Felicia Sonmez and the Truth About Objectivity / Julia Ioffe

Felicia Sonmez and the Truth About Objectivity

Julia Ioffe julia@puck.news via m.convertkit.com 

09:20 (2 hours ago)

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Felicia Sonmez and the Truth About Objectivity

Two weeks ago, Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez filed a lawsuit against her employer, alleging discrimination against her based on her gender and being a survivor of sexual assault. If you’re not familiar with the case, here’s a quick summary: In 2018, as the #MeToo movement was sweeping America, Sonmez was the second woman to allege that Jonathan Kaiman, the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Beijing, had engaged in sexual misconduct. (Kaiman denied the allegations, and said of both accusations, “all acts we engaged in were mutually consensual.” He resigned amid the L.A. Times’ investigation.) The Post later determined that her outspokenness on the issue and her personal experience presented a conflict of interest that should prevent her from reporting on stories that pertained to sexual misconduct, like the controversy surrounding the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Then, on the day basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter were tragically killed in a helicopter crash, Sonmez tweeted out a link to a story about how Bryant had been accused of sexual assault, a case Bryant settled. In response, Sonmez was deluged with death and rape threats. The Post suspended her, only reversing the decision after a public outcry from the Post’s union and hundreds of Sonmez’s colleagues. It took another year for the newspaper to end its ban on Sonmez covering sexual assault.

People I had spoken to at the Post seemed to consider the matter closed, so Sonmez’s lawsuit, which seeks $2 million in damages, or “an amount to be determined by a jury,” for “economic loss, humiliation … and the deprivation of her rights to equal employment opportunities,” landed like a bombshell. And it had another bombshell buried within it: in her court filing, Sonmez, who declined to comment for this story, alleged that a male colleague at the Post had been accused of, and investigated for, sending “an unsolicited photo of his underwear-covered crotch to a young woman.” (The Post’s investigation concluded no wrongdoing, but the reporter was given a warning.) Despite having been investigated, her suit asserts, this man was still allowed to write stories about the #MeToo movement and sexual assault. Last weekend, the Daily Beast reported that Sonmez’s allegation was accurate. The Beast also identified the reporter, as well as the stories he wrote about sexual assault after he was investigated and warned. The allegation seemed to illustrate a disparity: a woman who survived sexual assault was seen as unable to cover #MeToo objectively, but a man who had been accused of sexual misconduct could.

I had heard some Post staffers, all of them white and male, gripe in private that while Sonmez’s suspension was probably unfair, she was now going too far in pressing the matter further. She was, one of them said, behaving like “an asshole.” But that hasn’t been the response elsewhere. The lawsuit set off a new round of often heated discussions in media circles, especially among women and journalists of color, both inside the Post newsroom and outside of it. Regardless of how the lawsuit plays out, Sonmez’s allegations felt true to many of the friends and colleagues I spoke to privately.

Sonmez’s experience was clearly unique, but it resonated with many, especially women, because it reflected our lived reality in newsrooms, especially those at the heart of the big-name, legacy media organizations. Everyone had their own stories of feeling like they had been treated differently—held to a different, more stringent standard and punished more ruthlessly for deviating from it—than their white male colleagues. Everyone had had moments, like Sonmez did, of not being treated as an adult professional. Everyone marveled at Sonmez’s courage to not only publicly push for the lifting of the ban, but also to sue her employer. Many of us have been too scared to do far less than Sonmez for fear of losing a job for which we are constantly told to be “grateful.” Our experiences and Sonmez’s may have been different in their specifics, but, as one journalist friend said, “it’s all part of the same system that treats women fundamentally differently.”

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The lawsuit has also fed into the debate about what objectivity in journalism really means. Last summer, amid the wave of protests after the murder of George Floyd, journalists of color began to speak out about the inadequacy of media bosses’ understanding of “objectivity.” “Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses,” star reporter Wesley Lowery wrote in the New York Times. “And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers. On opinion pages, the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the gaze of white editors. The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral. When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities.”

Lowery would know. A two-time Pulitzer winner, he left the Post after a conflict with then-executive editor Marty Baron over one of Lowery’s tweets. Lowery criticized the New York Times for a story about the Tea Party that did not include the context that it was partly a backlash to America’s first Black president. Lowery was drawing attention to the fact that the Times, which prides itself on its voice of disembodied objectivity, was missing a key part of the political context—that of America’s racial politics—a context Lowery had special insight into as a Black man and journalist. The Times seemed to acknowledge the oversight because it later added some context to the story, but Baron, according to reports, felt that Lowery had undermined his own objectivity as well as the paper’s, and suggested that Lowery would be better served working at an advocacy organization.

Lowery later left the Post, and Baron, who oversaw the decision to limit the scope of Sonmez’s professional duties, has recently retired. He is one of the defendants in Sonmez’s suit and, despite his long and impressive list of accomplishments, there’s a sense even among more establishment journalists that Baron helped create this problem. “Part of this is that Marty fucked up,” said one industry insider. “He’s a brilliant editor but he didn’t handle this brilliantly. It’s an absurd argument. Does that mean that a Black person can’t write about racism or a Jewish person can’t write about anti-Semitism?” (The Post declined to comment for this piece.)

What seemed strange to many, myself included, was that a reporter’s background is often valued—or even fetishized—as bestowing a certain level of expertise. I often cringe when I’m introduced as a Moscow-born reporter, as if I got my understanding of Russia and Vladimir Putin from my mother’s milk, rather than from decades of study and reporting. My personal connection to the place, though, is usually seen as buttressing my credibility, not compromising it. “I think a lot of editors can’t figure out which it is: does your personal experience make you more qualified to report on something or less qualified?” Columbia Journalism professor Bill Grueskin told me. “I don’t think it’s a prerequisite or a disqualifier. If you decide it’s a disqualifier, then the logical extension of that is you have to give your reporters questionnaires, like at the doctor’s office. If [being the victim of a sexual assault] is a hard disqualifier, then don’t you have to interview your entire newsroom and ask, are you a survivor of sexual assault? It’s the kind of illogical extremes you can get to if you see these things as disqualifying. What you hope is that you hired journalists who are qualified and professional enough to cover these issues.”

Even the Post’s own slightly awkward coverage of the Sonmez saga has flicked at how the paper’s management of this dilemma wasn’t up to snuff. “It’s unusual, if not unheard of, for a reporter to be banned from writing about a subject with which she is personally familiar or which involves the reporter’s background,” Paul Farhi wrote in the Post about the reversal of the ban placed on Sonmez. “News organizations usually value such experiences in that they may offer readers or viewers special insight or perspective.”

And this is the question journalists are debating these days. After #MeToo, after the George Floyd protests, after the Trump presidency, what is objectivity? Is it an attainable or even appropriate goal of our coverage? Or is it a flawed and narrow concept that unnecessarily limits journalists and their coverage? Does striving for it do more harm than good?

“In a hyper-political, hyper-divisive atmosphere, I more than understand why some yearn for ‘objectivity’ in journalism, a source of journalism that’s unimpeachably true,” said New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick. “But that word seems more apt, more achievable, in science than in journalism. Journalism is committed by human beings and we all bring points of view and much more to the game. What is more achievable is fairness, scrupulousness, vigilance about facts, a serious and constant attempt to present reality or a debate as accurately as possible.” Len Downie, the former executive editor of the Post, told me, “My starting point is that I’ve never, for the longest time, believed that objectivity was the goal. Sometimes, there’s no second side of an issue.”

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But other journalists, especially women and journalists of color, feel that what has defined objectivity in the past should be reconsidered, and the definition of what counts as objective should be expanded. “There’s an unequal burden on the question of objectivity,” New Yorker writer and Columbia Journalism School professor Jelani Cobb told me. “The presumption has been that people who are not traditionally represented are biased by those experiences, whereas white men aren’t. Often objectivity is a stand-in for a narrow set of acceptable biases, or viewpoints. They’re by no means neutral, but they’re acceptable. A person could have just as easily looked at the Sonmez situation and said, this is someone who understands this issue and could bring sensitivity and depth to covering it. It happens a lot with people of color who report experiencing racism—oh, you’re biased. Does someone who comes from the corporate world who wants to report on business have better insight—or are they biased?”

“I think what we’ve seen for the last few years, while newsrooms wrestle with diversity, be it racial or gender diversity, is that so many of them come up against what they define as objective, which has historically been defined from a white male perspective,” said Miriam Elder, an editor at Vanity Fair. “So you’ll see Black journalists speaking out against racial injustice or women speaking about deserving to go about their lives without being constantly harassed, and that’s seen as some great breach of objectivity—versus it being seen as the umbrella of journalism expanding to give a voice to people who haven’t had a voice before. Instead, they’re telling them you should leave your ‘identities’ at the door, as though being a white male isn’t also an identity.”

She pointed to the case of CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, brother of embattled New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who had played a role in advising his brother on how to handle a recent blizzard of sexual harassment allegations—a pretty clear-cut violation of journalistic standards of objectivity and ethics. (Andrew Cuomo has denied the allegations against him, calling himself a victim of “cancel culture.”) Still, the network did not discipline Cuomo—who for years has brought his powerful brother on his show to shoot the shit and talk politics—but said that he would not cover the allegations against the governor because, in their words, “he could never be objective.”

CNN, however, did not say it was taking its highest-rated anchor off of stories involving sexual harassment or misconduct, and made sure to indicate that questions regarding Cuomo’s objectivity were relegated to this very narrow matter. “He’s never not going to be seen as objective, except for this matter with his brother,” said Elder. “It’s not going to spiral outward, like it did for Felicia. There is no reckoning. Can you imagine if it was anyone who wasn’t a white man doing this? There aren’t deep questions about what it means for him as a journalist, it doesn’t become existential for CNN.” (A spokesperson for CNN did not respond to a request for comment.)

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NPR recently waded into the discussion by introducing a new policy, allowing its journalists to attend protests that advocate for “the freedom and dignity of human beings” if they first secure their supervisor’s approval. It reminded me of debates I had with my Russian colleagues, many of whom joined the Russian pro-democracy protests in the winter of 2011-2012 not as journalists covering the event, but as participants. I argued that this was a breach of objectivity and not the most powerful and effective use of their time; they argued that this was a do-or-die moment, that it was their country and their lives on the line.

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed in Washington during Trump’s presidency and his party’s unprecedented attacks on the very fabric of American democracy. “Not enough journalists recognize that we’re not bystanders in this,” said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. “You cannot be a neutral bystander when democracy is being attacked. It’s morally wrong. Too many Washington journalists have a desire to get back to the old world, where there are two parties, and they have to get a quote from party A, then party B. It’s just not that world anymore.”

For Hasan, like for many female journalists and journalists of color, objectivity as defined by the white establishment of old is impossible because, like for my Russian friends, the stakes are just too high and too personal. “I’m an immigrant, I’m a Muslim, I’m a journalist: I hit the Trump trifecta,” he told me. “I can’t dispassionately cover this. This idea that you can dispassionately cover this stuff, that you can attain this view from nowhere they teach in journalism school—one of the silver linings [of the Trump era] is that it laid bare the nonsense at the heart of that.”

I still think that participating in a protest as an activist rather than as an observer is not ideal: one’s journalistic platform, either a publication, a network, or even social media, is much more powerful than adding one more body to an already large crowd. And most protestors think they’re defending human dignity, including anti-abortion marchers and the January 6 insurrectionists. The policy also misses the point: it’s not about whether a journalist’s body can be in the streets, but whether their particular perspective—born of exposure to racism or sexual assault or not being part of traditional power structures—is acknowledged and valued or dismissed as biased. Whether that journalist is rewarded for bringing their unique perspective to the job, or are punished for it. Which is why so many people in American newsrooms are quietly rooting for Felicia Sonmez.

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Good night, tomorrow will be worse,

Julia