The Problem with the Problems with the Problems with Serial.
Over the weekend, Jaime Green put up on a post on her Tumblr titled, “The Problem with the Problems with Serial.” She wrote about two critiques of the show that had been published last week — one by Julia Carrie Wong in Buzzfeed, the other by me, in the Awl. Green said I made “lazy moves” and “(willfully?) misinterpreted parts of Serial. She goes on to accuse both me and Wong of stripping away context and focusing on small, excerpted parts of the podcast to levy our arguments. She concludes, “But if you’re writing about a podcast which I, and your target readers, have listened to in its entirety, you can’t abandon context. A, your readers know the context, so your arguments are gonna seem weak. And B, that is unethical.”
These are serious charges. I’d like to address Green’s critique below, not so much out of old high-school debate habit (although, I admit there’s some of that) but more to continue an ongoing conversation about race and representation in media.
First, I’d like to present a Storify link of everyone who has tweeted a link to the original Awl story.
You’ll see that there is a wide range of opinions, but that there are also many people who also felt the same discomfort I described in my article. These things are almost never definitive or cataclysmic — there is no smoking gun in Serial that “makes” my critique, nor is there any explicit prejudice or bias. Instead, as many of the respondents on Twitter said, the problems with Serial are experienced more as a creeping burn. People of color are attuned to pick this up because they’ve had to do so their entire lives. Green certainly doesn’t have to believe that such “feelings” are valid, nor does she have to accept any reading of Serial outside her own. But to argue for a strict textual focus that takes “context” (her defintion of this word is pretty vague, especially for a piece that argues for the need for it) is to completely miss the point. It’s not about overall good intentions or the totality of work. It’s about the accumulation of small, discomforting moments in which I, and many others, question Koenig and her all-white staff’s interpretations of the lives of Adnan Syed and Hae-Min Lee. The argument happens, not at the level of the text, but at the level of personal interpretation.
The debater in me is frustrated by this, as I’m sure many of my critics are. In my original Awl piece, I even pointed out that “These are annoying questions” because they cannot really be litigated out. You either believe the “feelings” are valid or you don’t. If I say that I find Serial troubling in its portrayal of immigrant communities and point out examples, there really isn’t a way to say “here are all the evidenced reasons why you didn’t feel that discomfort.”
But Green’s piece seems to be an exercise in “feeling that way is wrong.” She addresses the reader as a writing teacher who wonders whether or not me or Wong’s critiques would pass muster in her classroom. She ultimately says both of us would fail because we take too many liberties with interpretation.
This interpretive creativity is inherently in tension, of course, with ethical source use. You can’t just excise a quote out of context and interpret it for your whimsical personal aims. (My students most often struggle with this in confusing a source’s claim – Cronon believes that… – with a claim that a source discusses – Cronon addresses the idea that…) The context of the quote matters. You have to interpret and analyze it with fairness to the original meaning, to the extent that you can understand it, with awareness of the local context and entire project from which it comes.
And so if a student of mine wrote this about Serial, I’d tell them they were mischaracterizing their source. (I would remind them – partially to scare them straight – that mischaracterizing sources is right next door to plagiarism.) In this analysis of a moment from Serial, Wong implies that Koenig doesn’t interrogate these impulses and responses in herself, neither in the immediate vicinity of this moment nor throughout the rest of the podcast. When in fact, as any listener of Serial would know, the exact opposite is true.
You’ll notice there is no substantive argument in the block quote above. There is only rhetoric about the importance of context and what Green would say to a hypothetical student. There is no new evidence or better quote or, for God’s sake, the actual context of Wong’s quote. The second-to-last sentence certainly does not suffice as the explanation — it’s the set-up to the assumption that every Serial listener will know that this is all silly posturing.
I suppose what’s most frustrating to me here — and again, this is me speaking as a former debate nerd — is that in a piece about building arguments, this section doesn’t even bother to follow up the claim with a warrant. Instead, it relies on a broad idea of what “any listener of serial would know.” What that might be is neither explained nor detailed in Green’s post.
Oh, and who is “any listener of Serial?” Did Green poll Serial listeners to find this consensus? (I would argue that the collected tweets above are a more accurate poll than Green’s broad assumption, but I’m not a writing teacher, I guess) Are both Wong and I, because we have problems with it, not listeners of Serial?
Let’s move on:
This troubling use of evidence is endemic in critiques of Serial, and it is obscuring the importance of the claims being made. This piece at The Awl is trying to make the same claim — Serial is tainted by uninterrogated white privilege — and makes the same lazy moves of (willful?) misinterpretation:
Let me make this very clear: Serial was enthusiastically suggested by many of my close friends. As someone who has reported on crime in the past, and someone who is interested in different journalistic forms, I was excited to give it a try. The idea that I would want to find bias in Serial; that I would somehow willfully misinterpret another journalist’s work for reasons that Green doesn’t name, shows a galling lack of good faith on Green’s part. In Green’s classroom, Wong and I are not allowed to interpret Serial through our own experiences without first acknowledging the unexplained consensus of “reasonable Serial readers.” And yet, in the same space, Green enables herself to question the authenticity of my critique. Where is the evidence that my claims are part of some deceitful manipulation? Where is the context that proves that this is all race hustling for Twitter points?
I’ll only speak for myself here, but I don’t enjoy seeing the small, but persistent evidence of bias in media. I don’t even enjoy writing about it. And while I invite arguments saying that those “feelings” are wrong, I certainly do not accept being told that they are somehow craven and insincere.
Green isn’t just disagreeing here. She’s trying to invalidate the entire idea of a critique by questioning whether or not it actually exists.
After a block quote of my article, Green continues:
As Sarah Miller writes for Cafe, “Koenig’s comment was about the extent to which, as she sat down with Lee’s diary, she found it so utterly textbook typical — mercurial, sappy, teenager-y. And it wasn’t that she felt surprised that this particular diary was so typical, but rather that any diary could be so straight out of Teen Girl Diary Central Casting.” Miller’s interpretation isn’t the only one, but I think it’s the one that most obviously comes through from that moment of the podcast — it’s what Koenig explicitly says. So if you want to argue for an alternate interpretation, you have to do the real work. You can’t just drop a quote and say, “I think this means X.” You have to acknowledge, “Many listeners might think this means Y; I think it means X and here’s why.” If you ignore the context in which listeners encountered the moment, you lose your authority (because your readers are gonna be like, Um, did you not hear the rest of the episode?). Arguing for a non-status-quo interpretation is basically the core, central move of critical writing. I love it. You just have to actually do it.
Again, there is no substantive argument here. There is no analysis. Sarah Miller’s quote mirrors Green’s interpretation of what Koenig meant, and rather than find some evidence from Serial or from Koenig’s many interviews, Green goes back to the post with “most obviously.” Hilariously enough (and this is the point where my head exploded) she follows this up with “So if you want to argue for an alternate interpretation, you have to do the real work.”
As any rhetoric or writing teacher knows, “most obviously” is not work. Her interpretation of Koenig’s quote is simply the read that Miller and Green agree upon.
Do I even need to point out the other problems with the phrase “most obviously?” Do I need to say “most obviously to whom?” Do I need to ask why Green feels it’s upon me, the holder of an “alternate interpretation,” to do more work than she is willing to do herself? These issues are so obvious that I would refrain from teaching Green’s response to an undergraduate critical student class because the lesson would last three minutes.
TL;DR: Once again, Green goes to the post for a consensus that she neither bothers to justify, explain or detail.
I’m skipping the next section because it’s about Wong’s piece, specifically, and I want to give her the opportunity to defend her own piece. Moving on.
All of this writing and podcasting is, of course, an interpretive endeavor. The same piece of evidence can mean different things to different writers, can be used to support different claims. (This is the creative work in academic writing, and a big part of why I love my job — seeing young minds learn how to make these moves.) And so, as an author, Koenig definitely colors our understanding of the material. And maybe she’s taking things out of context — who knows! Since I don’t have access to the full tapes and files, I have to trust her. (Building up that trust with a sense of honesty and transparency is one of Koenig’s main projects. This, I think, is why she brings her own thoughts and feelings to the forefront so often. It’s not about centralizing herself as a character, but about disclosing her potential biases.)
But if you’re writing about a podcast which I, and your target readers, have listened to in its entirety, you can’t abandon context. A, your readers know the context, so your arguments are gonna seem weak. And B, that is unethical.
I don’t know Jaime Green. And I certainly won’t question her motives or sincerity, even in a parenthetical. I will only point out the following line: “Since I don’t have access to the full tapes and files, I have to trust her.”
I don’t have to trust Sarah Koenig. And while I find the idea of the unreliable crime serial narrator to be a cool experiment in form, I certainly don’t have to find all of Sarah Koenig’s neuroses to be compelling, forgivable, or interesting. As I pointed out in my piece on the Awl, there is a good way to do this. (Unlike Green, I even gave examples!) Serial, for all the reasons I wrote about at length, felt a bit too slipshod in its portrayal of immigrant kids, a bit too quick to cast them as stereotypes or whitewash them. The material failed the form, at least for me.
I believe that Green’s argument here is that form justifies itself. That any narrator who tries to be transparent and honest should be trusted and allowed to take liberties with storytelling. I agree with this. I also have the right to object to those liberties, no?
Also LOL at “your target readers.” I really would like to know who my target readers are! And not to beat the dead horse, but it certainly sounds here like Green believes that these “target readers” who have listened to Serial “in its entirety” would, of course, conclude on Green’s side. There’s somewhere around 400 responses in that Storify link. I don’t think they show ANY consensus of opinion on how Serial handles race. If that isn’t the crucial “context” here, what is? And are all those people not part of my “target” readership?
Green concludes:
Serial raises as many questions as it answers — more than, really — in terms of its explicit narrative but also in terms of the themes it interweaves. Race, class, and crime, yes, but also authorial bias and point of view. (It’s not like Koenig doesn’t realize she’s implicating herself as a narrator.) So challenge it, critique it. Tear open those little gaps and let’s see what’s really inside.
Agreed!
