriptions (a holiday gift that arrives through- great magazine, even for non-Texans like me, so please send them
out the year and costs less than the Cheese of the Month Club). some financial holiday cheer. thenation.com; texasobserver.org N

NATIO N N EWS / D . D . G U T T E N P L A N space relentlessly shrinking and the casualty list of extinct titles

Reimagining growing with every passing month, The Nation faces the same
imperatives as anyone else in this business.

The Nation in Print As a magazine in continuous existence since 1865, from the
invention of the telegraph to the arrival of TikTok, we have a
proud legacy of evolution and reinvention. Now is no different.
s the last few weeks have made bru- That’s why, both to survive in this industry and to give the sub-
tally clear, the gap between what is scribers and donors who support us more of what they say they
actually happening in the world and want, we are reimagining our print edition.
the terms allowed for discussion in the Each new issue will be much longer—with more room
corporate media has never been wider. It’s no for hard-hitting investigative pieces, reporting that challenges
accident that Edward Said first became visible corporate power and conventional wisdom, and reviews and
outside the academy in our pages, or that James Baldwin’s commentary on culture that aim to provoke active thought
“Report From Occupied Territory,” Toni Morrison’s remind- rather than solicit passive agreement. Space for open, civil de-
er that in moments of crisis “there is no time for despair…no bate on the left. Delivered at a monthly frequency that allows
room for fear,” and Tony Kushner’s “Socialism of the Skin” first readers more time to enjoy what we publish in print, while at
appeared in The Nation. Or that we’re the first—and sadly, so TheNation.com we continue to post the same nimble, respon-
far the only—US magazine to have a Palestine correspondent, sive, authoritative reporting and analysis we already provide to
Mohammed El-Kurd. The need for a publication dedicated to millions of readers each month.
the radical possibility of “what might happen if you tell people This shift will allow us to be more journalistically ambitious,
the truth” has never been more urgent. creating space for both longer reads and a wider range of voices.
But as this special issue underlines, the current moment holds We’re excited about the changes—which will start with our Jan-
unprecedented peril for independent media. With newsstand uary issue. We hope you are, too! N

By the
Numbers 500% 11/29 C A LV I N T R I L L I N

The increase from The date that pi-

oneering feminist
DeadlinePoet
the number of
media jobs elimi- website Jezebel
was resurrected
nated in 2022
by new owner The Death of Henry
Paste Magazine Kissinger
2.5
The average num-
ber of local news-
100+
The number of Vice
When somebody dies it is said
paper closures per One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.
week in 2023 staffers who were
laid off on April 27
To that I have tried to stay true.
11/9 $1M+ It’s rarely been harder to do.
20K
The number of
The date that pi-
oneering feminist The total value of
website Jezebel the bonuses Vice
media jobs elimi- executives received
nated in 2023 was shut down by
owner G/O Media on April 28
 How the
attention-starved
the CEO took over our
communications
infrastructure.
Siva Vaidhyanathan

Brand of MEDIA
Media
DOMINANCE
Dominance
lon musk used to be a car guy—an eccentric visionary, sort in online access for much of the world.
of quirky and absurd, but mostly entertaining. For some reason, We’ve seen a sobering real-time
a key group of people in and around Silicon Valley took him demonstration of Starlink’s power and
seriously, but he rarely exhibited the kind of depth or power that reach over the past few years, espe-
would concern anyone outside his core businesses. cially in Ukraine. Since the war be-
Now Musk is a media mogul whose decisions cost lives and affect the world. He gan in February 2022, Starlink has
seems more absurd than ever, yet we can no longer afford to dismiss or ridicule him. been a crucial service for both civilians
Musk is not a media mogul because he owns Twitter—now called X after and the military. Musk had agreed to
Musk’s favorite letter. On the day he bought it in 2022, the platform had hardly load up the skies over Ukraine with
ever cracked the top 10 most-used social media services in the world and was never satellites at Starlink’s expense, while
able to make a significant profit. Yet Musk believed it was worth $44 billion. NATO governments and private do-
Since then, Musk has clumsily and angrily dismantled the service, which once nors supplied most of the receivers on
hosted many influential conversations among elites and served as a site for activism the ground. But by failing to engage
like #BlackLivesMatter and as an early-warning system that could flag breaking seriously with the nature and course
news and emergencies. For all the limitations and virtues of pre-Musk Twitter, of the conflict, Musk has generated
almost none of its value remains after he drove away its most some dangerous situations—most no-
talented staff and the most valuable advertisers. tably when he refused to extend Inter-
Musk is also not a media mogul because of his appeal to a net service beyond Starlink’s geofence
corps of angry young men who wish that they, too, could sire limits into the Russian-occupied terri-
progeny in the double digits without commitment or conse- tories, stating that he wanted to avoid
quence and command the attention of a fawning and gullible participating “in a major act of war
business and celebrity press. and conflict escalation.” As Russia has
No, Musk is a central figure in the 21st century because he illegally been taking pieces of Ukraine
exercises an unusual new form of power over one of the most since 2014, this was a de facto ac-
Siva Vaidhyana- important resources in the communications ecosystem: satel- ceptance of Russian claims to these
than is a professor lite Internet connectivity. He can turn the digital tap on and territories, such as Crimea and the
of media studies at off at will for millions of people. He can monitor the nature Donbas, without regard for Ukrainian
the University of of Internet activity in sensitive places around the world if he sovereignty, human rights concerns, or
Virginia and the
chooses to—and has begun experimenting with that power in international law.
author of Anti-
social Media: a host of troubling ways. And no one seems willing or able to This is a dangerous, unaccountable
How Facebook hold him accountable. move to privatize the basic founda-
Disconnects Us Musk’s media power flows mainly from an early side project tions of global conflict. Past media
and Undermines in his privately owned (but largely publicly funded) rocket-and- moguls like William Randolph Hearst
Democracy. satellite company, SpaceX. That project, Starlink, fills a wide gap have hyped up wars and helped change
14 ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIÀ FRUITÓS
squeeze  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

play maps, and financiers like J.P. Morgan propped up major being by early negotiations over the reach and
powers during two world wars. But none of these first-wave architecture of the World Wide Web. Back
media-and-money barons possessed, as Musk does, the direct in the 1990s, the United States used trade-
capacity to shape the outcome of a major war on the basis of negotiation pressure and persuasion to ensure
nothing more than personal caprice. that private operators built most of the world’s
The geofence scandal underscores a deeply worrying digital infrastructure. This meant that US-based
development: Musk’s unparalleled control over global com- companies like Cisco, Qualcomm, Microsoft,
munications can serve as a tipping and Google would end up dominating all the
point in global conflicts. His mood layers of the global communications ecosystem.
swings can influence how an en- This has been a colossal mistake. By acting
tire sovereign nation manages its swiftly to enable the mogul class to control
Musk seems more ab- digital life, how its government the pipelines and practices of global digital
surd than ever, yet and businesses operate, and how its communications, the United States rendered
we can no longer media systems work. important public policy concerns such as priva-
While the Ukraine episode has cy, security, and diversity of viewpoint as after-
afford to dismiss absorbed most of the attention thoughts, trailing the mad rush for innovation
or ridicule him. surrounding Musk’s new media and expansion. This left countries struggling to
power, it is just part of a far broad- retrofit the public interest into a system already
er, lower-profile bid to reengineer the entire grid of digital rigged against it. Meanwhile, illiberal regimes
communications in his own image. As countries around the such as Russia and China rapidly adapted the
world struggle to establish digital sovereignty in the face mogul-driven model of Net connectivity to the
of US-based behemoths like Meta and Alphabet, they have dictates of state suppression.
been boxed into the Musk-branded connectivity racket. Even Much like Donald Trump, Musk craves atten-
before they gained access to the monopoly platforms that can tion and revels in controversy. He’s a pugilist and
severely limit their own ability to participate in public dis- a bully who has no convictions other than that
course, many countries had come to rely on Musk’s Starlink of his own moral rectitude. But unlike Trump,
empire to support high-speed Internet in newly connected Musk possesses a storehouse of wealth that’s real
Blunt bro: Musk and low-population-density regions. and spectacular. With the exception of his four
lights up on Joe Starlink’s stranglehold on the global Internet gives Musk a years as president, Trump had never run anything
Rogan’s podcast.
market desperate for what he offers—much more so than with that mattered much in the world. He rarely had
any of his other ventures. Much of the world lacks the under- the ability to affect others’ lives—except for his
ground fiber or cables that carry high-speed Internet to American cities. In the unfortunate business partners and former allies,
vast areas of the world that are sparsely inhabited, Starlink’s low-orbit satellites whom he regularly stiffed and betrayed.
offer very good Internet service for an accessible price, by US standards. So for Musk currently controls six companies.
anyone who lives between the two coasts of Some, like the civic infra-
Australia or Canada (or in remote stretches structure firm the Boring
of the United States, for that matter), or is Company, do little more than
struggling to run a business or a military unit sell vaporware. Others, like
in a war zone, Starlink seems essential. Neuralink and xAI, are moon-
Starlink had the first-mover advantage, shot vanity projects, unlikely
flooding the skies with small, relative- to achieve market viability in
ly inexpensive satellites that connect with the near term—if ever.
battery-powered mobile receivers on the Twitter, or X, was a public-
ground (or on a ship, a plane, or a drone) ly traded company until Musk
as early as 2019. Since then, it has launched took it private, drawing on the
more than 5,000 satellites that serve more largesse of morally compro-
than 60 countries; Musk plans to have a total mised investors such as the
of 42,000 in orbit. Saudi royal family. The only

S
good thing about Musk’s ran-
ince additional space satellite sacking of Twitter and other
lines can’t be summoned out of nowhere, Musk has profitably properties is that he has largely managed to
exploited the classic “tragedy of the commons”: He’s enclosed a make his investments, debts, and decisions a
shared social good and forced everyone who relies on it into a posi- subject of comedy rather than a relevant factor
tion of permanent market subservience. in the world; after his first year as owner, Twit-
Musk’s actions have made it clear why this unprecedented accumulation of ter has shed 16 percent of its user base and seen
THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE

power is so dangerous. Because he controls global connectivity from a position app downloads decline by 38 percent, while ad
of zero public accountability, his “mogul’s whim” is the sole basis on which this revenue has cratered. Still, there are baleful—
essential service is distributed in emerging tech markets. Over and over, Musk and rapidly multiplying—liabilities from Musk’s
has deployed this power clumsily, incoherently, and dangerously. reign when it comes to the site’s utility as an
Of course, Musk didn’t become the Lex Luthor of the high-speed digital age aggregator of breaking news, as the response
simply by virtue of his own grit and determination: The role was massaged into to Hamas’s attack on Israel made clear: In no
16
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

time, Musk’s all-but-unmoderated platform was island of misfit tech toys, he probably won’t resist the temptation to break it in
overrun with disinformation, fake reports, old new and unexpected ways, as the geofence episode in Ukraine made all too clear.
videos, and vituperative speech from all sides. Again, the key mismatch here is the consignment of a critical social good—

T
affordable Internet access—to the hands of a privately held company. Too often,
esla is musk’s lucky break and the the critics of privately controlled media resources skate over the distinction be-
source of most of his wealth— tween public and private ownership, and thus misunderstand the incentives bred
though here, too, he didn’t so much by the latter form of corporate control. To cite one decisive political illustration
disrupt the electric-vehicle mar- of these differences, it was a hallmark of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign
ket with radical innovation as buy and subsequent term in office that nearly all of his marquee funders and advisers
his way into it. In 2004, he acquired the came from the world of private capital. Much of Trump’s lead economic and trade
largest stake in Tesla from the company’s initiatives followed the path laid by such dubious sources.
engineer-founders, Martin Eberhard and The same real-world consequences can be traced in the contrast between
Marc Tarpenning. As the largest shareholder, Musk and the tech titans presiding over publicly held corporations. Figures like
Musk took over the company board. Later, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg exert massive
he installed himself as CEO, lending his face influence over what Americans see, read, and believe. But because the companies
and voice to the mission of they run are publicly traded, they must an-
promoting a new kind of car swer to the disciplinary force of sharehold-
company that would liber- ers as well as the mandates of regulators.
ate individual transportation Of course, shareholders aren’t a mono-
from its dependence on pe- lithic force for the good—far from it, in
troleum and organized labor. a corporate managerial regime driven by
Tesla is the only public- the mandate to maximize stock returns
ly traded company in Musk’s above all else. However, certain blocs of
portfolio, and the one operat- shareholders, such as pension funds and
ing under the most complex university endowments, can exert pressure
lattices of regulatory influence on company managers to evince concern
around the world. As a result, about issues like workplace diversity, envi-
it’s been the subject of many of ronmental damage, and harms to democ-
his messy face-offs with regu- racy. If CEOs face enough of this sort of
lators and plaintiffs’ attorneys. pressure, they may feel obliged to deliver
The disclosure and transparen- reforms to address any corporate behavior
cy requirements that come with the ownership that could damage the reputation of the company and thus
of a publicly traded company have sparked some its bottom line. In addition to these big players in securities
Machine dreams:
of Musk’s trademark fits of rage. His public markets, short sellers and activist investors also help discipline Musk at the Tesla
statements and tweets seeking more executive firms and markets, often forcing corporate boards to address factory in Grünheide,
impunity have repeatedly landed him in hot issues they’d otherwise ignore, such as insupportable growth Germany.
water with the Securities and Exchange Com- projections or shady accounting practices.
mission. Indeed, he nearly lost his leadership Activist investors and short sellers have already aired im-
role at Tesla after he tweeted a phony threat portant criticisms of how Tesla is run and demanded that the
to take the company private in order to loose company be held accountable for its many legal and fiscal
it from the surly bonds of regulatory oversight. failures—investor Jim Chanos cautions that Tesla is “ridic-
Which means that SpaceX is the only true ulously overvalued,” with a market capitalization 75 times
Musk-generated success story. It may also well higher than its revenue. As a
be his only consistently profitable company. result, it’s safe to say that Musk
Most of its revenue comes from public contracts hates short sellers more than
with various national governments. SpaceX anyone else on his rapidly ex-
builds and launches rockets and satellites, but it panding enemies’ list. (Earlier Musk can monitor the
has a track record of launch failures and other this year, Musk settled a defa- nature of Internet
operational embarrassments that have sparked mation suit brought by a Tesla activity in sensitive
widespread criticism and calls for robust regu- short seller.) That antipathy is
latory scrutiny of its actions. likely one reason why Musk im-
places around the
Much as the failed search engine Yahoo mediately took Twitter private world—and he’s begun
bumbled its way into its role as the Web’s after he acquired the company, experimenting with
CHRISTIAN MARQUARDT / GETTY IMAGES

premier news site in the early aughts, SpaceX and has harbored the same plans that power in a host
appears to have backed into its own role as the for Tesla. of troubling ways.
owner of a consumer utility. As it has scaled up Musk’s remarkable ability to
into a global Internet service provider, Starlink avoid accountability through private ownership has distin-
has demonstrated an ability to reliably fulfill a guished him from almost every other major media mogul and
widespread demand at a reasonable price point. corporate titan on the scene today. Even former Fox News
But if it continues to be one of the only via- CEO and chairman Rupert Murdoch, for all his excesses,
ble products on Musk’s rapidly overpopulating egomania, and bald power plays, ruled over publicly traded
17
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

companies. When he faced friction, fines from regulators, or losses from litiga- quest for reliable information to fuel public
tion, Murdoch just took the write-offs and forged ahead, knowing that his public deliberation in a democracy. It’s also, of course,
holdings were a ready source of capital and credit access. the delivery point of the sprawling digital atten-

M
tion economy. Therefore, every major player
usk’s outsize role as a private-capital communications baron at this level of media activity must pay heed
also presents a shift in how we approach the problem of media to the algorithmic power possessed by the
consolidation. Traditional critics of trends in media ownership monopoly platforms arrayed across the second
typically focused on the “networks”—the original Big Three layer: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
television broadcasters and their allied print, radio, and book- and TikTok. These platforms guide readers
publishing fiefdoms, all ruled by a shareholding oligarchy. Detractors of the and viewers toward one piece of content over
former media order properly called out these conglomerates for the inordinate another—which means, in turn, that each pro-
power they wielded over editorial decision-making and the disbursal of informa- ducer of content must pander to the algorithms,
tion along the traditional grids of profit-making and (not incidentally) advertiser at the potential cost of their market existence.
appeasement. Tracking the 20th-century journalistic failures of CBS, ABC, This final layer is also the only one that con-
and NBC alongside the market interests tinues to foster some de-
of their owners—General Electric, Disney, gree of actual competition
and Gulf and Western—the traditional cri- among market players. At
tique of media consolidation focused on the same time, it’s also the
the means of information production and principal focus of regula-
distribution. Expanding on the speculations tory scrutiny, as demon-
of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, strated most recently by
critics reasoned that if the medium was not the Federal Trade Com-
entirely the message, at least the medium mission’s antitrust suit
and message were inextricably bound to- against Google and its
gether via the forces of vertical integration. recent rejection of the
We still have such leviathans, as the suc- proposed merger between
cess of Disney (which, in addition to ABC, Penguin Random House
now controls ESPN, Marvel Studios, and and Simon & Schuster.
many other sources of content) and Mur- That regulatory mismatch
doch’s News Corporation show us. In other is a legacy of the old mod-
words, media concentration remains a gen- el of media concentration.
uine problem—but it’s now a different problem. The nature of the corporation Public concern over the concentrated power of
matters more than ever, and so does the sanity and stability of its owner and CEO. Google and Facebook is only about a decade
In sorting out this new media landscape, it’s helpful to think of our media sys- old, which means that efforts to limit the power
tems as being aligned along three layers, in three dimensions. of those companies remain largely theoretical.

M
The base layer is the infrastructure: all that metal and
Tomorrow, the
heavens: A SpaceX fiberglass, all those satellites and routers. Today, a small eanwhile, the expansive and
rocket takes flight. handful of cable and telecommunications companies, such unprecedented reach of private-
as Comcast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, control most of ly held communications compa-
our information grid. nies means that control over the
The second layer is what we might call the “application” infrastructure level is the most
component of the mass assimilation of information. Here, consequential issue in the realigned digital me-
Google and Facebook—or rath- dia landscape: According to a recent McKinsey
er, Alphabet and Meta—form a study, private equity controlled $675 billion
duopoly that manages what we of the global tech market in 2022—up from
consider important, interesting, $100 billion in 2012. It is also, as we have seen,
Musk’s remarkable and “relevant.” (And thanks to why Elon Musk is a problem. Surveillance of us-
ability to avoid the algorithmic symbiosis that ers, strategic targeting of companies and states,
accountability through these gateway platforms have and throttling of content can happen above the
private ownership has formed with their users, they infrastructure layer, to be sure, but these sinister
distinguished him from harvest data that predetermines forces are far more powerful and effective when
almost every other access and consumer choices on instituted there. People can usually choose the
major media mogul and those users’ behalf.) We might applications they use and the content conveyed
corporate titan on be approaching an inflection through them. But when it comes to the under-
point at which a new interna- lying data grid, they are rarely able to make a
the scene today.
tional player, such as the Chi- meaningful choice beyond the market leader,
nese company Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, could shake because of either network economies of scale or
up this duopoly—but we’re not there yet. simple market inertia.
The final layer is the one media consumers know best: As a dominant player in the infrastruc-
the content. It’s the focus of the hypothetical ideal reader (or ture domain, Musk has adapted well to these
scroller or viewer or listener), who represents the aspirational (continued on page 29)
18
 the Big Unfriendly
TECH
Tech
We must ensure that corporations aren’t able to
pick and choose winners and losers in journalism.

GIANTS A
Zephyr Teachout

Giants
tiny group of tech companies may be the most dangerous
threat to democracy in US history. Google, TikTok, Facebook,
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Amazon, Twitter, and a few others have seized control of the

country’s media infrastructure. And they have decimated the
resources of news organizations while reaping profits from their work.
A recent blockbuster white paper by four researchers at the Initiative
19
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

for Policy Dialogue showed that if publishers had the power to negotiate for the four apartments through ads in six different
value they provide to the platforms, news organizations would get nearly $14 newspapers.) When the Internet came along,
billion from them. Craigslist and a few similar sites made the classi-
While we have never faced an information crisis of this scale before, we have faced fieds irrelevant: Instead of paying a newspaper to
gatekeepers accumulating political power by exploiting their advantages to control list a used car, people listed it for free online. But
producers. In the past, we’ve responded by reaching for the anti-monopoly toolkit: Craigslist didn’t try to control newspapers, and
corporate breakups, nondiscrimination rules, and limits on unfair business practices. the basic source of revenue—ads—remained.
These tools—sharpened for the 21st century—still provide some of the most ef- Even after Craigslist, advertisers and publish-
fective ways to dismantle concentrated power. We see one mechanism in the efforts ers had direct relationships with local publications
by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to break the grip of and radio stations. Some publishers had greater
Big Tech over smaller businesses by splitting up tech conglomerates. But there is an- power than others, and readers of magazines like
other, equally important tool: nondiscrimination. Along with breaking up Big Tech, The Nation would rightly protest when publishers
we should ensure that the companies aren’t able to wield gave individual adver-
their power to choose the winners and losers in journalism. tisers favorable cover-
Nondiscrimination laws are the broad bucket of laws age. But it would be
that contain prohibitions on treating different counter- ludicrous to look at any
parties differently. Network neutrality is a nondiscrim- individual publisher in
ination tool; so too are state laws that require shopping the 1990s and claim
centers to allow political pamphleteers. The Journalism that it exercised sig-
Competition and Preservation Act, recently introduced nificant influence over
by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D.-Minn.), is the big nondis- more than its own cor-
crimination bill that could help save local reporting. The ner of the country—at
act, which has bipartisan support in the Senate, would most. While the big
forbid platforms from discriminating in negotiations with TV news shows could
news organizations based on their size or on the views lay claim to a nation-
expressed in their content. Passing this bill is crucial to al reach, they had no
saving the journalism industry. control over what

T
showed up in local papers or on local television,
o understand the current crisis, let’s go back to 1833, when the let alone on the multiple local radio stations.
seeds of the popular press that defined American journalism for most At the same time, the Internet was democra-
of the country’s life were sown. A newspaper called The Sun started tizing news, allowing people to publish and con-
showing up on the streets of New York City. It cost a penny (at a time nect with one another and providing unheard-of
when other papers cost more than a nickel) and covered a wide range of access to news from all over the world and across
topics—but unlike the fancy financial papers, whose operating expenses were paid the political spectrum. If you didn’t find what you
for by subscribers, its primary revenue source was ads. As The were looking for in your local paper, you could
Sun’s motto put it: always read the Chicago Tribune or the BBC’s
website or, for that matter, Drudge Report or Salon.
The object of this paper is to
And then, in the aughts, social media compa-
lay before the public, at a price
nies, led by Facebook and Google, began buying
within the means of every one,
As tech companies up tech firms—by 2010, Google was acquiring
all the news of the day, and at the
companies at a rate of about one business per
extended their same time offer an advantageous
week. They made themselves essential digital
reach, they medium for advertisements.
infrastructure for anyone looking to communi-
went from being In essence, the newspaper man- cate with friends, find jobs, or follow the news.
relatively neutral aged the relationship between read- While they called their various components
platforms to ers and merchants, merchants and “social media” or “messaging” or “search” or
reporters, and reporters and the “video sharing,” these features were subsidiary
choke points. public. The dual revenue source— to their core business: digital advertising.
merchants and readers—shaped the In 2017, Google’s parent company, Alpha-
content. While subscriber-funded papers tended to cover finan- bet, made $95 billion from selling digital ad-
cial news and elite gossip, The Sun and its variants covered scan- vertising and maintained profit margins above
RONDA CHURCHILL / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

dals, schools, sports, crime, and accidents. They printed poems, 20 percent, and Facebook made almost $40
short stories, and commentary, and they covered local political billion from digital ads. That year, the two
meetings. They hired reporters to watch, dig, and engage. For companies accounted for 99 percent of new
Zephyr Teachout, 180 years, a press offering this mix of cheap news and cheap ads digital ad sales. Not coincidentally, 2020 also
a member of
popped up in different incarnations across the country. saw 16,160 newsroom jobs disappear.
The Nation’s
editorial board, is These newspapers helped stores sell sewing machines, ser- The more these companies made them-
a law professor at vices, and shampoo—and they connected people through clas- selves indispensable as the distributors of
Fordham Univer- sified ads. (It’s hard for many today to understand how central news, the more they could charge advertisers.
sity and the author classified advertising was to American economic life through At least a third of American adults regularly
of Break ’Em Up. the 1980s; I’m 51 years old, and I got five jobs, two cars, and get their news from Facebook, a quarter from
20
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024
squeeze
YouTube (owned by Google), 16 percent from century anti-monopolists is that we should start thinking
play
Instagram (owned by Facebook), and 12 per- about these problems in part through a discrimination lens.
cent from X (formerly Twitter). As the turn-of-the-century journalist Ida Tarbell reported,
We’re all familiar with how this works: You’ll you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing debate about how
see a headline and maybe a sentence of text. The railroads gave different users different rights of access. Tarbell
headline links to another site, but few people described the public outcry over rail-
click on the link to read the actual article. Instead, road pricing discrimination this way:
they will see the headline or pronouncement as
Nothing was commoner, indeed,
part of their news diet, and in this way, ad dollars
on the trains which ran the length
of the region and were its real fo- Democracy cannot
flow from the headlines and brief descriptions
straight to Facebook, Google, and X.
rums, than to hear a man explain- survive without
Think of it like a milk distributor. The
ing that the railways derived their local news—and yet
farmer used to get a significant share of every
existence and power from the we have enabled
dollar spent on milk, but now, because only a
people, that their charters were a business model
few distributors control access to the market,
contracts with the people, that a
fundamental provision of these that destroys it.
the farmers’ cut has shrunk, and they lose their
incomes and eventually their farms.
contracts was that there should be
As tech companies extended their reach, they
no discriminating in favour of one person or one town,
went from being relatively neutral platforms,
that such a discrimination was a violation of charter.
on which the discovery and sharing of news was
possible, to choke points—and then used those People understood that giving discounts—a mode of
choke points for profit. They sorted and deliv- discrimination—was a betrayal of the obligations that flowed
ered the news that was most profitable for them, from the corporate charters granted by states. The anger at
meaning items that were most likely to generate discrimination led to the creation of several state and federal
emotional engagement. And during a 10-year laws that limited how railroads and other companies that ran
period, they changed strategies constantly, from essential infrastructure could treat customers differently.
prioritizing local news to degrading it in favor of Six years ago, just before he was hit with a scandal and re-
family updates. When Facebook turned up the tired, Senator Al Franken introduced the idea that the media
dial on video, many news organizations laid off infrastructure problem was a discrimination problem. “As tech
print journalists and invested in video reporting, giants become a new kind of Internet gatekeeper,” Franken ar-
only to have Facebook shift strategies again. gued, “I believe the same basic principles of…neutrality should
For a while, many people thought that the apply here: No one company should have the power to pick and
problem wasn’t caused by these platforms; the choose which content reaches consumers and which doesn’t.”
issue was that the legacy newsprint organiza- (continued on page 45)
tions weren’t nimble enough. Time has
given the lie to that story. Even once-
fashionable digital outlets like BuzzFeed
Newspaper Employment: 2005 and 2022
News, which were created during the era of
a more open Internet, have now shuttered.
Communities need political news. They
need school-board news and traffic news;
they need reporters who understand local
budgets and the impacts of federal spend-
ing on local life. Democracy cannot survive
without local news—and yet we have en-
abled a business model that destroys it.
While the local “rags” cared about ad
revenue, they remained, at heart, news or-
ganizations funded by ads—not ad organi-
zations that happened to make money off
news. For TikTok and Instagram, journal-
ism is just “content”—one of many ways to
keep people online.

W
hat can we do? since this
is a problem of both con-
centrated power and a
predatory business model,
we should make sure that
any strategic response speaks to both.
One thing we can learn from the 19th-
21
 THE
THE

ALGORITHM
Algorithm How the Internet produced the
age of monopoly platforms.

Colleen Tighe

OLIGARCHY
Oligarchy
23
Colleen Tighe is an illustrator, writer, and animator who likes learning
about the structures that make up our world. She also likes her cat.
25
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

lthough it seems like an eternity now, it wasn’t so long ago the old-media giants, the deals signaled
that the traditional film and television business was thriving. The the conglomerates’ first real response
Big Six media conglomerates—General Electric, Time Warner, to streaming—the technology itself and
Sony, Disney, News Corporation, and Viacom—ruled the industry. the growing threat of Netflix and Ama-
But the double whammy of streaming and the pandemic toppled the zon, two fast-rising media powerhouses.
old-media oligopoly, which, with the singular exception of Disney, was woefully—if Both companies were launched during
not fatally—slow to respond to the radically changing conditions. So most of the the digital revolution—Amazon by Jeff
legacy media giants now are struggling simply to survive, while a new breed of Bezos in 1994 and Netflix by Reed Hast-
digital-age behemoths, led by Amazon and Apple, gauge their film and television ings and Marc Randolph in 1997—and
prospects, and Disney and Netflix lead the way into an uncharted online landscape. parlayed the new DVD technology into
The failure of the conglomerates to adapt is none too surprising, considering early success in the booming home-video
the unrivaled success they had enjoyed for decades. Spurred by Reagan-era eco- sector. Both also shrewdly used the In-
nomic policies and the FCC’s deregulation campaign, the media industries con- ternet, initially to market their inventory
verged in a series of M&A waves that began in the 1980s with the News Corp–Fox, and, by the mid-2000s, to deliver films
Time-Warner, and Sony-Columbia mergers and culminated in the acquisition of and TV series via streaming.
Universal by GE, NBC’s owner, and the launch of NBC Universal in 2004. At that As digital delivery began overtak-
point, the Big Six owned all the major film studios, all the broadcast networks, and ing DVDs in the early 2010s, Netflix
most of the top cable networks. They dominated other media industries as well, but revamped its business model. Hast-
their key assets were their film and television holdings. ings and his chief content officer (and
The NBC-Universal union also marked a decisive reset in the old guard’s re- eventual co-CEO), Ted Sarandos, in-
sponse to new media. In 2000, Time Warner merged with the Internet colossus creasingly built Netflix’s library around
AOL (in a shocking deal valued at $165 billion), and Universal was acquired by the long-form TV series and moved ag-
French conglomerate Vivendi (for $35 billion). The architects of both deals were gressively into original programming
betting on high-speed Internet delivery, then referred to as “broadband,” which to ensure a steady supply. Netflix pre-
was ramping up but not yet widely available. The rollout of broadband, however, miered its first original series in 2012,
proved to be disastrously slow, which was a key factor in the dot-com bust of the Nordic noir Lilyhammer, followed
the early aughts and the collapse of both the AOL–Time Warner and Vivendi- by a run of homegrown hits in 2013
Universal deals in 2002. that included House of Cards and Orange
In the wake of that dot-com Is the New Black. Those cued Netflix’s
bust and the consolidation of swing to original programming, as its
the Big Six, the film studios re- stockpile grew from 73 hours in 2013
Streaming and the trenched, doubling down on their to over 1,500 hours in 2018 and the
traditional theater-driven busi- company matured into a streaming-era
pandemic toppled ness and blockbuster franchises. TV network. In fact, Netflix nabbed
the old-media They also fixated on the explod- 112 Emmy nominations in 2018, the
oligopoly, which was ing overseas markets, which first year since 2001 that any network
slow to respond to couldn’t get enough of Holly- outpaced HBO. Its subscriber count
changing conditions. wood’s franchise fare. Foreign grew from 40 million to 140 million
revenues had started to climb in during that explosive five-year span,
the 1990s, pulling even with the while its market value soared from
domestic returns and edging ahead in the early 2000s. Then, in $22 billion to $130 billion. Amazon
Media mogul: Reed 2004, foreign releases took off, leaping more than 50 percent followed suit, but at a more modest
Hastings, the exec- ahead of the domestic returns. The gap became an abyss, with pace, building a massive film library on
utive chairman of
the foreign market doubling the domestic take by 2010 and its Amazon Prime service and easing
Netflix, at an event in
Madrid in 2019. nearly tripling it in 2019. At that point, 83 of the top 100 all- into original series programming, pro-
time worldwide hits had been released since 2004, and every ducing its first hit, Transparent, in 2014.
one of them was a franchise film. The conservative turn paid As their series production caught
off, as the studios reaped record profits and relied more and on, both streamers inevitably chal-
more heavily on high-cost, low-risk series spectacles. That
put the squeeze on midrange and prestige pictures as well as
on “Indiewood,” a formidable bloc of conglomerate-owned
JUAN NAHARRO GIMENEZ / GETTY IMAGES

independent studios that was decimated after 2004.

The M&A action also stalled. The only significant deal over
Thomas Schatz
the next decade involved NBCUniversal, which GE sold to
is a professor
in the Depart- Comcast in a buyout that closed in 2013. Then, five years later,
ment of Radio- came the first inklings of another wave: AT&T’s buyout of Time
Television-Film at Warner, an $85.4 billion deal that closed in June 2018, and Dis-
the University of ney’s buyout of 21st Century Fox in a $71.3 billion deal approved
Texas at Austin. by the feds that same month. More than simply a realignment of

ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

lenged Hollywood, and Amazon scored the first movie hit with Manchester by pressuring the legacy companies that were bet-
the Sea in 2016. But again, Netflix was more aggressive, releasing more than 50 ting on streaming to stay in the game, despite the
feature films per annum by 2017, far outpacing Amazon and any of the studios, crippling start-up and content costs. Netflix was
and edging into the theatrical arena with Oscar-qualifying limited releases of the only profitable streaming service coming out
prestige pictures like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). In fact, Roma provided one of the pandemic, netting over $5 billion in 2021
of two clear signals in early 2019 that Netflix had arrived as a Hollywood player. and again in 2022, while the legacy companies
On the morning of January 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lost billions.
showered the film with 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Meanwhile, the theatrical market began to
Director. Later that same day, the Motion Picture Association designated Netflix recover in 2021 and climbed to roughly two-
a major Hollywood studio. thirds of its pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Fran-
That was obviously a watershed moment for the streaming and movie indus- chise fever ran higher than ever, with the top 10
tries, although Netflix would be overshadowed on both fronts in 2019, when hits that year—all of them big-budget sequels or
multiple high-risk acquisitions by Disney CEO franchise films—accounting
Bob Iger paid off in truly historic fashion. Three for over half the ticket sales
involved motion-picture companies: Disney’s in the United States. The
buyout of Pixar (in 2006, for $7.4 billion), Mar- M&A action also resumed,
vel Entertainment (in 2009, for $4 billion), and highlighted by two landmark
Lucasfilm, the creator of the Star Wars franchise deals announced in May
(in 2012, for $4.05 billion). Those new assets, 2021. One was Amazon’s
along with Disney’s animation division, recast $8.45 billion acquisition of
the company as a coalition of franchise-driven MGM, giving it a legendary
micro-studios. Disney released fewer features Hollywood brand and add-
and relied more heavily on presold IP than the ing some 4,000 film titles to
other major studios, and that strategy carried it its massive library. The other
to phenomenal heights. It led the industry four saw AT&T, struggling with
straight years in the late 2010s, peaking in 2019 the move to streaming and
with a 33 percent domestic market share on just with mounting debt, unload
10 theatrical releases, nine of which were franchise blockbusters. WarnerMedia in a deal with Discovery, a sec-
Disney’s foray into streaming in 2019 was also keyed to earlier acquisitions. ond-tier cable company that paid $43 billion
In 2017, the company secured control of BAMTech, a streaming service owned for a minority stake and complete control of
by Major League Baseball, and later that year Iger announced the buyout of 21st the stumbling media giant, which it rebranded
Century Fox, which increased Disney’s heft in the media sector while giving it a Warner Bros. Discovery.
controlling interest in Hulu, then the No. 2 streamer behind Netflix. The Fox This was a stunning setback for the once-
buyout officially closed in March 2019, at which point Iger and company began mighty Warner, but the Disney-Warner duopo-
gearing up for the November 12 debut of Disney+. The launch ly that had ruled since the early 1990s was
faced stiff competition from Apple, which rolled out its much- history. Disney’s main rival now was Netflix—a
hyped streaming service Apple TV+ on November 1. But the vastly different adversary that continued to ex-
Mouse in the house:
Disney steamrolled latter’s meager lineup of nine original series and its lack of a pand at a staggering rate. Netflix released more
into the streaming library attracted few new subscribers, and the rollout was a bust. than 450 titles in 2021 and over 700 in 2022,
market in 2019 with Disney+, on the other hand, was a runaway hit, enrolling with far more feature films and series (in all
the launch of Disney+. more than 10 million subscribers on day one and more than formats) than its competitors as well as far more
25 million by late December. Its success was fueled by several international productions. And Netflix accom-
factors: an ad-free, low-cost service ($6.99 per month, versus plished this as a pure-play media company that
$12.99 for Netflix); the momentum of its theatrical hits; its small was not conglomerate-owned and was not itself
but incomparable library; and a slate of 25 original series and 10 a conglomerate. Disney, conversely, was the
new features, most of them tied to Disney IP—including a hit consummate media-and-entertainment com-
Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, that established the prototype bine, a global juggernaut whose portfolio now
for subsequent franchise offshoots. included three streaming services and a total

T
subscriber count of roughly 235 million—just
he disney+ launch was a surpassing Netflix’s 230 million and far ahead of
tipping point in the stream- the other legacy company streamers.
ing era, prompting the Netflix and Disney were thus a study in
The Disney-Warner ramp-up of Warner’s HBO contrasts, although a few recent developments
duopoly that had Max, NBCU’s Peacock did bring them into closer accord. Brutal “mar-
ruled since the and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+. It ket corrections” hit the industry in 2022, with
also came just before the outbreak the streamers’ stock value increasingly gauged
early 1990s was
CHESNOT / GETTY IMAGES

of Covid-19, which accelerated the in terms of profitability as well as subscriber

history. Disney’s global move to streaming. The world growth. Disney and Netflix saw the steepest
main rival now was learned to live online during the pan- drops, as their market caps plunged more than
Netflix. demic, rendering Netflix, Amazon, $100 billion that year—Netflix down to $130
and Apple stronger than ever while billion, about where it stood before the pandem-
28
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024
squeeze
ic, and Disney down to the $170 billion range. pat, waiting for the recent disruptions—and the writers’ and
play
Netflix tumbled when its decade-long growth actors’ strikes—to play out. More M&A action is inevitable,
suddenly slowed in early 2022, although its though, with Amazon and Apple increasingly invested in their
revenues and profits held up thanks to high sub- media operations, and the tech giants Microsoft and Alpha-
scription fees. Meanwhile, Disney struggled as a bet (the parent company of Google, which owns YouTube)
result of low fees and enormous content costs. ready to pounce. And the weaker
Despite the different reasons for their Wall legacy companies—Warner Bros.
Street woes, Disney and Netflix turned to the Discovery, Paramount Global, and
same remedy: TV commercials. Both launched what’s left of Fox—cannot possi-
ad-supported tiers in late 2022 to attract new bly hold on without deep-pocketed The question for
subscribers and generate new revenues. This was digital-age allies (or owners). both Disney and
hardly a novel strategy; all of the other major The most intriguing M&A pros- Netflix is whether
streamers already offered ad-supported plans. pects are Disney and Netflix. Both
And the adjustment came easily enough for Dis- have the capacity to survive and
they can afford not
ney, given its experience with commercial tele- thrive on their own, but they are to partner with a
vision and with Hulu’s ad-supported platform. unlikely to sit still for long. Indeed, tech giant.
It was a bitter pill for Reed Hastings, however, the question for both is wheth-
who had vowed never to sully Netflix with ads. er they can afford not to attach
But there was no stopping the online migration themselves to a tech giant. Rumors have been swirling for
of commercial television, and an added benefit years about a partnership between Apple and Disney, due
for Netflix was its alliance with Microsoft, which largely to Iger’s penchant for high-stakes dealmaking and
took sole responsibility for building and manag- a long-standing rapport with Apple dating back to his close
ing the streamer’s advertising business. friendship with the late Steve Jobs, who sold Pixar to Disney. Netflix’s likeliest
“Consolidation” was the industry buzz- partner is Microsoft, which already handles its ad business and recently acquired
word in early 2023, with the Disney-Fox, War- the gaming superpower Activision Blizzard. Netflix has been quietly expand-
ner-Discovery, and Amazon-MGM mergers ing into gaming for a few years, and together the two could rule the online
seen as mere previews in a Darwinian struggle gaming realm—and introduce yet another vital subindustry into the digital
to adapt and survive. But the major players stood entertainment ecosystem. N

(Vaidhyanathan, continued from page 18) of unproven entrepreneurs, without the investing and private capital ownership.
conditions. Far from an apostle of com- usual benefits of testing their hypotheses He’s melded the hubris-rewarding ethos
petitive capitalism, he’s steeped in the against data or track records to arrive at of the VC world with a cult following
same monopoly vision advanced by his reasoned decisions. seemingly designed to feed his titanic
former Paypal colleague Peter Thiel. And If the classical models of market capital- ego and his desire to make himself the
like that early Facebook investor, Musk ism can be said to contain any traditional wealthiest human ever. And he did all this
recoils at the thought that market pres- virtues, they are principally those of Greek without ever employing that many peo-
sures, labor, investors, or the public in- tragedy: the slow-rolling punishment of ple, without selling many products on the
terest might play some hubris, imperial ambi- open market, and without even turning a
legitimate role in deter- tion, and vanity. Com- profit very often.
mining the best way to panies that simply amass Musk’s success in defying so many tra-
run his businesses. VC backing on glorified ditional laws of market gravity means,
This affinity speaks elevator pitches while among other things, that we have missed
to another critical el- blowing past any mar- the moment to create Internet service as a
ement of Musk’s cor- ket warnings about their public utility. Now we have to begin reck-
porate biography. More overriding folly usual- oning with the legacy of that failure as it
than serving as an ideo- ly meet a bigger mar- wreaks havoc across the globe. One place
logical vessel of his up- ket nemesis in the end, to start would be a serious effort to work
bringing in apartheid by misdirecting capital through the costs and benefits of nation-
South Africa, or hewing that could otherwise alizing satellite Internet delivery systems
to his later tutelage in be used productively to like Starlink. It’s true that a slapdash or
the rarefied precincts of satisfy real needs. For jingoistic model for such an endeavor
the Ivy League, Musk two lurid recent illus- runs the risk of extending the same sort of
truly came of age during Silicon Valley’s trations of this principle, see the collapse American market hegemony that created
belle epoque of venture capital. Because of Elizabeth Holmes’s scam blood-testing Musk’s rise to the summit of the global
venture capital investors seek to cre- company, Theranos, and Samuel Bankman- communications order in the first place.
ate new markets and business models Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, FTX, and But it’s equally true that the specter of
largely out of thin air, they often make their eventual reckonings with the federal having Elon Musk as the de facto arbiter
decisions based on their market crush- justice system. of global struggles over national sover-
es and storied gut instincts. Their job Elon Musk is the poster CEO for the eignty and information access means that
is to push piles of money into the laps combined fecklessness of venture capital we no longer have a choice. N
29
THE Media,
The MEDIA , Disability,
DIS ABILITY, and
AND
Working in media has always been an uphill battle for disabled writers,
but an ever-shrinking industry gives “hard” a whole new meaning.

Vilissa Thompson

ver the past decade, i thought i had finally figured out how to earn topics as “special interests” rather than
a living as a disabled person. I work as a speaker, a consultant, and an activist, as facets of the way our society operates.
but writing was always my first love. I started writing professionally in my The way in which disability has been
late 20s, and since then my work has been published on blogs, in magazines, consigned to niche coverage, along with
and in books. I have taken tremendous strides in this aspect of my career. the tiny number of staff roles filled by
But in 2020, when the pandemic shook all of our lives, progressive news sites began disabled folks in an industry where jobs
shutting down in droves. It has been devastating to witness over the past three years. are already scarce, has made it difficult
While the 2010s might not have been the heyday of the business-class-flying, glossy- for multiply marginalized writers to
magazine reporter, that decade’s media allowed many of us—disabled and non-disabled cover disability or to branch out and
writers alike—to write and be paid for it. It’s disheartening to know that many aspiring cover other stories from our perspec-
journalists and journalism school graduates are having to give up before they start, given tive. Squeezing out disabled writers
the dwindling opportunities for writers, editors, and fact-checkers. who have so much insight to offer,
As a disabled writer, I’m no stranger to working hard and especially into the injustices, biases, and
getting creative to pursue a dream no matter the circumstances. discrimination they face, is an obstacle
Indeed, the obstacles for people like me are endless: workplace that the media industry should not only
discrimination; inaccessible job sites for people who are wheel- acknowledge but actively address.

M
chair-bound, as I am; poverty wages (also known as “subminimum
wages,” where it is still legal for employers to pay a disabled person y journey to becoming
less than the minimum wage, and some workers are paid pennies a writer started after I
on the dollar); and income restrictions for public benefits that graduated with a master’s
Vilissa Thompson
make it nearly impossible to earn enough to live comfortably. degree in social work in
is a social worker,
freelance writer, Despite the barriers that the journalism industry has raised for 2012. I knew that my op-
speaker, and the disabled writers, writers of color, and LGBTQ+ writers, members tions were limited. Many of the jobs
founder of the of those marginalized groups have led the way toward a more available to social workers at that time
organization inclusive approach to the coverage of disability and disability jus- required them to do home visits and
Ramp Your Voice! tice. Historically, news outlets have treated disability and related to drive, which presented a problem
30
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

for me since most homes aren’t In addition to handling these stories recklessly, many outlets continue to resist
wheelchair-accessible and I don’t updating the language they use to describe disabled people, which has been a major
drive, because of the cost of acces- point of focus for us, especially with the media’s increased reliance on automation.
sible vehicles. Given such limita- The preferred language used by many in the disabled community is identity-first
tions, it made more sense for me language, which puts the disability first in describing a person—“disabled person”
to seek work that I could do from rather than “person with a disability,” for example. News organizations don’t often
home. I decided to start blogging adhere to this, and their failure to do so will keep the industry behind, while con-
for a social work outlet that needed tinuing to frustrate those who have worked hard to push language forward.

W
someone to write about the societal
issues that disabled people face in hile writing for money is hard for everyone in media today
the United States. I wrote about to pull off, the financial realities for disabled writers are partic-
everything from the school-to- ularly distressing. Because of the outlets’ own budget crunches,
prison pipeline and how it affects freelance writers often have to press them to pay and to do so on
disabled students to how social time. In general, disabled workers, including disabled writers, have
media helps disabled people find historically been paid lower rates. We need jobs that not only pay well but that can
community. A year later, I founded also support the medical requirements we may have to cover out of pocket in order
an organization called Ramp Your to sustain our quality of life.
Voice! and began blogging about What I’m describing is what we call the “crip tax”—all the extra costs that
the intersection of disability rights, disabled folks have to take on, in the form of services and tools, in order to live
social work, and race. After three more accessibly. A household with a disabled adult needs an average of 28 percent
years, I was able to turn the recog- more income—an extra $17,690 per year for a typical US household—in order to
nition I had received through my achieve the same standard of living as a comparable household without a disabled
writing at Ramp Your Voice! into member. Earning a livable wage for me means making enough money to repair my

ME
freelance gigs at digital outlets. By wheelchair and save for new hearing aids, to name just a few of my needs. I came

Me
the fall of 2020, I had become a off the rolls of Social Security seven years ago; catching up on saving and having the
regular contributor to the indepen- means to take care of myself without significant limits is a new concept to me. Like
dent news outlet Prism. many of my disabled peers, I am financially behind my non-disabled counterparts.
While the business of freelance Earning a wage looks different when the wage has to sustain a different kind of life.
writing has evolved over the past Being paid a livable wage should not be an exception but the reality for ev-
decade for all writers, disabled eryone in the workforce. However, for freelancers who are writing for outlets
writers—particularly those who that may pay as little as $100 a story, chasing stories and money is often the hard
are multiply marginalized like me reality. Too often, writers are scrambling to pitch to multiple outlets to find the
(along with being disabled, I am also a Black one that will give them rates they can live with. And often,
Bitch: The feminist
woman)—face a unique set of issues. In addition they can’t. As s.e. smith, a California-based freelance jour- magazine, founded in
to being shut out of most full-time roles, we must nalist, put it recently, as a disabled writer, “I watch outgoing 1996, closed its doors
consider the outlets we write for deliberately; in expenses exceed my income.” for good in 2022.
particular, we need to know to what extent their Such financial barriers are making those of us who remain
editors know or are open to learning about dis- in this industry wonder how much longer we can last. For
ability, and whether we will be able to tell our full disabled writers, who are already forced to spend more money
story without it being edited down to fit a narra- day-to-day to survive, the outcome is particularly crushing.
tive people are more comfortable with. “Freelancing built my career as a
Ableism—the social prejudice against disabled disabled journalist by allowing me
people—is a barrier disabled people have faced to work on my own schedule,” smith
since the beginning of time. It is prevalent in told me. “It may also be the thing
journalism primarily because storytellers often that drives me out after more than Historically, news
ignore lived realities in favor of stereotypes and 15 years.” For freelance journalists, outlets have treat-
simplified sketches. This distortion is concerning who have always had to prove them- ed disability as a
for disabled journalists, because people read news selves through tireless, poorly com-
for “the truth” and often take specious narratives pensated efforts, work has gotten
“special interest”
as accurate. Magazines, newspapers, and blogs of- much harder. And when you start at rather than as a
ten make missteps that contribute to the public’s the bottom of the rung, “hard” takes facet of how our
misunderstanding of disabled people, including on a whole new meaning. society operates.
by emphasizing inspiration porn (such as an The current political environ-
ambulatory wheelchair user who is able to stand ment has been an additional hurdle.
or walk for the first time); downplaying mercy As we stare down another presidential election, conservatives
killings by highlighting the elimination of the
“burden” on caregivers; disregarding the societal
barriers we face in experiencing violence and dis-
are more emboldened than ever, creating a dangerous envi-
ronment for multiply marginalized writers who share their
stories. Pieces about disability may be deemed by those on
squeeze
crimination in public spaces; and allowing parents
and caregivers to be the voice for a disabled per-
the right as “too woke” and not in line with their agenda to
“return” to an America where such stories and individuals
play
son without engaging with that person directly. (continued on page 35)
 Fourth-estate titan:
Ida B. Wells docu-
mented the brutality
of lynching at the turn
of the last century.

32
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

y father’s family tree has a capt. charles l. mitchell, born Americans, the mainstream (read
in my hometown of Hartford, Conn., who took what he learned “white”) press will hardly ever go long
during what was later described as a “relatively brief tenure at that or deep. Which is why the metaphor-
city’s venerable Courant” to establish a Black-oriented newspaper, ical cookout that is Black media today
also called the Courant, in his adopted city of Boston in the late encompasses everything from the more
19th century. On my mother’s side of the family, there was, most notably, my uncle than 200 Black-owned-and-operated
C. Sumner “Chuck” Stone Jr., who was at various times in the 1950s and ’60s editor newspapers that make up the Nation-
of The New York Age, The Washington Afro-American, and The Chicago Defender—all al Newspaper Publishers Association
before his 18-year run as a columnist, political gadfly, go-between for law enforce- (NNPA) to online platforms like The
ment and Black suspects, and senior editor at the Philadelphia Daily News. Scrolling Root, the digital reincarnations of Ebony
recently through old copies of the Age, which closed in 1960 after 73 years, I was and Jet, and TheGrio, whose website,
astonished to find that Chuck’s sister (and my mother) Madalene contributed a col- with its formidable array of news, opin-
umn covering Hartford’s Black social calendar. I suppose, despite the roughly 110 ion, features, investigative stories, and
miles separating them, Hartford and Harlem were still close enough to require the political commentary, is a key compo-
kind of society updates that Black newspapers were renowned for providing. But as nent of a multi-platform media network
both Chuck and Mom are gone now, I doubt I’ll ever get the whole story. owned by Byron Allen, the stand-up co-
The more pertinent point is that, although it wasn’t exactly the family business, median turned media mogul. TheGrio’s
journalism was viewed in my Black household, as in others, as crucial to our col- own Twitter page proclaims itself as
lective advancement and identity. In the racial tumult and upheaval of the 1960s, simply “Black Culture Amplified.”
our devoted consumption of Black news outlets—not just newspapers, but also
magazines such as Ebony, Jet, and the lesser-known but still fondly remembered
Sepia—was vital because we always suspected that whatever magazines and news-
papers for white folks weren’t telling us, Black newspapers and magazines would.

E
But as with
BONY is still around, as are black-owned-and-operated news outlets Twitter, Black
ROBERT ABBOTT SENGSTACKE / GETTY IMAGES

following the centuries-old mandate of making Black people feel less invis-
ible and more connected to one another. But the once-mighty flagship of
Twitter reacts
Johnson Publishing has had to retool and rebrand itself for a digital age that far more often
has all but forgotten what it was like to have living-room end tables bulg- than it reports
ing with glossy journals and newsprint. What was once known and cherished as the what it’s
“Negro press” has become “Black media,” which in its larger, more sprawling man- reacting to.
ifestation still tries to reflect what the Black diaspora is thinking and talking about.
Better still to imagine Black media as One Big Cookout—“cookout” being the “We cover social justice, entertain-
go-to metaphor for African American consensus. The analogy may be unwieldy, ment, lifestyle,” says Geraldine Moriba,
given the many contemporary variants and offshoots of Black media. It fits nicely, an award-winning documentary produc-
however, when you’re talking about Black Twitter. Want to know how the latest er and filmmaker who is now TheGrio’s
revelation concerning the fraught marriage of Will and Jada senior vice president. “Whatever the
Pinkett Smith registers with the Black boomers, Gen-Xers, and Black community is talking about today
millennials who once avidly watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? or should be talking about today, we’re
Consult Black Twitter. How’s the newly styled hair of basketball trying to cover it.”
star Jimmy Butler going over? Black Twitter will be happy to let Allen, whose ever-expanding con-
you know. Was another unarmed Black person killed by police glomerate comprises television sta-
or assaulted by white bigots? Black Twitter gives you a seismic tions and programming, podcasts, and
SON / AP

reading on the level of outrage. live sports, sees Black media as a means
But as with Twitter—or X, or whatever Elon Musk calls of economic empowerment for the
CHRIS CARL

it these days—Black Twitter reacts (and then riffs on those Black community—and a vehicle for
reactions) far more often than it reports what it’s reacting to. broadening America’s vision of itself.
Black Twitter will not be the first to tell you, for instance, what “You have to have a seat at the ta-
the unemployment rate is among Black Americans (currently ble,” Allen says. “You have to control
5.8 percent) or what that means for parents, children, and your image and your likeness and how
Gene Seymour their respective needs. Nor will it be the first—or maybe even you’re depicted around the world….
worked 18 years the second—to tell you what elected officials plan to do about Media is so powerful—it can be wea-
at Newsday as affordable housing, student loan debt, union organizing, or ponized to the point where you had
a film critic and
effective neighborhood policing, or whether charter schools are people on January 6 so wound up and
jazz columnist.
He has written really a better option for your kids than public education. And angry, they’re trying to overthrow a
for Bookforum, Twitter, Black or white, isn’t going to tell you the impact that country that they already control.” But,
CNN.com, and changing the street where you live from two-way to one-way he adds, “media can be used to unite
The Washington will have on your walk to the grocery store two blocks away. us. Media can be used to introduce
Post. And as to how all these issues might directly affect African ourselves to each other.”
33
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

Allen’s vision eagerly broadens and steadfastly reinforces the centuries-old [by the network]. Now that I’m senior vice
mission of the Negro press, which, from its beginnings in 1827—when John president at TheGrio, I look forward to those
Russwurm and Samuel Cornish founded Freedom’s Journal—sought to make daily calls, because I know we’re not going to
visible people whose dimensions, possibilities, and achievements were made end up defending the value of those stories or
imperceptible even to themselves. The fusion of ink, newsprint, and eventually whether we should be reporting them. We’re
photographs bore magical, transformative properties for Black America through going to debate the angles, discuss the layers
the brave work of word ninjas like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, William in a story, and then decide the ‘how’ more than
Monroe Trotter, and Walter White, who stalked and often subdued superstition, the ‘whether.’”
injustice, and legally sanctioned barbarism against people of color. Still, the Pew report suggests that Black con-

I
sumers’ expectations about who should cover
n the bad old days of jim crow, black-owned newspapers like THE NEW such stories are changing: While 45 percent of
York Age, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American the respondents say Black journalists do a better
exposed lynching, helped facilitate the Great Migration of Blacks from job covering issues related to race and inequal-
the rural South to the urban North, exposed discriminatory practices in ity, only 14 percent said it is important that any
housing, employment, and courtrooms, and reinforced African Americans’ news they get, regardless of topic, comes from
collective identity and self-worth. Black journalists.
Such impulses still drive Black media—even as NNPA-member news outlets Gauging who turns up at the cookout, in
have had to make the same adjustments to digital demands that mainstream other words, is trickier than it seems. As is fig-
publications have. “A lot of us have become revived because of digital transfor- uring out where Black-owned outlets fit into the
mation,” says Denise Rolark Barnes, the publisher of The Washington Informer, a era of electronic media.
family-owned newspaper that has served the D.C. Black community for 59 years. “The newspaper has gone away,” Allen says.
“It has taken a while not just to get on that train, but to even find a seat. There’s “But that has more to do with technology, not
something about what we do and have done historically that I think has saved behavior. No one woke up and said, ‘I don’t want
our publication and those like it. The question is: How do we generate enough news from my community.’ They woke up and
revenue to continue to not just survive but thrive?” said, ‘I want it from a digital platform.’ Our digi-
Barnes’s publication and others like it also have to compete in a media market tal platforms, our local TV stations, are growing
that is at once broader and narrower in scope than it was in the mid- to late 20th in terms of engagement and revenue, which
century. Among the findings in a September Pew Research Center report on means the platforms are the new newspaper.
Black Americans’ relationship with the news is that about a quarter of the African They may not want the paper, but they want the
American adults surveyed—24 percent—say they get news from Black media news. And the Black press is needed more than
outlets, while a third say they get news from a mélange of sources, including ever, and it has more power than ever before, be-
local and national outlets, social media sites, friends, and family acquaintances. cause the Black press now, for the first time, has
This rough profile seems aligned with how most Americans piece together their global distribution through technology.”
regular news diet. But Richard Prince, a veteran African
The Pew report also notes, how- American journalist who since 2002 has run
ever, that nearly 63 percent of those Journal-isms, a website that monitors diver-
polled believe news coverage of Black sity issues in the news industry, says much of
people is more negative than news Black media is struggling to keep up with the
In the bad old about other racial and ethnic groups. demand for faster, better news coverage of
days of Jim Crow, And at least half the people surveyed their communities.
Black-owned news- say the news they see and hear about “Historically, Black news outlets have talked
Black people is limited to “certain about emphasizing positive images on their
papers reinforced segments” of their communities and pages,” Prince says. “It goes back to this idea
African Americans’ misses important information that that we shouldn’t put all this bad stuff out there,
collective identity could bring balance and perspective because mainstream papers are always empha-
and self-worth. to their stories. Which sounds a lot sizing things in our community like crime,
like the same complaints that ce- guns, and unemployment. But your main task
mented Black readers’ age-old loyalty isn’t to be positive. Your task is to deliver the
to Black-owned-and-operated news outlets. news. And there are ways to engage these so-
Those perceptions may not be as deeply embedded as they called ‘negative’ issues in a positive, proactive
once were. But Geraldine Moriba, who worked for CNN, PBS, way that lets your readers, the community,
NBC, and other television networks before moving to digital know you’re serving their interests.”
media, says there is still a need for Black outlets such as TheGrio Denise Barnes remembers her father, Calvin
to convey the full and diverse voice of her community. Rolark, the founding publisher of The Washington
“My biggest challenge was the daily editorial call at places Informer, insisting to her that the paper publish
like CNN,” Moriba says. “Most of the time, I was the only positive news. “I’ve thought about it,” she says.
one at the meeting pitching stories about people of color, de- “And I say to myself, ‘We’re a weekly newspaper,
fending the value of those stories, sometimes even explaining and especially in a time like today, if we were
why they’re stories. Even though I knew my own experience to put out on the front page of our paper on
was unique, I was still trying to explain the experiences of Thursday that someone was killed, or five people
other Black people in a way that would get them picked up were shot, people are going to want to know by
34
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024
squeeze
next Thursday, ‘Well, which people were shot, (Thompson, continued from page 31)
play
and who was the killer?’ Well, we can’t keep up did not gain widespread reach. (Look no further than Fox
with that news. But what we can keep up with is News to confirm that any company or person who discusses
the work the community is doing to engage the or depicts disabled identities in a positive light is at risk of
problem of violence in our neighborhoods, which being lambasted.) As a result, outlets that give space to dis-
is the kind of thing that doesn’t get reported [in abled voices may face more resistance from the public. The
mainstream papers]. We’ve talked about and cov- prospect of an outlet being pressured to reduce, shift, and/or
ered marches and demonstrations against police abandon inclusive storytelling is a scary one.
violence in our community years before George There is also the safety of the writers. The risk of being
Floyd. That may not be a ‘positive’ story per se, targeted for harassment as a disabled individual remains
but it is a reflection of our community actively high. Keah Brown, a disabled Black woman who’s a freelance
seeking solutions to the problems that lead to journalist, told me recently that after she wrote an essay for
violence. Which makes the story ‘positive,’ but it Inverse about how superhero stories have a disability prob-
doesn’t ignore the ‘negative’ that exists, because lem, she “received actual death threats and slews of e-mails
we live it.” calling me all sorts of ableist and racist slurs.” I, like many
As another example of this impulse, Prince disabled people with Internet footprints, have been similarly
cited “Beyond the Barrel of the Gun,” an ongoing harassed. Magazines, newspapers, and media websites that
series of articles in the New York Amsterdam News remain silent and unprepared for this will face consequences
investigating the root causes of gun violence in when it comes to acquiring and retaining multiply marginal-
communities of color. Backed by the Google ized writers.

T
News Initiative Equity Fund, the series exempli-
fies what Prince characterizes as a “bright spot” hroughout my career, i
of foundation grants made available to Black have been lucky to work
news outlets. with outlets that have “I received actual
“Everybody knows there are news deserts transformed the freelanc- death threats and
everywhere, not just in the Black community,” ing experience for dis-
Prince says. “But the problem for me isn’t that abled writers by recognizing that
slews of e-mails
[Black outlets] don’t have the money to do this they can offer an undeniable value calling me all
work. The problem is that, overall, the standards to journalism. Some of those web- sorts of ableist
for the Black press aren’t the same as they are sites include Teen Vogue and Prism. and racist slurs.”
in the mainstream press. For instance, when a But the one that feels closest to my —Keah Brown, disabled freelance journalist and author
Black newspaper reported that Tyler Perry had heart is Bitch magazine, the first
bought BET, it was portrayed as a done deal. website that gave me an opportunity to interview one of my favorite celebrities,
And then it turned out it wasn’t a done deal and Rachel True. It was my first celebrity interview and unrelated to the disability
they embarrassed themselves. You’ve got to have writing I am typically given a lane for.
editors around to flag these things down.” Writing about something other than disability rights—one of the few topics
Linn Washington Jr., who served as execu- editors often trust disabled writers to cover—has become a privilege when it
tive editor of the historically Black Philadelphia shouldn’t be. Ableism has put the onus on disabled writers to correct the record
Tribune between 1993 and 1995 and still works about our lived realities. Bitch did that for so many of us before it ceased operat-
as a correspondent there, has found other frus- ing in June of 2022, and its loss continues to be felt. The closures of progressive
trations in trying to do the basics of community outlets in the past few years have been difficult for everyone in journalism, but for
news gathering. multiply marginalized people, the few opportunities we started with are now even
“It’s a fact that we in the community don’t al- fewer. Many of us have been left wondering where we can receive editorial care.
ways respect our media,” Washington says. “I’ve For those of us in the industry, the questions about where journalism will
found Black people who’ll believe the Inquirer be in five or 10 years are ever-present. And given the ableism and misguidance
[Philadelphia’s major news outlet] before they’d from uninformed editors who handle disability-centered content, the cesspool of
believe the Tribune.” comment sections, and the possibility of being doxxed, many of us are weighing
Despite such frustrations—and the failure of whether it is actually worth it. Amid the revival of interest in blogging with tools
mainstream networks like MSNBC to routinely like Substack and Tiny Letter, the choice of writing for oneself as many of us did
include representatives from Black media on their a decade ago is looking more appealing, despite the financial risk it poses.
programs—Washington values papers like the As a social worker, I have always been motivated to support not only myself
Tribune that manage to survive despite the obsta- but others. My vision for my future as a Black disabled writer includes working
cles. Barnes, whose Informer has nine full-time with newsroom leaders to address the lack of stories about and by disabled folks,
employees and 11 freelancers, likewise believes while still writing for outlets that respect my voice—and, importantly, using my
there will always be a place for Black news outlets. contacts to support and leverage the work of disabled writer colleagues.
“It’s a matter of trust,” she says. “It’s like This is a critical moment for journalism that will determine not only its
being home. Sometimes we don’t always value fate in terms of legitimacy and relevance, but also in regard to who is afforded
home, but it’s that place where the people the chance to tell their stories. Prioritizing free speech, facts, and ethics in our
who are writing about us, photographing us, narratives and revitalizing an industry in a ghastly era are the responsibilities
editorializing about our issues—they know us. not only of disabled people like me, but of all of us—writers, editors, outlets,
Because they are us.” N donors, and readers. N
35
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

ANTI - MONOPOLY
Anti-Monopoly Beginning in
the 1970s, the
Federal Trade
Commission gave
up on its mission
to protect
consumers and
competition. Then
Lina Khan took
charge of the
Bryce Covert agency and turned
it on its head.

he inaugural anti-monopoly summit, convened in may in washing- been the sole focus of antitrust enforc-
ton, D.C., by the left-leaning nonprofit American Economic Liberties ers for the past 50 years, she said, but
Project, was sold out; latecomers had to stand along the walls. The also whether entrepreneurs can start
video that kicked off the event was the stuff of political campaign rallies. new businesses and whether workers
Loud, upbeat music played over footage of President Joe Biden signing are receiving good wages and benefits.
executive orders aimed at promoting competition. Other members of his admin- Biden’s decision to elevate Khan to
istration appeared too; prominently featured among them was Lina Khan, the the chair of the FTC “put her in a very
Federal Trade Commission’s youngest-ever chair. Just six years unique position to propel this agenda
earlier, Khan was a law school student writing controversial forward in ways that no one else could,”
papers that took on corporate behemoths. says Darren Bush, an antitrust expert
The members of what has been called the neo-Brandeisian and professor at the University of Hous-
movement—named for Louis Brandeis, the ardent anti- ton Law Center. From her current post,
monopolist Supreme Court justice—were feeling victorious. Khan has reclaimed the agency’s exist-
In the span of just a handful of years, their arguments about the ing powers to propose new rules that
urgent need to revive antitrust enforcement to ensure a fairer could net workers hundreds of billions
and more robust economy had worked their way up from the of dollars in increased wages; revamped
pages of law journals and lefty publi- its scrutiny of mergers with the aim of
cations to the halls of federal power. unleashing a crackdown; and even gone
And there is perhaps no more strik- after Amazon. But she has also become
ing example of that movement’s me- the movement’s lightning rod. As of
“If everybody in teoric rise than Khan’s appointment May, The Wall Street Journal had run 76
the anti-monopoly shortly after Biden took office. “If ev- editorials, op-eds, and letters to the edi-
group had to pick erybody in the anti-monopoly group tor criticizing Khan during her two-year
had had to pick someone to lead the tenure; other Biden officials who have
someone to lead the FTC, we would have picked Lina,” pushed similar policies, such as former
FTC, we would have says Stacy Mitchell, a co–executive special assistant to the president for
picked Lina.” director of the advocacy group the competition and tech policy Tim Wu
—Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “To and Department of Justice Antitrust Di-
the surprise of everyone, especially vision Assistant Attorney General Jona-
reformers, one of the converts [to than Kanter, have not received the same
their movement] was Joe Biden.” treatment. And Khan’s time is limited:
Khan was both a member of the audience and a keynote Her term expires next September, and
speaker at the summit. Wearing the kelly green blazer she although she can continue to serve until
often dons for public events, with little makeup and her dark someone is confirmed to take her spot,
hair pulled back haphazardly, she appeared relaxed onstage as under a Republican president she stands
she talked about her work at the FTC. One of her priorities, little chance of remaining as chair.
she said, was to ensure that antitrust policies are pursued “in Senator Amy Klobuchar, who
a way that’s benefiting everybody.” That doesn’t just mean spoke at the May conference, rattled
concern for whether consumers face higher prices, which has off a list of anti-monopoly bills she has
36 ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON
 It was during Khan’s time at Yale that the
revived antitrust movement started gaining trac-
tion. Americans’ wages were barely growing
despite low unemployment, and scholars made
the case that “monopsony” power was one rea-
son why. Monopsony—in contrast to its cousin,
monopoly—impacts workers rather than con-
sumers: A company has monopsony power when
it squeezes out competitors and leaves so few
other employment opportunities that workers
get locked into their jobs and can’t demand bet-
ter treatment. Then, in 2016, Senator Elizabeth
Warren gave energy to the movement with a
keynote speech on antitrust at a New America
conference. She would later make it a core part
of her 2020 presidential campaign.
It was also during her time at Yale that Khan
pending. “We have to stop admiring the problem,” she implored. Despite the became famous, or infamous, depending on
sense of triumph, there was also a question hanging over the conference: Can whom you ask. At age 27, she published “Ama-
this movement generate enough concrete change to permanently reanimate an zon’s Antitrust Paradox,” an unusually digestible
agency—and a political agenda—that has been moribund for decades? law school paper that argued that even though

B
Amazon held prices down, it was still engag-
orn in london, lina khan moved to the united states with her ing in monopolistic behavior by elbowing out
family when she was 11, and she retains no trace of a British accent. competitors and swallowing up market share.
Her parents are from Pakistan; her father works as a consultant, at It “quickly and somewhat unexpectedly became
one point for a large Indian online gaming company, and her mother about as famous as any [student academic paper]
worked in healthcare and information services. Khan and her two has ever become,” Grewal said in his statement.
brothers went to public school in a suburb of New York City. At age 15, she wrote The inspiration for the paper had come to Khan
a story for her school’s paper about a nearby Starbucks that wasn’t allowing stu- while she was at New America. As part of her re-
dents to sit down, which got picked up by The New York Times. search into consolidation in different industries,
When I sit down on a plush, blue leather couch across from her in her cav- she talked to small and medium-size businesses
ernous FTC office in October, Khan tells me she was radicalized by the 2008 that sold their products on Amazon, as well as to
financial crisis. At the time, she was a sophomore at Williams College, studying investors, analysts, and others. It was “hundreds
political theory. It “struck me as a very sharp illustration of how policymaking and hundreds of hours of those conversations,”
gone awry can really be catastrophic for people’s lives,” she Khan says, that showed her how Amazon “was
says. She graduated in 2010 into an economy still mired in the walking headfirst into the shortcomings of our
aftereffects of the Great Recession. current antitrust regime.”
Listening in: Khan,
seen here with Princi- Khan got hooked on antitrust “accidentally,” she tells me. Rohit Chopra, now the director of the Con-
pal Deputy Assistant Drawn to journalism, she landed at New America, a D.C. think sumer Financial Protection Bureau, was also a
Attorney General Doha tank, joining a group that was working on industry consolida- speaker at the anti-monopoly summit. In 2018,
Mekki (right), held tion and antitrust enforcement well before those issues were he had come to the FTC with three other new
a series of listening
sessions to hear from
on the national agenda. “My job was really to document the commissioners and found an agency that “had
ordinary people about consolidation and document what the effects of it had been,” fallen into deep decay and disarray over four de-
the impact of mergers she says. So she dove deep into specific markets, including book cades,” Chopra said in his remarks. “The agency
on their lives. publishing, commodities like grain and silver, and the airline had largely lost its credibility as a regulator and
industry. Her work instilled in her a deep sense of not only how enforcer.” He soon hired Khan to work with
much consolidation had occurred in the economy over the past him at the FTC as a legal fellow to uncover the
40 years, but also how policy choices had allowed it to happen. agency’s past and “lay out a new vision.” With
After her stint at New America, Khan chose to attend Yale her help, Chopra published an official comment
Law School rather than take a job that September describing how to restore the
as a commodities reporter at The agency’s enforcement authority simply by reas-
Wall Street Journal. “It was a close serting the powers Congress originally vested in
call,” she says. But she worried that it—powers that had been ignored for decades.
“Khan understood beat reporting would force her to In 2019, after leaving the FTC to teach
deep in her bones stray from antitrust. She “already at Columbia Law School, Khan was hired by
that what she was had her own voice and her own David Cicilline, then a member of Congress
commitments in law school,” David from Rhode Island and the chair of the House
doing was not some Singh Grewal, a professor at the UC subcommittee on antitrust, to work with him
theoretical, eso- Berkeley School of Law who taught on what would become a landmark investigation
teric argument.” Khan at Yale, said in a statement he into Big Tech. Khan contributed to a 400-
—Former representative David Cicilline shared with reporters. page report laying out how large technology
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squeeze
companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and agency’s policies and priorities, says Spencer Weber Waller,
play
Facebook had crushed their competitors, which the director of the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies
led to a bipartisan package of bills. “She under- at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.
stood deep in her bones that what she was doing Khan is unlike any of the chairs who have preceded her
was not just some sort of theoretical, esoteric at the FTC, at least in recent history. At 34, she is not only
argument,” Cicilline says. the youngest person to chair the
The FTC’s headquarters in D.C.’s Federal agency but also the first person of
Triangle is a majestic building adorned with South Asian descent. She’s the fourth
enormous columns, in view of both the Capitol woman to hold the position on a
and the Washington Monument. Its location non-acting basis. She also represents
in the center of power is a vestige of the cachet an ideological break with the recent As of May, The Wall
Congress intended for the agency. “The FTC, past. Previous heads came from pri- Street Journal had
as originally designed, was supposed to be the vate law firms and expected to return run 76 editorials,
overseer of policy,” says Bush, the antitrust to private practice afterward. “That op-eds, and letters
expert. It was created in 1914, although its revolving door creates a lot of in- to the editor crit-
predecessor, the Bureau of Corporations, was centives to not disrupt” how things
formed in 1903, at a time when antitrust issues work, Bush says. Under both Repub-
icizing Khan during
were very much in the public consciousness. lican and Democratic administra- her two-year tenure.
Brandeis was on the Supreme Court; Theo- tions, the FTC frequently waved big
dore Roosevelt, famous for busting corporate mergers through, allowing American
“trusts,” was in the White House, followed by industries to become more and more concentrated. In 2015,
Woodrow Wilson, who continued that mis- under President Barack Obama, the FTC announced that it
sion. A look around Khan’s office confirms that was going to essentially kneecap its own enforcement actions
public sentiment. The walls are lined with anti- against unfair competition by narrowly employing the stand-
monopoly political cartoons from the early 20th alone authority that Congress had granted it to act outside
Movement makers:
century; the one hanging over the couch she of specific antitrust laws. Khan and her fellow commissioners Rohit Chopra, now
sat on when we spoke depicts trusts as pirates rescinded that statement a few weeks into her tenure. head of the Consumer

N
forcing Uncle Sam to walk the plank. An early Financial Protection
version of Monopoly—a game developed by ot only is khan reviving the ftc’s powers, but Bureau, recruited
Khan to the FTC to
the feminist and anti-capitalist Elizabeth Magie she is working hard to shed the agency’s techno- “lay out a new vision”
Phillips in the early 1900s to demonstrate the cratic past and invite the public in. She regularly for the agency.
evils of concentrated wealth—sat on the coffee holds open commission meetings in which anyone
table between us. can speak directly to the commissioners and has
“Monopoly was part of the everyday po- opened public dockets that allow Americans to submit comments about the unfair
litical discourse of Americans,” says Mitchell. business practices they’re experiencing. She has also held a series of listening ses-
But starting in the 1970s, the concept got less sions, something that was infrequent under many previous chairs. At a recent ses-
notice from politicians and the press. Mitchell sion in Colorado about the proposed merger between the Kroger and Albertsons
suggests that, paradoxically, the success of the grocery chains, she heard from workers who had suffered under other such deals.
antitrust movement meant “They promised us we would keep our jobs.
monopolies became less of a That we would have better benefits, a pension
problem for the public; she for retirement,” said Christine Martinez, who
also faults the FTC for “re- worked at a grocery store that was sold as part
ced[ing] into the bureaucratic of the Safeway-Albertsons merger. Two months
shadows” as its enforcement later, she said, “I was told our stores were clos-
actions became more techni- ing.” When Khan asked the audience if anyone
cal. The growing public apa- there supported the merger and wanted to speak,
thy allowed President Ronald the only response was laughter.
Reagan’s administration to “We hear from everybody, from gig drivers
put out policies reflecting the to hotel franchise owners to parents who have
views of the conservative le- lost their children because they had to ration
gal scholar Robert Bork, who insulin,” Khan says. She joined striking Hol-
argued that mergers and ac- lywood workers in July, connecting their com-
quisitions would benefit the plaints to consolidation in the industry.
SAMUEL CORUM / SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES

economy so long as they didn’t lead to higher Meanwhile, there has been an equally energetic backlash. The Wall Street Jour-
prices for consumers. nal has run an average of one piece against her every 10 days. In January, it said she
Khan is determined to throw the FTC’s had gone from “aspiring renegade to establishment phony” emblematic of D.C.’s
doors back open and reclaim the tools it once “nonstop mendacity and cynicism.” In February, it accused her of abusing her
employed, and she now has the power to do power and engaging in “bias and lack of transparency,” concluding that “the deck
so. The other commissioners vote on which is stacked against business under Ms. Khan.” In March, it called her “a Machia-
cases to bring and which rules to propagate, but vellian who muddies transparent processes and trashes precedent.” Many people I
the chair has “tremendous influence” on the spoke with said it’s hard not to tie the relentless attack to who Khan is—a woman,
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play especially a young woman of color. One of the things fueling health aide, signed a contract with an agency that
the criticism of her, Bush says, “is the unspoken fact that she is had a six-month noncompete clause because she
a minority woman.” Jonathan Kanter, the assistant AG, doesn’t needed the work. If she were to get an offer of
attract the same level of vitriol, even though the two frequently better pay at another agency, she is “barred from
appear together at events and speak from the same playbook. moving to the higher paying company,” Ramsey
It’s hard to square the venom hurled at wrote in a comment. It’s “unfair. It stacks the
Khan with what she’s like in person. Eliza- system even more against working people.”
beth Warren first met her when she invited Khan didn’t stop there. The FTC and the De-
Khan and others to dinner in her Senate of- partment of Justice have long maintained a doc-
fice while Khan was still a law student who ument, known as the “merger guidelines,” that
“We’re not going had just published her paper on Amazon. gives companies a road map of sorts regarding
back to the pre- “The conversation was terrific,” Warren what kinds of deals will be blocked or approved.
Lina status quo. recalls: Khan was the first person to ex- In the 1960s, the guidelines created “these bright
Full stop.” plain to her “how something could appear lines,” Mitchell says—for example, an acquisition
—Senator Elizabeth Warren to be free to the consumer and yet cause by a company with a certain level of market share
significant injury both to the consumer and would routinely be blocked. In the 1980s, under
to competition.” Despite the waves she is Reagan, the agency did a 180 and issued new
making, Spencer Weber Waller says, Khan “is a conservative guidelines that reflected the assumption that
person in terms of her decision-making style. She’s deliberate, mergers would be denied only if they were likely
she’s very precise, she wants a lot of information.” to raise prices. Subsequent revisions, even under

K
Democrats, went further down that road.
han insists that she’s not inventing new pow- In July, Khan and Kanter released a pro-
Comrade in arms: ers for the FTC; instead, she’s “adhering to the posed update outlining the ways they plan to
Assistant Attorney rule of law.” In addition to the Sherman Act crack down on consolidation and anticompetitive
General Jonathan (1890), which cracks down on monopolies and mergers. It lays out 13 ways that the FTC and
Kanter, another
member of the anticompetitive interstate trade practices, and the the Justice Department could determine whether
“neo-Brandeisians,” Clayton Act (1914), which prohibits anticompetitive mergers a merger violates existing laws about economic
has attracted less and acquisitions, the FTC enforces the Federal Trade Com- competition, and it names not just consumers
vitriol than Khan. mission Act (1914), which gives the agency broad authority as possible victims of an anticompetitive merger
to go after companies that engage in “unfair methods of com- but workers too. If an employer is so big that it
petition.” While the agency is limited in the remedies it can can “reduce or freeze wages” or “cut benefits [or
seek—it can issue cease-and-desist orders, but not fines or criminal penalties—it make schedules] much less predictable” through
has “a broad range of powers” to regulate corporations, Waller says, including market share, Khan said at a webinar shortly after
the ability to make rules that give enforcement more teeth. “The FTC should the guidelines were released, that would make it
have quite strong powers to enforce against unfair methods of competition and anticompetitive. The revision highlights the ways
to call them illegal,” says Eleanor Fox, a that technology compa-
professor emerita at New York University nies try to squash rivals by
School of Law. Yet the FTC’s focus since buying up potential future
the 1970s has been on “efficiency” and competitors and using their
consumer welfare, neither of which is scale to overwhelm com-
based in the laws governing the agency. petition. It also calls out
Khan is looking back to what those vertical mergers of com-
earlier laws actually say. “We are fully acti- panies that don’t compete
vating the tools and the laws that Congress directly but operate in the
charged us with administering,” she told same supply chain as well
the audience at the anti-monopoly summit. as companies that engage
That’s been true throughout the past year, in multiple acquisitions.
which has seen the agency take a series of The changes are meant
significant actions. The first was a rule pro- to discourage companies
posed in January that would ban noncom- from pursuing these kinds
pete clauses, which prohibit workers from of deals while shifting the
VALERIE PLESCH / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

taking jobs at similar businesses. In proposing the new rule, the FTC employed the way future FTC commissioners, as well as judges,
stand-alone power that Khan’s predecessors swore off in 2015. The agency estimates view what kinds of mergers are permissible.
that if the rule were enacted, it would raise wages by nearly $300 billion a year by The FTC has targeted a variety of mergers
allowing workers to move more freely between jobs for better pay and benefits. under Khan. In a recent case against an anesthe-
The proposed rule, which is relatively easy to read, has gotten over 26,000 siology practice in Texas, it took the unusual step
comments, many of them from workers who have been stifled by an inability to of suing a private equity firm that employed what
switch jobs. John Ludlow, a urologist working under a noncompete clause, wrote: it called a “roll-up scheme” by buying other prac-
“If I left my practice I would have to take my children out of their school, move tices in the state, alleging that they were working
them away from their friends and established extracurricular activities, solely due to together to consolidate the industry and drive up
the restrictive covenant in place that is remarkably onerous.” Eve Ramsey, a home prices. The FTC has also attempted to block a
40
 number of mergers, such as the ones proposed
between the pharmaceutical companies Amgen
and Horizon Therapeutics as well as the medical
technology companies Illumina and Grail.
In September, Khan took aim at her white
whale: Amazon. The FTC, along with 17 state
attorneys general, charged the company with
breaking antitrust laws by using its monopoly
power to “inflate prices, degrade quality, and stifle
innovation for consumers and businesses.” Rath-
er than claim that Amazon is breaking laws by
unfairly holding prices down, as Khan argued in
her law school article, the suit contends that the
company uses its size to increase prices and keep
competitors out of the market. The argument is
based on “a framework that’s more traditional
than radical,” says Fox. That’s a benefit, she adds:
“If they prove the allegations, they should win,
even under our very conservative law.”
Some have criticized this approach. But Khan
says that writing a paper as a student is very differ- appealed to the courts,” Fox says. And while judges will typically heed the merger
ent from bringing a lawsuit as a government offi- guidelines that Khan and Kanter updated, it will take time for them to be fully em-
cial. At the FTC, she was able to issue subpoenas braced; some judges may resist them completely. Biden has been nominating new
to peek under Amazon’s hood. She also notes that judges at a rapid clip, but the Senate hasn’t been able to confirm them at the same
monopolies go through “a life cycle.” A new com- pace. Then there’s the current Supreme Court, the most pro-business court in the
pany trying to gain market share rapidly may use country’s history. Any of Khan’s reforms that end up there stand little chance.
different tactics to squash competition than the In a functioning system, the FTC’s court losses would prompt lawmakers to
ones it deploys as a full-blown monopoly. Had the act. That’s what happened after the Justice Department lost a case to block a steel
agency brought a lawsuit against Amazon earlier, merger in 1948; two years later, Congress passed an amendment to the Clayton
she argues, it would have probably looked very Act that applied it to vertical as well as horizontal mergers. Lawmakers could
different. Regardless, the FTC’s job is to “ensure clarify that antitrust laws aren’t focused solely on consumer prices and that market
that markets are working fairly and competitive- efficiency alone isn’t grounds for a legal merger. They could
ly,” Khan tells me, especially when it comes to set some thresholds for industry concentration and empower
Power of the press:
companies that have “become too big to care.” agencies to go after new forms of monopoly behavior.

W
In this political
One reason some in the movement remain optimistic is cartoon published
ill the changes khan has made that antitrust is not championed only by Democrats. Khan in 1904, Standard
at the FTC endure beyond her received 21 Republican votes when she was confirmed to the Oil wraps its many
term as chair? “We’re not go- FTC. Antitrust legislation aimed at consolidation in tech was tentacles around
industries, the US
ing back to the pre-Lina status introduced in 2021 on a bipartisan basis. Republican senators Capitol, and the
quo,” Warren says with a laugh. Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance have embraced the antitrust White House.
“Full stop. Lina has reminded everyone that cause. Still, on the right and the left, the number of lawmakers
the emperor has no clothes in antitrust law.” committed to these issues is small. Warren lambasted Repub-
Everyday people can see themselves in what licans as “terrible” on the issue, even if a “handful” have gotten
she’s doing: She’s taken on “real-life stuff that on board. Equally as troubling, she
makes a difference,” Waller says. Mitchell notes notes, “Democrats are only some-
that a number of trade associations, from farm- what better.”
ers to pharmacists, are now spending time and Khan herself is thinking about
resources lobbying on antitrust issues. Some of what the FTC’s future will be once In a functioning
the people watching what Khan is doing will also she is no longer chair. One part system, the FTC’s
be inspired to go to law school and pursue her of ensuring things are done dif- court losses would
way of thinking on antitrust; once low in terms ferently, she says, is the work she’s
of enrollment, such courses are now filling up. overseen to update the agency’s
prompt Congress to
But even if the public has changed its mind, enforcement mechanisms. Another update antitrust
the judiciary hasn’t yet. In January, a judge ruled is ensuring that the public under- law for new forms
against the FTC in its lawsuit to prevent Meta, stands how much economic consol- of monopoly power.
the owner of Facebook, from buying the virtual- idation affects their lives. “People
JOSEPH KEPPLER / PUCK

reality app maker Within, and in July a judge are recognizing the ways in which
barred the agency from delaying Microsoft’s ac- outsized, unchecked corporate private power can harm not
quisition of the video game maker Activision just our economy but also our liberty,” she says. “That means
Blizzard. “Anything the Federal Trade Commis- that whoever has the fortune and privilege to be in these
sion does, if it’s an order or a judgment, can be positions going forward will also be held accountable.” N
41
Local news has
been destroyed.
Here’s how we
can revive it.

BUILD
Build
BACK
Back
BETTER
Better John Nichols
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024
squeeze
play

ver the past decade, the most useful construct for explaining Statesman, a traditional daily print and
the crisis that is playing out at the intersection of American media digital newspaper. “We usually had a
and democracy has been that of the “news desert.” Popularized reporter from the Chronicle, our alter-
through the groundbreaking work of researchers like those at the native weekly, and another from NPR,
University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustain- some television people. It was a crowd.”
ability in Local Media, the idea was instantly recognizable to people living in But that was then. “By the time I was
small towns like the one where I grew up, in rural southeastern Wisconsin: As leaving [in 2022], there were a lot of
old-media outlets collapsed and new media failed to fill the void, news in vast meetings where the media table was
stretches of the United States was going uncovered. Over time, the definition empty,” Casar tells me.
was expanded to recognize the decline of newspapers and other forms of media Casar talks about the decay of lo-
in metropolitan areas, where—just as in rural America—people were being cal media in Austin, a university town
deprived of “the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that and state capital at the heart of one of
feeds democracy at the grassroots level,” the center warns. America’s most rapidly growing regions,
The “news desert” framing has proved to be enormously valuable, not just with the same sense of loss as the resi-
for journalists and media reform activists but also for political writers trying to dents of areas such as Hemphill County,
explain why former president Donald Trump—despite 91 criminal charges and Tex., where the local weekly newspaper
ever more fascistic rhetoric—currently leads most recent 2024 general election stopped publishing in March, or Union
polls. When people get all their information from Fox News, right-wing talk Grove, Wis., where I grew up and start-
radio, and Elon Musk’s X—with no tempering by a local outlet that offers some ed working for the now-defunct Union
variety of reporting and opinion—is it any wonder that Trump’s strongest sup- Grove Sun. “It’s one of the saddest things
port has come from news deserts? I’ve seen in my time in politics,” Casar
Yet, despite all that it has added to the national conversation, the concept of says of the hollowing out of journalism
the news desert as it’s currently understood is due for retirement. That’s because in Austin. “It’s a huge issue for this city
the idea can no longer adequately and, I’d say, for the whole country.”
describe what has happened in the The great mesh of local media that
United States. The term “news des- underpinned our civic life—made up
ert” implies that, somewhere, there of thousands of newsrooms that tried,
The current concept is a news oasis—some pocket of the however imperfectly, however insuffi-
of the news desert country where local journalism is ciently, to tell the story of the United
can no longer ad- thriving. But while some places are States—has been torn so violently that
better off than others, the process it no longer functions. Our democratic
equately describe of desertification has spread across safety net, which was spread over the
what has happened the whole country. This is not an long history of the republic, often with
to journalism in isolated, or an isolatable, phenom- massive federal government support, is
the United States. enon. America has become a coast- now too tattered to provide anything
to-coast news desert. more than a vague and increasingly un-
It is neither wise nor accurate to reliable promise of protection against
think of the death of local news as a phenomenon associated propaganda and autocracy.
with the most neglected corners of America, be they rural or Unless media advocates and policy-
urban. “People think news deserts are only in flyover coun- makers focus on addressing this existen-
try,” says Samuel Freedman, a veteran newspaper reporter tial reality, there will never be a response
and former New York Times columnist. “Local news, local to the crisis of journalism that is suffi-
journalism, is disappearing everywhere.” cient in vision and scope to address the

T
void that is swallowing up civil society.
he crisis is becoming every bit as real in prosper- Yet the depth of this crisis is still too
ous urban centers as it is in the abandoned factory frequently neglected in the discussion
towns of the Rust Belt or the dusty county seats of about saving what’s left of journalism.

W
the Dakotas. Just ask Congressman Greg Casar, a
Texas Democrat who represents two of the most hile there is consider-
dynamic metropolitan areas in the United States: Austin and able recognition that
San Antonio. the old, pre-Internet
John Nichols is a In 2014, when he was elected to the Austin City Coun- models for funding
national affairs cil, Casar found a robust media spotlight trained on him. journalism, which relied
correspondent for “We usually had two people from the Statesman at most on advertising and mass low-cost sub-
The Nation. council meetings,” he says, referring to the Austin American- scriptions, are bankrupt, there is still

ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIÀ FRUITÓS

43
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

an air of unreality to the proposals They’re also struggling. “Many digital

for finding new sources of support. start-ups have trouble gaining enough sub-
Even now, the discussion defers to scribers and funding to achieve long-term sus-
What’s needed is wishful thinking about multiplying tainability,” Abernathy explains. “Since 2018,
nothing less than a the number of ego-driven billion- the number of new local news digital start-ups
aire buyers for prestige papers like established annually has roughly equaled the
Marshall Plan for The Washington Post and the Los number that go dark.” The same goes for other
journalism. That Angeles Times; about philanthropic alternatives to the traditional daily newspaper.
requires massive interventions; and about Congress “Most ethnic and minority-owned media have
public investment. providing tax benefits for ailing suffered from the same dramatic decline in
newspapers—even those owned by advertising revenue as mainstream newspapers.
the hedge funds that have gobbled As a result, more than 150 longstanding ethnic
up local media outlets in search of a news operations closed during the pandemic,”
quick buck. While there’s merit in trying some of these ideas, Abernathy says. “And public broadcasting out-
none of them can begin to solve the problem. lets—especially local NPR news stations—are
The same goes for other worthy suggestions. Breaking up underfunded…many metro areas have not been
existing media conglomerates is a great idea. So, too, are reg- able to replace the missing newspapers with
ulatory interventions that address the damage done by social digital or broadcast alternatives, and most sub-
media giants such as Facebook, which grab up local journal- urban and rural communities that lose a local
ism without fair compensation. And, yes, tax credits for hiring newspaper do not get a replacement.”

O
journalists will help a bit in some markets. But these steps will
never establish a local and regional journalism that is strong f course, there are still ways for
enough to give Americans the information and insights they wealthy and powerful people to get
need to govern their own affairs. information. But for the vast major-
What’s needed is nothing less than a Marshall Plan for ity of Americans, says Craig Aaron,
journalism. That requires massive public investment in not- the co-CEO of the media reform
Only a start: Curbing
the power of strip for-profit news outlets—primarily but not exclusively public group Free Press, “even in urban centers with
miners like Dean media—so that it rivals what’s seen in countries that rank well multiple news outlets, there’s a dearth of local
Singleton and zillion- above the United States in the Economist Group’s Democra- news coverage. There have been so many cuts
aire tycoons like Jeff cy Index, such as Germany and Norway. Or, if you’re looking to newsrooms. There are so few journalists
Bezos is good—but
it’s not enough.
for an American model, to levels not seen since content-neu- working to provide local coverage, to provide a
tral postal subsidies led to a proliferation of local news outlets local perspective, that the national conversation
in the first decades of the republic. is overwhelming the local conversation.”
Unfortunately, the chances of that happening in our polarized political envi- That local conversation involves not just
ronment will remain nonexistent until there is a much deeper recognition of the reports from Main Street but coverage of
crisis—and the need for urgent action. many of the great issues of
The argument for hitting the panic but- the day. Think of how many
ton is based not on speculation but on data. battles over book banning,
Newspapers that still maintain the larg- LGBTQI+ rights, and con-
est—and sometimes the only—newsrooms trol of school boards have
of consequence in communities across the taken place in small towns
country are disappearing at an exponential and suburbs in recent years.
rate. And the prospects for their replace- When there is robust lo-
ment by online experiments remain dim. cal journalism that is easi-
The United States is now losing an ly accessible and widely
average of 2.5 newspapers every week on distributed, it brings a sense
a trajectory that has seen the shuttering of of perspective and respect to
just under one-third of local print publi- the discourse. “When peo-
cations—many of which had at least tried ple get their news primarily
to develop a digital presence—since 2005. from national sources, they
During the same period, according to a are much more likely to see
new study written by Penelope Muse Ab- [journalists they] disagree
ernathy for Northwestern University’s State of Local News Project, 43,000 jour- with in a negative light,” says Freedman. Just
nalists lost their jobs, most of them reporters and editors for daily publications. as our elections are warped by congressional
No area in the United States is immune. “In terms of local news, New York gerrymandering, so our news is warped by the
BRANDON BELL / GETTY IMAGES

City really is a news desert,” says Freedman, noting not just the national focus of nationalization of political debate by old- and
The New York Times but the decline of the Daily News, which historically kept a new-media corporations that profit by pushing
close watch on local issues, and the weekly Village Voice. This is no slight on the Americans into camps that fear and, in many
stellar independent news start-ups that have worked hard to fill the void. But, cases, literally hate one another.
Freedman adds, “the online efforts haven’t gotten the penetration, even remotely. Yet most of those discussions miss the full
They’re for insiders.” reality of the concern that James Madison, the
44
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

essential author of the First Amendment protection for freedom million a year for the next five years certainly sounds impressive,
of the press, outlined 200 years ago: “A popular Government, it’s a drop in the bucket.
without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but What’s needed is spending on a whole other level. Germa-
a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” ny, for instance, funds public media at a rate of $142.42 per
What’s at stake is not just the loss in coverage of city coun- person. The United States, by comparison, spends $3.16 per
cil hearings and school board meetings. Without a lot more person, per year, on public broadcasting. Content-neutral,
journalism in a lot more places, the nationalization of the journalism-focused investment in existing public and com-
discourse will accelerate, the divisions will deepen, and the munity media is not the only fix for collapsing local news.
journalistic void will continue to be filled with political attack New media outlets of all kinds need to be developed, suggests
ads, lies, and propaganda. Aaron, especially in communities, rural and urban, “that never

T
had enough coverage.”
urning the tide will require a level of investment There’s no need to limit the vision of what might work. But
that billionaires and philanthropies are never going to there is a need for an honest understanding of the scope of the
make. There was much excitement in late 2023 over crisis—and the size of the investment that will be needed to
the announcement by Press Forward, a consortium of address it. The challenge is to create a political movement suf-
the MacArthur Foundation and 21 other donors, that ficient to advance solutions that are bold enough to ensure, as
it would invest $500 million over the next five years to revitalize Freedman puts it, that “journalism is no longer an abstraction”
local journalism. That sounds good, until you remember that for the vast majority of Americans. To do that, we’ve got to
back in 1985, when the Des Moines Register was fully staffed and recognize that the news desert is now nationwide. Providing the
covering Iowa with a seriousness that had won the paper 15 Pu- resources that are needed to make it blossom anew is essential
litzer Prizes, the newspaper sold for $165 million. While $100 for saving democracy. N

(Teachout, continued from page 21) tion rules will hurt innovation, but history What would such a nondiscrimination
He never drafted a bill along those lines, suggests the opposite: Antidiscrimination law look like in practice? The America On-
but with these same principles, we could. enabled a thriving communications eco- line Choice and Innovation Act, another
In fact, laws requiring that central- system free of centralized power, general bill by Klobuchar, would ban platforms like
ized infrastructure treat all people equal- dependency, and fear. Google, Amazon, and Apple from discrim-
ly are among the oldest regulations in A nondiscrimination rule, as applied inating “in the application or enforcement
human society. In the Roman Empire, to platforms, could take several forms. It of the terms of service…among similarly
“just price” laws prevented sellers from could mean a rule that companies can- situated business users in a manner that
charging more based on demand, regard- not discriminate based on the viewpoints would materially harm competition.” They
less of how much buyers would pay when of the content they’re required to carry. can still engage in content moderation,
the conditions allowed it. (Ferrymen, ac- There is no law prohibiting tech firms but they can’t use discrimination to exploit
cording to legend, could not enact surge from manipulating their platforms for their dominant position.
pricing on the Tiber!) their owner’s ideological To be clear, nondis-
These kinds of regulations have been or political ends—say, crimination is insufficient.
especially important in communications right before an election We should still separate
infrastructure. Nondiscrimination rules or during a critical mo- the ownership of social
are at the center of the early laws gov- ment of political debate. media from other com-
erning the post office. Since the Postal Google and Facebook, for ponents like messag-
Service Act of 1792, the post office has example, can suppress de- ing and slow down the
had a core obligation of equal access. The bates on corporate taxes, merger mania so that Big
Atlantic Cable Act, passed by Congress and publishers will take Tech can’t keep buying
in March 1857, required Great Britain note and generate fewer empires through acqui-
to agree on the “equality of rights among articles on such policies. sitions. There’s also the
the citizens of the United States in the use TikTok—owned by a Chinese company other part of the problem that needs to
of said communication and the lines of over which the Chinese state has veto be solved: a predatory business model.
telegraph.” The Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 power—can easily amplify voices that Klobuchar’s Journalism Competition and
extended the basic premise of nondiscrim- serve the interests of the Chinese govern- Preservation Act—which made it through
ination to the telegraph, telephone, and ment and hide those that are more critical. committee with bipartisan support but
wireless industries. In today’s climate, a nondiscrimination never saw a floor vote—would give small
Antidiscrimination rules have gov- principle for speech on tech platforms is news organizations (those with less than
erned each new revolutionary technology often seen as a right-wing idea. But Demo- 1,500 employees) the right to collective-
to protect the public from corporations crats and progressives have a chilling exam- ly bargain and negotiate with Big Tech,
seeking to use these technologies to be- ple of what the right to freely discriminate thereby allowing local news organizations
come despotic gatekeepers. The principle means: Elon Musk. When Musk bought to stand up to the technological bullies.
of equal access came to define and then Twitter, he made more users see his favorite In other words, to protect democracy
govern all the developments in informa- projects (and his own tweets) and sup- for the rest of us, we need a lot more anti-
tion infrastructure—until now. pressed voices with which he disagreed. He trust actions against the Goliaths—and an
I’m sure we’ll hear that antidiscrimina- turned the platform into his megaphone. antitrust exemption for the Davids. N
45
START the
Start THE Presses!
PRE S S E S! How to throw off the corporate shackles
and launch your own media company.
Kelsey McKinney & Aleksander Chan

This, but better:

Goodbye, bad cor-
porate thing that
you don’t run. Hello,
good indie thing that
you do run. (Details
of thing TBD.)
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS

S
o you want to start your own media company. in. The college newspaper did not have
This is a bad idea. We are qualified to say this because we have enough money. The pages of the print
done it. As founding members of two new, worker-owned media edition were chopped every quarter.
companies (Discourse Blog and Defector Media), we are begging you We paid our staff writers nothing. We
not to do this. Maybe open a bakery, or open a dog sanctuary, or even worked full-time, many of us piling
go back to law school! If it is too late for you—if you (like us) did not heed this up personal debt just to work there
warning and stuck by your silly little dreams of making the media ecosystem a in between classes. This, we thought,
healthier, more interesting place—then at least don’t repeat the mistakes others was “paying our dues.” It turned out
have made before you. to be the perfect preparation for the
You might have noticed that very few of the upstart publishers of the social burgeoning new-media industry!
media age have survived: Just in the past few years, companies like Bustle Digital After graduation, we made our way
Group have either closed entire publications (RIP again, Gawker) or, like HuffPost, to New York. We worked and wrote for
merged into the holdings of BuzzFeed (which itself has shuttered its news division). various blogs—from Gothamist to The
Things aren’t much better in legacy media: The Washington Post is owned by one of Awl to Fusion.net—that are now dead
the richest men in the world. Yet even though the paper’s operating costs amount or mere husks. We lived through the
to pocket change for Jeff Bezos, reporters at the Post still face near-annual rounds pivot to Facebook, the pivot to video,
of layoffs and buyouts. the pivot to uniques, the pivot to Goo-
In all likelihood, you’re among the thousands of journalists who have been gle News. None of these pivots made
canned in the past couple of decades as the Googles, Apples, and Facebooks of the our writing any better or our mental
world ate everyone’s lunch (and then some). The insane idea of starting, running, health any stronger. The pivots them-
and, God help you, living off the money you make from the media company you selves were bad business—for jour-
built yourself has its own appeal when the typical routes to a livelihood keep dis- nalism, if not for the platforms. The
appearing. Is it really a saner option to get back in line for one of the 12 jobs left companies we worked for lost money.
in journalism—only to get laid off two years later? We were laid off (more than once).
Or maybe you’ve survived the layoffs and are making ends Every single workplace we have ever
meet in your incredibly shrinking newsroom, with dwindling shared has gone down in flames. The
resources to do the work of two (or three or four or 16) peo- last jobs that we held at the same com-
ple, and have reached your breaking pany were at Gizmodo Media Group
point. Perhaps you’ve been toiling (later G/O Media) in 2019: Aleks at
for far too long as a permalancer, Splinter and Kelsey at Deadspin. We
subsisting on contracts from a pub- made a joke about how we’d be lucky if
We’re here to tell lisher who never seems to be able it lasted a year. Within six months, both
you that what we to bring you on full-time. Or you’re of our sites were dead—Splinter after
did might have freelancing, watching all the plac- being bled dry, stripped of resources,
es you used to pitch die slow and and thrown off a cliff overnight, and
seemed insane, but painful deaths, taking with them the Deadspin after C-suite editorial inter-
it was worth taking trickle of income you had left. ference so egregious that the entire
the leap. Here’s We started our own media com- staff quit en masse.
what we learned. panies after our newsroom was sold We recommend this process. Not
to private equity—chop shops for only will it cost you thousands of dol-
businesses, but the suits wear $800 lars in therapy bills, but it’s a great
down vests—and the workers were either let go or forced crash course in how not to run a media
to endure a torrent of bullshit that eventually compels you company. Who needs an MBA when
Kelsey McKin- to quit. We’re here to tell you that what we did might have you can watch a lot of doofuses with
ney is a writer seemed insane—but it was worth taking the leap. Here’s what MBAs drive perfectly profitable com-
and co-owner we learned. panies into the ground? You can’t buy
at Defector that kind of experience, but you will in
and the host of TO BEGIN, YOU MUST
fact pay for it.
the Normal FIRST BECOME CURSED

T
Gossip podcast. BE A POPULAR GENIUS
he real key to starting your own media company is

Y
Aleksander Chan
to become as traumatized as possible by the media. Our ou will need so many more
is the publisher
and co-owner of journey with the evils and dangers of the industry began things than you’ll realize,
Discourse Blog before either of us could legally drink. In the early 2010s, we but to get started, you really
and the former worked together at a college newspaper that (in retrospect) only need two things: (1) an idea for
editor in chief of projected a metaphorical blinking red sign that read “Do not what you want your company to be,
Splinter. go into journalism” on every wall of the basement we worked and (2) friends.
47
squeeze  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

play Does the idea need to be “good”? Hopefully! Would it LEARN ABOUT MONEY
help if you had a distinctive approach or point of view to

O
differentiate yourself? Sure. Mostly, though, it has to be a k, so you have an idea, and you have
framework you can see yourself living with for (ideally) a long friends. You’re an innovator, even. You
time. How do you get an idea for what your company should are the future of the media business!
be? Please return to step one. The Good start, but famously, businesses need
terror of working in the industry money. How are you going to pay for all this?
(or even reading anything from a How will you turn a profit? Subscriptions?
major newspaper or one of the few Ads? Car washes?
Think hard about blogs that still exist) will show you Should you find yourself in the enviable po-
who you want to put how many holes there are in the sition of being able to start your own company
your name next to media ecosystem. Surely one of free of conflict and rich in capital, then by all
them is interesting enough for you means, go ahead. But if you are not the progeny
on documents that to try and fill. Defector chose sports, of the elite, then you may have noticed: Writers
say: “WE OWN THIS and Discourse Blog chose politics and editors aren’t usually paid particularly well,
BUSINESS AND ITS and birds, but we are sure there’s at least not compared with the people who laid
PROBLEMS TOGETHER.” an audience of readers out there for them off. To choose to work in media is to trade
any topic, be it books or fine art or the ability to buy a new couch for the knowl-
pickleball or brain surgery. edge of what every single meme means.
Now about those “friends”: They should be people you So you’re likely not flush with cash. There’s
are comfortable owning a company with. We chose to form a good chance you’ll have to work evenings
our companies with the coworkers we knew well from hav- and weekends launching your new company,
ing worked together for years, almost all of whom we are probably without any money at first. This could
Over to you: Sit at
your fancy news trauma-bonded to. That’s beautiful. be prohibitive for many people, and it certainly
desk, or, more likely, When you know everyone’s deal, it can be easier to reach wasn’t easy for us. We helped build Discourse
cramped home consensus on difficult decisions. You do not have to do it this Blog and Defector Media between freelance
laptop area, and start way. But think hard about who you want to put your name assignments and day jobs. In short, we still have
thinking about what
this thing will be.
next to on official documents that say: “WE OWN THIS to make ends meet, silly dreams and all. For a
BUSINESS AND ITS PROBLEMS TOGETHER.” Don’t lot of us, these sites are not yet our only source
just think about who you want to be a part of the big party of income. You need to be prepared for the fact
you want to throw for surviving five years—think about who that even if you do manage to get your compa-
is going to make you feel comfortable and secure when you’re forced, in your first ny going, it might not make enough for you to
few years of existence, to survive both a pandemic and a global recession, too. live off its revenue alone. Only you can decide
whether the risk is worth it.
BUILD A FOUNDATION

N
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF
ow that you have your idea and your pals, get everyone together
GOD, DO NOT TRY TO DO THE

PAGE 46: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES / GETTY IMAGES; JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES; AP; LEFT: AP
and start talking. Take notes. You don’t have to figure everything out to
BUSINESS YOURSELF
get started, but you should talk about the big-picture items: What is our

A
media company called? What do we stand for? Who does what? When do we fter watching a ton of dreary men in
want to launch, and how? gingham shirts and khakis destroy the
As you make your plans, figure out your timeline and decide who is responsi- companies you love, it is easy to believe
ble for doing what and when. Focus on the truly structural elements, to start with, that businesspeople don’t do anything and
and resist getting bogged down in the day-to-day details like posting schedules aren’t helpful. This idea has a lot of potential,
or headline conventions. That all comes in due time. For now, concentrate on until you begin asking your fellow writers and
the big picture. editors if they know how to look up how much
This will involve more discussion than you realize, and there will be dis- they have in their 401(k), or even if they know
agreements. It could take a few weeks or even months to reach a consensus. how to navigate a spreadsheet. One major
Something we’ve found helpful is trying decision you have to make as
to make decisions from a place of active a company is whether you are
solidarity, where everyone can be OK with going to file your taxes as W-2
an option even if it isn’t their first choice. employees or W-9 employees
But getting to that point requires some or K-1 employees. If you don’t
amount of fighting and debate. You might know what those terms mean,
be seeing friends in a new light (business you can’t do this on your own.
owners), and that might be very different You need to pay some business-
from how you already know them (weirdo people to help you. Not every-
journalists). Some people might decide this one with an MBA is so bad!
isn’t for them. One option is to try and
But everyone should try and be honest persuade someone who knows
about what their limits are. This is when you anything about money (fund-
get everything out in the open. raising, tax codes, business
48
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

shit) to join your janky pirate ship full-time. Writing, editing, planning, publishing—you know, those tasks everyone al-
This may work, but it may not. It is worth a ways complains about doing—is the easiest part of this process. This step (the
shot, because one businessperson is worth 82 second-to-last on this long list) is the easiest because you already know how to do
bloggers. Do not tell them this. They will get it. This is the part of your job that’s second nature, which is why it comes so late
a big head. Also, you can’t afford to pay them in this handy guide. It is easy to get bogged down in these fun questions instead
that difference. of doing the active work to set up your company to succeed. But don’t worry:
But at the absolute minimum, you will need You can fight about what to post, and when, and with what frequency for the
a lawyer, to prevent you from rest of your company’s existence!
getting sued; an accountant, to How lucky!
prevent you from getting sued
NOW YOU HAVE TO DO
and keep you from giving the
IT!!! AND NOT JUST
government every single dollar
THE WRITING PART.
you make; and someone who
ALL OF THE PARTS
understands how things like

P
paychecks and invoices work. lanning is important, but
Unfortunately, finding this planning past the point of
person will also require you to productivity is procrasti-
do something called “decision- nation. No amount of planning
making matrices.” Don’t can save you from launching your
worry—the MBA-havers will website with a typo in a headline,
know what this means. It’s just or only realizing later that no
a framework that will help you one knows how to obtain health
decide what powers people have insurance.
within the company and what There are so many steps before
checks exist on them. this one that it could be easy to
It is important not to repeat the mistakes of never get here. You must roam through the terrible halls of your brain for weeks,
the rich dudes who came before you. Do not maybe months or years, to find your good ideas. Your friends might be busy.
take money from venture capitalists. Do not Your money problems might feel insurmountable. But at some point, you must
seek riches beyond your wildest expectations. declare it good enough. No starting position will be so good that it can prevent
This is journalism, after all! No businessperson failure. You must face the terror of being seen. You must launch your website
(or team) can do magic. No media company and try. No more dilly-dallying.
can scale itself to infinite profit forever. At their Very quickly, you will realize the true benefit of working
absolute best, profitable media companies will for a major media company that could lay you off at any time:
Genie, you’re free:
make ends meet. The ideal situation here is isolation from tiny problems. Sure, the big companies will You don’t have to be
enough stability to allow everyone to quit their restrict your freedom of speech, refuse to give you cost-of- like this sad-looking
second job. That’s the best-case scenario. living raises, try to police what you do in your personal time, khaki news guy! You
edit your work into a bland shell of what it started off as, don’t have to be a
THE PART YOU KNOW HOW TO
and one day at random kick you out of Slack as a signal that corporate drone! The
DO: GET POSTING sky’s the limit… fly!
you’ve been laid off before they even call you—but at least

I
t is a media worker’s dream to have full when you work for a corporation, it is someone else’s prob-
power over what your website looks like. lem when the homepage isn’t working on your smartphone,
There’s no one imposing restrictions on or a button doesn’t work, or the entire site is suddenly taken
your work! There’s no dude who just bought over by a pop-up ad without any warning. Unfortunately, all
the company asking you if you’ve considered those problems are your problems
posting about the start time of the Super Bowl! now. You are the one who has to
No, Josh, we hadn’t considered doing the exact help your colleagues find health
same thing as every other company! insurance. You are the one who has
There is no Josh here at your own media to figure out how to get people to You must face
MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

company. There is only you. subscribe, troubleshoot when not the terror of
Still, the power to post what you want is enough do, and make plans to try being seen. You
daunting: The website becomes an empty doc- and reduce the dreaded “churn.”
ument, taunting you, reminding you how much Everything is your job now: the
must launch your
opportunity and beauty could exist if you just blogs and the backlash and the website and try.
stopped being so scared. It is helpful, we have W-9s or W-2s or K-1s or whatever. No more dilly-
found, to set boundaries to work within. The We tried to warn you at the start. dallying.
infinite space of the blank page is too intimidat- We tried to tell you that this would
ing. You have to figure out what you want your be miserable and difficult and suck
main focus to be, what tone you want that cov- up every single minute of your free time. But if you’ve gotten
erage to carry, how often you want to publish, this far, you may be a lost cause like us. You may have a silly
what time of day (or night) you want to publish, little dream, and all you want to know is: Is it worth it?
and what you think readers will want. Of course it is. N
49
 B O O K S the
A R T S

regnant women are everywhere,

More Than but in a way it’s hard to see them. The
pregnant woman’s body is shrouded
a Natural in a veil of symbolism, made an ob-
ject of our anxieties and hopes in a

Function way that’s distinct and intense even

when compared with the various other ways we objec-
tify woman. When people look at a pregnant person,
The politics of birth
they often don’t see a human being so much as a series
BY MOIRA DONEGAN of abstractions related to pregnancy: “maternity,”
“nature,” and “creation” in all their gauzy allure.
They see a vision, colored by ideology, of what has
long been presumed to be women’s destiny. In some
tellings, childbirth is the act by which the mother
comes as close as a human can be to a god; in others,
CORBIS / GETTY IMAGES

it’s the moment where she is revealed to be an animal

50 after all. But most understandings of childbirth depict
it as somehow fated, the fulfillment of an ancient and
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

B
even sacred human function. Childbirth, we are given to understand, is the culmina- irth Control comes out
tion of the mother’s humanity, the moment in which she fulfills her highest biological swinging against the med-
and social purpose. These are not necessarily bad beliefs—at least, they do not appear ical profession, and it ad-
ill-intentioned. But they have the unfortunate effect of obscuring what might be the vances the arguments of
most important aspect of pregnancy and childbirth: that they are done by real human the natural childbirth
beings—women, mostly—with minds and needs of their own. movement in what is perhaps a uniquely
Allison Yarrow’s new book, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood, inconvenient political moment. Although
seeks to correct some of our misconceptions about the process of birth. Offering an ac- the medical risks of pregnancy can be a
count of labor and delivery practices in contemporary America, the book is also something tangential concern for the vast swaths of
of a manifesto for the natural childbirth movement. the public who are not currently preg-
Yarrow points to a crisis in American childbirth. C-sections are common; preg- nant themselves, law and reality have now
nant women fear pain or even death during delivery and so seek out medical inter- merged to make the very real dangers
vention. Our biology has been misunderstood, Yarrow says, often for misogynistic of pregnancy and birth newly visible. In
reasons, and women’s bodies are often blamed for difficult pregnancies or birth com- 2023, one year after the Supreme Court’s
plications. Sometimes, doctors impose decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health
their own judgments about what is best cues from the nearly century-old natu- Organization, the rapid proliferation of
in childbirth, and for the scared and vul- ral childbirth movement, Yarrow’s book abortion bans with no practicable excep-
nerable woman in the maternity ward, advances a vision that downplays the tion for the life or health of the mother has
this can be painful, violating, confusing, complications of pregnancy, waves away made the difficulty and danger of pregnan-
even degrading. the high rates of maternal mortality in cy and birth brutally clear. Maternal and
How has American childbirth gone the pre-medicalization era, insists that infant mortality rates are rising. Women
so wrong? Yarrow asks. How have hos- the pain and fear felt by women in labor are being denied abortions even as their
pitals, doctors, and the obstetrics field are psychosomatic or are caused by the miscarriages give them sepsis; they are
more generally acted on a set of reduc- very medical interventions meant to help also being forced to develop preeclampsia,
tive assumptions and misogynistic myths them, and claims that childbirth is hardly or gestational diabetes, and subjected to
about women, pregnancy, and childbirth ever complicated or dangerous enough births that lead to life-altering injuries.
in ways that make the act of bringing a to warrant the presence of a doctor. Though Yarrow points to an excess of
child into the world more dangerous, These are the book’s empirical claims, medical intervention as the cause of the
painful, and frightening than it should but Birth Control also makes a set of mor- sorry state of American childbirth, these
be? Yarrow embarks on a mission to un- al ones. Not only is childbirth low-risk, catastrophes have been caused by too little
cover the ways that the medical system Yarrow argues, but it is, for women, a access to care—too little respect for wom-
fails the people she refers to as “birthers”: natural fulfillment of their biological en, too little freedom for doctors, and too
scaring them, curtailing their options, destiny—an opportunity to become their little choice. Pregnancy and birth, it turns
and, in Yarrow’s view, imposing unnec- truest, most fully realized selves. “Child- out, are very dangerous, made more so by
essary medical interventions. Yarrow is birth is the most powerful moment of a the misogyny and inequality that cut off
appalled by the terror and pain that many woman’s life,” Yarrow writes, approving- access to the effective treatments that save
women feel during childbirth; she wants ly citing the British birth advocate Sheila lives. In this context, the natural childbirth
labor and delivery to be a peaceful, joyous Kitzinger. “A woman meets herself in movement’s assertions that pregnancy and
experience, and she is determined to find childbirth.” It follows that such a spiritu- birth are safe, and that their medicaliza-
out why it isn’t. In this project, Yarrow is ally significant event is too important to tion is nothing more than the nefarious
often lucid, righteously angry, compas- be mediated by things like birth control project of what Yarrow calls “a profession
sionate, and moving. pills, medical expertise, and pain med- founded on fear of the generative power
But after Birth Control’s inquiry into ication. Giving birth isn’t dangerous, of the birthing body,” are a bit difficult to
the sexist failures of the medical sys- Yarrow tells us, and you don’t need a swallow. If birth were so safe, and medical
tem, Yarrow eventually moves on to a doctor to help you do it. If you’re scared, care so unnecessary, then the removal of
broader condemnation of the field of it’s because you’ve been brainwashed; that care—its prohibition and constraint
obstetrics itself and espouses a near- if it hurts, it’s because you’re rushing under misogynistic laws—would not have
absolute faith in the ability of the fe- things and don’t trust your own body. resulted in so much human pain and loss.
male body to deliver safely on its own. Your body knows what to do—not your Every day, another tragedy emerges in the
Ultimately, she comes to oppose just mind. In this way, Birth Control not only news to prove this fact again.
about every medical intervention related offers a critique of the troubling history This is not to say that the natural
to childbirth. Her vision precludes the of sexism in the medical profession; it childbirth movement is entirely wrong
use of epidurals, looks down on hor- also partakes of the subtler and more in its critique of medical providers. In-
monal birth control, and decries every- insidious mythology of biological des- deed, Yarrow takes her cues from a long
thing from induced labor and C-sections tiny advanced by the natural childbirth feminist tradition of challenges to med-
(including in cases of breech) to the movement—one in which the story of ical authority, one best exemplified by
hospital setting and, ultimately, the in- pregnancy, birth, and motherhood car- the collaborations of Barbara Ehrenreich
volvement of doctors itself. Her solution ries with it clear prescriptions about and Deirdre English. Their 1972
instead is unmedicated home birth with what women and their bodies should do
the assistance of a midwife. Taking its and be.
pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and
Nurses, one of the most influential
51
 B&A
B O O K S

texts of feminism’s second wave, describes

the
A R T S

painful and invasive genital incisions. But that caused them to clench their muscles—
how delivering infants had traditionally for all the horror of the episiotomy, the which Yarrow calls the “fear-tension-pain
been women’s work—that is, until the 19th reality is that the procedure is only rarely theory.” Dick-Read set out to change
century, when the practice of medicine practiced now. Its use began to decline British childbirth, encouraging women to
became professionalized and the emerging in the 1980s, as a growing body of data abandon medical interventions in order to
male-dominated field of obstetrics took a showed that the incisions did not yield the achieve a supposedly more authentic birth
dim view of its competition. Yarrow tells a beneficial outcomes they were believed process. For him, this primarily meant
similar story in Birth Control: Two parallel to have, and in 2005, a definitive study forbidding pain medication for women in
tracks of childbirth care developed with disproving the supposed benefits of episi- labor. This point—the rejection of pain
the stigmatization of midwifery in the 19th otomies led to a dramatic drop. Hospitals relief—is still the natural childbirth move-
century—one of credentialed, professional and ob-gyn departments respond quite ment’s main tenet, the factor that separates
doctors, mostly men, and the other of un- well to empirical evidence, even if they do a “natural” birth from an “unnatural” one.
credentialed, nonprofessional midwives, not respond as well as one would like to Yarrow quotes Dick-Read at length,
mostly women. Sensing competition, doc- women’s own testimony. and any account of the natural childbirth
tors embarked on a years-long lobbying Demographic changes in the field also movement’s history would be incomplete
campaign to penalize, stigmatize, and ul- make the natural childbirth movement’s without him. But she is ambivalent about
timately outlaw much of midwifery. And it narrative of male doctors exploiting fe- him, making it clear that she can find him
worked: By the 20th century, births were male bodies—or, as the subtitle of Yar- off-putting. Dick-Read’s book “can feel
increasingly being conducted under the row’s book puts it, “The Insidious Power pejorative and coddling,” she writes. “[He
care of male doctors, not female midwives, of Men Over Motherhood”—not quite thinks] women’s purpose is to give birth.”
and more and more of them took place in as straightforward as its advocates insist. (An odd complaint, given that Yarrow’s
hospitals. But obstetricians did not learn Throughout Birth Control, Yarrow uses the book makes similar claims, but Birth Con-
from the experience and expertise of mid- word “men” as a stand-in for “doctors,” a trol is not a work of great consistency.)
wives; instead, they looked to standardize move meant to contrast It likely doesn’t help
and innovate in childbirth care and set the so-called masculine that Dick-Read came to
about reinventing the wheel. Women in empiricism of medicine advocate natural child-
labor tended to suffer because of it. with the supposedly When people look at birth for the purpose of
This history is real, and in terms of the feminine realms of in- a pregnant person, eugenics: He believed
human suffering involved, it is also chilling. tuition, tradition, and
Medicine, like every site of institutional superstition that are they often don’t see that the “over-civilized”
women of Britain’s up-
authority, has a long and horrible history favored by the natural a human but a set of per classes—those he
of enforcing gender hierarchy through childbirth movement. abstractions. found most genetical-
violent means. So when the natural child- It’s a rhetorical move ly desirable—were not
birth movement asserts that medicine has that obfuscates reality breeding enough be-
frequently been used as a legitimating in more ways than one. For starters, the cause they had developed a pathological
pretext for women’s violent oppression, it obstetrics field is now dominated by wom- fear of pain during labor. He compared
has history on its side. en. Perhaps no field of medicine has been these women unfavorably with the
But the righteousness of the natural transformed so quickly and completely “primitive” women of other countries,
childbirth movement’s complaints about in its gender composition: In 1970, just 7 who allegedly did not fear childbirth;
exploitation and callous disregard by doc- percent of gynecologists were women; in he praised, too, the poor and ignorant
tors can obscure the sometimes dubious 2018, 59 percent were. The field is likely women of the London slums, who he
empirical claims it makes about medical to become even more female in the future. said gave birth without medical assis-
outcomes, or the essentialist and unsup- According to a 2015 report by the Asso- tance, complaint, or even basic hygiene.
ported assumptions about women that ciation of American Medical Colleges, “There was no soap or towel; Dick-Read
motivate its reasoning. For one thing, the about 85 percent of obstetrics residents brought his own,” Yarrow writes of a
obstetrics field has changed dramatically are women, a trend that is due in no small delivery he performed in one such slum.
since medicine was professionalized, and part to patient demand: Women tend to “There was ‘no fuss or noise,’” she adds,
many of those changes have made ob- prefer female obstetricians and increas- quoting the doctor himself.
stetric practice and maternal care kinder ingly have the power to request them. But Dick-Read’s solution for the up-

T
and more skilled. For example, Yarrow per-class women he hoped would breed
spends a good deal of time decrying the he term “natural child- more was not to give them pain meds so
use of episiotomies—surgical cuts made birth” itself is nearly a they would stop suffering in labor and
to the perineum during birth to create century old. It was like- hence stop fearing it. Instead, his solution
a larger opening for the baby to pass ly coined by the British was to inform them that natural childbirth
through. These cuts were painful and of- obstetrician and World would not hurt and that the pain they had
ten conducted without the woman’s con- War I veteran Grantly Dick-Read in his felt was only because they were doing
sent; sometimes, they were used to hasten 1933 book of the same name. Dick-Read it wrong. “Fear of birth pain produces
birth when a bit more time and believed that childbirth was not an inher- the real thing,” Yarrow explains. If pain
52 patience would have allowed a
successful delivery without the
ently painful process; instead, the pain was is psychosomatic—merely the product
caused only by women’s fear—an anxiety of a woman who doesn’t trust her body
 B&A
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enough—then the answer is not to treat

the
A R T S

to describe my three natural childbirths.” wise—someone who trusts nature and

the pain, but to fix the woman. “The Good for her. her body and is not too civilized to resist
solution to the syndrome, Dick-Read In Birth Control, Yarrow justifies the them—then you don’t.

A
proposes, is to ‘relieve tension and to natural childbirth movement’s opposition
overcome fear in order to eliminate pain,’” to pain relief for women in labor by alter- decade after Dick-Read’s
Yarrow writes. “In other words, the work nately claiming that the use of pain med- death, the natural child-
of eliminating labor pain is in the mind.” ication leads to C-sections (although it birth mantle was taken up
What is the natural childbirth move- does not) and that unmedicated labor pain by the woman who can
ment’s approach to labor pain? Judging is mostly psychosomatic, all in a woman’s be called the true founder
by the most prominent movement leaders head. In this sense, the movement resem- of the modern American movement: Ina
cited in Yarrow’s book, the approach is bles nothing so much as the medical mi- May Gaskin. Now 83, Gaskin is a midwife
simply to deny it. People like Dick-Read sogynists it decries: gaslighting women by whose first book, Spiritual Midwifery, be-
argued that labor pain was only the result insisting that their pain is nothing more came a sensation when it was published in
of women’s “over-civilization.” Yarrow than the product of their own anxiety. 1975. Other books followed: Yarrow calls
herself maintains that most labor pain is Yarrow also denounces those religious Gaskin’s 2003 book, Guide to Childbirth,
caused by Pitocin, a labor-inducing drug, traditions that have depicted labor pain “perinatal required reading.”
rather than by the contractions of the as a punishment for the sins of Eve. But Gaskin was the countercultural matri-
uterus, the dilation of the cervix, or the from the very start, the natural childbirth arch of a rural Tennessee commune called
descent of an infant through the vaginal movement has also framed labor pain as the Farm, which was founded in 1971 by
canal. Others in the movement seek to a result of women’s inadequacy, their un- a group of some 300 hippies who had left
sentimentalize labor pain by describing it willingness to just get over it. Labor pain, San Francisco in a caravan of school buses
in cloying, mystical, or schmaltzy terms. the movement suggests, is something that to seek a promised land. The Farm was
“The power of birth is like the strength happens only if you’re scared of what the kind of spiritual community that leads
of water cascading down the hillside, the your body is meant to be doing naturally. outsiders into debates about whether it
power of seas and tides, and of mountains If you’re not thinking of your labor in was technically a cult. The group was led
moving,” Yarrow quotes the British mid- sufficiently optimistic terms, or if you by Stephen Gaskin, Ina May’s husband,
wife Sheila Kitzinger as saying, which I don’t love your baby enough, or if you’re who wanted to build a community based
guess is one way to put it. Yarrow also simply not enlightened enough, you feel in part on the revelations that he’d expe-
reports that “painful isn’t the word I use pain. But if you’re good, kind, loving, and rienced while high on LSD. The Farm
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

was generally suspicious of law, science, medicine, and authorities other than Stephen. en are for—their bodily destiny, their
To join, members had to accept him as their leader and hand over all their money. logical purpose, and in some sense their
They practiced plural marriage and collective breastfeeding; Stephen prohibited di- highest reason for being. It is here, in its
vorce, abortion, and birth control. The Farm produced a small commercial crop of rapturous faith in women’s reproductive
soybeans—and a lot of babies. role, that the movement begins to sound
Under these conditions, Ina May became a skilled midwife, even though she never like the anti-choice zealots whose regres-
studied nursing or had any formal medical training. Gaskin opened a birthing center sive and sexist ideas about pregnancy and
on the Farm, where members and nonmembers alike could deliver their babies. What childbirth now carry the force of law. As
Yarrow does not disclose is that, in order to discourage abortion, the birthing center Yarrow asserts in a chapter called “Child-
advertised that the Farm would, if asked, take in and raise the babies of women who bearing Hips,” women “[need] more sto-
gave birth there. Ina May used no pain- ries that acknowledge the truth: we were
killers during delivery; over time, she sarily less than ideal—i.e., flawed. In that born to birth.” Although Yarrow is pro-
became famous for the “Gaskin maneu- sense, the natural childbirth movement, choice, how different is this contention
ver,” a method of positioning a laboring which so nobly seeks to free women from from the one offered by the anti-choice
woman on her hands and knees with one the degradation and hurt that they endure extremist Laura Strietmann, who argued
leg bent forward, like a runner’s stretch, at the hands of doctors, often begins to that pregnancy is not really dangerous
which has become widely used to correct look less freeing than cruel. even for little girls impregnated as the

I
shoulder dystocia without resorting to result of rape, because “a woman’s body is
C-sections. (Gaskin claimed that she t is curious that Yarrow, designed to carry life”?
learned the move from Indigenous Gua- for all her praise of Gas- Women are not “designed” objects;
temalan women.) kin, does not mention the they are not mere vessels for the repro-
Like Dick-Read, Gaskin decries pain midwife’s most distinctive duction of humanity or animals marching
relief as insufficiently “natural” and sug- contribution to the phi- toward their natural destiny. They are
gests that labor pain can be alleviated by losophy of natural childbirth: the theory people—thinking, feeling, and intelligent
a woman’s efforts to change her state of popularized in a 2008 documentary, Or- human beings, even while they give birth.
mind. Unlike Dick-Read, however, Gaskin gasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret. Gaskin The natural childbirth movement is re-
did not tell women to just grit their teeth claims that if childbirth is done correctly, sponding to a real concern: the justified
and bear it, but instead invited fathers into with sufficient stimulation from the father distrust of the medical establishment by
the birthing process, encouraging them and an appropriately enlightened state of women and their reasonable discomfort
to, among other things, French-kiss their mind in the mother, women will climax as with many of the ways that labor and de-
partners during labor and to issue encour- they deliver. Patriarchy’s various demands livery are—and historically have been—
aging platitudes. “At one birth she attend- on women—to be caring, self-sacrificing, mismanaged and misunderstood. But
ed, a husband repeatedly told his wife sexy—are thus distilled into one grue- practitioners like Dick-Read and Gaskin
she was ‘marvelous,’” Yarrow writes of some image. Compelled to be simulta- do not alleviate the suffering of women
Gaskin’s midwifery practice. “The woman neously earth mother and sexpot, the in labor. They simply deny it, burying it
believed that the words opened her cervix laboring woman is not relieved of sexual under layers of romanticizing naturaliza-
and invited the baby out.” responsibility even when giving birth: tion, like so many paisley scarves.
It is lovely that the mother believed She is expected to achieve an orgasm— None of this really helps the people
this. But should we? Yarrow seems to or, at least, to perform one—even as the it intends to help; it only adds yet anoth-
think so. The natural childbirth move- infant tears its way out of her. There’s a er unreasonable expectation that women
ment is perhaps aptly summarized by this word for this, but it is not “liberation.” will fail to live up to. It is Yarrow’s great
little vignette, with the laboring wom- The truth about childbirth—that it virtue that she feels immense loyalty to
an virtuously forgoing painkillers and is dangerous; that it is complicated; that women in labor. She has been as vulner-
proving her worthiness, femininity, and things can go very wrong without warn- able as they are—scared and uncertain,
proximity to nature by delivering a child ing; that it really, really hurts—are things navigating disrespect from doctors and
without any help other than assurances that the natural childbirth movement’s the morass of postpartum life; her em-
from the man who impregnated her that most ardent proponents must talk around pathy for them, her desire to protect
she is “marvelous.” Yarrow and the rest and deny in order to have their worldview them, is searingly evident on the page.
of the movement routinely insist that make sense. “There is no physiological She wants to save laboring mothers, to
they only want to fulfill women’s own function in the body which gives rise show them a better way. But the natural
desires regarding childbirth. But this is a to pain in the normal course of health,” childbirth movement, with its embrace
polite fiction. The truth is that the natural Dick-Read asserts, as if that settles the of regressive myths about women and
childbirth movement is prescriptive and matter. Yarrow agrees: She frequently its insistence on the nonreality of their
highly judgmental: It posits an ideal birth speaks of the “design” of women’s bod- pain, is not the better way Yarrow seeks.
and then imagines the kind of woman ies—though without saying who designed Women—mothers—deserve better than
who achieves it. Yet if a birth involves it—and insists that this design cannot be its patronizing sentimentalization of their
painkillers, or fear, or a need for medical flawed and should not be tampered with. physical pain. They deserve competent
intervention, or even an acknowledgment This brings us to the most troubling medical attention. They deserve
that it hurts, then that birth, and the suggestion made by the natural childbirth
woman who goes through it, are neces- movement: that giving birth is what wom-
sensitivity and respect. And they
deserve the good drugs. N
55
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Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, and other

early Marxist luminaries, the book bears a
rather breathless subtitle—“How an Idea
Changed Everything”—that is far too
ambitious for any author, but it is none-
theless a searching account of Marxism’s
early days. Although it offers no certain
answers as to what the “idea” of Marxism
really consists in, it does provide a welter
of personal and biographical detail that
enriches our sense of Marxism’s varied
history and the lives of its party leaders.

H
ow should we write the
history of Marxism? Over
the past century, when
political opinion has been
sharply divided on the
meaning and legacy of the socialist tra-
dition, historians have felt compelled to
choose one of two modes of narrative:
either triumphant or tragic. Both of these
approaches are freighted by ideology, yet
neither has permitted a truly honest reck-
oning with the political realities of the
Marxist past.
Morina, a scholar whose training re-
Bookworms and flects the methods of social and political
history associated with the University

Fieldworkers of Bielefeld in Germany, where she now

works as a professor, has set out to write a
history that avoids strong ideological ver-
How did Marxism become Marxism? dicts and places a greater emphasis on the
sociology of intellectuals and the details
BY PETER E. GORDON
of the Marxists’ personal lives, a method
that also draws inspiration from the new
n the years leading up to the outbreak of the 1905 trend in the history of emotions pio-
revolution in Russia, Eduard Bernstein—the spirited neered by scholars such as Ute Frevert.
German advocate of socialist revisionism—warned No doubt the book also reflects her own
his Marxist colleagues about the dangers of an “al- experiences as a child in East Germany,
where she witnessed the “absurdities and
most mythical faith in the nameless masses.” More inhumanity” of an authoritarian state that
skeptic than firebrand, Bernstein worried that Karl was arguably socialist in name only.
Kautsky and other leaders of the international socialist movement The fruit of her efforts is a group biog-
placed too much confidence in the spontaneous emergence of an raphy that explores the fate of nine “pro-
organized and disciplined working class: tagonists” from the first generation of the
“The mob, the assembled crowd, the least because he symbolized the spirit of European socialist movement following
‘people on the street’…is a power that can pragmatism and parliamentary reform that the death of Karl Marx in 1883. Morina
be everything—revolutionary and reac- ended up on the losing side of the debates weaves together their personal and party
tionary, heroic and cowardly, human and that roiled the socialist movement in the histories with unusual skill, though with-
bestial.” Just as the French Revolution decades preceding the Bolsheviks’ victory out quite telling us “how an idea changed
had descended into terror, the masses in 1917. For historians who are less parti- everything.” Perhaps the key difficulty
could once again combust into a violent san, however, the time may well seem ripe is the method of prosopography itself,
flame. “We should pay them heed,” Ber- for a new appraisal—a revision of revision- which fractures the book into individual
nstein warned, “but if we are supposed to ism—that casts Bernstein and his reformist life stories and leaves little room for a
idolize them, we must just as well become wing in a more favorable light. continuous political narrative. Those who
fire worshippers.” This is the ambition of Christina Mo- are not already familiar with the broader
Among the votaries of Euro- rina in The Invention of Marxism, recently history of European socialism will find
56 pean socialism, Bernstein has sel-
dom enjoyed much acclaim, not
translated into English by Elizabeth Jan-
ik. A study of Bernstein, Kautsky, Lenin,
it difficult to understand how the vari-
ous national parties (in France, Germany,
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

Austria, and Russia) all participated in a common struggle. But there is a case for her beneficiaries of wealth and education: Jules
approach nonetheless, as it leads to some unique insights. By examining how personality Guesde (born Bazile), later a major figure
and emotion shape one’s political commitments, Morina paints a portrait of Marxism in French Marxism and socialism and an
less as a specific theory than as a shared language and a set of informal dispositions opponent of Jaurès; and Eduard Bernstein,
that spawned a variety of competing interpretations. Her nine protagonists were not, whose father was a plumber and who never
she explains, gifted with a sudden revelation of the truth. Each underwent a slow and attended university and worked as a bank
emotional process through which the ideas of Marx became a common framework for employee to support his activities in the
explaining and evaluating political events. German Social Democratic Party.
While we now take this framework for granted as Marxist doctrine, Morina notes These protagonists, most of them
that the creation of Marxism was itself “a vast political project” that developed only members of the middle class, belonged
gradually. The term gained “ideological meaning and political heft” only in the 1870s to what Morina calls a “voluntary elite.”
and 1880s, as works by Marx and Engels Her group study, though often engaging,
spread across the world in various edi- sity education at a time when less than remains poised in an uncertain space be-
tions and translations. For Morina, this 1 percent of secondary school students tween intellectual history and party chron-
means that the task of the social historian in Western Europe went on to study at icle, without ever truly resolving itself into
is to understand how those works were university. Karl Kautsky, a leading mem- a satisfactory version of either. Needless
received, often on a case-by-case basis. ber of the German Social Democratic to say, this ambivalence may be baked into
The result is a book that tells us a great Party, was born into a home of writers the topic itself, since Marxism is perhaps
deal about these early Marxists as individ- and artists, and his parents were highly distinctive in its contempt for mere the-
uals, though much less about Marxism as committed to his schooling. Victor Ad- orizing and its constant refrain that we
a comprehensive theory or idea. ler, a leader of the Social Democratic must bridge the gap between theory and

H
Workers’ Party of Austria, was a practic- practice. After all, has there ever been a
istorians tend to emphasize ing physician as well as a publisher—he Marxist who did not insist that their ideas
the social and biograph- founded Gleichheit (Equality), the first were not correlated with material events?
ical settings of an idea, a socialist party newspaper in the Haps- Morina, though hardly a Marxist in her
method that is unlikely to burg Empire. Rosa Luxemburg studied methods, suggests that her study exempli-
satisfy philosophers or so- at the University of Zurich and was by all fies the genre of Erfahrungsgeschichte, or
cial theorists, who are concerned chiefly reports an exceptionally precocious child the “history of lived experience.” Experi-
with the intrinsic validity of arguments. whose parents grew prosperous thanks to ence, however, is itself a concept of some
But given Marxism’s own interest in ma- her father’s success as a timber merchant; controversy, since it hints at some bedrock
terialism, these contexts are something her theoretical acumen and political pas- of individual reality beyond interpretation
that historians cannot afford to ignore. sion elevated her to prominent seats, and deeper than mere ideas. And this
They also point to an irony within the first in the German Social Democratic would seem to be Morina’s point: By turn-
tradition, for if Marxism is an idea, it’s only Party and later in the Independent Social ing our attention to the biographical and
because of the intellectuals who carried it Democrats, the Spartacus League, and emotional history of the European social-
forward and helped ensure its longevity— the Communist Party. Jean Jaurès, born ist tradition, she hopes to remind us that
and many (though, of course, not all) of in the South of France, rose to the top of Marxist intellectuals were not bloodless
these intellectuals were by origin and ed- his class and attended the École Normale theoreticians but human beings caught up
ucation members of the bourgeoisie, not Supérieure, where his classmates includ- in the same world of passions and interests
members of the working class lionized in ed Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, they wished to explain.
Marxist theory. before he emerged as the most influential Her group portrait comes alive most
Morina is acutely aware of this irony, leader in the French Socialist Party. of all at moments when its protagonists
and it informs all of her judgments in the The other protagonists in Morina’s tale encounter one another in friendship or
book, some of them subtle, others overt. enjoyed equal or even greater advantag- debate. Before theoretical disagreements
Running through The Invention of Marx- es. Vladimir Ulyanov (later Lenin) was drove them apart, Bernstein and Kautsky
ism is a powerful current of unease about born into a prosperous Russian family that sustained a close friendship: They went
the “abstraction” of theory and the great owned estates; his father, a liberal teacher swimming together in Zurich and en-
distance that separated some of Marxism’s elevated to the post of school inspector, joyed the outdoors with “a text by Marx
most esteemed theorists from the world was eventually granted a title of nobility, at our side.” In 1881, Kautsky sought the
they wished to understand. Although they while his mother came from a family of guidance of both Marx and Engels and
were passionate in their principled com- landowners with German, Swedish, and even wrote to his mother about Marx’s
mitment to the working classes, they of- Russian origins and spoke several languag- daughters, who (in Morina’s words) “un-
ten knew little about the workers’ actual es. Georgi Plekhanov, the “father of Rus- fortunately were already married.” Marx
lives, and at times they responded with sian Marxism,” had parents who owned dismissed Kautsky as an intellectual me-
revulsion—or at least discomfort—when serfs and belonged to the Tatar nobility; diocrity who was little more than “a born
exposed to the real suffering of the pro- following the Emancipation Edict of 1861, pedant and hair-splitter in whose hands
letariat for whom they claimed to speak. Plekhanov’s family fell into financial de- complex questions are not made simple,
Morina takes special care to note that cline, but thanks in part to his mother, but simple ones complex.” This
many of the party theorists in her tale he enjoyed a very strong education. Only
enjoyed the rare privilege of a univer- two figures in Morina’s book were not the
did not deter Kautsky from forg-
ing a close personal bond with
57
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Engels that eventually established him as the official legatee for the papers of both men distant from the working class; his politics
when Engels died in 1895. came from his hatred for bourgeois society.
Though Kautsky would acknowledge that Capital was “more powerful” than anything Only the fieldworkers—Adler, Bernstein,
that Engels had managed to write, his relationship with Engels would continue to inspire and Jaurès—emerge from her analysis with
and shape many of his own insights into Marxism. Kautsky’s 1887 book The Economic their reputations intact.
Doctrines of Karl Marx in fact concludes with a bracing line from Engels that communism The portrait of Bernstein, in particular,
will mark “humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.” may arouse the most interest today. A
Engels’s influence on Kautsky and the “orthodox” Marxism avowed by the Second In- pragmatist at heart, Bernstein gradually
ternational can be found not just in citations. A theme that Morina returns to throughout lost his taste for violent struggle and came
her book is how many of these socialists sought to interpret Marxism as an objective sci- to believe that participation in parliamen-
ence. “The co-opting of ‘science’ by Marxist social analysis,” she writes, “may have been tary democracy was the best means for
the most effective political idea of social critics on the left in the nineteenth century. It socialists to improve the lives of the work-
turned Marx’s theses into Marxism, and an intellectual worldview into a political truth.” ing class. Hence his famous slogan (as he
The idea of a “scientific Marxism” grew restated it in his 1899 essay on the tasks of
in popularity among theorists like Engels, us, and because they are “on site, in the socialism): “The movement means every-
who praised Marx at his friend’s graveside middle of things,” they tend to under- thing for me and…what is usually called
as the Darwin of the social world. But it also stand Marxism more as a “moral principle” ‘the final aim of socialism’ is nothing.”
became a common view among Marx and than as a “dogma.” The adventurers, like Luxemburg, like Kautsky and many
Engels’s heirs. In the era of electrification Lenin and Luxemburg, live as “activists others, found this sentiment intolera-
and rampant technological expansion, a and agitators,” even if their efforts land ble, and she thus denounced Bernstein’s
vague kind of positivism gained in author- them in exile, where they nourish “outrage position as “opportunism.” In her 1900
ity among socialists, moving many Marxist more than empathy” and where Marxism pamphlet “Social Reform or Revolution,”
theoreticians to claim that Marxism, too, becomes an “emotional and intellectual Luxemburg chastised Bernstein for aban-
could enjoy the prestige of a science no home.” Meanwhile, the bookworms like doning the movement’s very purpose:
less than that of the natural sciences such Kautsky form their worldviews far from
as physics and biology. Morina does not the scene of action; their workplace is But since the final goal of socialism
examine this view in much depth, and to- the “desk, office, or library.” In affect, constitutes the only decisive factor
day very few Marxists would wish to defend they tend to be “sober and matter-of-fact, distinguishing the Social-Demo-
the notion that Marxism is a strict science or even cold and calculating.” For them, cratic movement from bourgeois
that discovers unbending or universal laws. Marxism is not a matter of lived experience democracy and from bourgeois
All the same, she recognizes that the am- but a “theoretical structure.” radicalism, the only factor trans-
bition to portray Marxism as scientific can Such broad characterizations may re- forming the entire labor movement
help us to appreciate why it caught fire as mind the reader of Isaiah Berlin’s well- from a vain effort to repair the
a cultural and political ideology. In this known distinction (borrowed from the capitalist order into a class strug-
respect, she treats Marxism no differently Greek poet Archilochus) between hedge- gle against this order…the ques-
than a social historian might treat other hogs and foxes. According to this zoo- tion: “Reform or Revolution?” as
systems of belief: To explain its ascendancy, logical schema, a fox knows many things, it is posed by Bernstein, equals for
she looks at its motivational power, not its while a hedgehog knows one big thing. Social-Democracy the question:
claims to truth. Morina’s typology, like Berlin’s, comes “To be or not to be?”

R
freighted with strong judgments and im-
eaders who are invested plies a preference for what Berlin once Morina typically takes care to main-
even marginally in the called a “sense of reality.” Morina, too, tain the neutral posture of a historian who
truth claims of Marxism disdains the hedgehogs and admires the is more interested in understanding than
will find much to value in foxes, the worldly fieldworkers who shape in moral judgment. But when we come to
Morina’s narrative, but it their ideas based on lived experiences the debate over socialist revisionism that
may also leave them confused. The dif- rather than single ideas. shattered the socialist parties in the years
ficulty is due to her sociological method, To be sure, Morina’s distinctions are preceding the First World War, she ex-
which on the one hand seeks to explain themselves a set of abstractions: They carve presses a subtle preference for Bernstein
Marxism chiefly as an affective framework up the intellectual sphere into simplified over Luxemburg. Some readers may feel
for political mobilization but on the other types that hardly capture the complexity that her judgments about Luxemburg
hand frequently refers to social “reality” of social reality. But it is when she turns depend rather too much on personal de-
as if it were the unproblematic and deci- to her adventurers and bookworms that tail. Luxemburg is often eulogized as the
sive factor when it comes to categorizing this becomes particularly clear, especially tragic martyr of European communism,
and judging the book’s protagonists. She when she examines the lives and personae not least because she died a brutal death
proposes that we divide her nine Marxists of Luxemburg and Lenin, neither of whom at the hands of the Freikorps in 1919.
into three types: “fieldworkers,” “adven- appears in a favorable light. Luxemburg, in But Morina mines facts from her life
turers,” and “bookworms.” The fieldwork- Morina’s estimation, was an ideologue who and her private correspondence to paint
ers, such as Adler, Bernstein, and loved humanity from afar but disdained the a picture of Luxemburg that is far less
58 Jaurès, base their knowledge on poor and the suffering when they pressed
“firsthand experiences,” she tells too close. Lenin, she tells us, was no less
appealing: The cofounder of the Sparta-
cus League appears here not as a heroine
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 B&A
B O O K S the
A R T S

M
were not as sympathetic to Bernstein as orina does not extend her
she is here, he would still stand out as one narrative into more recent
SIDE BY SIDE: of socialism’s unsung and unlikely heroes. times: She confines The In-
PARALLEL Although his proposals earned him only
derision among the more orthodox the-
vention of Marxism chiefly
to the “golden age” of Eu-
HISTORIES OF orists and officials in the communist ropean socialism that preceded the Bolshe-
movement, it was Bernstein’s somewhat vik revolution. Of the three “fieldworkers”
ISRAEL-PALESTINE drab and reformist style of social de- in her analysis, two were dead by the end
mocracy that survived as the model for of the First World War. Jaurès was assassi-
parties on the European left well into nated in 1914, and Adler died in Vienna in
the mid-20th century, when more mili- 1918, on the very last day of the war. Only
tant groups had dwindled in power and Bernstein survived through the 1920s; he
influence. As it turned out, the idea of died in Berlin in late 1932, at a time when
a socialist state governed by a single the communists and the Nazis were fight-
party was a recipe for dictatorship, not ing each other in the streets. By that point,
democracy. The various socialist parties however, Bernstein was hardly an active
in Europe that swelled in membership participant in the socialist movement.
did so only when they abandoned their Already by 1903, Bernstein had been
militant rhetoric and took their place as pushed aside, and at the party conference
An unprecedented parliamentary-style organizations that in Dresden that year, he was denounced
collaboration between competed with other parties in free elec- for revisionism. Later, in an essay on his
Israelis and Palestinians that tions. This pragmatic strategy may not role in the revisionism debate, Bernstein
offers a way to understand have realized the utopia of socialism’s admitted that he had not fully grasped
the current conflict dreams, but it contributed to robust so- the “spiritual” meaning of his dissent or
cial democracies and welfare states that the emotional significance of the word
vastly improved the lives of everyday “revolutionary.” Although the SPD was
people, and it also avoided the massive not in fact a revolutionary party, for many
waves of violence and murderous repri- years its revolutionary ideal continued
thenewpress.com sal that ensued whenever the forces of to shine as an inspiring beacon, for the
revolution and counterrevolution con- working class and especially for the SPD’s
fronted each other in civil war. membership. Revolution “marked the line
Marxist orthodoxy, meanwhile, end- that distinguished the party they esteemed
but as a somewhat cold individual who ed up a victim of its own absolutism. from all other parties” and gave the SPD
regarded the suffering of others with Even after Stalinism and the suppression its “distinctive worldview.”
“striking ambivalence.” of democratic movements in Hungary Perhaps Bernstein was right, but if so,
Whether or not one agrees with Mo- and Czechoslovakia, many exponents of he may not have grasped the deeper and
rina’s characterization of Luxemburg, it communism refused to denounce the more ambivalent implications of his own
does feel in these passages as though she Soviet bloc on the dubious grounds that discovery. The ideas that vault us into col-
is putting her finger on the scale a bit— it was still necessary to choose between lective action need not have the status of
and in Bernstein’s favor. It is hardly ob- “real existing socialism” and the capitalist truth; the primary value of the ideologies
vious that an individual’s persona should West. Meanwhile, the record of human that inspire us in our political life is often
play a role in our judgment of their ideas rights violations and the torture and ha- not their descriptive accuracy but how they
and their contribution to major political rassment of dissidents only grew more move us and the feelings they arouse.
events. What matters, after all, is not obvious to anyone who was not blinded Is this an insight we should welcome?
whether we happen to find Luxemburg by ideology. All of this has done far more Yes and no. Ideology, to be sure, is always
personally appealing, but whether her harm to the legacy of Marxism than any volatile, and this is what makes it power-
stance in party debates over theory and of the theorists who strayed from the ful—but also dangerous. In the 20th centu-
policy was one we consider sound. Un- orthodox path. ry, while Marxist theorists in the West were
pleasant people can have good ideas, just To be sure, in recent years those so- busying themselves with intricate debates
as pleasant people can have bad ones. cialist and social democratic parties that over the nature of class consciousness and

N
have moved to the political center have cultural hegemony, it was the fascists who
otwithstanding these occa- lost much of their prestige. Both the came to understand the sobering truth that
sional quarrels with Lux- Social Democratic Party of Germany what binds the mass into a cohesive group
emburg and some of her (SPD) and the Parti socialiste (PS) in is not reason but passion, not the language
other protagonists, Morina France have hemorrhaged votes as their that helps us see the world as it really
offers an original portrait members have shifted to the political is but the far more atavistic language of
of Marxism’s invention, one that encourag- center or to new parties on the left that symbolism and myth. In this way, Morina’s
es us to reconsider the role of the are either more “green” in their policy history of Marxism as a history of emotion
60 “moderates” in the history of Eu-
ropean socialism. Even if Morina
aims or more militant in their calls for
class struggle.
may reveal rather more about the nature of
political life than we care to admit. N
  T H E N AT I O N 12.25.2023–1.1.2024

ence of being Black in the United States

today. In Monstrous Intimacies: Making
Post-Slavery Subjects, Sharpe—a professor
of Black studies at York University in
Canada—examined how the sexual and
physical violence inflicted on the enslaved
continues to haunt the formation of Black
subjectivity in the present. With In the
Wake, she combined meditations from
her own life, analyses of the historical re-
cord, and close readings of works of con-
temporary Black art to consider the kinds
of Black lives and aesthetic practices that
emerge out of what she calls “being in
[slavery’s] wake.” To live knowing that the
effects of slavery persist into the present,
Sharpe argues, profoundly affects not just
public life but our private lives as well; to
study the afterlife of slavery therefore re-
What About Black Life? quires an approach to history and culture
that looks beyond the formal disciplinary
The art of everyday Black experience constraints of the academy and into the
realm of the felt, the subjunctive, the con-
BY OMARI WEEKES
jectural. One must turn to poetry as well
as to sociology, art as well as economics,
ays after tyre nichols was killed by five mem- culture as well as politics.
phis police officers earlier this year, the city’s police Along the lines of these previous en-
department released footage of his murder. The deavors, Ordinary Notes breaks out of the
videos sparked protests in Tennessee and across the reductive conventions of academic schol-
arship in the pursuit of Black study. Just as
country, demonstrating once again that depictions In the Wake braided together personal bi-
of state violence and Black death can spur national ography and critical theory, disclosing how
action and bring bodies into the streets. But seeing this sequence a series of deaths in Sharpe’s family deeply
of events play out yet again raises a different question: What about affected her and how these lives lost illus-
Black life? Can it also spur people into trate the extent to which slavery’s insistence
action? Nichols, an amateur photogra- repair the injustices of the past or the pres- on Black inferiority continues to guide
pher of the urban and rural South, would ent. Sharpe’s brilliant collage of materials the modus operandi of various American
not have wanted his legacy to endure probes how “Black people make a life in institutions, Ordinary Notes brings togeth-
through the lenses of police body cams or beauty and in struggle” in the face of struc- er a variety of media—ephemeral, histor-
local surveillance cameras. His portfolio tural racism and precarity. In close and ical, social, and otherwise—in order to
of photographs includes experiments with provocative readings of Toni Morrison’s tell a personal and individual story that
color and perspective that revel in the Beloved, Dawoud Bey’s black-and-white contributes to and is shaped by a larger
beauty, love, and charm that constitute landscapes, Black Lives Matter protest structural one.
the Black aesthetic of the everyday. What video stills, Torkwase Dyson’s multime- For Sharpe, photographs are particu-
would happen, what actions would be dia installations, and other notable public larly useful tools for telling these stories.
sparked, if we disseminated these images projects, Sharpe considers Black culture Drawing from photographs in her own
invested with the vibrancy of Black life “in all of its shade and depth and glow.” personal library as well as those found
and subjectivity as well? But she also notes that while the images of in various archives, she shows how each
In her new book, Ordinary Notes, which everyday Black life are valuable counter- picture—especially those featuring Black
was a finalist for this year’s National Book weights to the numerous images of every- subjects—always documents a negotiation
Award for Nonfiction, Christina Sharpe day Black death that circulate, they too will of power among the people in the pho-
explores this question without providing not be enough to abolish anti-Blackness. tographs, those taking them, and those

I
CHRISTINA SHARPE’S MOTHER (JOSEPH WILLIS)

any easy answers. A lush enmeshment viewing them. An old photo of the writer’s
of photographs and other images with n many ways, Ordinary mother and grandmother leaning gently
notes on various subjects—some as short Notes extends from Sharpe’s into each other, the former dressed in a
as a phrase, others as long as a few pages— previous work, which has Halloween costume made from scratch
the book invites its readers to engage showcased how the typ- by the latter, displays a tenderness that
with the multitudes of Black life, to think ical, the commonplace, would have been lost in the offi-
about and work through them without
expecting this engagement to necessarily
and much of what has been naturalized
as such have contributed to the experi-
cial paperwork, “those archives
that suspend and defer Black life
61
 B&AB O O K S the
A R T S

W
in ways that would make our living tangen- ho are photographs for, for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala.,
tial to some other living, not ours.” A well- anyway? More specifically, which was created by the Equal Justice Ini-
known photograph of Elizabeth Eckford what purpose do memori- tiative. While she’s there, a weeping white
being harangued by an angry white mob als to the victims of slavery woman interrupts Sharpe’s walk through
as she desegregates Little Rock Central and racism—which often a graveyard built to commemorate the
High School is juxtaposed with a recent employ images of Black suffering—serve, thousands of African Americans who had
image of white nationalists in Charlottes- and who are they for? Throughout Ordi- been murdered by lynch mobs. The wom-
ville, Va., chanting anxiously about their nary Notes, Sharpe directs our attention an approaches Sharpe with an expression
replacement. Sometimes Sharpe presents to the ways in which we choose to memo- of regret and offers an apology, but Sharpe
us with pictures that are more opaque—at rialize as well as to the memorializations doesn’t respond: “With her apology, she
one point, photos of the condensation and themselves. Such memorials, she suggests, tries to hand me her sorrow and whatever
frost on her window panes serve to illus- cannot always “be” for everyone, but so else she is carrying, to super-add her bur-
trate how important it is “to notice or ob- few seem to be for Black people. When den on my own.”
serve with care.” Each photograph, Sharpe Sharpe visits the Whitney Plantation, a Often, Sharpe notes, museums, art gal-
reminds us, gathers so much within it: the former plantation site about an hour west leries, and monuments dedicated to the
depths of intimacy between a mother and of New Orleans that has been restored as Black experience purport to do a service for
a daughter, the racist vitriol that can be a center for education on the history of Black audiences, but at best it is one limited
found even in a white supremacist’s spittle, chattel slavery, the founder of the museum by the service they also provide for white
the calm of routine weather. goes out of his way to assure white visitors audiences. Many of these memorials are
In poring over these images, Sharpe that none of them were responsible for the designed, above all else, to remind those
threads a needle between Roland Barthes’s atrocities that once occurred there. For who need reminding of a history that others
ruminations on photography, which insist Sharpe, such an assurance not only sanc- know all too well. As Sharpe adds, they also
that the medium is often haunted by a tions whatever feelings are aroused in the usually have another problem: By framing
sense of death, and those put forward by, white guests as they peruse the plantation; their memorializations as studies of some-
for instance, Frederick Douglass, which it also obscures how much the “peculiar in- thing totally relegated to the past, they offer
argue for the positive political work that stitution” continues to echo in the culture, a model of history that erroneously stresses
photographs can do, especially when it structures, and interpersonal relations that discontinuity between yesterday and today
is Black photographers working against shape our lives today. Bronze sculptures of and misses how much of American history
the rampant proliferation of anti-Black enslaved children dressed in overalls and has already repeated itself. Slavery and Jim
caricatures. Sharpe does not entirely dis- work aprons are displayed throughout the Crow may have formally ended, but their
agree with Barthes or Douglass, but she plantation, intended to galvanize white legacies—mass incarceration, redlining,
does think that neither school of theory visitors into anti-racist action by highlight- police brutality, Black maternal mortali-
accounts well enough for the filters that ing the innocence that was lost on that site, ty rates, environmental racism, and many
photographs are viewed and understood even as Black innocence is lost all around others—all continue to manifest them-
through. While Douglass had grandly us in the here and now, every day. Sharpe selves today. The damage that has been
claimed in a speech titled “Pictures and knows why the plantation doesn’t have any done continues to be done.
Progress” that photography could help sculptures of Black adults on display: They Perhaps we will never finish reckoning
usher in a social advancement for Black tend to play a different role in the white with our incomplete past and will have to
Americans that would “dissolve the gran- imaginary, often forcing white audiences accept that fact. We will never fully know
ite barriers of arbitrary power, bring the to reckon with “the culpability, the debt, history, much the way we will never fully
world into peace and unity, and at last the entanglements, and the ongoing bru- know one another. At a certain point, a
crown the world with justice, liberty, and tality of slavery’s afterlives.” little more than halfway through Ordinary
brotherly kindness,” Sharpe contends that Sharpe does not restrict her critique to Notes, Sharpe wonders if this unknowability
this might place too much faith in the memorials founded and funded by white is itself something that history and memo-
observer’s ability to transcend their own patrons and institutions: At one point in rialization should try to preserve. Writing
negative preconceptions of Black life. Ordinary Notes, she narrates her experience movingly about her mother, Sharpe pauses
One example, in fact, is provided in at a screening of a short film produced and expresses an uncertainty about how
Sharpe’s discussion of Barthes’s writing. by Claudia Rankine that stitched together candid she has been: “Maybe I ought to re-
For Barthes, a portrait taken by the Af- recordings of interactions between Black turn my mother to her own opacity; allow
rican American photographer James Van people and the police, many of which de- some description to fall away.”
Der Zee of a Black family in Harlem pict excessive violence by law enforcement. Ordinary Notes is a large book full of
dressed in formal attire signifies the un- She then reproduces a letter written by ideas, both ephemeral and enduring; in
fortunate (because it is impossible) desire Rachel Zellars, a Black professor who had it, Sharpe offers much piercing analysis
“to assume the White Man’s attributes,” a attended a similar event, that asks and but also, in other cases, respects the mys-
“spectacle” that stirs “almost a kind of ten- elaborates on a single question that Sharpe teries of the everyday and the beauty that
derness” within him. But as Sharpe notes, directs at Rankine: “Do you consider the comes from them. Sometimes the images
Barthes’s reading of the photograph is impact your film will have on Black people of Black life should prompt us to action;
itself “a gaze and not a look,” as it in the room before you show it?” at other times, they should simply remind
62 projects the desires of whiteness
onto the picture’s Black subjects.
Elsewhere in the book, Sharpe de-
scribes a visit to the National Memorial
us that if we surrender to our own beauty,
perhaps we can ride it. N
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GLOBAL CONNECTIONS TELEVISION
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