On Friday, the Washington Post announced a change that may sound procedural, but has enormous implications: after 42 years, the paper will no longer employ an ombudsman to examine the operations and stances of the paper from an independent perspective (Disclosure: the last ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, was a colleague and editor when I started out at National Journal, and remains a friend). Instead, publisher Katharine Weymouth wrote in a note to readers:

We will appoint a reader representative shortly to address our readers’ concerns and questions. Unlike ombudsmen in the past, the reader representative will be a Post employee. The representative will not write a weekly column for the page but will write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate.

On the face of it, this structure seems like a problem for two reasons. A reader representative is not the same thing as a person who represents the best interests of the Post, and who tries to discern what those interests might be for readers, reporters, editors, and the business side in concert. Reader concerns are only one part of that constellation—though of course they’re an important one—and readers’ concerns may not grow out of an understanding of what it takes to report a news story. Readers’ interests may run counter to journalistic ethics or to quality journalism, as is the case with readers Pexton wrote about in a recent column, who want coverage of homosexuality to give equal weight to discredited ideas about gay people. And readers aren’t the only or most informed critics of most papers: a good ombudsman weighed criticism from media analysts and ethics groups as well as reader concerns. Replacing the ombudsman with a reader representative feels diminishing, a step down to an emphasis on the local reaction to the paper rather than a continued emphasis on the Post’s national reputation.

And even on that scale, this is a worrisome development. How can someone who is employed by the Washington Post itself be expected to truly represent reader concerns against the priorities of the people who sign his or her paycheck? Even if the job is being scaled down to focus on reader concerns, readers should feel more confident if their advocate is financially independent of the paper. And reporters who are criticized by readers should worry about whether they will get a fair hearing against those criticisms given that the person weighing them needs to please their employer as well, and is representing readers, who in turn represent dollars, to the publisher. It’s also notable that Weymouth, rather than Post editor Marty Baron, made the announcement of this change in policy, which seems more about customer service than journalistic integrity. This is a tangled set of incentives rather than one set up to produce firewalls and genuine independence, much less trust from the readers this new position is meant to represent.

In a feature on the decision at NPR, Edward Schumacher-Matos argued that, while it’s not surprising that news organizations, like individuals, might dislike hearing criticism, the best ones embrace ombudsmen as a way of enhancing their own credibility, and as a way of protecting themselves from backlash against free speech. He explained:

Curiously, while the American news media cowers and pulls back, unable to believe in itself, the increasingly free press in so many other parts of the word are adding ombudsmen and improving standards. Even in some places without a long tradition of free press, there is a growing recognition of the link between good public information, on the one hand, and economic development and democracy, on the other, as shown in studies by the World Bank and others.

I am on the board of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen and have watched with delight as the number of ombudsmen has taken off in countries such as India, Bangladesh and South Africa. According to Stephen Pritchard, the president of ONO, Colombia now has 14 ombudsmen working just in television — each with a weekly half-hour show—and Mexican television has five. When Lord Justice Leveson issued his report last November on the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain, he cited having an independent ombudsman as a “best practice” to respond to public complaints.

In other words, the Post’s choice to ditch the ombudsman position doesn’t just make the Post look journalistically anxious. It makes the paper look parochial. And if the Post wants to restore its reputation as a nationally and internationally important news organization, it would do well to look past its own organizational anxieties to international norms for excellence.

In The New Republic, Marin Cogan dismantles a central assumption of Netflix’s House of Cards, the idea that all female reporters in Washington are constantly sleeping with sources for stories. The show got Washington Herald-turned-Slugline reporter Zoe Barnes’ arc wrong, she argues, not because no reporter ever succumbs to the personal charms of a staffer or member of Congress, but because the show reverses the dynamic. Instead of throwing on v-neck t-shirts and push-up bras and heading over to Congressmen’s townhouses, the more common dynamic is powerful men in Washington putting the moves on women they assume are interested in them. Marin reports:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.”…“I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.”

Marin’s piece clarified for me the reasons I reacted so viscerally to the element of the show that portrayed Zoe as the initiator of her affair with Frank, and her colleague Janice’s revelation that, despite slut-shaming Zoe, she too was sleeping her way up the ladder. The arc wasn’t just a male fantasy—it was a fantasy that erases an ugly reality by inverting it. It’s not Frank’s fault for stepping out on his marriage, or putting Zoe in a position where she feels like she has to put up with his advances to get a story. An ugly scene between them in which Zoe asks Frank “If you just want the girl who will do your bidding, you have that. Why do you have to fuck me?…Why do you need this? You don’t seem to get any pleasure out of it. I certainly don’t,” is, in the framework of the show, at least partially her due for being naive enough to think that what was going on was something other than, as Frank puts this, “a transaction between two consenting adults.”

What Marin is talking about is a very specific form of sexual entitlement. But this week also saw the debut of Said To Lady Journos, a compilation of the way female reporters have been harassed on the job. “If you got shrapnel in your ass, I’d be happy to take it out,” a contractor says to a reporter in Iraq. “Why don’t we make it a camera, and turn it on you?” a city councilman tells a reporter who is asking permission to tape record their interview. And these are the things that people are saying to female journalists in person.

In combination, it makes the thought of recommending journalism as a career to young women kind of exhausting. Be ambitious? Pop culture will tell people that you’re an amoral blogslut. Get sexually harassed on the job? You were probably Zoe Barnes-ing it up. This is not to say that no woman with a reporter’s notebook and a hard pass has ever behaved poorly, or that journalistic sauciness doesn’t make for compelling drama. But when it comes to sexism fatigue, the Evil Girl Reporter has me particularly tuckered out.

This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of Downton Abbey.

Last night’s super-sized Downton Abbey was a bit lumpy in places—the cricket match in particular felt like it might have been a richer subject several seasons down the line when we had a better sense of who actually lives not just upstairs and downstairs, but in the village. But the combination of two episodes that aired as individual hours in the UK let Downton ground Thomas’s story in a larger context of the ways in which sexual repression poorly serves men and women alike in 1920s England. As O’Brien conspires to lure Thomas to Jimmy’s room, Edith finds herself drawn to Gregson, and Matthew worries about his potential fertility, this episode was a reminder that, medically and socially, an inability to speak honestly about sex has terrible consequences.

Edith’s latest romantic adventures begin as professional ones. After Gregson writes her to inquire again after her availability as a columnist, she declares “I think I will go. It seems rude not to, in a way. And I haven’t been to London for ages.” Her family continues to be less than entirely supportive. As her grandmother puts it, “A woman’s place is in the home, but I see nothing wrong in her having some fun before she gets there. And another thing, Edith isn’t getting any younger. Maybe she isn’t cut out for domestic life.” But as it turns out, confining a woman to domestic life might also keep her from running across promising romantic prospects. When she and Gregson meet for lunch, Gregson admits to her “Am I allowed to say I’m pleased you’re not married?” “I’m a little less pleased,” Edith tells him. But she doesn’t leave the lunch and she takes the job—and she doesn’t quit it when Gregson remarks “You look very pretty today. I’m not sure how professional it is for me to point that out.”

It’s a relationship that brings out the best in both of them. Edith dares not just to write, but to take on subjects that no one would have expected her, like the lack of employment opportunities for soldiers returned home from the war, not all of whom are so lucky to amble into managing an estate, as Matthew has done. “I like the idea of a woman taking a position on man’s subject,” Gregson tells her. “I think we’re on to something new, here. The mature female voice in debates.” And it’s good for them personally—to a point. Edith comes out of her shell enough to enjoy a flirtation and to talk honestly about her experience being jilted. Gregson clearly enjoys her company as a colleague and as a woman. But when she inquires into his background, she discovered not just that he’s married, but how English law has inconvenienced him. Gregson is a decent man, but there’s something profoundly unfair about the law that shackles him to his wife because she’s too mentally ill to give consent to their divorce, and there appears to be no treatment that can make her well enough to set him free. Sir Anthony hurt Edith horribly because he couldn’t bear to tell her in a definitive way that he didn’t actually feel comfortable being with her. Gregson at least finds the courage to tell her the truth, but not after leading her down a disappointing path. What happens next may depend on how comfortable Edith feels defying convention. It’s one thing for her flighty cousin to convince herself a married member of the nobility is going to leave his wife for her, and another to go into a relationship like this one with your eyes open.
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This post discusses, in its entirety, the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.

Over the past two days, I watched all of Netflix’s most ambitious original series yet, a remake of the British miniseries House of Cards. While the show raises interesting questions about both television business models and narrative structures, and while it’s deeply entertaining to watch Kevin Spacey, as Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood, chomp scenery and occasionally on Kate Mara’s ambitious young reporter Zoe Barnes, I couldn’t help but feel that House of Cards has a fatal flaw. For all that the show looks attractive, and even half-authentic to the District sometimes, and for all House of Cards is trying its darndest to replicate the repellant chilliness of the British original, it’s actually far too nice to the people and institutions the show would like to skewer. And that’s because House of Cards itself falls prey to some of the kinds of thinking that are most pernicious in the nation’s capital.

Part of the problem is House of Cards‘ insistence that there’s a grandness, rather than a grandiosity, to Frank—while the show believes he’s malign, it’s still convinced that he’s Milton’s Satan rather than Dostoyevsky’s, who Arturo Perez-Reverte once described as “petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.” He declares in the first episode that “My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” and House of Cards seems largely to agree with his assessment. Frank may hold up an education bill to get a version that suits his ends, or derail the nomination of the man who was chosen to be Secretary of State over him, but he does get a bill to the President’s desk roughly on deadline, and once the other man is out of the way, speeds the confirmation of his hand-picked replacement. What really distinguishes him from his colleagues, however, and what the show portrays as the source of Frank’s efficacy, however unattractive it may be, is his treatment of power as a higher good than policy. “Leave ideology to the armchair generals,” he says in one of his many editorial asides to the camera. “It does me no good.”

House of Cards is full of acid portraits of people whose conviction has made them weak or duplicitous without being excellent at it. Even if the show has some sympathy for their dedication to and principal on the issues, it never gives them triumphs over Frank, and frequently suggests that passion makes them obvious, slow, or otherwise unfit to play the game that Frank has mastered so well, his competence overriding our moral calculus. During a subplot that involves the passage of a major education reform bill, Frank’s partner on the legislation, a life-long liberal reformer who’s a stand-in for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy turns out to be a naive patsy without the stomach for compromise or maneuver. “I could put my mind to policy, but I’m no good at this brand of politics,” the man tells Frank in agreeing to take the fall for a leak of his proposed bill that garners negative press coverage, and to let Frank take over writing the next draft. His actual ideas about the issues are never mentioned, simply summed up by Zoe as “very far left wing” for a headline. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Kennedy is rotating in his grave fast enough to dislodge the dirt above him so he can haunt House of Cards writer Beau Willimon for this perfidy.
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At some point in my mid-teens, I bought a paperback copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch at my local independent bookstore, inspired by its subtitle “In Praise Of Difficult Women” more than by any particular familiarity with the content, which ranged from Anne Sexton to The Seduction of Joe Tynan. The book, which draws from many different pop culture media to weave together a tapestry of the ways women women can be complicated, uncompliant, mentally ill, and other ways, considered “bitchy,” is a significant inspiration to my criticism. And it’s meant that even as Wurtzel, who’s written memoirs about her depression and her drug addiction, has spent much of the decade and a half since being awfully difficult herself, I’m always curious to see what she has to say next.

In this case, it’s a messy, very sad essay in New York Magazine about how miserable Wurtzel is, how much she cases intense sensation since it seems to be the only thing she can feel any more, how she’s made decisions that have left her without any safety net, and she claims this is some sort of principle. The piece is an embarrassment, rather than accomplishment, but a compulsively readable one—whatever you think of the content, a sentence like “I knew David Foster Wallace pretty well*, and he was pretty smart, but David Boies makes David Wallace look like, well, some other lesser David, maybe David Remnick,” is tremendous in its audaciousness and construction—and over at Slate, my fellow columnist Amanda Marcotte wrote that the piece is “as lengthy as it is incoherent, so the question arises: Did Nolan pay off Wurtzel to make his point for him?”

The Nolan to which she refers is Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan, who recently wrote a piece called “Journalism Is Not Narcissism,” in which he implored young writers not to mistake confessional writing for the stuff of a career. “By plundering your own life for material, you are not investing in yourself as a writer; you’re spending the principal,” he wrote. “Soon, it will all be used up. There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time.” Putting aside the fact that there are very few writers other than Wurtzel and Susan Shapiro, a memoirist and professor Nolan uses as his lead, who make a living, or who want to, solely by dining out on the lunch that they are simultaneously eating and writing about, there are more substantive objections to the idea that reporters should segregate themselves from their stories.

Ann Friedman, who published my favorite long form story of the last year, a story about a woman in Alaska trying to obtain an abortion in which her experience is the incredibly compelling vehicle for an exploration of the policy reasons it’s so difficult for her to get the care she needs, argued in response to Nolan that journalism is always shaded by perspective, and it’s a matter of revealing that perspective honestly and carefully, rather than covering it up. “I cringe every time I read a New York Times story in which the reporter awkwardly refers to herself as ‘a visitor.’ Really? You can’t just say “provided me with directions to her Craftsman bungalow”? Please,” Friedman wrote. ” journalists were always a part of the story. Why not just own up to the fact that three-dimensional humans are doing this work? We have always brought our personal histories and political opinions and casual biases with us while reporting. We just tried to pretend we weren’t with stupid stylistic conventions.”

Another thing that struck me while reading their pieces is the reminder that confessional journalism can serve as a means to reveal that experiences people once thought were singular are actually common, and not a cause for fear or shame. As much as Nora Ephron didn’t like her consciousness-raising group when she went in the seventies, her writing about her breasts and her sex fantasies, and about writing for Cosmopolitan, and about feminine hygiene sprays that were harming women mattered because they spoke aloud things that previously weren’t spoken of at all. Making people realize that problems they thought were personal are actually political and cultural is powerful work.

And that’s why Wurtzel’s essay comes across as intermittently powerful and infuriating and ramblingly bizarre. It’s not about that synthesis, that call to action. It’s aimed at making the rest of us feel like we are a herd of mundanes while Elizabeth Wurtzel is singular and special. “But this is it for me. I am a free spirit,” she writes. “I do not know any other way to be. No one else seems to live as I do. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.” Maybe. But it’s also a cliche, and not nearly as special or rare as Wurtzel seems to think it is. Young journalists should get the same lesson in confessional writing as they do in all else: why does it matter to anyone but you? The answer that they’ll want to consume your special snowflakeness is almost never true, and even more rarely enough.

*Apparently, Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” is about Wurtzel, and boy does that make things click into place.

I think about the way journalism is portrayed in pop culture quite a bit, and yesterday for Slate, on the occasion of the swan song of Gossip Girl, I spent some time writing about how television and movies fail to deal with a phenomenon the media itself has adjusted to: bloggers. In particular, I was interested in a bit of a gender split that seems to be occurring. Female bloggers are shallow, or gossipy, or in need of tutelage by older reporters (male and female), who are presented as a distinct species. But men may have it worse: they’re crazed conspiracy theorists:

If State of Play’s portrayal of Della was irritatingly smug, the way USA’s miniseries Political Animals treated its young female blogger was downright insulting. The miniseries countered old-school journalist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino) with blogger rival Georgia Gibbons (Meghann Fahy)—not just a shallow, style-obsessed chronicler of D.C. nonsense, but a selfish slut who was sleeping with Susan’s boyfriend. To the show’s credit, Georgia at least got a shot at proving she was competent, scooping Susan on a story when Susan’s old-school focus on source development lead her to delay the news too long. But even if Georgia got the story, she was still a bad girl, if personally rather than professionally, and Susan was the hero, even if she got so cozy with her sources that she ended up sleeping with the First Lady’s son. In this formulation, reporters get a free pass on crossing ethical lines, but their blogger counterparts are dumb little girls who need to be taught valuable lessons.

Male bloggers don’t fare much better though: While their female counterparts are merely unsubstantive, men who blog for a living are loons, and sometimes ones who do enormous damage. In Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, a disgruntled blogger who keeps getting his freelance pitches turned down by a newspaper editor. When a global pandemic strikes, Alan sees his chance to become a prophet: He spreads the rumor that he’s cured himself of the disease using forsythia as an herbal remedy, and urges his readers to ignore public-health officials. His misinformation renders the population more vulnerable—including that newspaper editor, whom he leaves to die in the street—and he’s ultimately found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company eager to profit off the crisis. When, at the end of the film, Alan’s arrested, he claims he’ll be bailed out: He’s evil, but the stupidity of his followers may be even more dangerous.

Either way, it’s interesting that movies and television haven’t accommodated themselves to the idea that bloggers and journalists can actually be the same thing. Maybe now that Hollywood went gaga for Nate Silver, we’ll get hero bloggers, or at least bloggers with integrity, in a couple of development cycles. I’m guessing Jim Sturgess ends up playing Silver.