ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Sewell Chan Says He Was Fired From CJR After ‘Pointed’ Interaction With Writer ‘Devoted’ to Gaza.
Sewell Chan on Friday said he was fired as the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after staffers complained about several recent “pointed interactions.”
One of those interactions, Chan said in a statement shared with TheWrap and posted on X, was with a writer who was “passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests” who had covered the “recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively” for CJR.
“I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered,” Chan said.
The other recent interactions that spurred his firing, Chan said, included a conversation with a reporter working on a “sensitive #MeToo investigation” against a “prominent investigative reporter.” Chan said he reluctantly gave her more time to work on the story, which remains unpublished, after urging her to “move expeditiously” towards publishing it. The third “pointed” interaction was with a staffer who refused to come into the office or write at least one story per week, Chan said; that writer received several months’ paid leave to look for a new job from Columbia, he said.
Chan said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, confronted him about recent staff complaints about those interactions on Monday.
“While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment. Instead I was fired,” Chan said.
“These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media,” the former editor maintained.
In 2006, Hugh Hewitt wrote about the Columbia School of Journalism for the late, and sometimes lamented Weekly Standard: The Media’s Ancien Régime.
[Nicholas] Lemann also recommends to me the 1920 Walter Lippmann essay “Liberty and the News,” but curiously not Lippmann’s better known 1922 opus, Public Opinion, which opens this way:
There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.
You can put Lippmann’s book down after page one, his 1920 essay, and Pulitzer’s vision statement for his school as well. Lippmann’s world, Pulitzer’s world, even Nicholas Lemann’s world of the Harvard Crimson from 1972 to 1976–they are all gone. Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.
Lemann understands completely what has happened. I think he regrets it. He is certainly trying to salvage the situation. And there is simply no way he can succeed.
In multiple newsrooms in 2020, but most prominently in the New York Times, young scribes fresh out of J-school thought they should be running the asylums, not their editors. The even younger wannabe-scribes at CJR are simply speeding up the process even before they get their first real jobs.