The Death of Gatekeepers

And the most enraging thing about our clout-chasing media system

A few days ago, the New York Times published a podcast hosted by culture editor Nadja Spiegelman with guests Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino. The subject of the podcast was ‘micro-looting’, aka theft.

This wasn’t a subject that the guests wandered into during the course of a conversation. The topic was explicitly chosen and the guests were curated to have an entire conversation about the ethics of crime, and both guests and the host basically came down on the side of “haha, crime is so cool and justified, right?”. Piker and Tolentino, with Spiegelman egging them on, bloviated at length about how stealing from grocery stores is good, perhaps even heroic, it’s an act of anti-capitalist resistance, and nobody should feel bad about it. They eventually migrated into talking about how stealing from art museums is good, blowing up pipelines is good, and killing CEOs is technically not good if you’re a square but extremely understandable and sympathetic and *wink wink*.

Given the topic and the personalities involved, social media predictably exploded. I won’t waste your time documenting every reaction except to note that there were a lot of them, and this graduated into a capital-D Discourse.

It’s easy to point out the basic problems with the theft-is-good worldview, and better writers than I have already done so. As Kelsey Piper notes, stealing is not just morally wrong, the effects of widespread shoplifting also make your community poorer and a worse place to live. Derek Thompson made a great point about CS Lewis’s special exceptions for immoral behavior - everybody has some cutesy reason their particular crime is excusable, but special exceptions can’t create a just society. Cartoons Hate Her points out that shoplifting paradoxically tends to be a middle-to-upper class behavior, done for thrills by the affluent and bored rather than done by the desperate to survive.

But if I’m being honest, pointing out that theft is bad is the intellectual equivalent of cage-fighting a toddler. The more interesting problem with shoplifting discourse comes from the fact that we’re talking about this at all.

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The core issue with Shoplifting Is Moral Under Leftism discourse, like so many discourses before it, is that our social media algorithms select for this kind of ragebait. We exist online in a system that is designed to find the most childish and inflammatory opinions and amplify them to millions of people.

In an earlier age, gatekeepers existed to stop morons with puerile or reprehensible views from being heard. I’m not the first (or even the hundredth) person to note that all the gatekeepers are gone and we now live in a permissionless, anything-goes media environment. The death of gatekeepers is why you’re reading this blog on Substack, it’s why I can make my living from writing here and podcasting over at the New Liberal Podcast. There are real benefits to allowing anyone to create and distribute their work without having to break through a stultifying, bureaucratic system.

But the death of gatekeepers also has downsides. Today, even the New York Times seems to be chasing clicks any way they can. Invite the hot doofus on your show to say blowing up stuff is cool and shoplifting is good but plastic cups are a moral travesty. Why not? That’ll go viral. You’ll probably get a bonus. Watch everyone get mad while you bask in all the attention. This mercenary attitude has always existed in independent media, but now it’s everywhere.

Maybe it’s pointless, but I feel the need to stand athwart the tide of history and yell that gatekeepers still matter. And it’s a joke that our biggest institutions deny that they have any choice in the matter.

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There’s a predictable pattern that happens when people get mad at the publication of a stupid piece of content. Most media types, when confronted with an argument that they published something idiotic, deny they have any influence at all. They’re just publishing what the people want to see. They are but leaves upon the wind, blown about by the gales of public discourse, unable to truly chart their own path in any meaningful way. They abdicate responsibility, blaming societal forces larger than themselves. Their job is simply to follow whatever’s popular. And hey, everybody’s talking about this column, so even if you hated it I guess I did my job in the end?

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just listen to Nadja’s boss, lead culture editor Sia Michel of the New York Times, from last year when the paper axed a bunch of its cultural critics:

We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in American culture. New generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions, smartphones have Balkanized fandoms even as they have made culture more widely accessible than ever, and arts institutions are facing challenges and looking for new opportunities.

Our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms. Our mission is to be those guides…

…it is important to bring different perspectives to core disciplines as we help our coverage expand beyond the traditional review.

Oh yes, ‘guides’ who can ‘bypass traditional institutions’ on various ‘platforms’ beyond the ‘traditional review’. The translated version of this corporate gobbledygook is that serious criticism is out and trend-chasing is in, taste and judgment are passé and clickbait is the new normal. ‘Traditional institutions’ with their gatekeepers and judgment are dying, so let’s make sure to at least be popular as we chase whatever the mob is talking about.

I hate this argument so, so much.

In the days when dinosaurs walked the earth and newspapers still existed as physical products, everyone understood the value of a gatekeeper. Editors, critics, publishers, and other cultural tastemakers took their jobs seriously. They had a civic duty. They were custodians of the public discourse, entrusted with sorting signal from noise and introducing audiences to what actually mattered. Music critics did not view themselves as mere reporters whose job was to dutifully describe whatever was already popular. And newspapers did not imagine their role was merely to print whatever excited the crowd. They occupied a privileged position, and they knew that with that privilege came a real responsibility to the public, an obligation to put forward ideas that actually mattered.

That sense of obligation is gone. Only the good lord above knows what’s in Nadja Spiegelman’s heart, but my guess is that if you asked her to justify why her New York Times podcast is promoting the idea that shoplifting is good, she’d say some version of ‘people were already talking about it’, or say that her job is to reflect culture rather than build it. Odds are good that she’d simply deny that her position involved any moral responsibilities at all.

I’ve heard that too many times from too many people in the media. And it’s bullshit.

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The less cynical version of this argument is that the people involved don’t really have a choice. They might be aware of this dynamic, but the ravening beast that is social media has them completely at its mercy. If you don’t chase the crowd, you won’t get the attention, and the only options are to capitulate or die. There’s at least some truth in this - the problem is larger than any single person or institution.

But the more cynical version of the argument says that gatekeepers do have a choice, they’re just failing it. Lots of media companies are dying, sure. But the New York Times is not one of them. They’re highly profitable and they’ve thrived by leaning in to quality. They have an incredibly strong brand. People trust them. If the Times wanted to continue acting as gatekeeper, as arbiter of what matters and what’s worth discussing, they could. They simply choose not to. The temptation is always there to court controversy, to publish inflammatory nonsense from culture war figures and bask in the attention. Posting is the most powerful force in the universe, after all.

Maybe I’m the hidebound dinosaur for being mad about this, destined to go extinct as I stubbornly insist that people in important cultural institutions do actually have moral obligations to society to use their positions well. But what I can tell you is that I put more care into a relatively unimportant Substack than many legacy media employees seem to put into any of their work. I think hard about the things I cover, what I choose to put in your inbox, whether it matters and why it matters. And it’s fucking infuriating that people with a thousand times my reach seem to do none of this, throwing their words out into the discourse and proclaiming zero responsibility for how those words might affect our politics or our culture. Have some fucking pride.

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Some people may object to this line of thinking by pointing out that the shoplifting podcast was in the Opinion section - isn’t it fine to publish controversial opinions? This argument fails because even the opinion section should exhibit thoughtful curation. Why do Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat have podcasts at the Times instead of Jimmy Dore and Alex Jones? Because the editorial team believes they are the most responsible versions of their political philosophies. They’re trusted to exercise judgment and to create engaging content that addresses the most important issues of the day in an intelligent way.

Editors do the same thing when publishing op-eds. In practice, the New York Times has a nearly infinite number of op-ed submissions to choose from and a nearly infinite number of topics to discuss, but only publishes a select number of columns and podcasts each week. What you choose to publish is a matter of taste and judgment. Occasionally you’ll run something morally awful because, say, a powerful US Senator is saying it, and there’s public interest in knowing what Senators are saying. But when it comes to random influencers there’s no reason to give a platform to whatever idiocy they just farted out.

To state things as clearly as possible: when you have an enormously large audience, and when you run influential institutions, you have a moral responsibility to the public. You are an arbiter of what matters and what does not. You need to take this role seriously and exercise discernment and good judgment when you choose what to publish.

Your position is a privilege and a responsibility. The things you publish have a real impact on our culture and our politics, and you have an obligation to exercise some damn thoughtfulness about what you put out into the world. The Times failed that obligation with their micro-looting podcast. They chose to chase inflammatory clickbait rather than talk about something, anything else that actually matters.

It’s one thing to have serious debates on controversial topics. But the podcast in question is not William Buckley debating Gore Vidal, or even close. It was a host giving off the vibe of ‘omg I am so stoked I get to hang out with u guyssssss’ as the guests promoted straightforwardly idiotic and destructive behavior with very little pushback. This is a podcast whose practical purpose was to allow middle-aged millionaires to say edgy nonsense so that sociopaths on the internet will continue to think they’re cool.

Even institution curates what they publish. The only question is whether they acknowledge that responsibility, or ignore it and let the algorithms do the curation for them. I worry that even places like the Times are losing the idea of stewardship, and that the world is becoming a little bit worse as a result.