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I made the same mistake everyone did—and I have a Ph.D. in English and am a retired English professor.

My mistake wasn’t misreading late night television host Jimmy Kimmel’s supposedly controversial public words in the wake of his indefinite suspension by Disney.

My mistake was not reading them at all.

That is, like many I didn’t read Kimmel’s statements in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination—I watched them.

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Earlier this week, following a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, a federal law went into effect that required that the popular social media app TikTok be taken down in the United States. President Joe Biden immediately indicated that he would leave to the discretion of his successor in that office, Donald Trump, whether the statutorily permitted 90-day extension of TikTok’s ability to remain operative in the U.S. would be enacted (as the law that banned TikTok also said that evidence of an active and fruitful search for a U.S. buyer for the Chinese-owned company could earn the site a stay of execution, so in theory there was a determination yet to be made by an elected official on that score before any ban could be postponed). One hiccup in all this was that Donald Trump wasn’t yet President of the United States at the time the ban went into effect, and therefore didn’t technically have the authority to issue—or reject—the 90-day ban extension, the latter the course of action apparently urged on him by his co-president Elon Musk, who made clear in a tweet on his Twitter platform that he doesn’t think TikTok (a competitor of Twitter) should be legal in the United States so long as his own platform isn’t legal in China.

It’s also worth noting that Mr. Trump has consistently and aggressively been in favor of banning TikTok, changing his mind only during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign and only when it seemed he might lose the election and after a billionaire megadonor convinced him (apparently) of a cause 150 million average Americans couldn’t; indeed, as you can see below, it was Donald Trump who in 2020 single-handedly launched the effort to kill TikTok that’s now reached fruition. So his commitment to keeping TikTok alive is far from clear, to say the least; on the one hand, he and Musk are regarded by many as grave national security threats due to their conflicts of interest in China—which leave them amenable to almost anything the Chinese Communist Party wants, whether or not it’s good for the United States—but on the other hand, banning TikTok is now a bipartisan position in Congress and Trump has promised his MAGA faithful that he’ll be tough on China. So no one really knows what Trump will do, especially as nothing he says can actually be believed.

With all this in mind, one of two things had to be the case going into this weekend: either Joe Biden had delegated to Donald Trump the decision on whether to enact a federal extension on TikTok even in lieu of Trump having presidential authority, in which case if Trump really wanted the app to stay live all this weekend it would have, or else President Biden didn’t delegate that authority to Trump, in which case under federal law the app had to remain shuttered until noon on Monday (when Trump will be sworn in as the next President of the United States, inches away from co-POTUS Elon Musk).

What actually happened is that—as you can see from the images below—TikTok first shuttered itself in accordance with the new federal law, then (presumably because of a backchannel communication from or with Team Trump) almost immediately thereafter changed its main-page message to locked-out users to a note that lauded Trump for promising to save TikTok. Then, 14 hours later, the platform went live again under a new message that offered fawning credit to Trump at a time when Trump has invited the TikTok CEO to his inauguration and received positively gobs of money from a donor closely linked to it. All this created an unavoidable impression of a hoax or scam in which (a) Trump is really just pumping his megadonors for cash behind the scenes as he also (b) could have insured TikTok stayed live all weekend but wanted it down for a period of time so that the 150 million Americans who use TikTok would suffer from a sense of loss and grief just long enough to feel lasting gratitude to Trump for “saving” an app in fact he himself had taken offline (and perhaps so megadonors would open their pockets a little wider to ensure their investment remained healthy). Further evidence that this is all a scam or hoax that has to do with Donald Trump’s particular relationship with TikTok is that all other Byte Dance apps (e.g., CapCut and Lemon8) are still banned, and none (including TikTok) are available in the Google or Apple app stores—confirming that the reinstatement tonight was some sort of sub rosa political arrangement that indeed flies in the face of federal law. That is, an exception has been made so a one-off political stunt could be pulled.

Never before in American history has a U.S. president spent the 48 hours before he takes office (1) executing a vile memecoin scam, then (2) scamming and deliberately traumatizing 150+ million Americans out of a service they rely on simply to create for himself a political “win.” This sort of dodgy conduct is a pretty good indication that—as nonpartisan historians held to be the case after the first Trump Administration—the second Trump Administration will also be accounted the worst in U.S. history. It’s no wonder that a meme is now going around referring to TikTok in the Trump era as “TrikTok.” Users have no way of knowing whether it (a) is back to stay; (b) will instead be pulled out from under them again for political purposes like Lucy (of Peanuts fame) pulling the football away from Charlie Brown just before he kicks it; (c) will come back, but only a long time from now, after Musk has extracted the concessions he is now demanding from the CCP; or (d) will come back but only under an owner Trump has handpicked—he says he’s demanded 50% U.S. ownership of TikTok—in which case the platform might be quickly MAGA-fied and “enshittified” as Musk did to Twitter.

Coda: Additional Memes

And a headline that’s going around with respect to Trump’s preposterous memecoin:

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The Current Situation

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{Note: Those looking to read up on one of the subcultures that pervades Bluesky after formerly occupying a corner of Twitter, a microcommunity known as TPOT or postrat, should go here. The values of the group include deliberate illegibility, a refusal to discuss public policy at the level of logistics, hostility to bona fides indicating expertise, shitp…

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{Note: Nothing in this lengthy article will change anyone’s mind on this issue, nor can it dull the intensity with which those on both sides of it experience it. Post-internet cultural theorists have long acknowledged that internet discourse doesn’t change minds unless and until two discrete condit…

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Introduction

A few days before the last time Joe Rogan got attention—again—for saying something ignorant, a video of a conversation between Rogan and far-right activist Jordan Peterson went viral among the population of Americans looking to infect their fellow Americans and then die rather than vaccinate themselves against a global pandemic.

If you watch…

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Introduction

To “PWN” someone is to—per the odd digital slang of our age—“utterly defeat” them. And that’s exactly what the home base for Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” insurrection aims to do (see below) to the scores of companies, websites, media outlets, and persons it now aims to “cancel.” As Proof has reported on at length before, as head of the Republican Party Trump is now overseeing the most militant cancel culture our nation has ever seen—one that threatens American markets and American democracy.

The most ardent adherents to a self-described billionaire’s “populist” movement claim to be animated by what they say is the worrying spread of “cancel culture” in America. If their complaint seems not just hypocritical but even delusionally self-contradictory, do remember that that’s the point: Trumpism is about attributing to one’s opponents whatever it is one is doing oneself that one cannot defend, whether it’s encouraging violent attacks on persons and property, undermining U.S. elections, or “cancelling” so many companies, websites, media outlets and persons through concerted digital action and even (see below) a systematized protocol for cancelling entities that there can no longer be any doubt that Patriot.Win is now the chief “canceller” in the United States.

The Patriot.Win Website

Patriot.Win is an insurrectionist outgrowth of the now-defunct pro-sedition website TheDonald.Win, which latter address now redirects to America.Win. Patriot.Win has two badges it uses to warn its users about companies, sites, media outlets and persons:

The Orange “Warning” Badge

The Red “Cancellation” Badge

Any company receiving either badge from Trump’s fan base immediately has its entry in the website’s index of links changed from white to (as is consistent with the badge) either orange or red. Links receiving the red badge above also receive strikethrough treatment from Patriot.Win, meaning that they are visually “cancelled”—that is, a line is drawn through the link text—and users are recommended to perpetually avoid them.

Notable in this Trumpist-devised systematic cancellation lexicon is that none of the companies, websites, media outlets, or persons so cancelled have been conclusively determined to have done anything wrong prior to their permanent cancellation—a truly remarkable oversight for a movement that’s made opposing cancellations of any kind (warranted or otherwise) an unshakable pillar of its worldview and its cultural agenda.

Badge #1: The Orange “Warning” Badge

Patriot.Win’s orange badge and link—indicating a need for users’ caution—uses three key “weasel words” to underscore that the site owners can’t actually confirm any of the allegations leveled by the site against any companies, websites, media outlets, and/or persons it’s so tarred: “appears”, “leaning”, and “influence.” Precisely to whom a given company, website, media outlet, or person “appears” to be “left-leaning” to a sufficient degree to receive an orange badge is unclear, though a likely group, surely, is the site’s anonymous editors. While the site links to articles attacking each company, website, media outlet, and/or person it cautions its users against, the quality of that sourcing is about what you’d expect, ranging from notorious fake-news websites like The Gateway Pundit to far-right propaganda outlet Breitbart, from the op-ed site The Federalist to random online videos (one such video purportedly establishes that users should avoid the far-right website Newsmax—which happens to be run by longtime Trump friend Chris Ruddy—because it has, and no I’m not joking, “left-leaning” predilections per a single video of “[Newsmax anchor] Bob Sellers and Mike Lindell” in conversation).

{Note: Lindell is a recovering crack addict who now sells pillows and claims that former president Trump will be reinstated as President of the United States by August of 2021.}

According to Patriot.Win, a link to an interview with Lindell somehow establishes that there’s the “appearance” of a left-“leaning” “influence [upon]” the Newsmax website. Note that the notion of an “appearance” of a left-“leaning” “influence [upon]” a company, website, media outlet, or person doesn’t even rise to the level of the following:

1. A demonstrated leftist predilection within the entity; or

2. a demonstrated left-leaning predilection within the entity; or

3. a demonstrated leftist influence upon the entity; or

4. the appearance of a leftist predilection within the entity; or

5. the appearance of a left-leaning predilection within the entity; or

6. the appearance of a leftist influence upon the entity.

No—all that is required is the appearance of a left-leaning “influence” for users of Trump’s insurrectionist digital headquarters to be warned against using, crediting, or trusting a given company, website, media outlet, and/or person. No better example of a “cancel culture” (or perhaps “cancel subculture”) can be found in the United States.

The Red “Cancellation” Badge

One might think that when a website is putting links in red; crossing out the names of companies, websites, media outlets, or persons; and adding a “stop hand” icon to an index entry for a company, website, media outlet, or person it is doing so with clear, significant, and corroborated evidence of indisputable malfeasance (though of course, given that the America First “movement” opposes all cancellations, we’d really expect even clear, significant, and corroborated evidence of indisputable malfeasance to be insufficient for Patriot.Win to try to cancel anyone or anything).

But it’s not so.

Per the Patriot.Win’s red cancellation badge, if there are even “reports” of “alleged” misconduct that even unintentionally could have a “chilling” effect on any Trump supporter, a company, website, media outlet, or person must be instantly cancelled.

Note that the standard used here—a “report” of “alleged” conduct—doesn’t even rise to the level of the following:

1. Direct evidence of since-confirmed misconduct; or

2. direct evidence of unconfirmed misconduct; or

3. second-hand reports of since-confirmed misconduct that did chill someone; or

4. second-hand reports of unconfirmed misconduct that did chill someone.

Instead, all that’s required is a report of alleged conduct that could have chilled someone, which given the “snowflake” tendencies of Trump supporters would require almost no effort at all. What sort of sources qualify as a “report” of “alleged” misconduct? Per the Patriot.Win website, sufficient sourcing includes entries from the blog of Ben Shapiro (Daily Wire); a random tweet from a “writer, filmmaker, [and] rabble-rouser” named Christopher Rufo; and a website called Reclaim the Net.

So Who’s Been Cancelled By the Trumpists?

A review of Patriot.Win confirms that Trumpists will cancel almost anyone, at any time, for any reason or no reason at all—again, a mere “appearance” of an issue or “allegation” of an “influence” or even a merely potential “chilling” effect is enough—and that upon such cancellation Trump’s supporters will systematically try to cut off traffic to the company, website, media outlet, and/or person they are trying to cancel. To be clear, they don’t do this by tweeting out—as sometimes occurs on the political left—detailed criticisms of the company, website, media outlet, or person under fire that can be responded to through public discourse, but by simply crossing out the entity in question as seen in the screenshot from Patriot.Win below:

You’re reading the above image right: Trump’s supporters have officially cancelled every single third-party payment intermediary in the United States except far-right Christian website GiveSendGo, which is currently being used by domestic terror leader Ali Alexander to hide from federal law enforcement.

You may also have noted the use of a category heading in the image above. Patriot.Win has indeed indexed all its official cancellations (as well as its endorsements) into these sixteen—yes, sixteen—categories:

• Broadcasting

• Education

• Financial

• Flags

• Gaming

• Humor

• Memes

• Music

• News

• QAnon

• Shopping

• Social

• Technology

• Travel

• Video Platforms

• Visual Art

This appears to be the most comprehensive cancellation protocol on the internet. The only categories in which Patriot.Win issues no orange “warning” or red “cancellation” badges are—perhaps not surprisingly—Flags, Humor, Memes, and QAnon.

Among the 11 flags endorsed by the Trumpists are the Jolly Roger Flag (the “skull and crossbones”), not just one or two but five Revolutionary War flags that have absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump or neo-fascist authoritarianism or Trumpism in any form, and (inexplicably) the Black Flag of Anarchy. As to which self-confessed QAnon sites are deemed acceptable, it appears that basically all of them are.

With all that said, here is a complete listing of the companies, websites, media outlets, and/or persons that Patriot.Win seeks to keep Trump supporters nationwide from in any way patronizing (entities being listed for the first time in this article are in bold):

Orange “Warning” Badge Recipients: A Compendium of Those Who “Appear to Have Left-Leaning Ideological Influence” (55 Entities)

• 23 and Me

• Activision

• AirBnB

• Anastasia Beverly Hills

• Aritzia

• Atlantic Records

• Axe

• Billie

• Biossance

• Blizzard

• Brooklinen

• Bungie

• Chik-Fil-A ^

• DECIEM

• Devolver Digital

• DoorDash

• Dropbox

• DuckDuckGo

• FashionNova

• Firefox

• Fitbit

• For Love and Lemons

• Ford

• Ganni

• Gatorade

• General Motors

• Glossier

• Goya ^

• Hourglass Cosmetics

• Ilia Beauty

• Intel

• Kosas

• Lululemon

• Minecraft

• Nabisco

• Newsmax ^

• PetSmart

• PlayStation

• Pluto TV

• Pokemon

• Pretty Little Thing

• Pusheen the Cat

• SavagexFenty

• Skillshare

• Spanx

• Square Enix

• Stitch Fix

• Target

• That Game Co.

• Tinder

• TOMS

• UbiSoft

• UGG

• Warner Records

• Yelp

^ This is not a typo. Chik-Fil-A, Goya, and Newsmax are somewhat famously run by far-right figures, so presumably they appear on this list because they pushed back insufficiently, in the view of Trumpists, on what was perceived as left-wing criticisms.

Red “Cancellation” Badge Recipients: A Compendium of Those With “Reports of Alleged Censorship, Suppression, or Chilling Effects” (82 Entities)

• Amazon

• American Airlines

• American Express

• Angie’s List

• Apple

• AT&T

• Bank of America

• Bed Bath & Beyond

• Cash App

• Chase Bank

• Coca-Cola

• Coinbase

• Cisco

• Costco

• Dell

• Delta Airlines

• DigitalOcean

• Discord

• Disney

• Etsy

• Facebook

• FactCheck.org

• Fox News ^

• GoDaddy

• GoFundMe

• Goodyear

• Google

• Grubhub

• HEB

• Indiegogo

• Instagram

• Kickstarter

• Kohls

• Lehigh University

• Levi Strauss

• Mailchimp

• Marriott

• Mastercard

• Medium

• Microsoft

• Morgan Stanley

• NordicTrack

• Okta

• Papa John’s ^

• Patreon

• Patagonia

• PayPal

• Pinterest

• Poshmark

• Ravelry

• Reddit

• Robert Gordon University

• Salesforce

• San Francisco Public Schools (SFUSD)

• Sephora

• Shopify

• Slack

• Snapchat

• Southwest Airlines

• Squarespace

• Streamable

• Stripe

• T-Mobile

• TikTok

• Twilio

• Twitch

• Twitter

• Under Armour

• United Airlines

• Vari

• Vimeo

• Visa

• Wagner College

• Walmart ^

• Wayfair

• Webflow

• WhatsApp

• Wikipedia

• WordPress

• Y Combinator

• YouTube

• Zendesk

^ This is not a typo. Fox News, Papa John’s, and Walmart are somewhat famously run by far-right figures, so presumably they appear on this list because they pushed back insufficiently, in the view of Trumpists, on what was perceived as left-wing criticisms.

Post-Cancellation Profile of a Contemporary Trumpist

Here’s an overview of the ascetic life that Trump’s movement now apparently demands of its followers (if they love him enough to respect the cancellations loving him brings).

(1) You can go online, but in doing so you must avoid all of the following companies (in any of the many permutations they may appear to you): Amazon, Angie’s List, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Discord, Etsy, Facebook, GoDaddy, Google, Indiegogo, Instagram, Kickstarter, Medium, Microsoft, Patreon, Pinterest, Reddit, Shopify, Slack, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, Twilio, Twitter, Vimeo, Webflow, Wikipedia, WordPress or YouTube.

(2) You can travel by car or plane, but you must not patronize any of the following while you are doing so: American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Disney, Goodyear, Marriott, Southwest Airlines, or United Airlines. {Note: Remember that you also cannot use any of the digital services above or financial services below while you are traveling by car or plane.}

(3) You can conduct telephonic and/or digital communications and/or transactions, but not via any of the platforms or service providers listed here: American Express, AT&T, Bank of America, Cash App, Chase Bank, Coinbase, Mailchimp, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, T-Mobile, Visa, or WhatsApp.

(4) You can eat food to survive, but not with the aid of any of the following service providers: Costco, Grubhub, Papa John’s, or Walmart. {Note: And as noted above, you must also be extremely wary of Chik-Fil-A, DoorDash, Gatorade, Nabisco, Target, and Yelp.}

(5) You must be vigilant about the products you purchase, for instance by avoiding all of these: bedding from Bed Bath & Beyond; Coca-Cola products of any kind (this includes literally hundreds of brands, from Bacardi to Barq’s, Capri Sun to Crush—when it’s sold in Peru—Dannon to Dasani to Dr. Pepper, Fanta to Fresca, Minute Maid to Mello Yellow, Pibb Xtra to Powerade, Schweppes to Smart Water, Vitamin Water to Vanilla Coke); no news from Fox News; no clothes from Kohls, Levi Strauss, Patagonia or Under Armour; no perfume from Sephora; and no furniture from Wayfair.

Trumpists also can’t use Substack, as the site’s third-party-payment vendor is Stripe—which is funded by now-cancelled U.S. seed money startup accelerator Y Combinator.

Conclusion

Cancel culture is destroying the lives of Trumpists, who now have so many brands and services they’ve been ordered to cancel that it makes continuing to live in America in 2021 virtually impossible. While no one doubts that on occasion an internet mob has bullied someone who didn’t deserve it—for instance, what Trump ordered his minions to do to now-retired U.S. army lieutenant Alexander Vindman or to the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich—as a systemic ailment in American life the entirety of the danger from anything answering to the description “cancel culture” is one that threatens the health, welfare, and happiness of exclusively Trump supporters. And it does so, moreover, as an exclusively internal threat that the anonymous leaders of the America First “movement” at Patriot.Win and similar websites have ginned up.

Needless to say, Trump himself is avoiding exactly none of the brands and services that his followers are being told to eschew.

Given the ruthless scope and militancy of the cancellations being ordered by Trump’s minions with Trump’s tacit approval—a cancel culture so brutally comprehensive that it creates a veritable cultural prison that all Trump supporters are told they must inhabit—it’s worthwhile for America to begin a discourse on the right-wing scourge of cancel culture before it destroys the lives of even more insurrectionists than it already has.

While Trumpist insurrectionists are admittedly willing participants in the cancel culture they’ve imprisoned themselves inside, the rest of us nevertheless owe it to democracy to make sure that the sort of militant, cultist asceticism that has firmly taken root on the political right doesn’t threaten either the American free market or our democracy.

Certainly we owe it, at a minimum, to the children of the insurrectionists—who can’t even drink Capri Sun juice-boxes now, per Trump’s neo-fascist totalitarianism—even if we don’t have enough empathy for their parents to try to save them from themselves.

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Introduction

The first time I witnessed the simultaneous horror and absurdity of expertise was at Harvard Law School in 1999, when the HLS administration assembled my class of 1L students to hear a panel of legal ethicists unpack some thorny ripped-from-the-news legal hypotheticals. I assumed, as I think did many of my classmates, that the goal of the ex…

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{Note: This is the sixth and final lecture in a series of college lectures on American journalism. The first, “What Is Journalism?”, is here; the second, “How Does One Study Journalism in 2021?”, is here. The third is “How Do Journalists Determine the 'Newsworthiness’ of Info?”, while the fourth is titled,“What Principles and Skills Does Superlative Jou…

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{Note: This is the fifth lecture in a series of university lectures on American journalism. The first lecture, “What Is Journalism?”, is here; the second, “How Does One Study Journalism in 2021?”, is here. The third is “How Do Journalists Determine the 'Newsworthiness’ of Info?”, while the fourth is titled,“What Principles and Skills Does Superlative Jo…

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Introduction

One of the reasons I almost never use the phrase “cancel culture” is because, like the phrase “political correctness”, it was built in a focus group by high-priced Republican political consultants, intended for use—for cynical political gain—as a catch-all term to describe a universe of unrelated ideas and behaviors. If you love focus groups and the empty suits paid six or seven figures to run them, by all means embrace the phrase “cancel culture” the same way you would any other product you’ve been manipulated into purchasing but don’t need.

Indeed, “cancel culture” serves a similar function to the word “smurf” in the 1980s animated kids’ television series The Smurfs. It’s a linguistic chameleon that can do a variety of tasks, though in the case of the phrase “cancel culture” case none of them are particularly important, unless you consider far-right virtue-signaling important.

A second reason I take a dim view of the phrase “cancel culture” is that, as a university professor of rhetoric, composition, and digital communications, I admit to being irked by the fact that the phrase doesn’t actually mean what its constituent words import. Just as conservatives call phenomena that are (a) unpopular, and (b) have nothing to do with politics “politically correct”—when in fact such cultural detritus is neither “political” nor generally received positively (i.e., as “correct”)—“cancel culture” is usually used to denote situations in which no one is being cancelled and no “culture(s)” are involved.

This said, something like “cancel culture” certainly could exist if the phenomenon so denominated involved:

1. “Cancellation” in the conventional sense of that word, meaning a process with some finality to it, that puts one on the wrong end of a binary pejorative status; and

2. a discrete, circumscribed “culture” with the capacity to systematically execute a “cancellation” and do so permanently.

Distinguishing Cancelling and Cancel Culture

To be clear, even with all the misuses of the phrase “cancel culture” in America today, there are surely some people—I might add that they are usually “extremely online” people, as those who live mostly in “meatspace” don’t really possess the proper tools to orchestrate a “cancellation”—who would indeed love to cancel certain others from both the marketplace of ideas and the nation’s free market, and to do so permanently.

We find such people on both the political left and the political right, of course. They contact the employers of those they criticize online to try to get them fired; or they slander and libel and defame their targets; or they spread vile conspiracy theories or outright disinformation about their enemies; or they organize snap boycotts or mass departures from a given service or venue. In short, when such people—Donald Trump would be the archetypal example—find something or someone they deem unpalatable or even dangerous, they do not engage with it but seek to destroy it immediately.

Let’s remember, though, that in some select instances this impulse is a responsible one.

There’s no particular reason we shouldn’t at least try to “cancel” neo-Nazis from our marketplace of ideas and, to the extent it can be done legally and consistent with our Constitution, even from the free market—inasmuch as, for instance, we can demand that the booksellers we frequent not organize a White Supremacy Literature section, and we can lobby local politicians not to let, say, a storefront for white-supremacist paraphernalia open up next to a synagogue.

On the other side of the political spectrum, while I’d never propose the “cancellation” of “antifa” because (a) it’s an idea and not an organization, (b) the idea (“anti-fascism”) is one all Americans should support (as millions of people, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, have died fighting fascism at home and abroad), and (c) even when anti-fascists organize in groups, they overwhelmingly do so peacefully, some notable exceptions notwithstanding, if, in contrast, someone were to propose trying to “cancel” violent anarchists from American discourse, and to the extent allowable from marketplaces—e.g., by disallowing, say, bomb-making guides on Amazon—I’d not see anything objectionable in it, nor would, I’d venture, most Americans.

{Note: With respect to my comment about peaceful anti-fascists, which I’m sure some far-right cranks would love to jump on, I’ll just say the following: in recent years, many U.S. Republicans have developed another nasty habit besides authoritarianism. This is the use of argument-by-anecdote exclusively. Know that this is just a crutch for those unwilling to do serious research.}

Cancelling Is An Ancient Tradition

My point is that at some time or another we’ve all had a desire to “cancel” someone or something by eliminating its cultural capital and perhaps even its market capital.

The notion that this is an idea that hails from either the American “left” or “right” is preposterous. The idea is an ancient and universal one. It’s a very human impulse to try to eliminate phenomena we regard as not just noxious but actually dangerous to us and those we care about.

For instance—albeit in every possible sense of the two words indefensibly and risibly—the political right in America has now spent approximately over 140 years trying to “cancel” Black voters through Jim Crow legislation, violent intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests, misinformation, disinformation, systematic voter-suppression plots, voter identification laws, the curtailment of early voting and Sunday voting hours, manipulation of polling places and polling hours, the refusal to make Election Day a national holiday, and much more. All of these efforts were aimed at destroying Black voters as a cognizable political base of power in the United States. Thankfully, after decades and decades of these efforts being successful they are starting to backfire in states like Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. Cancelling Black voters—a favorite hobby among the American right—just doesn’t have the track record it once (tragically) did.

Indeed, for all that cancelling is a human and group instinct—one sometimes deployed with honorable intentions, sometimes dishonorable ones—it’s almost never successful.

So why is that?

The simple answer is that “cancellations” tend to not be permanent or comprehensive unless and until they occur in the content of a discrete “culture.”

While none of us would deny that cultures throughout human history have used the punishment of “exile” as a form of cancellation, we also can’t deny that—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—Donald Trump Jr. is right to mock attempts to “cancel” him as doomed to fail. They are indeed so doomed, as short of imprisoning someone for demonstrated crimes, American culture writ large doesn’t have the capacity to cancel anyone, be it Trump Jr. (who richly deserves to be imprisoned for election fraud and campaign finance crimes) or anyone else. American culture is simply too large, too heterogeneous, and too dynamic to effectuate permanent cancellations.

Try to “cancel” Trump Jr. and you’ll simply make some segment of the population love him more. Try to cancel Freddie deBoer on Substack via an allegation of transphobia and you’ll just (as has now happened) increase his newsletter’s readership exponentially. And these things don’t happen because Americans are contrarian—that is, being the target of a would-be but inevitably ineffectual cancellation isn’t the thing that causes someone to gain in popularity—but because benighted attempts to cancel anyone or anything invariably raise their profile and the amount of attention they receive and so, through the hegemony of large numbers we see in the digital age, build their audience.

While in theory it’s possible for a cancellation campaign to be so large, so protracted, so well-organized, and so highly publicized that it could in time become successful— I’m imagining, for instance, the forcing of a company to shutter, or the forcing of a public figure to retire from public life permanently—situations in which this sort of erasure from America’s collective consciousness occurs are usually accompanied by other protocols that would or could have caused the same end: for instance, a company has been or is about to be sued into oblivion by all those it has harmed, or the public figure in question faces criminal prosecution for his public or private misconduct.

The odds of a permanent cancellation occurring in the absence of systemic cancellation are extremely low. Again, the reason is simply the size, complexity, and dynamism of our transnational digital culture (whether it is seen as a “monoculture” or, more viably, as a near-infinite number of nano-cultures abiding within and sometimes crossing over micro-communities). Even if an attempted cancellation doesn’t result in someone becoming more popular with an audience comprised of individuals with the opposite ethos of the would-be cancellers, anyone or anything shooed away from public life can eventually reemerge in an entirely different format—with a wholly different identity—and with a renewed and refreshed purpose. This process may take time, but it certainly can and does happen.

The only exception to the above we might propose is one in which someone’s conduct should have enacted systematized cancellation protocols, but did not. For instance, the allegations against comedian Louis CK—that he exposed himself to women comedians in private spaces—were more-than-arguably criminal in nature, as indecent exposure statutes in nearly every state would’ve made his conduct punishable by imprisonment. But these protocols were never enacted. Instead, Louis CK has suffered a protracted cancellation whose duration is clearly warranted by the fact that, in a very real sense, he “got off easy” by escaping a new and individuated criminal prosecution for every single instance in which he exposed himself to someone else without their permission.

Where We Actually Find Cancel Cultures

So in what context does “cancel culture” exist?

It exists in closed systems so tightly controlled—often by some centralized authority or protocol—that they can reliably enact permanent punitive excommunications. An example of such a system would be the contemporary Republican Party, which is, as we all know by know, controlled with an iron fist by former president Donald Trump.

It seems that every hour on the hour a cable news program is informing us that the reason Republican politicians at the local, state, and federal levels can’t behave with any integrity, decency, or honor anymore is that they are “scared” of how Trump will react to them acting out of concert with his desires. These elected cowards are quite clear about what they fear—and when they’re not, they always have interlocutors on cable to explain their apprehensions. What they fear is that Donald Trump will, using means both high-tech and low-tech, public and private, conventional and illicit, (1) take away all their money (by making it impossible for them to fund-raise), (2) take away their current employment (by making it impossible for them to be re-elected), and (3) take away their future livelihood (by making them personae non grata in GOP circles, including not just GOP entities at the local, state, and federal levels but right-wing nonprofit advocacy orgs, right-wing think tanks, and right-wing lobbying firms).

In short, Donald Trump enforces his will on GOP minions through “cancel culture.”

Of course, in the case of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, the emphasis isn’t so much on “culture” but on the first four letters of the word: “cult.” In overseeing a culture of fear whose conventional wisdom and permissible conduct is so tightly run and policed—to the point it bears all the hallmarks of the sort of “culture” one finds in cults—Trump ensures that he has the authority and agency and resources to “cancel” almost anyone he wants in what we call the “GOP” but now think of as a cult of personality.

The Problem With Every Discussion of Cancel Culture

I write all this knowing that there’s virtually no point in writing it. Since “cancel culture” is, in the hands of right-wing demagogues, really just a meaningless buzzword that acts as a proxy for things demagogues don’t wish to say outright, I really don’t know why I bother remarking on its silliness. It’s hard to see any real benefit in that.

Indeed, in a sense the silliness of the phrase “cancel culture” is the point. The phrase is so obviously being misused that all those who misuse it and hear others misuse it have essentially already reached an accord about its misuse. It’s sort of like a musical artist a large group of music patrons listens to ironically; as long as everyone is in on the joke, it doesn’t so much matter that the music is awful, as it’s the sense of togetherness in casting judgment on an absent third party that’s the real purpose of the whole exercise.

By the same token, people on my end of the political spectrum—the political left— increasingly find themselves responding to the evident preposterousness of the phrase “cancel culture” by over-correcting and insisting that even temporary cancellations never happen, though we know they do. We lose our moral authority when we pretend that no one ever loses a job because of a digital mob action; no one ever loses friends or the comfort of family members; no one ever loses their voice in public discourse or indeed really loses anything at all through the concerted acts of other people online. Or, we progressives will sometimes say, if anyone did suffer such punishments it’s due to the fact that such consequences were deserved—an observation that’s undoubtedly sometimes true, but also doesn’t mean that a cancellation (a permanent one or, much more often, a temporary one) has occurred. The simple fact is that a cancellation is not something other than a cancellation simply because it’s been richly earned—though as noted above, it’s certainly fair to question a claim of “cancellation” when a cancellation is impermanent.

In view of all the foregoing, I propose a simple catechism for reasonably identifying the existence of, and assessing the operations of, a so-called “cancel culture.” Here are the questions we’d expect to ask and have answered via such a catechism:

• Did the “cancellation” arise within a closed system, or a discrete community or subcommunity?

• Did the situation result in a permanent excommunication from that closed system or discrete community or subcommunity?

If the answer to either question is “no,” a cancellation cannot reasonably be said to have occurred. If the answer to both questions is “yes,” a cancellation has occurred. But to then find out if a cancel culture was involved, a third question must be asked:

• Has the closed system or discrete community or subcommunity developed, intentionally or negligently or accidentally, a series of formal or informal protocols for cancellation that are endemic to the system or community?

If the answer is “yes,” congratulations—you’ve located a “cancel culture.” And in doing so, you’ve encountered an ancient phenomenon that extends back to pre-homo sapiens and an era in human history when roving tribes of early humans developed practices and rituals and traditions for kicking someone (or a group of people) out of their tribe.

A Case Study in Cancellation

So for instance, when Justin Amash, once a Republican congressman from Michigan, expressed his intent to vote to impeach Donald Trump, he was dismissed from House Republicans’ Freedom Caucus almost immediately, and made to understand that he would eventually be stripped of his House committee assignments—a process he then hastened by becoming an independent (after which House GOP leadership told him he could no longer caucus with them).

Throughout Amash’s excommunication, Donald Trump cheered it and shepherded it via relentless external pressure on his congressional allies. To the extent the GOP has a discrete culture of authorities, protocols, traditions, and rituals—which it does—and to the extent Amash was removed from that culture in its entirety, which he was, he was the “victim” of a “cancel culture.” And his victimhood was publicly and privately orchestrated by the single most active canceller of other humans in the United States: Donald Trump.

I don’t say that Trump is a proponent of “cancel culture” because he often proposes boycotts, though he does, because (as noted above) there’s really no way to execute a successful cancellation of an entity like the National Football League or Major League Baseball—two entities Trump has sought to cancel—for the sort of specious reasons Trump has advanced. If the NFL or MLB were found to have systematically committed a slew of illicit offenses like those Trump’s friend Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is accused of—to wit, covering up the systemic sexual abuse of students under his care at The Ohio State University—there might have been some bite behind these boycott efforts by Trump, but again, any resulting cancellation would really have been caused by the universally condemned activity rather than the boycott. The boycott would be a mere symptom of the virus of (in this hypothetical) not giving a fig if the young men in your charge are sexually abused, as was and is the case with Trump’s friend Jim Jordan.

Conclusion

Trump is the reigning “King of Cancel Culture” because there’s no discrete system or community in America as tightly controlled by a single person as the contemporary Republican Party is by Donald Trump. We’re reminded of this daily when we are sagely told by political commentators that Republicans “cannot” cross Trump—yes, the word “cannot” is used—even when, say, the lives of kids on the U.S.-Mexico border are at stake, or the lives of 32 million Americans doomed to experience COVID-19 because of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge it, or when the lives of U.S. soldiers are imperiled because Trump decided to nearly start a war with Iran in January of 2020 for no reason whatsoever. In each instance, we have been told that Trump has the power to cancel the personal, professional, and pecuniary lives of Republicans anywhere in America who dissent from his deadly, capricious, and exclusively self-interested designs. Such is the power and the predilection of the leader of the contemporary Republican Party.

Now that—to quote Elroy Patashnik of Community, my very favorite television show—is a man who knows how to run a “cancel culture.”

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{Note: This is the fourth in a series of university lectures on the current state of journalism in the United States. The first lecture in the series, “What Is Journalism?”, can be found here, while the second lecture, “How Does One Study Journalism in 2021?” can be found at this link. The third lecture is “How Do Journalists Determine the 'Newsworthiness’ of Information?”}

I gave the lecture below, addressing the principles and skills needed to be a superlative journalist, as part of a course entitled Twenty-First Century Journalism. To be clear, this lecture was not developed with Substack (or even a general audience) in mind. But I believe it may be useful to a larger listenership at a time when the question of who is or is not a journalist, and how we recognize journalism worthy of our respect and support, is central to public debate over the state of journalism in the United States.

The lecture is about 70 minutes, and, as you might expect given the purpose for which it was first created, it proceeds at a stately pace. But I think if you bear with it, you’ll find it illuminating. To read pages from the journalism textbook it mentions, see here.

{Note: You’re reading a free article on the Proof website. If you enjoy this content, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Proof for just $5 a month—the lowest subscription rate on Substack. A subscription gives you access to all of the site’s content. See the Proof archives for a sense of the sort of content you can find here, or click the button below to subscribe to Proof right now.}

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Introduction

According to scores of major-media reports, there are a dozen people on Substack.

We know this because only a dozen people are ever mentioned as being on Substack, per articles in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Financial Times, Vox, Axios, Adweek, The New Republic, The Verge, Columbia Journalism Review, TechCrunch, and a handful of other outlets that heard about Substack and apparently shouted out their office-building windows to see what people thought of it as research for their think-pieces. I’m not going to link to all those articles, because I’m going to tell you right now what they say: that there are a dozen people on Substack.

Within this universe of Substack users, these articles add, there are only six people on Substack who actually matter. They are: Glenn Greenwald, Matty Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Graham Linehan, and Freddie deBoer. They happen to all be men, and widely disliked, and (excepting Yglesias) conservatives (or now seen as such, anyway).

So the picture is pretty clear, then: Substack is a playpen for disaffected conservative men. Case closed.

I guess I should add, however, that on occasion (but only on rare occasion) we hear tell of six other Substack authors: Heather Cox Richardson, Judd Legum, Bill Kristol, Bari Weiss, Emily Atkin, and Anne Helen Petersen. And yet, because this latter group is more heterogeneous—it includes a Boston College history professor, a progressive environmental justice author, a “Never Trumper,” a conservative woman, a progressive culture columnist, and Judd Legum—we don’t really know precisely what to do with it.

We can acknowledge that it exists, but that’s about it.

So, there you have it: there are a dozen people on Substack.

There Must Be More Than a Dozen People on Substack

You’re correct. There are more than a dozen people on Substack. It’s silly to think otherwise.

In fact, there’s a baker’s dozen people on Substack—as Patti Smith’s decision to create a Substack a few days ago was widely covered, including by Rolling Stone, Variety, NME, Pitchfork, and Yahoo! News.

There Must Be More Than Thirteen People on Substack

Well… maybe. But here’s where things get tricky.

Technically there are more than thirteen people on Substack, but we don’t know this because of any of the scores of articles written about Substack by major media in the 45 months that Substack has been around. While the New Yorker wrote in December 2020 that there were “thousands” of publications on Substack, that was just a rumor.

Certainly there was no evidence in any of the journalism surrounding Substack that there are more than, as already indicated here, about a dozen authors on Substack.

But I’m a crank—I admit it—so I decided to investigate this rumor in the New Yorker.

After all, Substack is in the process of raising $65 million in Series B venture-capital funding, with a total valuation of $650 million, and wouldn’t a $650 million valuation be considerably high for a company whose user base could fit in a Chevy Suburban?

I decided to, while I was at it, determine if, as major media has likewise made clear, the only topic discussed at Substack is politics. It seemed to me that twelve or thirteen people—including Patti Smith, apparently?—discussing politics in about that number of distinct digital newsletters would probably not be worth $65 million in VC funding.

Let alone a $650 million total valuation.

So I set out to find the truth. Below are my findings.

{Note: I don’t advise anyone in major media to replicate my bizarre, onerous research methods, which I’ve taken to calling—as a shorthand, apologies for the affectation—“basic journalism.”}

Substack By the Numbers

I’ve broken down my OSINT (open-source) research on Substack into five key findings:

(1) As of April 5, 2021, there were at least—I mean at a bare minimum—2,728 publications on Substack.

I know this because I counted all of those that are available to be counted when you click the “All” tab under each of the existing nineteen subject-matter categories (see below). The counting took me about fifteen minutes. Substack makes a listing of its publications in these categories publicly available—easily searchable and countable.

{Note: I say “at least” 2,728 publications because I’m not sure if new publications appear in the Substack index right away, and because I’m not sure if abandoned publications or publications outside the nineteen “ranked” categories appear or are locatable via this sort of search. So the figure above may be very low, but represents a good “rock-bottom floor” for future discussions.}

(2) These (minimum) 2,728 publications break down—according to Substack’s official category designations—as indicated below.

Before you read the charts below, you should know that Substack has been around for almost four years, but only disambiguated itself into first twelve—and now nineteen— subject categories on December 16, 2020.

Prior to that, Substack had only two rankings: “Top Paid Publications” and “Top Free Publications”—listings that captured only fifty of the site’s thousands of publications.

A review of the platform’s four-year history on WayBackMachine makes it clear that (a) the switch to subject-area categories rather than subscription-type categories was necessitated by the “Paid Publications” listing becoming too static and homogeneous (because politics journalists tend to charge more for their publications, with the result that politics newsletters will be overrepresented in any paid-publication ranking not disambiguated by subject area), and (b) prior to the switch to subject-area categories, Substack had a practice of featuring three to five publications on its main homepage—a major boon for those writers—and basically without exception, for years, those writers were politically progressive.

Total Number of Currently Visible Substack Publications By Category (Most to Least)

• Technology (516)

• Culture (453)

• Politics (292)

• Finance (242)

• Literature (220)

• Business (194)

• Sports (115)

• Food & Drink (108)

• News (91)

• Health (89)

• Music (70)

• Art & Illustration (68)

• Faith (64)

• Philosophy (51)

• Science (41)

• Climate (37)

• Education (36)

• Travel (29)

• History (12)

Substack Categories with a Full “Top 25 Paid Publications” Contingent (Alphabetical)

[UPDATED JUNE 18, 2021]

• Business

• Culture

• Faith

• Finance

• Food & Drink

• Health

• Literature

• Music

• News

• Politics

• Sports

• Technology

Substack Categories with Less Than a Full “Top 25 Paid Publications” Contingent (Ranked By Number of Publications Appearing in the “Top Paid Publications” Ranking)

[UPDATED JUNE 18, 2021]

• Art & Illustration (24)

• Climate (22)

• Travel (21)

• Science (19)

• Philosophy (13)

• History (11)

• Education (5)

Percent of Total Currently Visible In-Category Publications Constituted By the “Top Paid Publications” Ranking in Each Subject Area (Smallest Percent to Largest Percent)

• Technology (4.8%)

• Culture (5.5%)

• Politics (8.6%)

• Finance (10.3%)

• Literature (11.4%)

• Business (12.9%)

• Education (16.7%)

• Sports (21.7%)

• Health (22.5%)

• Food & Drink (23.1%)

• News (27.5%)

• Philosophy (27.5%)

• Art & Illustration (35.3%)

• Music (35.7%)

• Faith (39.0%)

• Travel (44.8%)

• Science (48.8%)

• Climate (51.4%)

• History (58.3%)

(3) Politics isn’t the most popular category on Substack. In fact, it’s not even close to being the most popular category.

Using the “2,728” figure retrieved above—with all the caveats already offered—Substack really could be thought of as a “technology publications” website, with a secondary focus on “culture publications.” The Politics category does run slightly ahead of Literature and Finance in this assessment, though.

{Note: It does appear that the Culture category acts as temporary storage for new publications as yet uncategorized by Substack, so the figure above is slightly—but only slightly—inflated. My own estimate is that up to 100 of the 453 Culture publications may later get reassigned to other categories, particularly Health, Science, Climate, Faith, Philosophy, Music, and Travel.}

(4) A review of Substack’s most popular categories reveals that (a) Substack skews wildly toward the political left, and (b) much of what is being written on the platform focuses on technology and money, with three of the platform’s six most popular categories (and 952 of the 1,917 currently visible publications in those six categories) focusing on these two topics. Of the remaining 965 currently visible publications in the six most popular categories, about 70% are in one of two culture-oriented categories, Culture and Literature. Incredibly, under this assessment “politics” sites make up only 15% of the currently visible publications in the six most popular categories on Substack.

Among the successful Substack users I discovered on the digital publishing platform who are not in the aforementioned “baker’s dozen” of Substack users are Roxane Gay, Grace Lavery, Cheryl Strayed, Samantha Irby, Tressie Cottom, Alison Roman—

—in fact, what I learned is that a publishing platform with thousands of publications can’t be typified by just a few well-known names, and that writing about Substack in this way is lazy… and not journalism. The same would apply to anyone who tried to write about Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Weibo, or Clubhouse in this way, even though all of those websites (Clubhouse excepted) are far larger than Substack.

(5) Journalists don’t know how to calculate the financial value of a Substack publication.

Glenn Greenwald was recently reported to be authoring a Substack publication that will earn between $1 million and $2 million this year.

That’s amazing!

Also, wrong.

Greenwald will make significantly more than this in his first year on Substack.

This revelation underscores that Substack is poised to redefine the creator economy—making it increasingly senseless for high-value properties at major-media institutions to stay where they are when they are earning less than 10% of what they could earn if they struck out on their own.

Simply put, you cannot calculate the annual value of a Substack publication by taking its current number of monthly subscribers and then multiplying by (a) the per-month subscription rate, and (b) twelve (the number of months in a year). This doesn’t retrieve an accurate figure because it assumes that the current number of subscribers a Substack author has will remain constant over the next twelve months. This strange assumption is particularly inapt for an author, like Greenwald, who has been on Substack for less than half a year.

In fact, the annual value of a Substack is best calculated by monthly subscriber accrual, as this figure allows an assessor to roughly gauge how many subscribers a publication on Substack will have in each month of its first year, assuming a steady rate of growth.

Using this calculation, Glenn Greewnwald is likely to earn about $2.34 million from Substack in his first year on the platform. In his second year on the platform, he would earn far more—indeed, more than double this amount, or well over $5 million. By his third year on Substack, Greenwald’s total earnings may well reach over $10 million.

While it’s certainly possible that Greenwald’s monthly subscriber accrual rate—about 6,000 new subscribers per month at last count—could slow, it’s far less likely, relatively speaking, than the assumption now being made by journalists attempting to calculate Greenwald’s annual Substack income: they assume he will never gain another subscriber.

So why are major-media journalists incorrectly calculating the value of the only twelve Substacks they’re interested in, making errors that would be embarrassing from a high school student? I see five likely possibilities, though admittedly all are speculative and the real reason could easily be even stupider than any of these.

1. Major media wants to make Substack’s $650 million valuation look ridiculous. Substack gets a percentage of Greenwald’s earnings—10%, to be precise—so by understating his annual earnings, indeed the annual earnings of every Substack author, major media deliberately and fraudulently undermines the legitimacy of Substack’s market valuation and even its business model.

2. Major media hates Greenwald, and can’t accept that he’s about to become the highest-paid journalist—by a fair margin—in the history of the United States. Never underestimate professional jealously as a motivating factor in major-media reporting. On the other hand, Greenwald has also pretty famously conducted himself as a jerk online—and done so for quite a few years, now—which puts me in mind of a related axiom: never underestimate personal animus as a motivating factor in major-media reporting.

3. Major media can’t accept the threat that Substack now poses to major-media institutions, and/or it can indeed accept it, but does not know how to respond to it, so it fraudulently minimizes it with willfully poor reporting and analysis. Certain high-profile major-media columnists, like Paul Krugman, and notable “access journalists” who sometimes get scoops by agreeing to publish obvious lies from their systematically deceitful sources, like Maggie Haberman, would almost immediately become millionaires if they moved from their current haunts to Substack. The same is true for a handful of other figures in major media. A few hundred others would at least see a notable raise from their current salaries if they jumped to Substack. If major media makes clear to its readers that this has been the case with Greenwald—and it has been—it more or less is engraving an invitation to its employees to bolt for the sunny wilds of the creator economy. This may be why the New York Times, which employs both Krugman and Haberman, has lately gotten busy setting obstacles to employees going on Substack (or, for that matter, any newsletter-publishing platform).

4. Major media doesn’t care about getting the story of Substack’s rise correct, because that’s actually not the real purpose of all its reporting on Substack. There’s usually a reason when we see—across dozens of different major-media outlets—complete indifference to getting a story correct. I’ve mentioned some of the reasons above, but there are others. For instance, it may be that major media hasn’t yet decided the story is truly significant, so it doesn’t put its best people on it. Generally, the not-ready-for-primetime team comprises twenty-somethings who’ve been instructed to write think-pieces that get clicks regardless of their accuracy, thoroughness, objectivity, or quality. We often discount just how many journalists are young people whose main “asset” as digital writers is that they have recognized that tearing something down that they don’t even understand is a quick way to get attention; even some slightly older journalists in emerging tech have now made a career for themselves not by advancing any new ideas, innovating in any way, or having any unique perspectives on existing phenomena, but by seeing something new and then eviscerating it before either it or anyone else (including journalists) even know what it is or can be yet. Tech journalism is especially ripe for this sort of by-the-numbers writing: it finds a phenomenon still in the process of defining itself and evolving, points out its obvious flaws—as anything unfinished and evolving is certain to have glaring ones—then crows like it discovered a New World. It’s rock-bottom “journalism,” but the click rates are positively delicious.

5. Journalists can’t do math—and also don’t have editors who are good at math. We often forget that most journalists don’t have much if any expertise in any field—one reason they’re so hostile to subject-matter experts who are not full-time journalists. The existence of such people with {shudder} experience, training, education, and a pedigree in various fields underlines the fact that journalists by and large become experts in the areas they cover only after many, many years. In the meantime, journalists suffer from the imposter syndrome of knowing that they are essentially dilettantes whose magic trick is to—often via a performative hostility to actual experts—appear like they know what they’re talking about, rather than being mere stenographers (or peanut-gallery cranks) to those who do. Reporting about Substack’s rise requires not some twenty-something think-piece writer but a serious business reporter who can do complicated math. Thus far, such resources have only rarely been deployed to cover the Substack story. This is incredible, given that Substack and services like it could cause the collapse and then generative reconstruction of the entire information ecosystem in the United States in the next 60 months. One could argue that Substack’s emergence—and that of newsletters generally (and, even more broadly, the “creator economy”)—is the most important story in America today after the domestic terror movement now being led by the former President of the United States, Donald Trump.

Conclusion

Don’t trust major-media reporting on Substack—at least not yet.

Major media has decided that Substack is a threat, and is acting accordingly—throwing its journalistic ethics to the wind in an effort to lie about the platform and those who use it. I’ve done my best to tell the true story of Substack in this article and also here, but the core truth is that we haven’t entered the era of decent Substack journalism yet.

May it come soon.

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{Note: This is the third in a series of university lectures on the current state of journalism in the United States. The first lecture in the series, “What Is Journalism?”, can be found here, while the second lecture, “How Does One Study Journalism in 2021?” can be found at this link.}

I gave this lecture on protocols for determining the “newsworthiness” of information as part of a course entitled Twenty-First Century Journalism. To be clear, the lecture was not developed with Substack or even a general audience in mind. But I believe it may be useful to a larger listenership at a time when the question of what does or does not get reported by contemporary journalists—and why—is of intense interest to many.

The lecture is about 73 minutes, and as you might expect given the purpose for which it was first created, it proceeds at a stately pace. But I think if you bear with it, you’ll find it illuminating. To read the early pages of the journalism textbook it mentions, see here.

{Note: You’re reading a free article on the Proof website. If you enjoy this content, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Proof for just $5 a month—the lowest subscription rate on Substack. A subscription gives you access to all of the site’s content. See the Proof archives for a sense of the sort of content you can find here, or click the button below to subscribe to Proof right now.}

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Introduction

Writing an article about a platform you publish on using that platform as your means of communication reminds me of comedian Lewis Black’s epic rant about a spot in Houston where two Starbucks franchises face one another from across a busy street. Black avers that the scene is a Sign of the Apocalypse, and I’m inclined to agree—despite my fondness for the occasional venti White Chocolate Mocha. Even so, as a working journalist and an assistant professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at University of New Hampshire who teaches digital writing, digital journalism, digital publishing, and creative nonfiction at the university level—among other subjects—I’d be remiss as both a journalist and an academic if I didn’t write about my experience of Substack thus far.

A few caveats before I begin: (1) I have been on Substack for just over two months; (2) Proof, the Substack newsletter and website you’re reading now, is a subscription outlet, so I receive income from my use of the platform; (3) I’ve never been in a conversation with anyone at Substack, not even once, and am not a Substack Pro enrollee; and (4) Proof does appear on the Substack national rankings (it’s #2 in the United States in the Culture category) so I have some familiarity with, and investment in, those rankings.

I mention all these items both for the sake of transparency and because they’ll become directly relevant later on in this essay. I also mention them because the watchword of this essay will be accuracy. I’ve read too many essays in major media and on various websites—a few by former Substack authors—that state things about Substack I know to be untrue, so ensuring I don’t repeat that error here is a top priority for me. This essay is intended as a clear-eyed look at a platform I have no relationship with beyond the fact that I use it. I say “clear-eyed” here because, like any Substack author, I could easily switch to another platform if at any point Substack stopped meeting my needs— so I have no reason to sugar-coat anything I say here. To their credit, and to the credit of the platform they built, Substack founders Hamish McKenzie, Jairaj Sethi, and Chris Best do nothing to dissuade authors using Substack from writing about the service or indeed any other service (a nice change of pace from, say, Instagram, which refuses to verify any user who links to another digital platform in their bio) so there’s no chilling effect on this essay emanating from that end of things, either. Newsletter subscriber lists are readily fungible, so moving from Substack to one of its competitors would be easy as pie for anyone who wanted to do it. One author unhappy at Substack for not offering them a sizable monetary advance to write on the platform—two years before Substack began doing so programmatically—was able to move their newsletter to a Substack competitor, in its entirety, in well under 96 hours, no questions asked.

So, despite me being a Substack author, what you’re getting here is only and exactly what I know, upon information and belief, to be true.

This means that if you’ve lately been reading accounts of Substack that clearly come from a place of personal animus or vendetta—and there are several of those floating around right now, all masquerading as journalism—you’ll find something different here.

One last point I think I should make early on rather than further below: I’ve now been a regular internet user for over 30 years—see what follows for an explanation of how this unusual circumstance came to pass—and I have never seen a digital platform lied about with more persistence, viciousness, and cynicism than Substack has been lied about. Agree or disagree with the many criticisms that have been made in recent years of Facebook and Twitter and TikTok, but by and large they are at least based on how those social media websites actually work, and their documented infelicities. Perhaps because Substack is a digital publishing platform rather than a social media website (see below for much more on this critical distinction), and because it therefore competes directly with powerful media organizations, major-media reporting on Substack has been profoundly disingenuous, even grotesque, and has at many points exploited the irresponsible rhetoric and heightened apprehensions of former Substack authors upset at the platform for reasons that appear to have nothing to do with the platform itself.

On the subject of “irresponsible rhetoric,” I should add too, at this point in the essay, what I know will become clear later on: I do not believe Substack should pay any monies, via its Substack Pro program, to any person whose past writing would violate Substack’s own content guidelines. Besides being unethical—as it would suggest that the company doesn’t really support its own content guidelines—it’d also be a terrible business decision, as Substack would be forced to immediately redact content from an individual it just paid, or in some cases suspend (either temporarily or permanently) a Substack account whose output the company had invested in heavily.

This is a different matter, of course, from whether Substack should allow individuals to use its platform (without monies from the Substack Pro program discussed below) if they have previously written content that would violate Substack’s content guidelines but do not publish any such content on Substack. There is a limit to the extent to which a company, Substack or any other, can become an investigative outfit sniffing out past public content from Substack authors that would have violated Substack’s content guidelines if it had appeared on Substack. We certainly do not expect this form of ex post moderation from any other social media website or digital publishing platform.

The question becomes whether a corporate incentive program that does not disclose who it enrolls is problematic. As indicated above, it certainly could become so in two instances: (1) that of a Substack Pro enrollee who has never before been known to publish material that would violate Substack’s content guidelines but now suddenly publishes such material, in which case there’s presumably no issue as long as the company treats with this author as they would any other (being unable to void their past deal with the author, but certainly able to apply the same content moderation to that author as any other); (2) that of a Substack Pro enrollee who the company knows has published content violative of Substack’s guidelines in the past, which again would be a catastrophically silly decision for the company on simply too many levels to count.

Recently, a very small number of ex-Substack authors have averred, without evidence, that Substack has run afoul of this second scenario by not just offering advances to people with diverse and divergent political views to entice them to make the move to Substack (worth noting, a very different proposition than being a publisher who gains partial rights to an author’s work, and a very significant percentage of their earnings) but selecting for this rare honor—actually not much of an honor, see below for why—individuals who Substack should’ve known would become content-guidelines violators.

We can’t really assess this complaint unless and until (a) content guidelines-violative material is found to have been published on Substack—something that apparently hasn’t happened yet—at which point readers will naturally inquire whether Substack stupidly paid someone who thereafter violated their posted guidelines, or (b) someone locates guidelines-violative content from a Substack creator that was published before they came to Substack, in which case some people may wonder whether the individual was given a Substack Pro deal.

Substack has indicated that it will likely deal with this inevitable second scenario by finding a way to, in the future, be transparent about who it has signed Substack Pro deals with, rather than (as print publishers do) leaving the revelation of any such deal to the author themselves. To date, I believe one instance has been shown of a Substack creator publishing content pre-Substack that would have violated Substack’s content guidelines; this individual is not believed to be a member of the Substack Pro program, however, though admittedly the lack of transparency with respect to the 30 creators enrolled in the program makes this impossible to know for certain. Meanwhile, and quite ironically, the confirmed Substack Pro enrollee who has most vociferously called out this other Substack writer—the one who published Substack guidelines-violative material before joining Substack—ironically did violate their own Substack Pro deal, and quite publicly, mere hours after signing it. They did so by informing readers that they could use a subscription payment method other than Stripe (thereby cutting both Stripe and Substack out of the author’s subscription revenue, a violation not only of Substack’s content guidelines but also any Substack Pro deal this individual signed).

Of course, the above few paragraphs constitute exactly the problem I’m writing about.

Already I find myself writing here about Substack Creator A and Substack Creator B when what Substack is is a platform with thousands of creators living and working on it. While I can understand someone being upset with Substack at the thought that it may have given some amount of money to a creator who published content guidelines-violative material pre-Substack—again, a preposterously stupid business decision on Substack’s part, if it ever happened—it is hard to get worked up about this possibility when there’s presently no evidence to suggest that any such thing has ever happened.

And that’s especially so if pursuing this hypothetical to its natural end would require forcing people who signed a contract with a confidentiality clause intended to protect them—not necessarily Substack—to be “outed” in a way we would consider abusive if it happened to an author publishing their work in print rather than digitally. Even so, those willing to spend their time musing about a distant hypothetical with no evidence to support its relevance are free to (because of Substack’s business model) take their subscribers and leave the platform whenever they wish. The notion that anyone would try to burn down the entire platform on their way out the door in such a rare scenario makes me very angry, for reasons that I’ll explain in more detail later on in this essay.

Indeed, this essay was born in part out of my frustration—not just as a Substack user but as an attorney, journalist, professor, creative writer, and professional author—at seeing the best digital platform I have ever personally used, and one that I think can be profoundly important to creativity and journalism in the United States going forward, falsely maligned by people and institutions with agendas they haven’t transparently disclosed. Anyone who knows the truth about what Substack is shouldn’t be standing idly by while persons and organizations with their own eldritch reasons for wanting to see the platform maligned are given ample time and space to exorcise their personal angst at Substack’s expense. Because of course Substack is no longer just a platform, it’s a community of thousands of creators, and over half a million readers, who deserve far better than the discourse about our community that we’ve been getting of late.

With all that said, here are the five key things I’ve learned about Substack that I think everyone should know. Many of you may already know some or all of these, but the implications of these findings are often more startling than the bare facts themselves.

The Top 5 Things People Misunderstand About Substack

(1) Substack isn’t a social media website, it’s a digital publishing platform. On a social media website, interactions between accounts aren’t just encouraged, but are indeed central to the UX (user experience). On a digital publishing platform, you could spend hours writing on the platform daily—in fact, hours a day for many years—and never interact directly, even once, with another author’s account.

{Note: I distinguish this from one’s interactions with readers, which are of a different character, are a wholly separate element of the community and user experience, and, blessedly, are intricately managed by Substack authors themselves. Authors can restrict comment boards to subscribers, permanently ban commenters with a click, and in general operate their comment boards as an integral part of a vast media outlet they exclusively run, so any Substack author who leaves Substack because their boards are out of control is using the platform incorrectly.}

The gulf between these two business plans is spectacularly vast—and the difference in UX comparably huge. Whereas the fact that millions of Donald Trump supporters have Twitter accounts is a reality I can’t escape when I’m on that platform, and indeed one that substantially alters my experience of the website, when I’m using Substack the only relationship that matters, or indeed really exists at all, is the one between me and my readers. I can, of course, choose to read other Substack authors’ newsletters—and I often do—but it’s 100% optional in a way that seeing content from objectionable persons on Twitter typically isn’t, short of a highly active blocking protocol. And in any case, even when I see other Substack authors’ content, it’s more like I’m choosing to briefly visit their digital homes rather than feeling in any sense like their views have been thrust into my face by a corporate-controlled algorithm—one that is, further, subject to the whims of strangers who retweet or quote-tweet unpleasant characters.

What this means for current discussions of Substack is pretty simple: if you haven’t quit Twitter yet because Mitch McConnell has a Twitter account, you should be literal light years away from choosing to leave Substack (if you’re an author) or avoiding reading Substack (if you’re a reader), as only 1% of Substack users—an estimate, but also a percentage you’d kill for on Twitter—are publishing content that you would find objectionable, and you do not (unlike on Twitter) have to be exposed to even that small stock of objectionable content if you don’t wish to be.

I’ll return to this first point—Substack isn’t a social media website and can’t be treated like one—repeatedly during this essay, as the downstream implications of this foundational point are many, and worth far more discussion than they’ve gotten so far.

(2) Substack is vast. To hear certain major media outlets and certain former Substack authors tell it, there’s a single category of content on Substack—political content—and within that category of content there are only a handful of authors, all of them conservative and male, whose voices are dominant. Not only is this laughably untrue, but in order to even generate this UX for yourself you’d have to bend over backwards in comical ways. Indeed, to use an inapt analogy to a social media website (just for the sake of making the point), having this experience of Substack would require, in Twitter terms, something like clicking over to Ben Shapiro’s feed on that website, following the three people Twitter recommends you follow on the basis of your interest in Shapiro and absolutely no one else, and then complaining that “Twitter is lousy with far-right nut-jobs.” Anyone who did this—instead of blocking Shapiro and his acolytes and choosing only to follow Twitter users who don’t retweet or quote-tweet the rantings of that particular set—would be roundly criticized for their masochism, and rightly so.

Of course, recreating such an experience on Substack is exponentially more difficult. It could more properly be said that certain of the criticisms of Substack that involve four or five of the platform’s thousands of users are more akin to objecting to a website’s existence because you found out that an ex-boyfriend—a really nasty piece of work—once logged onto it at the same time you were on it. You didn’t encounter him on the site at the time, and that couldn’t even theoretically have happened, but nevertheless you have decided that the entire platform, as well as the thousands of vibrant communities that have built themselves atop it, must now be utterly destroyed.

The truth? Substack has nineteen—and counting—discrete and catalogued categories of content, only one of which is Politics. The others, in alphabetical order, are Art & Illustration, Business, Climate, Culture, Education, Faith, Finance, Food & Drink, Health, History, Literature, Music, News, Philosophy, Science, Sports, Technology, and Travel. To give a sense of how quickly new categories and “Top 25” category rankings are being created, when I came on the platform on January 14, 2021, there were just thirteen categories. The approximately 50% increase in categories in just the last nine weeks doesn’t seem likely to slow down any time soon, either, as I expect (e.g.) Games & Hobbies and Advice & Self-Help categories to appear on-site any day now.

The current nineteen categories don’t just exist, either—they’re vibrant. Many of them feature work by well-known authors, and have been regularly written up as among the most interesting independent journalism available today. One Sports substacker, SB Nation sports journalist Ricky O’Donnell, just got written up in the Washington Post for providing entertainment to college basketball fans during the pandemic—not with commentary about a professional or amateur sports team you can watch on television, but one whose improbable adventures exist only in a video game. Over in the Culture section, one of the most talented and celebrated writers in America, Roxane Gay, is running a wildly popular book club. Chicago Reader credits music journalists on Substack with helping to keep the pandemic music scene in the Windy City buzzing.

The desire to erase and silence 99.9% of substackers to focus America’s attention on the exploits of a dismal few is positively inexplicable to me—especially because many of the voices being erased and silenced are those of women, people of color, and other vulnerable groups. Head on over to the Faith section of Substack and you’ll find a veritable herd of progressive rabbis who have found, in Substack, a new way to reach their congregations in the midst of a global catastrophe. Over at Food & Drink, Alison Roman, one of the most well-known food journalists in America, is dishing out “recipes, stories, and unsolicited advice” that her readers simply can’t get enough of.

Even so, former Substack authors looking to wound the platform—and therefore, all those who write on it innocently and in good faith—and major media outlets who see the very concept of Substack as an existential threat (in much the same way the same Chicken Littles used to think of blogging as an existential threat) get great mileage in their esoteric vendettas against Substack by treating four or five authors who no one on Substack but the subscribers to their newsletters reads as though they are ambassadors for the entire platform. It is, to put it mildly, infuriating. And, as I said, it “erases” and “silences”—not just metaphorically, but literally—thousands of hardworking creators of every background and perspective imaginable. Efforts to destroy existing Substack communities by bringing down Substack hurt real people in real time, not just creators but readers, and do so as part of a perverse project to elevate certain fringe voices to becoming synonymous with a platform they merely inhabit along with thousands of others.

Even the Politics section is preposterously miscast in major media. The most popular Politics Substack is authored by a progressive Boston College history professor named Heather Cox Richardson, who now makes over $1 million annually offering beautifully contextualized summaries of the events of the Trump era. The third-most popular Politics Substack is headed by one of the nation’s most well-known “Never Trumpers,” Bill Kristol. One of the two fastest-rising Politics Substacks in the Politics Top 25 is run by Dan Rather, famously the left-leaning anchor of CBS News from 1981 to 2005. Other Top 25 Politics substackers are controversial figures in U.S. politics, not for their conservatism but the opposite: for being progressives wildly unpopular among both the American Right and certain components of the Left. Another fast-rising Politics substacker, Shaun King, falls into this category via a collaborative publication, The North Star.

A former senior adviser to President Obama, Dan Pfeiffer, now has one of the most popular Politics Substacks. Even the few conservatives on the Top 25 list in Politics are an oddly non-dogmatic bunch: British-American journalist Andrew Sullivan is the former editor of the left-wing New Republic and a member of the LGBTQ community; Glenn Greenwald has at various points been a hero among both the American Left and the American Right, though more frequently the latter, recently; and Matt Taibbi is arguably a lefty whose sole basis for now being controversial on the political left is that he disbelieves almost everything ever reported about the Trump-Russia scandal.

{Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I have tangled with both Taibbi and Greenwald, the former both publicly and privately. I cannot say I have any fondness for either. That said, their continued presence on Substack affects me and my readers in no way at all, nor does it affect anyone else’s Substack—or anyone else’s readers—in any way whatsoever.}

In short, Substack is not a coffee clatch to which only four or five right-wing writers are invited any more than Twitter is Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump stuffed into the back seat of your 2003 Honda Civic. Substack is a sprawling digital platform that offers server space to literally thousands of authors of every perspective, background, and political persuasion. Just so, while the exceedingly small number of critics of the platform who have ever been on the platform may delight in focusing their attention on just one of the nineteen officially recognized subject areas on Substack, in fact the range of subjects discussed daily on Substack newsletters is almost as broad as the range of subjects discussed on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and Instagram and (lately) Clubhouse. To misrepresent Substack as a digital environment in which Glenn Greenwald or Graham Linehan are representative—the latter a name wholly unknown to me until the past week, and it’s still unclear whether either of the two Substacks authored by the creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd (as I now know him to be) is even widely read—is considerably more inane than saying that Twitter is uninhabitable because Mitch McConnell has a feed there, or that Facebook and TikTok are lethal toxic waste sites simply because sometimes you come across Glenn Greenwald on-site.

In short, speaking of digital publishing platforms in this way is only something that happens when you don’t understand what a publishing platform is in the first instance.

Some say, “Yes, but is it a digital publishing platform, if it offers advances to authors?”

To which I reply—more on this below—that this is literally what publishing platforms do.

The Big Five publishers in New York City—Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—offer advances of wildly differing sizes, in secret, to wildly diverse authors, and make these decisions as business decisions. How do we know this? Because the presses give money to both progressive and conservative authors, men and women, whites and non-whites, writers in every imaginable genre of creative writing, folks with every conceivable background and perspective, and—because these authors work with different editors at their press and each have their own agents—it becomes nigh impossible to say what the overall political bent is of any of these large corporate entities. The same is true for Substack, which (based on what we know so far) in fact appears to be leaning quite heavily toward progressive authors in its Substack Pro program (see below) but may well also be giving occasional advances to more conservative writers. This is not proof that Substack has an editorial perspective, but rather proof that it is a digital publishing platform run precisely as print-oriented publishing platforms have been run for many decades now.

{Note: Case-in-point: My book Proof of Corruption, which came out in 2020 from Macmillan and established top-to-bottom corruption in the Trump White House, including its press office, was published the same day Macmillan published Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ autobiography.}

So just as you couldn’t select one Penguin/Random House author, or even five or ten or fifty such authors, and declare them “representative” of the the thousands of authors Penguin/Random House has published since Penguin was founded 86 years ago, you couldn’t do so with Substack, either, even though it has only been around since 2017. The scope of what’s happening on the platform is already far too vast to allow for this sort of banal reduction, and those demagogues who fancifully imagine that Substack is like Parler or Gab are not just cynical but truly devious. They know they’re lying about Substack—and in doing so hurting many innocent people—and they simply don’t care.

(3) The much-maligned “Substack Pro” program involves a vanishingly small number of Substack authors who are, in fact, getting a raw deal. Moreover, almost none of the authors who’ve lately been accused of being in the program are actually in it, nor does the program run in anything like the fashion its detractors have insisted it does.

To be very clear about this up front, not only am I not in the Substack Pro program, I have never even spoken to anyone to works at Substack. Ever. On any subject. I’ve been very clear about that at Proof, ever since I created a “History” section for the website.

My knowledge about the Substack Pro program comes from doing what journalists, attorneys, and journalism professors like me do: research. And even the barest amount of research reveals that the things now being said about Substack Pro are simply untrue. For starters, an insidious attempt was made to tar people as being in the program (and therefore secretly receiving “advances” on earnings from Substack in the manner that print authors do daily in America) who had publicly been quite clear on the fact that they are not in it: most notably, the aforementioned Glenn Greenwald and yet another person I have argued with and have no regard for whatsoever, Jesse Singal.

{Note: For context, Singal once wrote a Boston Globe article about me in which he falsely claimed that I had invented a news story he well knew was a BBC report. Again, however, there is no effect to me or my readers whatsoever to Singal being on Substack, and to the extent I might wish that he weren’t, I could say the same thing about thousands of times more people who I’ve encountered on Twitter and Facebook. If you didn’t abandon those social media websites many years ago, you’ve no leg to stand on in saying that a considerably more friendly and progressive ecosystem on a digital publishing platform should be abandoned by anyone.}

I may not respect Glenn Greenwald or Jesse Singal as people or, frankly, as journalists, but I do respect my journalistic practice enough not to blithely say these two men are in the Substack Pro program when they have repeatedly said they are not and—as to Greenwald—Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie has made clear he is not in a widely heard podcast episode. Indeed, the only individuals we know for sure are in the Substack Pro program are progressives Matty Yglesias and Anne Helen Petersen; the sometimes progressive Taibbi; San Francisco psychiatrist Scott Alexander Siskind, who apparently writes about medicine, philosophy, and futurism (and has revealed that, like Matty Yglesias, he lost money on his Substack Pro deal); conservative agitator Freddie deBoer (who candidly I’d never heard of before doing research for this essay, and whose Substack is sadly #17 in the Culture category in part because his detractors did their damnedest to write about it incessantly and make it famous); and Nicholas Jackson, the former editor-in-chief of Pacific Standard, a publication that focuses on environmental justice. These six people comprise, collectively (see below) 20% of the entire Substack Pro program, and, taken as a “group average,” we’d have to say that they unabashedly lean politically left. I won’t speculate as to who else might be in the program—and candidly can’t believe that so many major-media outlets have engaged in such irresponsible speculation—but will simply note that every other Substack author I hear rumors about having received an advance is considered a progressive.

{Note: For perspective, the five Substacks ranked just ahead of and behind deBoer in the Top 25 in the Culture category include Feminist Giant, which offers “global feminist resistance to patriarchal fuckery”; Femstreet, where “women in tech lead, shape, and fund the future”; Power Plays, billed as “a no-bullshit newsletter about sexism in sports”; and a Substack on “occasional sad garbage” by the stunningly talented LGBTQ comedian Samantha Irby.}

Incredibly, it’s not just the roster of Substack Pro authors that has been deliberately misconstrued, mispopulated, and miscast, it’s also (1) the size of the program, (2) the provenance of the money that funds the program, and (3) the topical scope of the newsletters upon which the program is focused. In short, like anyone with Google, it took me very little time indeed to find out everything I now know about Substack Pro, and I remain mystified that a number of major-media outlets that have misreported this information haven’t already issued corrections—and that a number of freelance journalists who spoke to these major-media outlets (as part of a campaign to damage not just the founders of Substack but the hundreds or even thousands of innocent authors now building communities on Substack) have also done nothing to ameliorate the harm that their disinformation has produced. So, with that said, here are the facts:

1. Only 30 people are enrolled in the Substack Pro program, out of literally thousands of newsletter authors on Substack.

2. The program has been around a few months—not since 2018, as detractors claim.

3. More than half of those enrolled in the program are women.

4. A third of those enrolled in the program are authors of color.

5. The program extends across nearly every category of newsletter published by Substack, including the Climate, Culture, History, Literature, Art & Illustration, Music, Sports, Science, Health, and Philosophy categories.

6. The program is funded by Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, not from Substack’s 10% cut of Substack subscriptions.

The strangest untruth about Substack Pro that is going around is that it is helpful to its authors—a proposition for which there is simply no evidence whatsoever, and indeed much evidence to the contrary. Quite simply, the program just isn’t a very good bet for anyone who is well enough known prior to coming to Substack to ever be enrolled in it, meaning that it turns out that the luckiest folks on Substack are those who, like me, never came within a country mile of being enrolled in Substack Pro when it launched in late 2020.

To unpack my claim about the evident weaknesses of the Substack Pro program, I should start by noting that there are many ways in which Substack staff can and do choose to aid certain newsletters rather than others. These methods are transparently obvious the moment one joins the platform. For instance, Substack staff select certain newsletters to appear in the website’s “Featured” section each week—a special honor, given that, again, there are thousands of Substack newsletters, only six newsletters are featured each week, and the featured sites appear prominently on the platform’s main page. Substack also selects how each newsletter will be categorized under the platform’s indexing infrastructure, a judgment about the “content” of a newsletter that has real repercussions. A newsletter that would rank among the top newsletters in one area might not rank at all in another. In consequence, if Substack adjudicates a newsletter as covering, say, “politics,” you’re unlikely to ever be ranked nationally. If, however, you’re assigned a spot in one of the newer, less-populated Substack Top 25 rankings, you may be able to boast a prominent position in that ranking for months, even years.

Substack staff also choose which newsletters to write about on other social media platforms, and which newsletters to highlight in interviews. To date there is no evidence that Substack staff specifically focus their public attention on Substack Pro authors, though it can be tough to judge this as these are—as noted throughout this article—more or less the only class of author that major media ever seeks to ask Substack’s founders about. So some of these newsletters, like deBoer’s, appear to be popular in large part because of their detractors, not because of anything Substack did.

One of the few things that Substack does that cannot be regarded as putting a finger on the scale of a newsletter’s success is enroll its author in the Substack Pro program.

Being selected for this program—and agreeing to participate in it—doesn’t net the Substack Pro author even a single new subscriber, as it’s merely an “advance” system (much like book publishers have been using for decades) intended to make it easier for an individual to transition from other full-time work to writing on Substack. There’s literally no forward-facing component to being involved with Substack Pro, as (1) your involvement is non-public information (unless you choose to disclose it, which you likely wouldn’t, as it might generate envy among fellow authors, the same reason print authors don’t crow about getting giant advances); (2) your advance has nothing to do with subscriber accrual, a process for which you’re solely responsible once you receive your advance; and (3) your participation in the Substack Pro program doesn’t appear to give you access to any backroom community of authors, as not only is the program non-public—so you can’t learn who else is in it—but virtually no one gets selected for the program, with only 30 recipients in it across the platform’s thousands of authors.

Worse still, Substack Pro can cost participating authors more money than you could possibly believe. According to Vox, participating in the Substack Pro program will cost former Vox editor and columnist Yglesias, a well-known progressive, approximately $300,000 in his first year on Substack. Why? Well, it turns out Substack understandably selects Substack Pro authors on the basis of their likelihood to rack up enormous subscriber bases quickly—and the better a Substack Pro author is at doing what they were selected to do, the better the first-year advance deal one receives from Substack is likely to be. For Substack.

In the same way that the worst thing that can happen to a print novelist or nonfiction writer is to get an advance so large they can’t possibly “earn out”—a circumstance that can scuttle future book deals, given the highly public nature of a book’s sales record—it appears to be the case that Substack Pro is as much a hindrance to its recipients as a boon. You can, but wouldn’t want to, tell anyone you’re in the program, which from the jump saddles you with a secret that could be problematic for your marketing and your relationships if it ever gets out; either you’ll be wildly successful on Substack and your Substack Pro advance will cost you money, or you’ll fail to earn out your advance and worry thereafter that your inability to author as compelling a Substack as you were expected to be will be publicly revealed; and you’ll receive no evident benefits in terms of finding new subscribers—being in the program in no way “juices” one’s numbers, as one ex-Substacker outrageously claimed, sans evidence—and may find, instead, that Substack staff have to be careful how they talk about you (or how much they talk about you) because they’re sworn to keep your dubiously helpful advance a permanent secret.

About the only people Substack Pro would be a good fit for are those who cannot find the time to start a Substack while working in their current jobs, which candidly is a position I find it hard to believe many people are in. And I don’t say that because I’ve been working multiple jobs since I was a teenager, or because I misunderstand the schedule of someone struggling to make ends meet—I lived that life in my twenties—but rather because Substack is fundamentally a place to post in “long-form” the same sorts of inquiries you might otherwise have pursued on social media in “short-form” across a large number of tweets or posts or grams or videos or (et cetera).

What this means is that if you have time to work a job and be on social media, you also have time to work a job and (instead of social media) be on Substack. While journalists in major media love to hype the extraordinary and basically unreplicable stories of a vanishingly small number of Substack authors who had to quit their full-time jobs in major media to do what we called “blogging” not a decade ago, the far more common story—indeed, the 99.9%-of-the-time story—is someone who writes for a living opting to dip their toe in the water of writing a digital newsletter as a hobby or (at most) side gig while working full-time elsewhere, thereafter deciding to go full-time on Substack only if and when the financial metrics support it. The benighted notion that Substack Pro is an essential, almost mystically beneficial tool available only to a small caste of supernatural beings whose receipt of said gift is orgasmically important to their futures—as without a $250,000 advance making it possible, who in the United States could even conceive of finding time in their schedule to post one blog-post a week?—would be laughable if it hadn’t lately become the subject of disingenuous essays about Substack.

(4) Substack has incredibly robust content moderation policies—it just hasn’t had to use them very often. At present, there simply isn’t much objectionable content on the platform relative to the amount on other websites. In other words, there is surely some objectionable content on Substack, but (a) it’s a far smaller proportion of the whole as compared to say Facebook or Twitter, and (b) critics of Substack have thus far put almost no effort into finding it, perhaps because, as already noted, Substack is a digital publishing platform where you never encounter other authors unless you make it your mission to do so.

Substack’s content moderation guidelines explicitly prohibit all the following content:

• Spam

• Phishing

• Pornography

• Nudity*

• Sexually Exploitative Content

• Doxxing

• Harassment

• Threats

• Intellectual Property Violations

• Criminal Conduct

• Torts

• Impersonation

• Contravention of State or Federal Regulations

• Plagiarism

• Promotion of Self-Harm

• Promotion of Harm Against Other People

• Promotion of Harm Against Animals

• Hate Speech**

* With exceptions for art.

** Includes “content that calls for violence, exclusion, or segregation based on anyone’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.”

If you didn’t know that Substack prohibits all of these things, it’s probably because the people you’ve been reading who’ve been writing about Substack—some of them in major media, which feels threatened by Substack, and some here on Substack, but only as they’re on their way out the door—want you to believe, for reasons that remain unclear to me, that Substack was and is something it isn’t. While Substack may well have an ethos that says creators should be given as much room to create as possible, so does the creative writing program where I received my MFA degree, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Substack’s philosophy is no different than the philosophy of nearly every community of creators that has ever been generative and influential; and indeed, those offenses against art, communities, and creativity that are prohibited by Substack are more or less the very ones you’d hope the platform would take special action against.

Those folks in major media who bemoan the lack of content moderation on Substack without, apparently, even reading the site’s content moderation guidelines—as nothing in the discourse of such critics suggests any familiarity with those guidelines—never really complain about content on the platform, as their real complaint appears to be one of two issues: (1) some people have set up newsletters on the platform who have said objectionable things off-platform, in places Substack cannot execute its moderating function; (2) one or two people who have said such objectionable things off-platform may be participating in the Substack Pro program, though, Mr. deBoer excepted, as I mentioned before speculating on this subject is journalistically irresponsible (though it hasn’t stopped several people claiming to be journalists from doing so and with glee).

The second point above is not worth indulging, for the reason I’ve said. As to the first, I can only say that Substack’s critics all appear to remain active on Twitter and/or Facebook, two social media websites with a significantly greater ethical responsibility to aggressively moderate their community—because they are social media websites, not digital publishing platforms—that nevertheless allowed Donald Trump to commit actual crimes via their products, with impunity, for five years. So if you’re upset that a digital publishing platform isn’t banning authors who said objectionable things off-site, you should have quit Twitter in 2017 at the latest. And if you haven’t, then there’s something else in play that you’re not acknowledging: for instance, personal upset that you weren’t offered an advance by Substack, in which case welcome to an author’s life.

Indeed, when I was an Iowa Writers’ Workshop student, I saw some of the best work I’ve ever read get stiffed on its advance, and other work I found derivative and lame get more money than even seemed logistically plausible. Publishing, whether digital or print, is, sadly, a business; if you’re going to quit the business because some authors unjustly get hefty advances, it’s going to be a very short stay for you in the business.

(5) Substack is fun as hell—and easy to use.

I’ve been on Substack for about sixty days, and already it gives me the feels. I love reading others’ newsletters; I love the Substack interface; I love the distinctly slowed-down sense of time and space I have—as compared to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram—when I’m writing on Substack or reading it. When I hear former tech reporter and Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie talk about the platform he built with Jairaj Sethi and Chris Best, it matches my experience: Substack is an expansive, open-ended writing environment that offers nearly limitless possibilities for creators to participate in important national conversations. It can act as a critical adjunct to—not replacement for—conventional journalism, and can build communities and sub-communities in a healthy and organic way, entirely unlike the rolling catastrophes we find on Facebook Groups and in nearly every corner of Twitter (the latter a social media platform that I regularly use, and admittedly do consider an essential space for news framing, dissemination, and consumption in the United States today).

It’s not just that Substack allows authors complete control of a vibrant digital space—replete with options for podcasts and videos and visually attractive formatting—but that this sort of sandbox application allows writers to switch seamlessly between long- and short-form writing, develop an intimate relationship with their audience, easily network their writing with that of others, and do all of this with minimal oversight and, just as importantly, minimal intrusion by trolls, stalkers, bullies, haters, or cranks. Even if you don’t intend on accruing many paid Substack subscribers, you can set up a subscription system simply to help moderate your comment-fields; and in any case Substack makes it decidedly easy to delete comments and ban unruly commenters.

I also find the sheer scope of the work being done on Substack positively breathtaking.

The most popular categories, besides Politics, are Business, Culture, Faith, Finance, Food & Drink, Literature, Music, News, Sports, Technology. Well-known writers on the platform who aren’t in the Politics category include Roxane Gay, Anne Helen Petersen, Samantha Irby, Casey Newton, Alison Roman, Virginia Heffernan, Yashar Ali, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Cheryl Strayed, though of course it’s silly of me to think I can in any way encompass the diversity of persons and viewpoints on Substack when it is, after all, a digital platform rapidly achieving the same of diversity of persons and viewpoints that we would expect to find on any digital publishing platform in 2021.

My only complaint about Substack is that I should’ve gotten on it far earlier than I did.

While Hamish McKenzie graciously emailed me back in October 2017 to invite me to start a newsletter on Substack, I was so overwhelmed by my life at the time that I never wrote him back or even, if I’m honest, considered doing so. I just wasn’t in a position at the time to play around on a new platform—Twitter was more than enough of a drag on both my time and my emotions—and candidly I’d been approached enough times by that point in my career about trying out new writing products and platforms that in fall 2017 Hamish’s kind note (sent via my website) didn’t even really register with me.

So when I launched Proof on January 14, 2021, I did it the same way that anyone would. I clicked the necessary buttons until I had a website, and then I tried to teach myself how to use the platform through trial and error. I’m still learning how it all works. I’ve considered writing Hamish to apologize for blowing off his email all those years ago, but that’s the closest I’ve come to being in touch with the folks who run Substack. Indeed, despite now authoring one of the higher-traffic websites on the platform, I didn’t even know Substack Pro existed until—via a stunning swell of disinformation—it hit the news recently.

Once I found out the truth about Substack Pro, and gathered my thoughts about the platform writ large, I decided that writing this essay—risk of platform-navel-gazing included—made sense. I felt, too, like I had a unique story to tell about discovering this platform and finding a measure of success on it.

I’ve been a regular internet user for three decades, which I know sounds implausible. As it happens, though, I matriculated at Dartmouth College in the nineties, just as it was becoming one of the nation’s first fully wired campuses. During the several years prior to that, I was on America Online pretty regularly—in part because my father worked for a onetime major player in the computer industry, Digital Equipment Corporation, and in part because my mother was at the time running a freelance graphic design business from home that required major computing power. As early as mid-1994, I was using email to communicate more than I used the telephone; at the time, Dartmouth had a campus-wide email application, BlitzMail, that was the first digital product I ever (much like thousands of my classmates) became addicted to. If, for instance, you wanted to invite someone to dinner on the “gown” side of Hanover, New Hampshire in the nineties, you blitzed them, rather than calling. It was at once exhilarating and profoundly unhealthy.

All of which is to say that I’ve been on scores on digital platforms over the last few decades, and I earnestly think Substack may be the best of the lot. Sadly, as we’ve seen here, it’s widely misunderstood—in part because many in major media wrongly see it as a threat, and therefore feel entitled to misreport its components and evolution, and in part because some of those with an ax to grind about it lack scruples about how they pursue their vendettas, which means that in addition to spreading disinformation about Substack they’re not above exploiting major media’s anxieties about it, too.

Again, if you’re on any social media platform right now, you have no basis to complain about the authors or content on a digital publishing platform like Substack. If you have ever received or sought a book advance from any print publisher, you have got no basis for opining on how Substack has gone about erecting an identical process, or insisting that authors who’ve received advances—which advances Substack has, in keeping with industry practice, not disclosed—must reveal them to you. And if you’re telling a false story about Substack’s history or practices that describes commonplace publishing practices as a “scam” or “juicing” newsletters to (for some reason) misrepresent what Substack is, who has had success using it and why, or any other key component of the platform and its functioning, the question isn’t whether Substack abused you but why you’re now abusing readers and journalism by not just lying but doing so unashamedly.

The think-pieces about Substack I’ve seen in the last thirty days haven’t so much been poorly or incompletely fact-checked as not fact-checked at all—and indeed take such a hostile approach to the platform that it’s small wonder the platform I found when I got here was nothing at all like what I’d been led to expect. If at any point in this essay I’ve seemed angry, it’s because, in a way, I am. I dislike being lied to, and I shudder to think that I was almost kept from the best digital platform I’ve ever used by an exceedingly small cadre of independent and major-media journalists who shed their first principles as journalists not for the reasons they’ve been saying—to combat injustice—but to indulge the sort of petty jealousies and self-aggrandizing schemes for advancement journalism is supposed to inspire us to rise above.

All of the foregoing notwithstanding, I hope it goes without saying that just as there are many millions of people on Twitter and Facebook whose views I find repugnant, there are a handful of folks on Substack whose opinions I consider detestable. I have had more aggressive public and private disputes with many of the figures now part of the Substack Pro debate than even their most vociferous critics have had. And I feel as strongly—and personally—about the importance of anti-hate ethoi as any of these critics, only in small part because I’m in my sixth year of receiving regular anti-Semitic threats and abuse. My digital writing has at times even put me on the wrong side of government figures in the United States and abroad, and even (once) a convicted cyberterrorist, so I know as well as anyone what it’s like to feel imminently unsafe in a digital space. But I don’t leave digital platforms because someone somewhere writing something on them is manifestly odious to me—and neither do you. Nor should we.

When you look at the truth of what Substack is and what it does and how it does it and who it does it for and why it does it, I say again that it may just be one of the best—possibly the best—publishing website on the whole of the internet. It is creating a New Renaissance for creators the likes of which those of us with degrees in the Humanities never thought possible. It is helping America realize a world in which, incredibly and wonderfully, the more idiosyncratic you are, the more doggedly you pursue passions, the more you stay resolutely an ever-evolving yourself in the face of every imaginable pressure to be conform, the more likely it is you will find an audience, and vice versa.

{Note: Ben Thompson, author of Stratechery, one of the digital newsletters that inspired the creation of Substack, compellingly argues that the reason major media is so terrified of Substack is not so much that it fears hard-news reportage will move to Substack, but that Substack will enable journalists who work in journalism’s several dozen other genres to finally learn their market value—discovering, in the process, that their major-media employers are paying them a fraction of their worth. I might expand upon this observation to note that Substack may well provoke the same sort of revelation for many different types of creators, including those whose creativity in no way intersects with journalism.}

So maybe, just maybe, Substack can make doing what you love full-time a possibility for an ever-growing group of creators. At present, only a few people find themselves in this position, but if Substack is permitted to thrive—rather than getting strangled in its infancy—the benefits it now offers a few (almost none of whom are enrolled in the Substack Pro program) will become available to many. It’s in light of this view that I say that those who stand in opposition to this marked advance in the history of digital creativity, whether due to a personal vendetta over money cloaked in a noble cause or for some other reason, deserve to be fact-checked mercilessly about the claims they’ve made. And when they are, anyone who cares about facts—or journalism, or the law, or public discourse, or social justice, or the welfare of creators—will come to the same conclusion I have about Substack: that it’s a digital publishing platform that’s being responsibly run, and in consequence deserves to succeed even more than it already has.

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{Note: This is the final part of a five-part essay on the ongoing debate between major media and independent journalists working on Substack about whether the former is confirmably more reliable than the latter. Part I is here; Part II is here; Part III is here; and Part IV is here.}

Introduction

I didn’t think I’d write a coda to this essay series. I certainly had no plans to do so.

But then a thing happened, and then another thing happened, and finally a third thing happened that helped me see a larger picture in what I’d previously written about only in piecemeal: something more than just an ongoing tilt between Old and New Media.

What I thought I had glimpsed, following these three unexpected events, was a crack in the very foundations of American journalism.

To be clear, I don’t flatter myself to think I’ve seen much more than the barest glimpse of this weakened foundation, but I do think I’ve glimpsed it, slantwise at least. And if telling this story in a way that is uncomfortable for me and might even run the risk of looking self-aggrandizing or gauche is in any way helpful to exposing that weakened foundation, shouldn’t I do it? Whether I should or shouldn’t feel this way, I do feel I owe an unpaid debt to journalism—a communications, research, writing, and ethical practice I’ve now been committed to for 27 years, and that I teach at a large university to what I hope will be a new generation of courageous independent digital journalists.

It’s with all the foregoing in mind that I hope you’ll indulge me in publishing one more piece of my strange story about Shia LaBeouf, Columbia Journalism Review, and a now-disgraced freelance journalist, Lyz Lenz, who just a few days after getting fired from the Cedar Rapids Gazette for being too biased to produce competent journalism was unleashed on me—brutally—by one of the nation’s largest and richest universities in conjunction with one of the nation’s oldest and most once-respected media watchdogs.

This coda begins with the Kremlin—a fact that seems as humorously “on-point” to me as it does, I would guess, to you.

The Kremlin and a Second-Tier Humor Website

If anything can happen to a so-called “Special Report” that an Old Media watchdog has contracted for that confirms it, thereafter, as being neither a report nor special, it’s to have that document picked up by the Kremlin for use as anti-American propaganda.

Because I have been a very public critic of Donald Trump since the middle of 2015, the Kremlin’s propaganda arm (Russia Today, popularly known and advertised as RT) has been obsessed with me for years now. Three times RT has tried to interview me—most recently, just a few weeks ago, in January—and three times I’ve declined the invitation, twice without sending any response and once by sending a brusque declination. Here’s their most recent approach, which I ignored:

In lieu of speaking with me, the Kremlin settles for writing hit-pieces about me, or at least has done since I first turned it down for an interview in 2017.

As the years wear on, the number of derogatory references to me by RT has mounted. Google News returns ten RT articles referencing me—almost always negatively, with one or two neutral references thrown in for good measure—but the total number of RT articles attacking my credibility since late 2015 would probably be closer to twenty.

So when Lyz Lenz published a now-conclusively-debunked hit-piece about me, the Kremlin couldn’t resist hopping aboard. Indeed, it ran a televised segment about me that more or less just lifted Lenz’s words wholesale, in some cases reading them directly off a teleprompter. And then the bizarre Kremlin creature who acted as the congenial, English-speaking face of this single-use propaganda package wrote me on Twitter to try to heckle me and draw me into a discussion. It was eerie and morally bankrupt and candidly a little bit sad, which is generally how I think of the Kremlin.

How must Columbia Journalism Review feel to know that its dishonest hit-piece on a longtime Trump critic weas quickly mainlined into the veins of propagandists from a government entity the FBI now confirms tried to interfere in a second general election in the United States in the last five years? {Note: This is a rhetorical question, of course. Like any dying media entity, CJR hunts for clicks howsoever and wherever it can find them.}

More to the point, given that the CJR article in question persistently and unabashedly repeated Kremlin propaganda—even citing disgraced media outlet The Hill, which spread such propaganda on the subject of the Trump-Russia scandal (via Trump agent John Solomon) during the 2020 primaries and general election—one wonders if, now that this parroting has been clocked by Putin’s autocratic superstructure, CJR still feels pride in standing by, specifically, Lenz’s parroting of Kremlin talking points?

This is not an academic question. Indeed, among the many items that the Kremlin and Lenz agree on (all quotes hereafter by Lenz herself) are these:

1. America in 2016 was not “manipulated by sinister outside forces [including] Russia”, it merely “voted for a racist misogynist.”

2. To the extent Russia had any involvement in the 2016 election, it was exclusively “Russian organized crime”, so only “experts on Russian organized crime” should ever have been writing about Russia’s role in the 2016 general election.

3. The Mueller Report found “no lawbreaking, only a lot of shady dealings with a lot of shady men” (presumably these “shady men” were from the Russian mafia, not from Russian intelligence or any other Kremlin assets, agents, or entities).

4. Of Trump campaign collusion with Russia—for instance, Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort giving proprietary campaign data to a confirmed Russian intelligence operative during the general election, which fact has been confirmed by the Mueller Report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, and hundreds of major-media articles—Lenz writes, quoting a source, “What we know is that there was a crazy amount of disturbing contact, interaction, and [a] kind of mutual affection—or admiration—between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. And that is it.”

5. The fact, established by both Mueller and the Senate, that there was—at a bare minimum—2016 collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals that cannot be proven as criminal beyond a reasonable doubt, is, in fact, just a “narrative that doesn’t hold up.”

6. To Lyz Lenz, the view that Trump was secretly working on a major real estate deal with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election—as his attorney, Michael Cohen, the Mueller Report and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirm—is simply fueled by “a desire to believe that America is controlled by a nefarious foreign power”, even though “the evidence just isn’t there” for any involvement of the Russians in our elections or campaigns other than some benign “contact, interaction, and mutual affection” between certain U.S. and Russian nationals.

7. “The reliability of the Steele dossier is, to put it mildly, in question…[the dossier is] dubious, unvetted, and shady as hell” (Lenz here links to The Hill). Per Lenz, virtually no part of the dossier is accurate, despite many months of major-media reporting to the contrary.

These are just a few choice quotes from Lenz’s article. In general, the recently fired freelancer repeatedly claims to have a better understanding of the most complex federal criminal investigation of our era—up until the January 6 investigation, at least—than an author who wrote three national bestsellers on that very topic. This said, I wouldn’t have written a coda to my earlier essay simply because Lenz’s supplanting of her own ignorance on the Trump-Russia scandal for my knowledge of it, in an article betraying no familiarity with my writing on the subject, was later deemed useful by the Kremlin. As I said, the Kremlin has been looking for ways to discredit me for a while now, though I’m at best a minor gnat in their ointment and hardly worth the trouble.

No, I write this coda for a different reason.

I write this because it wasn’t just the Kremlin that found Lenz’s work to be useful to it. A humor website, Cracked, assumed that the things Lenz had written were true, and saw some comedic value in quoting her work. And so it did so, hoping my comments about CNN and LaBeouf would gets some laughs from Cracked readers, who certainly don’t go to that site looking for journalism of any variety or even anything particularly accurate. Nevertheless, when I saw that a humor website had twice called “false” my claims about CNN and LaBeouf that were, as this essay series confirms, accurate, and when I saw that Cracked had linked to Lenz’s article as its proof that my statements had been false, I decided to write the author of the Cracked article, Ryan Menezes.

I sent Menezes a link to this essay series and told him—in strong terms—his article needed to be “fix[ed].” Here’s what he sent back, in a period of time not much longer than it would take to read the essay series to which I had just directed his attention:

And so they did.

They fixed their mistake—and did it quietly and immediately and without any needless back-and-forth.

After having just spent weeks getting berated by CJR representative Stuart Karle—and told that everything in CJR’s “Special Report” on me was not, in fact, a report at all but mere “opinion”—and having heard from CJR justifications for not making corrections the likes of which I’d never before encountered at any journalistic institution, here was a humor site instantly retracting a false claim the moment it saw proof it had made one.

How messed up is American journalism when a self-declared scion of major-media oversight is getting parroted by Kremlin propagandists known to be inveterate liars, even as a second-tier humor site—in dealing with the very same subject and very same information—exhibits consummate professionalism? The answer: pretty damn broken.

I have many stories along these lines from the past few years that I could tell here, but again, this essay series was originally intended to focus on the ongoing brouhaha between a few major-media types (and academics like Jay Rosen and Sarah Roberts) and political “substackers” like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. I used “my story” because I thought it fit the theme, not because Proof is a repository for war stories.

This said, just as I was making the decision to write this coda, something felicitous happened: I had an exchange on Twitter that was a perfect fit for this article. Like any writer, I decided not to pass up the opportunity to share an on-point anecdote that had serendipitously showed up on my doorstep. This one involves in primary part a cable-news employee, but to really make the point the story had to be expanded somewhat—remember, my life has been strange these past few years, and my war stories therefore likewise—to include Michael Cohen, Rachel Maddow, and the President of MSNBC.

Kyle Griffin, the President of MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, and Donald Trump’s Fixer

I’ve been reading Kyle Griffin’s Twitter feed for years now. Griffin works at MSNBC, and is one of the best news aggregators out there—news aggregation being a genre of journalism that broadly falls under the heading of “metajournalism,” and is adjacent to (but different from, in many key respects) the curatorial journalism I myself practice. In all the years I’ve been following and retweeting Griffin, he’s never responded to me or in any way referenced me, so I was certainly surprised when he suddenly did on March 16. The interaction wasn’t what I expected, either; I realized shortly afterwards that a brief description of it belonged in this coda on battles between Old and New Media.

Some background useful to this story: I’ve spent 36 of my 44 years shuttling between the State of New Hampshire and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I attended what was at the time the only “R1” (“Very High Research Activity”) college in the former state, Dartmouth College; I practiced law for years as a trial attorney with the Nashua Trial Unit of the New Hampshire Public Defender; I now teach journalism, pre-law, and other subjects at the Granite State’s second-ever R1 school, University of New Hampshire; for what it’s worth—which may be nothing, but it adds some color to this story—I have more followers on Twitter than any resident of New Hampshire, and I write mainly about politics on Twitter; I’ve taught multiple students who now serve in the New Hampshire House of Representatives; a work colleague who is a friend of mine is among the top political experts in the state. In other words, I’ve a good claim to be generally knowledgeable when it comes to politics in New Hampshire and New Hampshire generally. Even growing up in Massachusetts in the 1980s, my family lived near the New Hampshire border—my father worked in New Hampshire, for Digital Equipment Corporation, then one of the major employers in the state—so I always felt close to the Commonwealth’s neighbor to the north, even before I lived there and was a radio DJ there and cohabited with a fiancée there and voted there and had some of the most formative years of my life there. And I live there now, and have since 2015.

So if there’s one thing I know about New Hampshire, it’s that it was a GOP-leaning state in national elections in the last century, but has been firmly “blue” in this one.

The last time New Hampshire voted for a Republican presidential candidate was over two decades ago, in 2000. Both of our U.S. senators are Democrats; both of our U.S. representatives are Democrats; and it’s been that way for some time. At the national level, we are a “blue” state and pretty clearly so. This is simply indisputable.

So I was taken aback when Griffin, an MSNBC employee, tweeted out an article from the Washington Post that was unambiguously about national politics (“Biden and Allies Launch Stimulus Campaign Focused on Competitive Battleground States”), and in doing so did something I hadn’t seen anyone do since I was living in Nashua between 2001 and 2007: refer to the State of New Hampshire as “GOP-leaning” at the national level.

I knew Griffin was wrong, so I quote-tweeted his tweet to amplify the Washington Post article, a good one, while noting that the classification of New Hampshire as a “GOP-leaning” battleground state was wrong. Maybe my tweet had a hint of snark in it, but frankly it was pretty milquetoast in Twitter terms.

For some reason, Griffin decided to respond to me, having never before done so despite me putting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of retweets of him, and quote-tweets of him, on my feed over the last five-plus years. Here’s what he wrote:

Both chambers of the state legislature are controlled by Republicans. The governor is Republican. [Senator] Maggie Hassan (D) only won her Senate seat by about a thousand votes.

There was nothing offensive about this reply whatsoever, it was just… sort of odd.

Griffin had unambiguously written that the State of New Hampshire was and is a “GOP-leaning [battleground state]” in national elections, and he was wrong, and after being pretty mildly called out on the error—not just by me, but by others responding to his tweet, who noted also that his characterization didn’t fit the State of Nevada, either (he’d also called Nevada “GOP-leaning” at the national level)—his response was to (a) change the subject to state-level politics, and (b) allege that a Democrat narrowly winning an election in the Granite State meant the state was actually “GOP-leaning.”

So I engaged with Griffin again, noting that my home state’s entire Congressional delegation is Democratic and has been for some time, and that my home state has reliably voted for the Democratic presidential candidate for many election cycles now, and therefore my state can’t under any circumstances be called “GOP-leaning.” I noted also that, like many New England states, we have a slightly different profile at the state level than we do in our national elections (the subject of the Washington Post article Griffin linked to). For instance, like New Hampshire, both Massachusetts and the State of Vermont have Republican governors but are reliably “blue” states that would never be called “GOP-leaning.” Just so, another New England state, the State of Connecticut, had a Republican governor for sixteen years straight between the 1990s and 2010s, but was a reliably “blue” state in federal elections the whole time; likewise, the State of Maine had a GOP governor from early 2011 through early 2019, and was similarly considered a “blue” state the whole time. Anyone who, like me, is a lifelong New Englander knows that you can’t discuss federal voting in New England states interchangeably with state voting. Those are two very different conversations.

In any case, when I pointed this out to the MSNBC journalist who’d falsely called New Hampshire a “GOP-leaning” state, here’s what he wrote me:

Your opinion has been registered. Thank you. I will keep the tweet and characterization as is. Have a good night.

Certainly, readers of Proof can note the tone here just as well as I can. It doesn’t take being a university professor who teaches tone—as I do, in both my “Professional & Technical Writing” course and my “Advanced Professional & Technical Writing” course at UNH—to know that the intended tone of Griffin’s tweet is “condescending.”

I’m certainly accustomed to being condescended to by folks who work in major media. In 2021, I think we all are. For instance, MSNBC invited me to come on its air a dozen times between 2017 and 2020, and yet it canceled on me without anything like a real apology each and every time but one (when I had to decline its invitation because I didn’t yet feel ready to speak on camera about the issue I was asked to speak about—Israel, which happens to be a particularly fraught topic for a non-practicing American Jew like me). I could have felt like having my time wasted in this way by a major-media company that wasn’t paying me for my time was condescending, but I opted to just tell my agent and publisher that I’d no longer accept invitations to appear on MSNBC. You can only let Lucy pull the football away from you at the last moment so many times, I figured. I did it eleven times, and I felt like that was more than enough for me.

At another point, a young man I won’t name, who was misrepresenting himself on Twitter as an MSNBC reporter, called me a “grifter” in a tweet. I angrily engaged with him publicly, wondering why MSNBC kept inviting me on-air if it considered me not just unreliable but dishonest. The “reporter” suddenly revealed himself to be an intern, not a paid MSNBC employee, so I withdrew from the conversation immediately—not wanting to have it out with someone I had just realized was likely college-student-age or thereabouts. Unfortunately, I pulled out of the conversation too late; somehow the Twitter exchange came to the attention of the President of MSNBC—I swear to you, not via me—and the intern was quickly released from his internship and sent home. I know this is what happened not just because of subsequent tweets by that intern (who wrongly decided I had taken action to affect his internship) but because the President of MSNBC called me personally to let me know that this had happened and apologize to me personally. I accepted that apology, admittedly flummoxed as to why MSNBC was suddenly so solicitous of my good opinion. Why not let me on-air one of the eleven times I was invited to do so, then cancelled on, if I was, as MSNBC’s President told me, considered a friend of the network and someone who the network admired?

At the time, the President of MSNBC—who I’m not naming here to not make it more of a thing than it was, but obviously you could Google it—asked that I keep our call private. At the time I agreed to do so, even though we weren’t involved in a journalistic exchange and, even if we had been, all of the statements he had made to me were made “on the record.” As time went on, however, I wondered about this bizarre request. Why was I asked to keep this apology from MSNBC a secret? Why did the president of the network laud me privately, when publicly there seemed to be some sort of institutional block against having me on-air? Why was a recently onboarded intern punished for falsely and maliciously calling me a “grifter” on Twitter, but no producer was ever told, “Hey, stop cancelling Abramson every time you invite him on?” I don’t have answers to these questions. But I tend to feel like whatever the answer is—in either the Griffin situation, or with the cancelled MSNBC invites, or my odd call with the President of MSNBC—somewhere encoded inside it is something about what’s wrong with media today.

One last note that I’d like to make in the body of this coda involves Rachel Maddow, who I have been and remain a fan of and whose show, The Rachel Maddow Show, I regularly watch. While on occasion, on subjects with respect to which I’m particularly knowledgeable—usually because I’ve researched them extensively for a book—I’ll find an error or two in Maddow’s journalism, which (genre-wise) is curatorial journalism like mine, it never affects my enjoyment of the program, or my respect for Maddow. That the official Twitter feed of Maddow’s blog followed me for almost the entirety of the Trump era was something that genuinely meant something to me.

The day the official Twitter feed of Maddow’s blog unfollowed me was the day I offered my first-ever criticism of Maddow’s program.

And it was a very mild one.

At the time, I was questioning whether it made sense to not only devote an entire hour to an interview with former Donald Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, but for journalists generally (including but not limited to Maddow) to so publicly fawn over Cohen and the prospect of interviewing him about his new book Disloyal. {Note: I have read that book and, candidly, I think it is excellent—though the question of who wrote it while Cohen was incarcerated, Cohen or a ghost-writer contracted with by him, remains open, in my opinion.}

In any case, Disloyal is a good book, and Cohen has a good story to tell. But it’s also one he told publicly—indeed on national television—before Congress. At the time America thought Cohen had told his whole story, but it later turned out that Trump’s former fixer had, perhaps in Trumpian fashion, withheld certain key details from Congress—not illegally, per se, but simply by way of not volunteering them as part of his presentation—so that he could seek a sentence reduction post-incarceration by proffering additional details of his work for Trump. While not the most honorable or smart move from a criminal defendant that I’ve seen in my legal career—all of which I spent representing criminal defendants—it was consistent with the benighted strategizing and sometimes silly posturing Cohen freely copped to in Disloyal. My point, in asking if Maddow had overplayed her hand or overhyped her upcoming interview with Cohen, was that there might be others she could interview who would be more likely to offer new and even more reliable info, even if they wouldn’t also bring the ratings of a Cohen interview.

Admittedly, having—at the time of that mild rebuke of Maddow’s program—written several national bestsellers in which Cohen’s activities, but also the activities of scores of other Trump agents, featured prominently, one of the many people I might’ve liked to see Maddow interview instead of Cohen was me. Maddow’s staff had been following my feed for years, I figured, and presumably (given that Maddow, her staff, and I had the same political preoccupations between 2016 and 2020) at least someone on her team had read my books or sections of them, so I wondered why Maddow had never so much as acknowledged my work while spending years discussing the very topics I had been writing about. Many readers of my Twitter feed wondered the same thing—though, frustratingly, some assumed that it was a lack of effort of my part that was behind my not appearing on Maddow’s program. The simple truth was that Maddow had not even 1% the enthusiasm for my work that she’d demonstrated for the prospect of interviewing convicted liar Michael Cohen on-air.

{Note: When I later did an interview with Cohen myself—in this case, after he’d asked me if I’d agree to be interviewed by him—some of my suspicions were confirmed. Cohen was charming, engaging to listen to, and clearly not only had great stories to tell but a particularly charismatic bravado in telling them. He also, it was clear, had a limited stock of such stories that he was willing to share and return to, and was far more comfortable reading from prepared notes than speaking off the cuff.}

In any event, my questioning of one decision made by Maddow’s bookers—the only time I can recall seriously questioning Maddow or her team, in the midst of years of lauding their work publicly and privately—turned out to be too much. The official Twitter account of Maddow’s blog unfollowed me immediately (within a matter of hours) after my critique appeared on Twitter.

I remember thinking at the time, “Wow—that was it? That was all it took?” I’d spent years supporting Rachel and her work, and years producing work that Maddow and her team might well have considered helpful, and the moment I spoke a word of critique, my years of research and encouragement were suddenly worth nothing at all?

I felt like I’d been provided a glimpse into the world of major media, where feelings are easily hurt despite all involved considering themselves professionals; where self-defeating grudges come easy despite the fact that the chief value amongst journalists and their staff should be access to reliable and relevant information; and where meaningful relationships between figures inside major media and figures outside major media, such as independent journalists, either (a) don’t really occur, or if they do, (b) have to occur on terms set and maintained and overseen on the “major media” end.

Conclusion

All this is my way of saying that I am, like my late father was, a “systems” guy. I try to analyze things at the level of the system. So it’s not just because of the differing responses of the Kremlin and Cracked to the recent article about me in Columbia Journalism Review that I say major media is profoundly broken. I saw it in my dealings with Chris Cuomo of CNN, Josh Meyer of Politico, and of course with disgraced journalist Lyz Lenz in the weeks after she was fired by the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

What all of these folks have in common is something I know a bit about: anxiety.

Far more than being attentive to the principles of journalism—which are damnably hard to perfectly adhere to, even under the best of circumstances—these people manifested a profound, abiding, and almost “mesmerized” focus on being accepted, respected, and permitted to remain in good standing within their professional class. Note that I say “professional class,” not “profession,” as it’s indeed difficult to detect much abiding concern with journalism among some of today’s most prominent major-media journalists. Far more evident, in the cases I’ve described and others, is interest in maintaining a death-grip on the status historically conferred by being a “journalist.”

Which, perhaps, is precisely the problem.

Always under-resourced and underpaid, major-media journalists now find themselves facing the trifecta: they’re at once under-resourced, underpaid, and under-appreciated.

Being a journalist just doesn’t have quite the cachet it once did, especially now that so much journalism happens in independent, semi-professional, decentralized spaces that aren’t controlled or even meaningfully influenced by the media scions of yore.

Today’s major-media journalists feel simultaneously so ill-used and worn by their own personal cares that every critique—and admittedly, they come fast and furious, now—feels like hot bacon-grease slathered on a gashing head wound. They worry, too, that to demonstrate any weakness is to be taken down by (now mixing my metaphors a bit) the barbarians at the gate. Needless to say, Kyle Griffin can’t be shown up by a Seth Abramson; Columbia Journalism Review can’t admit that an independent journalist it feels only contempt for does a much better and more consistent job of honoring contemporary journalistic mores and first principles than a self-declared media watchdog; the most popular program on MSNBC may deign to follow an independent journalist’s Twitter feed, but they’ll be damned if they’ll listen to even a single critique from that quarter. Cuomo and Meyer sure want the help of independent journalists—but not to credit them. Cuomo wants, too, for the very journalists whose help he won’t acknowledge to “send [him] love” on their Twitter feeds anyway, even as he gripes about not getting the same treatment from the barbarians as he feels Maddow does.

It is, as I said, a broken system—a degraded, devolved, and denatured system—and it is one I more and more find myself wanting nothing to do with, even as I still teach journalism at a public university. It’s a strange feeling, and perhaps explains some of the oddities in the first two entries in my new “university lecture series” at Proof (I, II).

There is something fragile, even brittle about some of today’s major-media journalists. It’s not that they don’t have a right to feel attacked—they do, as indeed they often are—but that one can’t both feel attacked and spend no time at all considering the critiques themselves. Major media doesn’t deserve all of the grief it comes in for, but it deserves some of it, and if it intends to do nothing to remedy the many ways in which it is and has long been degrading, devolving, and denaturing what was once widely thought of as journalism, perhaps it deserves even more grief than it receives. Really, though, what most of us who love and regularly consume major media even as we critique it want—in the same way we love and revel in being American citizens and living in America, even as we critique our country—is for things to improve. And right now I see no signs of improvement, or even signs that major media feels it must improve. Instead, we see a circling of wagons, a doubling down on past errors, a false haughtiness that offers only the thinnest veil between an increasingly dispirited public and a journalistic enterprise that I think on some hidden level knows it is failing itself and the rest of us.

For a long time, I wanted to “belong” in the world of major media. And if you were to read my biography and hear all the stories about my backchannel contacts with major media during the Trump era—scenario planning with Van Jones; private DMs with on-air talent at CNN and MSNBC; international phone calls with investigative journos working on topics I’d covered in the Proof trilogy—you’d probably think that in many respects I am part of that world. But I’m not, and I never really have been, and articles like those by Lyz Lenz are squarely intended to make sure I never will be.

Despite entering journalism 27 years ago, and over the years writing for and/or being interviewed by some of its biggest names—from The Washington Post to CBS News, The Economist to ABC News, Newsweek to The Dallas Morning News, The New Yorker to CNN and the BBC and dozens of others—it’s only now, decades on, that I realize that a space I once wanted to inhabit no longer holds much allure to me, and that I was foolish to so earnestly desire something of so little lasting value.

Journalism is complex and nuanced and heterogeneous and scary and a moving target. It requires a profound commitment to ethics—above all a degree of transparency and an interest in accuracy that is uncommon (the sort that would, respectively, prompt one to write an essay like this one and publish a book trilogy with 12,000 citations). But it also requires, much like several other professions I’ve worked in—the law, academia, publishing, criminal investigation, and poetry-writing—a degree of courage that is equally elusive and exceptional. Most days I don’t feel courageous, or act particularly courageously. But I know that I want to be courageous, and that at times I’ve exhibited that trait. And I know that almost every interaction I’ve had over the years with cable news, freelance think-piece writers, or major-media interviewers has left me with the distinct impression that journalism today does not especially value courage. Or daring, or idiosyncrasy, or a sort of integrity that’s pure and cantankerous and not particularly conducive to making friends. Journalism at the highest level feels today as though it is indistinguishable from Hollywood or (if you like) Washington politics, at a time when America needs it to be much more stringently committed to principles than the power-brokers of those broken ecosystems in D.C. and Los Angeles.

So what was this essay series about? Besides—quite obviously—a man who’s trying to process a traumatic event, it’s about a media watchdog publishing lies about me, knowing it was publishing lies about me, and then sending me abusive messages when I tried to get the sort of basic corrections any journalistic enterprise would have freely offered. The lies CJR maliciously published were then parroted by an American enemy, even as a humor website exhibited more decency and journalistic integrity in a matter of seconds than Columbia Journalism Review had in a matter of many, many months.

If that isn’t evidence that American journalism is broken, I really don’t know what is.

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{Note: This is the second in a series of university lectures on the current state of journalism in the United States. The first lecture in the series—“What Is Journalism?—can be found here.}

The university lecture below is a “slow-burn” rumination that takes an odd approach to its topic. It is, in brief, a lecture about a course textbook—its structure, m…

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{Note: This is the final part, Part IV, of a multi-part essay on the ongoing debate between major media and independent journalists working on Substack about whether the former is confirmably more reliable. Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here; and a coda is here.}

CJR (Part 4)

American news-readers are not entirely wrong to feel as though dishonest journalists are a dime a dozen these days. Still worse, when such folks are coddled by major-media watchdogs like Columbia Journalism Review—which should have known better than to contract with Lyz Lenz after she was fired by the Cedar Rapids Gazette; Lenz’s bizarre behavior online since has included cackling about getting an interview subject fired on the Book Fight podcast—they continue to do the things they’ve always done that put their employers in bad spots.

For the Gazette, it was the collapse of its coverage of the 2020 presidential election, as previously discussed in this essay series. For Columbia University and Lenz herself, it may well be a highly public and expensive defamation lawsuit. While this prospect gives me no joy whatsoever, I cheer myself by telling myself I did everything I possibly could to help CJR avoid this situation—in fact, far more than anyone who’s followed this story on social media or elsewhere would ever know.

Because I knew, when Lenz first contacted me for an interview in November 2020, that her “set” within the creative writing community had been at odds with me for years (she works at The Rumpus, a publication whose poetry editor, Brian K. Spears, has been trollishly obsessed with me on Twitter for over a decade now); and because I knew she had previously liked a tweet that accused me of being “not credible at all”; I told my agent, when he told me about Lenz’s request for an interview, that the interview was a trap—a set-up for a hitpiece. I wrote Lenz and declined her interview, hoping it would scuttle the piece (you’ll recall she told my agent that the piece was only something she was considering).

It turned out the interview was happening one way or another, as Lenz informed me. I thereafter wrote a letter to CJR Managing Editor Betsy Morais asking CJR to assign a different writer for the interview—outlining my history with Lenz, who indeed I had blocked on Twitter long ago—and I received no response whatsoever. This should have been enough of a clue that CJR did not conform to core journalistic standards, but I nevertheless naively entered into an off-the-record conversation with Lenz about her bias toward me.

With all this in mind, there remains some confusion about how this CJR interview came about in the first place. Lenz told me over email that she suggested my name to CJR, but after my accusations that she had a longstanding animus toward me, she changed her story entirely, and told the Book Fight podcast that in fact CJR had raised my name first. The one thing that soon became clear was that while my participation in the interview was optional, the fact of the hit-piece itself most certainly wasn’t. It was going to be written one way or another; it was not merely being considered. For that reason, I agreed (after a lengthy back-and-forth in which Lenz repeatedly assured me she had no animus toward me, a ruse she dropped the moment her article was published, crowing on Twitter that I’d been “bananas” for years) to speak with her.

It was a mistake to think that speaking to a reporter who’d already pitched her article as a hit-piece would change anything. Indeed, in her Book Fight interview Lenz agreed that I was stupid to speak with her, as the takedown series she’d been publishing at CJR—side note: no one knows why CJR is publishing a series of hit-pieces on people in media, given its stated mission—should have warned me that nothing good could come of it. I cop to idealism and gross naiveté on this score.

What I didn’t know was how deceitful Lenz had been or would be, or that CJR had no fact-checking mechanism whatsoever to issue corrections even when it knew—from hard evidence in its possession—that it had published statements that were false. And I certainly didn’t know that a piece so obviously non-journalistic (indeed not, as it had declared itself, a “report” but a fact-indifferent editorial) would thereafter be amplified by such luminaries as Maggie Haberman of the New York Times and Daniel Dale and Brian Stelter of CNN, let alone one of the self-appointed gurus of major-media ethics on Twitter, Professor Jay Rosen of NYU. I didn’t know that Melville House would cite CJR’s essay in declining, at the last moment, to publish the next edition of the annual literary anthology that had once (briefly) sought to honor Shia LaBeouf’s Twitter feed.

Chris Cuomo

I won’t rehash here the more than two dozen lies in Lenz’s CJR article, as I’ve already posted a lengthy thread on that subject on Twitter—and the old adage about wrestling with pigs (don’t do it, as all that happens is that you get dirty and the pig enjoys it) certainly applies here. CJR cares only about the number of clicks it gets for its article, not whether any part of the article is accurate or whether Columbia University is now facing a potential defamation lawsuit.

But I do want to say this: the most upsetting and indeed traumatizing aspect of having a hit-piece written about you that’s entirely false (as opposed to one based merely on someone’s opinion, which I don’t mind at all, whatever the opinion may be) is when major media participates in the hit not because the hit is honest but because it wants you gone from journalism altogether.

Even worse? When it wants you gone because it knows you have information about it that would be embarrassing. Then it wants you gone and—as many a clichéd movie poster has declared—“this time it’s personal.”

I must say, candidly, that I feel like that’s what happened with Chris Cuomo of CNN, who is mentioned in Lenz’s defamatory hit-piece. And it hurts, in part because I once admired Cuomo, and in part because I spent a year as a regular guest on CNN, during which time both producers and an executive VP at the network lauded my work.

You can head over to my YouTube channel to see some of my CNN clips.

In short, I went through a period in which I did a lot of free work for major media—even suffered through getting interviews MSNBC had solicited me to do cancelled a dozen times—and I didn’t think major media would turn around and do me like this.

As I said: I was naive and, in this respect, got what I deserved. I believed major media was the place of integrity, standards, and rigorous fact-checking Sarah Roberts says it is (see Part I), and it took me years trying to do good work for folks who didn’t deserve my time for me to learn better. One of those people I dedicated time to was Cuomo, and he didn’t deserve it, either—which I suppose I must thank Lenz for teaching me.

Cuomo first contacted me, out of the blue, on Twitter in April of 2018:

It was a pleasant surprise, as I was fond of Cuomo’s work on CNN. I responded in what I think was a modest way, acknowledging that cable news programs need to find a “fit” between analyst and program topic for a booking to make sense:

The compliment was nice, I admit it. I don’t much like dealing with celebrities, but I suspect I’m as susceptible to being complimented by a celebrity as anyone. Indeed, if CNN had never put out a statement to CJR—via an anonymous source at CNN, no less—insisting that I had “absolutely not” been in touch with anyone at Cuomo’s CNN program (including Cuomo), I wouldn’t be airing these conversations. As it stands, I must.

My next contact with Cuomo was in November 2018, and candidly wasn’t really by choice: my publisher at the time, Simon & Schuster, was pushing me to get on-camera on a major media outlet to promote Proof of Collusion, and while normally I don’t like to ask people for things, Jim Sciutto asking me for a copy of my book (as well as my many free appearances on-air at CNN) made me feel like proposing a spot on Cuomo’s show, given his prior statements to me, wasn’t out of line. Thus, this odd exchange:

This “exchange” is odd because, as you can see, it’s not really an exchange at all. I wrote Cuomo around Thanksgiving in 2018, and he wrote me back 120 days later with an unexplained complaint about his treatment by unnamed critics. I nevertheless tried to be comforting:

Did I think he sounded like a crybaby? Sure—but I also knew that I was in no position to judge, as despite having been enormously fortunate with my Twitter feed finding an audience whose size I never could have anticipated, I too fall into bouts of ridiculous self-pity. So I wasn’t entitled to “tsk” Chris for his, even if his level of success in the field of journalism (in every way one determines success) exceeded mine exponentially. You can see some of my self-pity in my response to Cuomo opining that, unlike him, Rachel Maddow had “protection” from sources inside the nation’s media apparatus:

As the author of a forthcoming book on citizen journalism, did Cuomo repeating the old canard that we’re “all citizen journalists” disappoint me? Sure. But I know how academics get—we respond too heatedly to people not knowing as intimately as we do topics we’ve been studying for years—so I didn’t have much of a reaction to his (as I considered it at the time) slip-up.

Then, in October of 2019, things got interesting:

I can’t even screenshot my response, as it’d break Substack’s memory limit for posts. In short, I sent Cuomo the best research from my 2019 New York Times-bestselling book Proof of Conspiracy across thirteen direct messages, some of them so long they broke Twitter’s word limit for direct messages and had to be parceled into multiple DMs. I sent Cuomo links to articles, names and dates of key events, and analyses from a guy (me) who’d published a national bestseller on the very subject Cuomo was asking about—all of it time-consuming and, importantly, free. I didn’t want anything in return; I just wanted to help out. Here’s the last DM of the thirteen I sent Cuomo that day:

I felt good. Chris Cuomo, who I admired, had asked me for help; I’d provided it; he’d acknowledged my help. But it was what came next that was most gratifying. Three days later, after I’d sent Cuomo a relevant article by Natasha Bertrand, this happened:

I wrote back “Sure, sounds good”, and didn’t write Chris again for a month and a half. In late November 2019, I became frustrated that major media was failing to distinguish between four distinct conspiracy theories Trump and his allies in Russia were pushing about the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. I sent Cuomo three of my threads. This screenshot (which includes the last of my DMs to him) lets you know what happened:

It was a great moment. I’d turned on Cuomo’s show on CNN and seen him outlining the four discrete conspiracy theories Team Trump was pushing, and in exactly the terms that I’d written about them in the threads I sent to CNN. I felt good—like my research for my next national bestseller, 2020’s Proof of Corruption, was getting into major media (in primetime, no less) in a way that would help Americans understand what was going on.

Then, in February 2021, came the hammer—Lenz’s article. Which said the following: “[Abramson] claimed…that he’d advised Cuomo Prime Time, Chris Cuomo’s CNN show…..A CNN source replied, “Absolutely not.”

I was devastated. First, by the false denial from a cable news network I’d done good work for publicly for over a year, and backchannel, on two occasions, during the 18 months thereafter; second, by the fact that whoever CJR spoke to at CNN wasn’t even willing to give their name in falsely denying my contact with Cuomo. {Note: I told Lenz my contact was with Cuomo, so I don’t know why her piece mentions the program; this causes me concern that the anonymous source Lenz used was Cuomo himself, and that he was granted anonymity by Lenz in a situation it was journalistically inappropriate because he’s a celebrity.}

When I showed CJR the proof that I’d been in a long-term discussion with Cuomo about the content on his show, they told me—in prettier terms—to go fuck myself.

I wish I could say that this was the only lesson I learned about the deceitfulness of major media from Lyz Lenz and CJR. It wasn’t. Lenz’s coverage of my interactions with Josh Meyer of Politico was just as dishonest. Meyer and I first spoke by phone, at his request, in November 2017. He’d just sent me this startling email:

This was pretty heady stuff for a Politico admirer. The top investigator at the media outlet called himself a “big fan” and said I do “great investigative work”? That was exciting. On the call, Meyer started the conversation with words that so etched themselves in my memory that after Politico denied knowing me for the first time, in 2018, I typed them from memory into a tweet: “You’re one hell of an investigative journalist.”

That was pretty cool, even if I first revealed it publicly only after the media outlet denied having any idea who I was. In fact, not only did Politico know who I was, they wanted our conversations to remain secret even as they sent me emails asking for “help!” with their reporting:

Like a boyfriend or girlfriend who’s abusing you, they demanded I keep their secret:

Politico asked for my aid so many times in the final weeks of 2017 that I’d again break Substack’s memory limit if I posted screenshots of all of them. The point is that I sent some of them to CJR, offered to send all of them, and CJR again told me—in slightly prettier language (but only slightly)—to go fuck myself.

Here’s the lesson, all: for a variety of reasons that I’m writing a book about right now—reasons that have nothing to do with those offered by the American far right—it is the case that we can’t trust many in major media these days. So find yourself journalists who don’t lie, who keep receipts, who demonstrate integrity even when it’s hard to do so, and then follow them on Substack.

Because that’s probably where they are.

{Note: There’s a link to a coda to this multi-part essay atop this article.}

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{Note: This is Part III of a multi-part essay on the ongoing debate between major media and independent journalists working on Substack about whether the former is confirmably more reliable. Part I of this essay is here; Part II is here; Part IV is here; and a coda is here.}

CJR (Part 3)

I’m going to take a brief detour from my story about Shia LaBeouf and his artistic collaborator Luke Turner to give a little more information about my harrowing experience with Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), a self-appointed major-media watchdog which, from my personal knowledge and experience, has the most broken, dishonest, indeed profoundly grotesque “fact-checking” process I’ve ever encountered at any media outlet—and I’ve been in journalism for 27 years, written for more than a dozen major media outlets, taught journalism at a major public research university for six years, and been in contact with countless fact-checkers for media organizations over the last quarter-century. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anything remotely like what I encountered at Columbia Journalism Review in 2021.

In addition to teaching my journalism students at University of New Hampshire the four core principles of journalistic writing, research, communications, and ethical practices—namely, “objectivity,” “accuracy,” “transparency,” and “honesty,” principles collectively known as the “OATH” principles—I teach them that the last two of these principles require that a journalist be willing to issue corrections when they make a mistake, but also try to avoid corrections on the front end by checking in with their sources when two sources conflict.

If a journalist does, instead, what CJR apparently encouraged its contributing writer Lyz Lenz to do—get a quote, see it contradicted by a second source, and then never check back with your first source—you’re virtually assured of publishing falsehoods, and potentially defamatory ones. Not returning to a source is particularly unethical when (a) you’ve assured the source multiple times that you will do so, as was the case with Lenz and me back in the late fall of 2020, (b) your source only declined to provide emails to protect individuals whom you as the journalist have since decided (with the consent of such individuals) to bring into your story, thereby rendering your source’s initial refusal to provide such emails moot and necessary to revisit, and (c) the source has already told you that proof of everything he has said does in fact exist and he is in fact in possession of it.

So, for instance, when a source tells you on the phone that in 2017 he spoke repeatedly with a Senior Investigative Reporter at Politico about stories involving the Trump administration (see Part IV of this essay for more), and was subsequently asked to provide research to Politico for free without attribution, you don’t contact a Politico editor who arrived at the outlet years later, in April 2019, to ask him if he ever offered your source a paid “job.” And when your source thereafter provides proof of his claims (see below), you don’t refuse to run them when you know your readership believes your source lied about ever being in contact with Politico in the first place. Here, then, is what Lenz wrote about me and Politico:

Excerpt 1

Excerpt 2

Here’s what I actually told Lenz about my 2017 contacts with Josh Meyer, then the Senior Investigative Reporter at Politico:

Excerpt 3

If Lenz had confusion about what year this occurred, or about who I’d spoken to at Politico, or about whether doing research for Politico meant getting paid by them or having a “job” with them (which it did not, as I think I pretty well indicated to Lenz by saying the digital media outlet was not offering even “a byline or a notation at the bottom of article” for my work), Lenz had an easy fix: she’d already told me on the phone that she would get back to me if she needed any clarifications. Instead, she sought the aid of Meyer himself, who—believing Lenz’s “report” that I said I’d been offered a “job” by Politico—came onto her Twitter feed to deny that. It was pointless, of course, as I agreed with him: Politico had never offered me paid employment.

But what Meyer was really angry about, I think, as Part IV of this essay confirms, is that he had put down in writing how desperately he needed my aid in doing the job he was paid for.

{Note: Lenz knew I was an avid record-keeper and had proof of everything I’d told her, as even my email to her in part about Politico included three screenshots confirming something else I’d noted in the email—that my Twitter feed was followed by members of the incoming Biden administration. In fact, one of the three screenshots was proof of my claim that the National Security Advisor of the United States, Jake Sullivan, had followed me minutes after being named to his post—something Lenz made sure not to include in her article because it was surprising, it bolstered my credibility, and she had documentary proof of it that she would have had to acknowledge. Ironically, Lenz had commented, via email, on the amazing thoroughness of my record-keeping, despite thereafter writing a piece that called into question whether I could prove anything I’d said to her.}

Luke Turner (Part 2)

I mentioned in the last part of this essay that Luke Turner’s tone toward me changed in the spring of 2014, as I continued writing about metamodernism in major media publications—and to a fairly large readership, Lenz’s subsequent claims about the size of the Indiewire and Huffington Post audiences notwithstanding—and Turner continued working on art projects with Shia LaBeouf. Where previously Turner had showed up whenever I said a word (“metamodernism”) he considered himself the owner of, now he was showing up in conversations I was having online with third parties who didn’t even know who Turner was:

I should have seen the warning signs in this behavior, but I did not.

Instead, because Turner was the then-webmaster of much of LaBeouf’s social media presence, and because the university press-published, non-profit annual anthology of experimental writing I co-edited with Damiani wanted to publish, as part of a free online feature, screenshots of LaBeouf’s Twitter feed (which Turner was taking credit for as part of the #IAMSORRY performance-art piece being touted by the LaBeouf, Turner & Rönkkö collaborative) I wrote Turner as part of an effort to get permission to use the screenshots. It was a form of permission I knew, as an attorney, we didn’t actually need—given that we were not charging any money for the screenshots and that they merely sought to honor LaBeouf—but I was trying to be courteous.

I should have realized by then that Turner would under no circumstances want me to be in touch with LaBeouf, but it didn’t really occur to me because I had no real interest in being in touch with LaBeouf, anyway—and frankly agreed with Turner’s view that LaBeouf’s permission wasn’t needed to honor his work via a profit-free screenshot of his public and notorious Twitter feed.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, I received a positively bizarre missive:

My publisher and co-editor were flabbergasted. What did Matthew Saver mean in saying that we were “publishing something allegedly written by my client”? Surely he wasn’t contesting that LaBeouf was the author of his own Twitter feed—the only work by LaBeouf we’d ever contemplated publishing? We were thrown for such a loop (after immediately deciding, of course, that we would under no circumstances use material from LaBeouf on our non-profit website seeking to honor, among the work of many other artists, his work) that it took me days to figure out what Saver was talking about.

Ultimately, about two weeks after receiving Saver’s email, I wrote Luke Turner seeking answers on why I was getting a cease-and-desist letter from LaBeouf’s attorney. Here was Turner’s response, in relevant part:

I had never written anyone, or ever expressed any sentiment publicly or privately, that involved “list[ing] [LaBeouf] as an author of” the anthology I edited—which of course didn’t even have an “author,” as it was, again, an anthology of works by 75 writers. More to the point, LaBeouf wasn’t going to be in the anthology, as he’d been selected for a free, non-profit online website. It soon became clear that Turner had gone to LaBeouf to try to gin up a lawsuit against me as a means of driving a wedge between LaBeouf and me—words I type now with some amusement, as I had never sought any sort of relationship with Shia LaBeouf in 2013 or 2014, and haven’t sought one since.

So by June 2014 I found myself in the preposterous position of having received a cease-and-desist order from a man I’d never met, simply because an obscure British artist whose career I’d effectively made by directing a Hollywood mega-star in his direction was needlessly territorial about (a) the said mega-star, and (b) an abstract concept that has been in academic circulation since before the said obscure British artist was born.

I felt, in short, that my life had become stupidly ridiculous.

What I didn’t imagine, when I told the story offhandedly to CJR as part of an hours-long conversation, was that it would end up being written up in the way it was—a way that bore little similarity to anything I’d discussed with Lenz. Indeed, the parts she got right were chiefly those she Googled. Here’s the beginning of her treatment of the saga:

Everything here is wrong. I was in no way a “follow[er]” of LaBeouf’s career in 2013; his plagiarism scandal was big news in late 2013, and I noted it along with everyone else. Indeed, I had no particular opinion on LaBeouf at the time, becoming interested in his scandal only because I was writing a column on metamodernism for Indiewire, and LaBeouf’s actions at the tail end of the scandal seemed, to me, metamodernist in bent—if only accidentally.

My article on LaBeouf did not “laud” LaBeouf, as anyone who read it would know. The poem Lenz references was indeed published online on January 13, 2014, and later on in my 2015 book Metamericana, but it did not “purloin” (i.e., steal) Shia LaBeouf’s words. In fact, the poem was preceded by a statement that read, “Author’s Note: The poem ‘The Public Apology of Shia LaBeouf’ comprises a collage of 40 discrete dependent and independent clauses tweeted (not retweeted) by actor Shia LaBeouf from December 13, 2013 to January 13, 2014. Punctuation and typeface has on occasion been amended.” No artist or journalist would ever say in such a situation—when the citation precedes the usage—that words have been stolen.

But Lenz was just getting warmed up. Here’s the second part of her “special report” (the term CJR used to advertise her article) on my brief involvement with Turner and LaBeouf:

It took me a while to make heads or tails of this. Obviously my correspondence with Turner began half a year before Turner first spoke to LaBeouf, and as Turner has conceded via email, I was the very reason he spoke to LaBeouf in the first place—in January of 2014—so Lenz’s claim, which she falsely attributes to me, that I began corresponding with Turner after he’d already begun working with LaBeouf is bizarre.

Just so, my statement about being “the reason Shia LaBeouf became a performance artist” was based on the words of both LaBeouf himself (on Twitter) and Turner (via email), and had nothing to do with the three-person art collaborative LaBeouf and Turner had thereafter formed with Nastja Säde Rönkkö. I never claimed any influence, nor would I ever claim any influence, on the artworks of LaBeouf, Turner & Rönkkö.

I don’t know how to take LaBeouf’s claim that I was using his name to sell copies of a print anthology he wasn’t in, nor his apparent continued insistence that I wanted to make him a co-author of a book with precisely zero authors that (again) he wasn’t a part of. But if these bizarre statements by LaBeouf and Turner surprised Lenz, as they were inconsistent with anything I’d said to her, she made sure not to contact me—as she’d promised—for comment, correction, or clarification.

Instead, she invented some new information from whole cloth.

Having never said to Lenz that I remained a “fan” of LaBeouf’s after his recent sexual battery scandal—which is still ongoing—Lenz invented the notion that I felt otherwise by linking to a tweet of mine from six months before the LaBeouf-FKA Twigs scandal hit the media. In doing so, and in writing up her own sleight-of-hand as “allegations of abuse were brought against LaBeouf…Still, despite everything, Abramson remains a fan”, Lenz gave the impression that I was unfazed by domestic violence. For personal reasons I won’t get into in this essay, this lie in particular was traumatic for me.

When CJR was contacted with the evidence above, and thereafter asked to correct Lenz’s misstatements—misstatements that accused an attorney of theft, a professor of celebrating and even practicing plagiarism, an editor of having no editorial standards, and someone who knows something about domestic violence about being an apologist for it—I was told, in slightly prettier language, to go fuck myself.

I was told this by the Managing Editor for CJR, Betsy Morais, and by Stuart Karle, the former adjunct faculty member at Columbia University who was, inexplicably, retained to represent Columbia University in this matter.

And then it got worse.

Part IV of this essay includes the conclusion of this bizarre story about the collapse of fact-checking at major-media institutions in the United States.

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{Note: This is Part II of a multi-part essay on the ongoing debate between major media and independent journalists working on Substack about whether the former is confirmably more reliable. Part I of this essay is here; Part III is here; Part IV is here; and a coda is here.}

CJR (Part 1)

This essay has much to say about Columbia Journalism Review—all of it with receipts—but for the moment it’s sufficient to note that on November 9, 2020, a contributing writer at the publication, Lyz Lenz, who had just been fired by the Cedar Rapids Gazette five weeks earlier (on October 5, 2020) contacted my agent to say she was “interested in” possibly doing a profile on me in CJR, and indicating that my forthcoming book Citizen Journalist (Macmillan, 2022) was a primary focus of her attention.

In the event, this is the entirety of what Lenz wrote about my forthcoming book in CJR, despite the topic being one we discussed at great length over the phone:

That Lenz’s plan was never to write about my forthcoming book is beside the point; I note the above just to establish that the article CJR recently published about me has 10 words about its ostensible subject (the first graphic textbook on citizen journalism in the twenty-first century), and a whopping 228 words about some long-ago interactions of mine with obscure British artist Luke Turner and, indirectly, his artistic collaborator, Shia LaBeouf.

{Note: Lenz has since tried to purge the web of evidence of her firing, but unsuccessfully. This thread shows some of the detritus of her purge efforts, which includes details about the claim, bolstered by the paper itself (see this link) that Lenz was considered so biased in her writing for the CRG that her employer got blacklisted by the Republican Party in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election—a major tragedy for any Iowa newspaper, as politicians normally line up to speak to media outlets in Iowa during, and immediately prior to, a national election year.}

Among the 228 words Lenz spilled about the story I’m telling you now about Turner and LaBeouf—every word of Lenz’s account false, and contrary to what I told her during our telephone interview—are these particularly troubling ones, given the current debate about accuracy and fact-checking in major media versus Substack:

I never told Columbia Journalism Review that I knew Shia LaBeouf, so I don’t know why Lenz asked the actor if he knew me. I did say that LaBeouf knew who I was, as (a) his artistic collaborator Luke Turner told me as much (see below), and (b) LaBeouf himself said as much to Jesse Damiani, a Forbes reporter, at SXSW in 2019. Here’s Turner acknowledging that my Indiewire article sent LaBeouf to him and his odd “manifesto”:

When I sent CJR the above email from Turner acknowledging that LaBeouf knew who I was, they ignored it; when I gave them the phone number of Forbes reporter Damiani to confirm that LaBeouf had offered—unsolicited—words of praise and admiration for my essays on metamodernism at one of the largest music festivals in the United States, CJR ignored it.

I would have provided these pieces of information to CJR prior to them running their story on me, but I had no idea that either Turner or LaBeouf were part of the feature at all—as they had nothing to do with the topic of the feature as presented to me by CJR. More importantly, as this essay is fundamentally about the collapse of fact-checking in major media, when I asked CJR fact-checker Andrea Cruzado, point-blank, if there were any quotes from Turner in Lenz’s piece that needed a response from me—which there were, notably his claim that I’d falsely said he knew me—Cruzado lied and said there were no such quotes in the article. {Note: Needless to say, it’s equally possible Lenz had lied to Cruzado, but Cruzado had Lenz’s article in front of her when we spoke by phone.}

When I called Lenz after the article’s publication to schedule a time for me to send her the months of emails between Turner and myself, she screamed at me and hung up.

Then things got even stranger.

Lenz wrote on Twitter that (a) she had recorded my call to her, as she recognized my number when it came up on her phone, and (b) that I had yelled at her during the call.

Neither was true.

Within a matter of days, Lenz had appeared on the Book Fight podcast with an entirely new story: that I had called her from a mysterious new phone number, not my usual one, to try to trick her into speaking with me, and that me doing so made it impossible for her to anticipate (or therefore record) my call. In fact, I only use one phone number—I’ve used the same phone number for every phone call I’ve made for over a decade—and I never yelled at Lenz (as my wife, who was in the room during the call, can attest).

{Note: Lenz also told the podcast that I’d coordinated a vast conspiracy to launch misogynistic attacks against her online. To this day, I have no idea to what this conspiracy theory refers.}

I began my call with Lenz by saying, “Is this an all right time to talk?” Lenz seemed unnerved to have to speak to me after the lies she had written in her piece—the ones about Turner being only the tip of the iceberg—so she said, a little shakily, that she could only speak briefly. When I told her I had information I needed to send her that confirmed that many items in her story were false, she yelled that she had “repeatedly” asked me for such proof. In fact, she said once—during our initial interview—that if I wanted to bring various parties into the story (e.g., Politico, CNN, and Luke Turner) by sending her private emails to substantiate some of my offhand statements about those parties, I could. I said that I didn’t want to drag people into a story that had nothing to do with them—for their own sakes. Lenz told me she would contact me further, after our initial interview, in the event she needed any clarifications or corrections from me, and I took her at her word. That was a mistake. Despite Lenz ultimately contacting all the parties that she gave no indication she intended to contact—and getting responses back that demanded an immediate reply from me—I never heard from Lyz Lenz again.

In her podcast interview on Book Fight, Lenz tried to rewrite her behavior by saying that she had contacted me after speaking with Politico and CNN to once again ask for proof of my contacts with them. This never happened, as my own email records and phone records will confirm. I have also urged Lenz to publish—start-to-finish—any recording she has of our phone call, as any such recording would confirm everything I’ve said about it.

Lenz’s claim that I refused to provide proof of my contacts with Politico, CNN, and Luke Turner doesn’t make sense in any case, as no one who has been told that Politico has lied about contacts with them, that CNN has lied about contacts with them, and that Luke Turner has lied about contacts with them—and who, most importantly, has documentary proof of all such contacts, which proof he has since posted publicly on his Twitter feed to an audience of over 900,000—would refuse to provide such proof when told by a media outlet that if he doesn’t it will run a false story calling him a liar.

All the above aside, as I know from teaching journalism for years at a public flagship university, even if a source initially refuses to refute claims against them—which, to be very clear, I certainly did not—journalistic ethics would require the publication of a correction once such proof had been provided, however tardily. Neither major-media publications nor major-media watchdogs can publish material they know to be false and continue to enjoy the trust of their readers.

CJR (Part 2)

When I told Columbia University’s lawyer, former Columbia University adjunct faculty Stuart Karle, that CJR had lied about Turner not knowing me despite having the email above and many others from Turner written to me in 2014 (all confirming that he knew who I was), Karle made an incredible claim: that CJR had never said that Turner didn’t know me, only that Turner had claimed that I was not an influence on his work (which I’d never told CJR I was, but this continued the outlet’s cruel trend of asking people to deny claims never made by me to better make me look like a fabulist).

Here is the relevant section (with typos) of Columbia University attorney Stuart Karle’s email to me, from March 7, 2021:

In the event you’re as confused by Karle’s response—on behalf of a self-appointed major-media watchdog and one of the largest universities in the world—as I am, I’ll try to explain it. Karle is saying that because Lenz paraphrased Turner’s lie (“Turner…denied knowing Abramson”) rather than quoting it, it doesn’t require a correction.

Take a beat and re-read that sentence.

In 27 years in journalism, I have never seen a media outlet deny having published something it definitely published—let alone in this bizarre way—in order to avoid having to correct it. I write about this event now because major media is pushing a new conversation about its own editorial oversight, fact-checking, and investigative research capacities and practices—comparing these to those independent journalists on Substack—and American news readers need a detailed anecdote like this one to better understand how morally, ethically, and journalistically bankrupt fact-checking at major media outlets (even a self-appointed watchdog of media ethics) has become.

Luke Turner

My years of interactions with LaBeouf collaborator Luke Turner—one of the scariest individuals I’ve ever encountered in my life, and a man who, based on the information available to me, appears to have spent years stalking me on 4chan and Wikipedia, attempting to coordinate bogus lawsuits against me, and lying about me publicly—began eight years ago, when he started writing me on Twitter to contest my writings on metamodernism. An obscure British photographer with no real following online or off, Turner seemed to believe that by writing a blog-post called “The Metamodernist Manifesto” on his personal blog, he thereafter owned a term that had been coined 38 years earlier by American academic Mas’ud Zavarzadeh in a peer-reviewed, journal-published essay entitled, “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives.”

Here’s what Zavarzadeh himself—the man who coined the word “metamodernism”— had to say about my work (in part, as this was part of a longer email conversation):

Keeping in mind what CJR wrote about me and metamodernism in February 2021—

—I’ll add that when I offered to send my exchange with the father of metamodernism to CJR, along with proof that I was the first American writer to be paid to write about metamodernism (by Indiewire), authored the first and second major-media columns on the subject (the second for The Huffington Post), and had written more on the subject than any writer in English per Google, CJR refused to receive any of this information.

{Note: In the event that Lenz meant, instead, that there’s no evidence that “metamodernism” now gets written about by major media outlets in the United States, a Google News search (as opposed to a general Google search) for the term on March 8, 2021 yields nearly 700 results.}

In any event, my history with the author of the “Metamodernist Manifesto” began in 2013:

Soon after 2013, Turner’s contacts with me turned obsessive, with him appearing on my Twitter feed every time I mentioned the words metamodernism or metamodernist, concepts and terms in which, again, he had taken a bizarre and wholly unwarranted proprietary interest. In the event, I heard from Turner every month in the summer of 2013:

In an apparent effort to keep me on his “side”—at a time when I didn’t yet understand that, in Turner’s view, there were indeed “sides” as to how the word “metamodernism” should be received publicly—Turner starting favoriting my tweets (doing so at least once in both August and September 2013). Then, on September 28, 2013, he followed me on Twitter, though I see now (reviewing my old emails) that he apparently first followed me on July 21, 2013, then un-followed me, then re-followed me in September:

Turner’s obsession with me—I didn’t follow him on Twitter, but not only did he follow me but showed up whenever, again, I mentioned his pet concept—continued into 2014:

By April 2014, however, the tide had turned—and with, I now see, very good reason.

By April, Turner had begun working with Shia LaBeouf as a result of my Indiewire article (see Part I), so I now presented to this minor British photographer as a possible threat: a competitor for mega-star Shia LaBeouf’s attention and admiration, and perhaps even for a role as his mentor in metamodernism. {Note: To be clear, this is a role I can plainly say that I never sought or desired, nor would I have accepted it had it been offered. I have a decades-long history of preferring to work alone and disliking celebrities, and had had enough experience with problematic partnerships with extremely troubled persons that by 2014 nothing could possibly have interested me less than working with LaBeouf. Turner, on the other hand, as an obscure artist, was desperate to attach himself to a Hollywood superstar.}

Little did I know that Turner’s desperation was soon going to push him to insane acts involving Shia LaBeouf, lawyers, and a course of deceit that has now lasted a decade and, within just the last 24 hours, cost me a potential book deal.

This story is continued in Part III.