Who Decides Who the Deciders Are?

There's a difference between gatekeeping and censorship, though at least a few newspaper owners really don't understand the distinction.

There was a fun thread on Bluesky recently about people's favorite acting roles by singers, which reminded me of a Movieline piece Joe Queenan wrote about why rock and roll artists are often terrible in movies, "The King and His Court." The piece is included in his collection of 1980s and early 1990s pieces, If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble: Movies, Mayhem, and Malice, and when I pulled it down from the shelves to confirm the title "The King and His Court," I got distracted by the essay Queenan had written about Martin Scorcese, "The Lonely Raging Bull." It's a fine essay for 1989; the premise is that the promise throbbing through Marty’s great work in the 1970s and 1980 had gone weird and stagnant as the decade wore on and Scorcese would likely finish his film career as a director of specific and limited talent.

But then 1990 happened, Scorcese dropped Goodfellas on a grateful nation, and the entire premise of the piece was instantly vaporized.

Look, an appropriate use for one of the most iconic and least bloody stills.

"Oh, criticism and commentary!" I chortled. "So often overtaken by events!"

Then I got to noodling about how in the 1980s and through the early 1990s, the reality was that there were not all that many places outside big cities where one could write good cultural commentary -- or read it. There were a handful of publications on newsstands and there were subscriptions, but the opportunities to impose your taste or opinion on people were few.

The reality of the pre-internet world of op-ed columns and critiques is that the quality of the thinking and writing is not directly correlated to how successfully the writer built the pedigree or forged the social connections that gave them entree to a masthead. Witness the timeless fashion critique that Kennedy Fraser wrote for the New Yorker (she had an in because she was Wallace Shawn's girlfriend when his dad ran the joint). On the other hand, it's also how we got Caitlin Flanagan, whose credentials for grabbing a persistent byline at the Atlantic were "I met her at a dinner party."

Some poor scholar of labor, feminism or sociology watching a plum spot on the Atlantic masthead going away

Editorial gatekeeping is why and how we get mediocre thinkers and plodding prose stylists and me posting regularly on Bluesky: “I am asking, once again, for term limits on op-ed columnists.”

Yet … is there a better way to put together writers and audiences? An algorithm doesn't cut it. You need the human discernment and situational agility of a human editor.

SO WHAT?

When publications are at their best, the editors do the heavy lifting of sifting through ideas, bringing informed and critical engagement to individual articles, and reinforcing the reader's sense that they want to retain membership in this community of taste. To boomerang back a few paragraphs, Queenan’s work ran in Movieline and not Premiere because the latter publication treated movie fandom as a sacred and uncritical endeavor, while Movieline readers identified as people who appreciated both cinema and snark.

But of course Conan O’Brien is a natural fit here!

Gatekeeping -- deciding who gets to write for you and what they get to write -- is an editor's job and good editors do it with an acute awareness of how certain elements can hurt or help their publication's mission every time they open or close a gate.

And the gatekeepers leave when it's evident they can't serve their publication's mission any more.

This past week, one of the planet's leading Lex Luthor figures made a rule that the newspaper he owns would demonstrate his unswerving commitment to free speech by only running opinion pieces that conform to his views. So we're about to see an exciting new era of ideological gatekeeping where the quality of thought or prose matters far, far less than whether it falls within party precepts.

WHO CARES?

All of us should, for reasons outlined in the Intercept's excellent 2018 piece, "What's Really at Stake in the Battle for 'Ideological Diversity' at Elite Media Outlets"

Few regular humans will care about which particular ink-stained wretches are hired to opine by the elite U.S. media — let’s say The Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. But they should.

That’s because the people who truly own and operate the United States — from right-wing billionaires all the way over to centrist billionaires — don’t have time to consider politics in any depth. They’re too busy bribing state officials to hire their hedge fund or straightening out supply chain issues in Kuala Lumpur. Instead, they outsource their thinking, just like they outsource their janitorial services.

Human beings all do this. We just can’t, even with the best of intentions, examine more than one or two issues in any depth. Instead, we look to our peer group for signals about what makes sense — and the superrich consider elite publications their peers.

When one of the last elite outlets in the U.S. openly declares its intent to censor ideas, it normalizes the practice for every outlet. A society that declares ideas off limits in public discourse opens itself up to destabilizing forces, from information asymmetry to the stifling of innovation; from moral absolutism to a (further) erosion of social trust.

You could tell people those three dopes in the back were the WaPo’s new editorial leaders behind the new Mrs. Bezos and we’d all buy it.

Gatekeepers have a purpose. When they’re removed in favor of overt censorship, it’s worth asking what the ruling elites want us to stop thinking about — and how the subsequent change in the way we think will change our country.

YOUR POP CULTURE RECOMMENDATION

One of my resolutions for 2025 was to scroll less, read more books. This keeps me from treating headline-scanning as some sort of sick, sanity-sucking hobby.

So I'm recommending you follow me on Bluesky, because every week I post a semi-themed round-up of seven to ten books I have read and liked in my lifetime.

And I'm also recommending that you read the new Lorne Michaels biography by the New Yorker's Susan Morrison, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

"if you wanna give Ringo less money that's up to you."

The ties between the New Yorker and Michaels run across decades. Lillian Ross used to hang around in the early days; when Michaels was exiled from SNL, he lent office space to the exiled Harold Ross; SNL friend of the show Steve Martin is married to a former New Yorker fact-checker; the magazine has run pieces from Tina Fey. There is a clear affinity between the two Gotham institutions devoted to maintaining their reputations as the pinnacles of their media niches.

It's no surprise the book reads like a longform New Yorker article. But it is surprising how the book is a primer on how to think about the "business" part of show business without ever falling out of love with the "show" part of the job; this is a book anyone who is a creative professional or wants to manage a creative endeavor should read. And it's nicely dishy.