Journalist, Heal Thyself

Maggie Haberman is an excellent reporter, a big player in the big leagues of journalism as the White House correspondent for the New York Times. And like many in her position, and indeed like many who aren’t in her position but have just had enough of the constant onslaught of idiocy, she’s decided to take a twitter hiatus.

That’s cool. Many others have, and many of us take the occasional week or month off from the never-ending reminder that the average IQ is 100, and half of all twitter users are below that. But Haberman didn’t just log off. She wrote an op-ed.

The evening before, I had complained to a close friend that I hated being on Twitter. It was distorting discourse, I said. I couldn’t turn off the noise. She asked what was the worst that could happen if I stepped away from it.

There was nothing I could think of. And so just after 6 p.m. last Sunday, I did.

In the early days of twitter, it was fairly benign. People posted pics of dinner and made jokes, most anodyne but some that would become problematic years later as the warring tribes searched for reasons to attack. But the tenor has changed markedly since Trump, and Maggie being all Trump, all the time, was a natural target.

After nearly nine years and 187,000 tweets, I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me.

That’s a lot of twits. I’ve been on twitter for ten years, and have about half as many. It may be because she’s used twitter as a delivery mechanism for breaking news, or felt compelled to engage with others, some worth her time and others just idiots of either the useful or annoying types.

Twitter has stopped being a place where I could learn things I didn’t know, glean information that was free from errors about a breaking news story or engage in a discussion and be reasonably confident that people’s criticisms were in good faith.

This is where Haberman’s rationale starts to break down. Twitter, like any medium, is merely a forum, a platform where there will be smart and dumb, honest and dishonest, good faith and bad. There are remarkably good things, funny jokes, interesting asides and fascinating discussions. And there’s tons of garbage. This was always the case. Even when it was less offensive, it was still largely dumb. After all, the twits come from people, and people aren’t nearly as fabulous as we should be. Not you, of course. You are totally fab. Other people.

The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs, with no end in sight. It is a place where people who are understandably upset about any number of things go to feed their anger, where the underbelly of free speech is at its most bilious.

And here is where Maggie goes rouge. Viciousness? Check. Toxic partisan anger? Beyond belief. Intellectual dishonesty? Oh yeah. Motive-questioning? It’s become an art form in the hands of trolls. Sexism? Wait, how did that get into the same list as the others? Why not racism? Is Haberman a racist, or homophobe, or, god forbid, a xenophobe? See the problem?

Whether it’s at an all-time high may be debatable, as the shameless use of hyperbole is taken for granted, but it’s bad. And so what? If the pain of seeing the toxic combination of ignorance and outrage becomes too much, blink, shrug, scroll. But for Maggie, in particular, to complain about the ugliness and stupidity of people seems, well, disingenuous.

More recently, instead of engaging in thoughtful debates, I found myself spending an increasing amount of time explaining an errant word or a poorly phrased tweet, and coming off defensive as I did it. At other times, I watched as an offhand comment became tinder for a divisive national conversation.

On Twitter, everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal. And that makes it harder for significant events — like Mr. Trump’s extraordinarily pliant performance with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — to break through.

Having read the New York Times for decades, including the past two years, this complaint cannot go unnoticed. There hasn’t been a day since Trump was the Republican candidate that the New York Times, the Paper of Record, hasn’t had at least two, if not more, editorials or op-eds that didn’t proclaim him “literally Hitler,” bringing the Apocalypse upon us, destroying everything that was good and holy.

Your paper, Maggie, gave it’s precious real estate to some of the most ridiculous, outrageous, baseless, and yes, utterly false, claims of the end of times. I’ve discussed a few of them here from time to time, but it could be a career vetting the inane op-eds. Have you ever read Michelle Goldberg’s columns? Poor Charles Blow has lost his mind. Or my favorite muse, Roxane Gay?

While I appreciate that as a reporter, you’re given assignments in your role as White House correspondent, but who has done more to elevate every burp and fart of this administration to prominence than you, Maggie?

On Twitter, everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal. And that makes it harder for significant events — like Mr. Trump’s extraordinarily pliant performance with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — to break through.

As of this moment, you have over 880,000 followers on twitter. Have you ever twitted that something Trump did, said, twitted, was dumb but insignificant? The vast majority of things that have come from the White House fits that characterization, dumb but insignificant. Have you used your clout on twitter to calm down the outrage, to focus on things that truly matter and distinguish the wheat from the chafe? Or have you broadcast them all the same, feeding the outrage machine even as you hold yourself aloof from the vicious animals and the flaming nutjobs?

You want off twitter? So get off twitter. Log out and don’t look back, just like mere mortals might do. But you and your paper are integral to this cesspool. to feeding red meat to the starving mob. You bear responsibility for this disease of twitter, and yet you blame twitter and want to walk away from the mess you were integral in making?

You don’t owe anyone twits. You can twit or not, as you choose. You owe no one your twits. But since you chose to “explain” yourself, at least be honest about what you’re walking away from and your complicity in making it the cesspool it is.