Does ’Semafor’ Know That Gossip Is Polarization?
There’s some annoyed chatter on social over Semafor, in an item in their latest newsletter about Jonathan Chait heading to The Atlantic, outing some remarks made in Ed Yong’s private Instagram. The specifics caught my attention because something didn’t seem right.
We’re told that health journalist Ed Yong, whose COVID reporting for The Atlantic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, shared posts on his private Instagram stories this week expressing outrage at the move, and what it suggested about the editorial direction of the magazine. Yong described Chait as a “fucking putz,” expressed frustration at The Atlantic’s skeptical coverage of trans issues and employment of the writer Helen Lewis.
All of this is presented like some sort of salacious look at what opinions another journalist, a Pulitzer-winner to boot, is hiding behind closed doors. There’s only one problem: Yong’ views of The Atlantic, and of Chait, are neither new nor news. He openly shared those views in his XOXO talk back in August.
On Chait:
Corollaries to this: no punching down, no quote-tweet dunking, none of that nonsense. I basically only broke this once because fucking Jonathan Chait started mouthing off about trans people, tagged me into his mentions, and can fuck off into the sun. Some people are so beneath you, you can’t help but punch down at them, so the rule is invalid. Relatedly, do not become a pundit.
On The Atlantic:
That for all the reasons I talked about already, and then also The Atlantic’s continuing commitment to publishing, alongside some of the best journalism in the world, poorly argued screeds about trans stuff, race, and much else, that I was done.
I’m not sure, then, what was the point of this social media “outing”, exactly. It’s the sort of thing one does to embarrass someone, but how can you embarrass someone with opinions they’ve already shared in front of everyone? The only real embarrassment here, really, is to Semafor, who apparently didn’t bother to run this simple search, whose top results include this blog post which mentions the things Yong said in that XOXO talk.
You’d think that Ben Smith, formerly editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed, would know how to Google before hitting send. Certainly, with these positions on Chait and The Atlantic being very public, it’s not only not news but completely unsurprising that Yong would look unkindly upon the former joining the latter. Semafor claims to be the antidote—the solution really—to “polarization”. Writing a gossip column, and an under-informed one at that, offers no such thing.