Why I (Usually) Hate Writing for the Media

Qui me non nisi editis novit, non novit. --G. W. Leibniz 

Trying to get a point across in public writing, whether established or clickbait media (a distinction of vanishing significance), with just the nuance, force, and connotations you intend, is like trying to perform a violin solo underwater. You can be as virtuosic as you like, but the medium you’re playing in is going to distort the signal to the point that your effort becomes a vain expenditure, and the result of it comes across as a dull, warped, and muted sound wave to which silence would have been preferable.

Most people who have not written for the media do not know that contributors are prevented from choosing the title of their own ‘piece’, and often see it for the first time only when it is already in ‘print’ (i.e., usually, already circulating on social media). At the low end of journalism, where I try not to go, this droit d’éditeur of framing the article by choice of title and subheading can result in true offenses against the intention and person of the author. But the title is only the first of many denaturing changes imposed in the course of editing, a process by which the author’s own voice is removed as if it were a weed, and replaced with a monocultured word-lawn spreading imperiously out from the rules about semi-colons and double quotation marks that are justified in the name of ‘house style’. Style is an expansible and contractible notion, and typically is interpreted to mean, in the current media landscape, not just the conventions of punctuation, but absolutely everything touched upon in old Strunk and White.

Does anyone really believe that editors make texts better when they ‘come back at you’ with ‘some edits’, when they say, ‘How about moving this paragraph to the intro?’ or ‘What if we were to add a transitional sentence here?’ (not to mention their endless campaign to extirpate polysyllables, hapax legomena, suspicious foreignisms, and anything, as they sometimes like to say, that ‘your grandmother would not understand’). It may be that writers too often imagine themselves as Nabokov or Naipaul, in complete control of every letter and mark. But just because a writer is not Nabokov or Naipaul, it does not automatically follow that the editor with whom he is paired is William Shawn or Bob Silvers. Is the one self-image not as unfounded as the other? Shouldn’t an editor have to prove, somehow, the authority by which editorial decisions come down? And if we recall the link between authority and authorship, if the editor is in fact in possession of it, why doesn’t he just write the thing himself?

(Incidentally, why is it that every American conservative I’ve ever met, of a certain age and a certain intellectual conceit, insists on staging a monologue about how great the New Yorker’s editors were in the old days, and how everything went ‘downhill’ with Tina Brown? Who taught them to do this? Who cares? Who, honestly, can keep track of who edited what in decades past?)

My complaint might seem petulant, but there is a very good practical reason, if the ad quem of the whole thing is good copy, for editors either to restrict themselves to light modifications in accordance with house style interpreted in the most contracted sense, or to simply reject a writer’s submission as sub-par. When a writer is subjected to multiple volleys of edits with gruesome red track-changes lines and incomprehensible marginal comments, what invariably happens, no matter how much good will and humility the author has at the outset, is that this latter human being, qua human being, begins to feel alienated from the work, no longer sees it as written in his or her voice, in his or her person, and comes to find it nearly impossible to do the necessary, focused, line-by-line rereading it would take to yield a final piece of work that holds together. And so mistakes inevitably slip through, turns of phrase that are a little off, non-sequiturs that the author knows, when they show up in print, were not there in the original draft. If editors are supposed to be the doctors of sick texts, then such mistakes, we might say, are of the iatrogenic variety. 

And who is this grandmother anyway? Mine are both long dead, but if they were alive it is still not for them that I would be writing, unless, I suppose, they wanted to make the effort. That’s their problem, not mine. Market incentives compel every editor to pretend to their authors, with a straight face, that anything but the dullest everyday English is unnecessarily ‘precious’, ‘snobbish’, etc. They are required to ignore the obvious truth spoken by Geoffrey Hill of poetry, but which applies no less well to prose: “In my view,” Hill says, “difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.” In another interview Hill dilates further on the question: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?”

In an ordinary day, fragments of a dozen or so languages swirl around in my head, French and English in particular weave around each other like threads, just as they did for a millennium before I ever came along to enjoy my share of them; and Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic words and phrases get woven in too, like strands of gold in thick brocade. These are the things I have attended to in my life, and I find that I would like to share them. I find that it is democratic to do so: to drop fragments of languages into a text that the reader might not (yet) know, simply because these fragments exist, they contribute to the richness of the world. They are jewels. To be told by an editor that it is ‘snobbish’ to put these jewels on display is in fact undemocratic: it is a symptom of the neoliberal market-incentivised inanition of our social life together.

These concerns would be less present for me, I imagine, if my purpose in writing in the media were to share opinions of which I am a stable representative: that there should be tariffs on steel, or that there should not be; that it is good to throw milkshakes at fascist politicians, because they deserve it, or bad, because it stokes the rising climate of violence and imperils everyone. In some cases I do have opinions, but it is not my primary concern to spend my life advocating for them. My concern is elsewhere: to model uncertainty and ambiguity, to reclaim these from shame, and to seek out exactly the right words for adequately conveying the experience of them. In this respect it has always been a bad match between me and the media, which treat all ideas as if they were the assignment for a high-school debate club, as if the only way to engage with an idea were by having an ‘angle’ on it.

Because in my salaried work I am a professor of philosophy, it is understood by many, especially my professional peers, that the sort of writing I am engaged in is ‘public philosophy’. But one cannot do public philosophy in a media environment structured in the way I have described. It is impossible. What one can do is advocacy, but we have known full well since antiquity that that is not philosophy.

The truth is I have understood all of this for a long time, and I go on making editorial compromises with media interested only in their bottom line simply because I am interested in mine too: I need the supplementary income. If this were not a concern, I would just post everything I feel the need to express right here at www.jehsmith.com. Perhaps that day will come. Perhaps I will force it to come through this public airing of my grievances. At the same time, I note that there are a few publications, closer to the boutique end of the media world, whose editors have had the grace and decency to edit me with a very light hand (I mention here in particular The Point and TANK). My sincere thanks to them. There is of course a direct correlation between exposure and compromise, and the higher one climbs in the ladder of visibility, the more one can expect to be forced to express oneself through clichés and dumb punchy position-taking. My hope is to stay in the shade-covered side streets of the boutique district as much as possible in the future.

*

DISCLAIMER: Every editor I have every worked with is, personally and individually, wonderful. I am concerned here about broad structural problems, not about individuals.

Comments

[Ray Saunders]

I used to think the Internet had democratized information and [regretfully] accepted that what allowed the good to rise from anywhere also allowed bad to arise and we just had to sort through the dross for the pearls. Lately, however, I've begun to suspect that rather than democratizing information, the Internet is becoming simply another sales venue, just as the potential of TV was betrayed to establish what Joe Bageant called the Hologram, aimed at controlling the Masses and (of course) profit.

The Golden Age of blogging has been swamped by Social Media, a term which has redefined the meaning of "social" and not in a good way. The few bloggers I still read, aside from you, have resorted to an annual donation drive. You might explore that angle.

I do not patronize sites with a paywall, like NYT and WaPo, even though I'm interested in their content. It's not that I object to the paywall per se, but that even behind the paywall I find myself bombarded by clickbait. Maybe a site with nothing behind the paywall except good writing would be an option. I'll contemplate what it would take to make that happen.

[Ignotas Artes]

One wonders by what reliable epistemic procedure you have come to this view of editing and editors, if "every" one of them you "have ever worked with is, personally and individually, wonderful." Is it not a terrifically convenient feature of this folk theory of blame that it can be leveled at diffuse "structural problems" but never at individuals or particular institutions? It saves you from having to jeopardize a relationship you might otherwise find useful. As Andrea Long Chu wrote last fall about the Avital Ronell affair, "Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people." A good editor of this post might thus have informed you that your disclaimer reads as protesting rather too much. (To take my tongue a bit out of my cheek: perhaps you meant the phrase "personally and individually" restrictively, suggesting -- however underhandedly -- that the goodness of the editors you've worked with does not extend beyond those personal limits into their professional work.)

In any case, not all editors are out to excise the pearls for the sand. I edit at one of those "boutique" publications in the U.S. (not one you mentioned or have published in), with no ads or paywall. I get to work both with writers and with fellow editors, including many philosophers, who tend the garden of stylistic and substantive richness you nicely eulogize here. For our part, all those tracked changes we send back are in the service of greater precision and nuance, not less of it. Perhaps you submit only the most alembicated and controlled of drafts for review, but most writers don't (aren't virtuosos very rare?), and surely you can imagine why we might want to give a less than perfectly formulated piece a chance, rather than reject it out of hand. (There's only trouble on this front when Nabokov complexes get in the way, but if the reader isn't always right, neither is the writer.) Conversely, I suspect you would be among the first to acknowledge that difficulty or preciosity should not be prized in itself, and in my own editing I often find myself proposing a more precise complexity for a vague or even inscrutable one.

Perhaps, in short, you are choosing to publish with the wrong people. You can sell out to the bigger or more well-known publications. Or you can support those smaller "boutique" media outlets, where you may find the virtuoso editors you seek.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

Thanks for your comments. Andrea Long Chu is a genius and I reflexively affirm everything she says (sometimes later having to backtrack when I realize I don't, in fact, agree with her). A very good example of the denaturing process I was attempting to describe was her own account on Twitter of what the NYT editors forced her to take out of her op-ed piece. I was heartbroken and angry on her behalf.

That said, my distinction between the structural and the individual is really just me trying to cover my ass. I don't want to alienate anyone I've worked with, and it is true that individually, as human beings, I like them, even when I really just wish they'd get out of my way and let me speak for myself.

Virtuosos are rare, but so much writing that was published before everything became so streamlined and formatted (and, I would add, all this largely in order to please the algorithms) would only come to appear as virtuosic after the fact, because of its idiosyncratic meandering -- I would cite here, e.g., Henry James, Thomas Browne. Let your authors meander; see what seeds they drop along the way and how these subsequently grow; and fuck the algorithms and the market, or at least stop pretending you are representing something other than these when you are repackaging perfectly fine idiosyncratic prose for mass consumption.

[Paul]

Not needing money and being tired of most websites, I restrict my writing to my blog. Hardly anyone reads it, but at least I am able to express myself exactly as I please. Though this provides almost no opportunities for discussion, I long ago concluded that the internet is usually not a good medium for that purpose.

[Betsy Anne]

Jesus Christ, man, you should back to drinking. Having a given text published by a media organization is not something you're entitled to. If media organizations adopted this black-and-white, publish-or-worship approach to most of the texts they receive, everything would be written by staffers. This means a more elite and insular media ecosystem in which a select handful of voices dominate, while other, more marginal voices are excluded. While you personally seem like an excellent writer, most people are quite bad it.

I also completely disagree with the pretentious labeling of phrases that the reader has to look up as "jewels." To whom does this have value? As if the writer's words were a gift that the reader should feel honored to receive?