The value of the insult
This is an exchange with Glenn Greenwald of First Look, which began on email. Both of us live and write largely in public, so we might as well continue the back-and-forth on the web.
Glenn and I are rivals for talent, tussling over the affections of editors such as John Cook. And I’m more evangelical about free-market capitalism. But when I’m in Brazil, I make my pilgrimage — this time to an all-you-can-eat restaurant near Glenn’s home, boasting “our forte is meat”.
Nick Denton:
I’m back in New York. Damn, that’s a long overnight flight. Still woozy. How do you do it? Oh, right, you don’t that often!
Dinner — both the conversation and the meat — was delicious. Give my regards to David. I hope the baby talk didn’t cause you too many problems!
When I got back to the hotel, I read your piece on the Sony hack, and the stenography of Max Fisher and others.
Unsurprisingly, the most egregious (and darkly amusing) “report” came from Vox’s supremely error-plagued and government-loyal national security reporter Max Fisher. Writing on the day of Obama’s press conference, he not only announced that “evidence that North Korea was responsible for the massive Sony hack is mounting,” but also smugly lectured everyone that “North Korea’s decision to hack Sony is being widely misconstrued as an expression of either the country’s insanity or of its outrage over The Interview.” The article was accompanied by a typically patronizing video, narrated by Fisher and set to scary music and photos, and the text of the article purported to “explain” to everyone the real reason North Korea did this.
Your piece was brutal, and brutally effective. But I did wonder whether you would have been quite so harsh if you’d been discussing the matter conversationally. You’re so charming in person, and such a killer on the page.
I do wonder which is more effective. (For Gawker, too.)
Glenn Greenwald:
My reply (slightly edited once Nick unveiled his “let’s-do-this-publicly” scheme):
Hey — yeah, dinner was great. David was particularly grateful for Derrence and Ryan’s presence, delivering him from dreary politics/journalism talk. So it worked out perfectly. I’ve mostly given up eating beef so being “forced” to do it was a good combination of satisfaction and fleeting guilt.
Overnight, inter-continental flying sucks so hard. It’s so fucking draining. It’s probably a by-product of getting older, but I find it so repressive. I sadly do it way more than I’d like: it’s the one and only downside to living here.
The question you’re asking about tone is a complicated one, and one I’ve thought a lot about over the last couple years, so you’re probably going to get a longer and more complicated answer than you wanted, but you have only yourself to blame:
1) I’ve actually modulated my tone quite a bit in the past few years. Previously, I would write almost every article & post in that same tone of outrage: mostly because I usually found what I was writing about outrageous. But then I realized that using that tone too often dilutes its impact: if everything is outrageous, then nothing is.
So now I reserve it only for those times when I really think it’s necessary to make the point and/or when I would be inauthentic as a writer if I suppressed it (I think both were true for the piece you’re referencing). See, for instance, my latest article from yesterday, on criminalizing online speech, which has a much different tone than the one you asked about.
2) Despite using it less, I think that tone is sometimes crucial. For one thing, authenticity as a writer is vital: if you feel intense outrage but pretend you don’t, your writing will be stifled, fake and weak.
Also, one of the worst journalistic practices is according respect to prominent people and things that simply don’t deserve respect. Some things deserve to be disrespected — it’s a crucial component of journalism — and speaking about a really corrupt practice or person in respectful tones vest them with a respectability that they don’t deserve and which can be quite damaging: like writing about torture or Dick Cheney or the Iraq War (or the new Judy Millers of the world) as though they’re within the bounds of reasonableness.
It’s ironic that you raise this question now given how effective that Deadspin critique of Vox was, which I quoted. What made that so effective and have such impact was the unrestrained tone of the critique. Had he larded up what he was saying with a whole bunch of caveats that diluted the tone (“I say this with the greatest respect for Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias”), or had he been less than clear and hard-hitting in his critique, his key point would have been totally lost: namely, that some Vox writers haven’t just made a few errors, but have been a huge fuck-up in an important, fundamental way.
Also, the meanest parts were also his most important: that they have fucked up so much because of the arrogant mindset of entitlement some of them have adopted about who they are and what they are doing (eg Max Fisher, the paragon of condescending journalistic recklessness; he somehow managed simultaneously to spew the most banal ideas of conventional wisdom *and* got huge amounts of it factually wrong). There would be no way to effectively make that vital substantive point with a different tone.
3) It’s definitely not the case that I only employ that aggressive argumentative style in writing. In fact, most people say that I’m at my most aggressive and critical in TV and in-person debates when I have an adversary in front me to attack (which is sometimes — maybe usually — the host!).
We all have different parts of our personality. I’m always amused when journalists come to Rio to profile me and end up shocked that I’m not this fire-breathing, abusive prick with horns growing out of my head. It’s awesome in one way: I have a very low behavioral bar to clear! But of course I don’t conduct myself the same way if I’m writing a polemic v. doing a friendly interview v. having a social dinner v. cooing with David. It’d be unhealthy to be the same way all that time.
That said, if you and I had discussed some political issue about which I feel passionate — if you had started to advocate state censorship or justified indefinite detention or said bigoted things about Muslims — I’d definitely have been polemically aggressive: not rude, but I’d have embraced the conflict of ideas with vigor. That’s because I think a clash of ideas is crucial to truth-finding, which is another reason I think that tone can be not just journalistically justifiable but also necessary.
4) I think it’s important to acknowledge (and I can’t believe I’m telling this to NICK DENTON of all people!) that there is a necessary and even noble entertainment component to journalism and political activism. If you just ignore the imperative to engage people and make them interested in what you’re doing, then the whole thing becomes self-indulgent and boring, and therefore inconsequential.
When I began blogging, I did all the things people said you shouldn’t do if you want to build a readership: I wrote really, really long and detailed posts with lots of formal argumentative structure (like this email!); I ignored the Controversy of the Day and instead focused relentlessly on a handful of topics; and I avoided things like profanity and informal language. Yet I did attract a really big readership — and quickly.
Part of that was because I was writing about stuff other people weren’t writing about, in a way that was different. But a big part was that I was always attentive to the entertainment factor: not being boring. I’d pick fights with big media figures or other bloggers and eagerly pursue the back-and-forth that ensued. People love that stuff.
One shouldn’t do that just for the sake of doing it, to attract attention, to be entertaining for its own sake — and I don’t think I did. But it’s necessary to get people into the door, to listen to what you have to say. It’s a tool used to engage people so that your serious journalism isn’t just good but — as importantly — “heard.”
I did a lot of that with the Snowden stuff: thought a lot about how to make sure people pay attention to it. That, to me, was part of the responsibility of doing the journalism: to engage people and make them want to pay attention. A lot of the drama around what we were doing was crucial in getting people to listen. And that’s how I see this issue of tone: if an aggressive, insulting tone helps to keep people interested in the substantive points you’re making, then it’s justified for that reason, independent of all the substantive arguments above.
These days, I receive emails now and then from long-time readers complaining that I’ve modulated my tone and my writing is thus not as “interesting.” I’m sensitive to that: not because I want to be a circus clown that juggles and does magic tricks to keep people entertained, but because you have to do things to make people want to spend their finite time reading what you’ve written instead of all the other shit they can be doing on the internet.
5) All this said, I do agree that this kind of tone can be — and often is — way overused in online writing. Part of it is Paavlovian: writers get a more acute response when they use this tone, so they keep doing it in pursuit of the immediate gratification. Part of it is monkey behavior: young journalists see successful writers (like, say, Matt Taibbi) using this tone so they think they should, too — and end up forcing it and copying it without the same skill or nuance that Matt has, and — most important — without the firm footing in expert, fact-driven journalism. Part of it is cultural: I think a lot of online magazines and websites try to establish themselves as edgy, innovative New Media — in contrast to stodgy Old Media — and one cheap and easy way to do this is to have writers spew screaming polemics even when it’s often vapid and substance-free.
If someone is using this tone without first doing the much harder work of creating the substance, then it’s just worthless or worse. But the tone can be an important spice — flavor — once the substance is established. Often, it is not just important but indispensable.
Originally published at nick.kinja.com.
