On Layeredness

More and more, it feels important to articulate that civic identity is a layered concept, and that this layeredness is good. Much is said, and rightly, about the intersectionality of vulnerability today, but, I believe, perhaps not enough about the layeredness of safety.

Given that I have spent a great deal of time pondering the need for organizational affiliation to complement, rather than counter, citizenship, it feels important to talk about how this might look in the future. Just as human rights are not checked at the door of an organization like an overcoat, and organizations cannot command eminent domain over constitutional privileges, equal citizenship should not be even partially revoked when rights are invaded in a sector too big to critique, even if and as it conglomerates or merges with another sector.

Even though it often feels as though women’s safety in media organizations is treated more like safety in war theater situations, and this is worth giving pause, I continue to believe that no American organization should be permitted to be an anomaly in the fabric of society where human rights are suspended. This is because, in organizations, we remain sheathed in the ability to expect equal protection under the law, and we should not be vulnerable to being rendered refugees by organizational leadership as corporations are intended to be more like refuges than battlefields. Before agreeing to work for the Larry King Live team, CNN had genuinely felt like a home and a family to me. But Larry King Live pomanagement felt profoundly foreign. It was if a preposterous decision had been made by the leadership of this team and those responsible for holding it accountable that, because their broadcast was so immensely profitable, the isolation and harm of individual persons somehow did not matter.

As we are often told, with authority comes responsibility; but, as the relationship between these attributes is not elastic, what is done with responsibility matters. Until people, and organizations, evolve past the tendency to shift responsibility for problem-solving to the most vulnerable in their midst, vulnerability will, at least to a degree, likely need to be leveled with authority. That said, vulnerability, and certainly victimhood, should arguably not be sought.

On Sculpture

Like many painters, I enjoy toggling between additive and subtractive image-making processes depending on the needs presented by a given project. But as a sculptor, I know I need to employ both.

It is often implied that real American heroes are the builders and not those who shape the contours of our still emergent democracy by chisel. But both are helpful. While it is true there can be a season to each of these practices, they can also be performed in tandem, and their timing is up to no person. Constructive criticism did not get its name from nowhere, after all; and needed critique builds structural integrity.

Many people, it seems, want to be builders. Hence the need for chiseling, or the raising of concerns when serious wrongs go unaddressed, perhaps less as a full-time job in the future but more like a continual act of hygiene, and a responsibility that falls on everyone.

On Factions

Our country was designed based on the presumption that human nature was a fairly static quality, that factions missing “a sole regard to justice and the public good” were inevitable, and that a primary goal was to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

But have recent decisions over the past several months by corporate leaders to shape and pursue what seem to be more ethical policies, rather than maximized shareholder return at all costs, indicated a move of the needle of evolution in the right direction?

Possibly; but the timing of these changes just after such corporations’ ability to trade publicly was being called into question implies this is unlikely.

On Fit Characters

Still, the attempted sculpture of public opinion still deserves special consideration.

As many media outlets have transitioned from reporting to advocacy, sometimes serving as platforms for little more than the advertisement of journalists’ opinions, they at least seem to have begun collecting what appear more and more like taxes too related to the quieting of some and slander of others. I believe it goes without saying that their issuance of speculative currency is at least problematic. (While I continue to wonder whether journalistic organizations should be publicly traded, I also wonder whether direct subscription is a better solution in the new climate. I currently render unto the New York Times that which seems to be the New York Times’ but do not feel connected to this or many similar organizations in any way.)

As media organizations’ influence over world affairs is mutually amplified, willful ignorance in journalism would amount to no less a problem as malpractice would be in medicine or policy. In 2016, I proposed an education-sector listening agency model that would build a relationship of mutual accountability between the journalistic and educational sectors – less because I thought it would be a boon to academics newly able to help hold the journalism sector accountable, but more because I felt that, as a producer, being on a journalistic team more reliably incented to do substantive work would be welcome. Being pressured to cover news in ways about which one does not feel good is a considerable burden.

But in reaching out to what I considered to be a model media company, I was told they were not interested in projects so focused on youth and that I had not made the case the project would be mutually beneficial. (My hope had been to articulate that I felt this project would be beneficial to the world.)

I also, almost at the same time, looked for feedback from school partners but had an unexpected and disappointing opportunity to kick the tires of a potential university collaborator’s views on the central concepts on which I was focusing after, regrettably, further raising an already-made report of discriminatory behavior I’d observed under what I considered pressure from a mentor.

I had mainly sought feedback from the educational and journalistic sectors in order to learn whether I was on a right track. But more important than proposing a particular solution to challenges I encountered earlier in my career, I reasoned, was the mandate to simply voice that there were problems to be solved.

On Largeness

While there are unquestionably major benefits involved in working alongside a large team, and it is worth pausing here for emphasis, these benefits should include enabling one to stand up for what is right in safety and not pressure to ignore an ever tightening weave of tares and wheat for the expedient goal of obtaining strength in numbers.

As a young woman I felt very much pushed and uninformed to the point of feeling deceived into taking the job mentioned above, which ended up being completely unlike anything I believe I could even have imagined. Up until that point, I had largely focused on coverage of political stories and, when I was told a new program on which I would be focused would be about the law, I assumed this would be scholarly and largely about Supreme Court case analysis. But it ended up being in support of coverage that felt much more sensational than programming that felt good to me and, worse, involved feeling trapped in what I considered an unsafe situation. After I spoke up, I was told to tell the company what I wanted and that they would see if they could get it for me. But when I proposed policy changes to better protect civil rights for women, they did not respond to my recommendations. After this, I spoke semi-publicly, although this was certainly not something I wanted to do.

Years after this experience, I saw that the organization that enabled it to take place formed a relationship with Sesame Street. While I cannot claim this to be a bad thing, I still wonder, who is to say kids watching now are not in danger of going on to dream of and then work for one of these media networks, experience an attempt to harm them physically, and learn their rights are not recognized when they try to speak.

It is tempting in situations like this to constantly take a loud and contrarian position, but I am learning that resolving, rather, to be centered in one’s own sense of what is right rather than tempted to constantly take a reactionary stand against what seems wrong, requiring constant and exhausting recalibration, may be better.

Changing Course

After I first attempted to speak up about my earlier experiences, and it felt like no one listened, I had mixed feelings seeing this organization begin to form alliances with groups as important and diverse as the incoming presidential administration, children’s education groups, and even the racial justice movement as I certainly did not want a critique of the problems I encountered to be read as critiques of these organizations’ constituencies.

It felt like a window had arisen, during which what so many were speaking up about – an almost age-old tendency in groups to harm the vulnerable – was so readily identifiable, but that it was quickly fading into a blur. But even if it is true that a predatory historical form of American government never dissolved but dispersed into the aerosol droplets of a thousand publicly-traded companies, and that with every iteration, this element becomes harder to pin down, this does not make it impossible to speak.

On Openness

One critique I regret I have had about various movements over the years has been that problems have been articulated without solutions. But these articulations, marked by bravery, self-sacrifice, love, and teamwork, are arguably still progressive.

With regard to women’s rights in media, now, I sit neither only with suggestions nor a hard and fast prescription but with a question: if not the education sector, who in the future will hold accountable a press seemingly now accountable to no one?

While an attempt to fill this vacuum appeared to be made by the entertainment sector several years ago, it does not seem to have proven a lasting, or even a helpful, solution.

I wonder whether perhaps one of my primary contributions to problem-solving on this matter now is simply to help elucidate that there’s still a problem to be solved.