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Last week, no one had heard of Emily Wilder. Then she became the focus of a national campaign to get her fired. Days later, she was.<\/p>\n
Things move fast. So there\u2019s a good chance that days from now, the story of a rookie journalist who lost her job because of the way she used social media to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will have faded from the discourse. Her firing will become just another bullet point in future stories about \u201ccancel culture\u201d on the right and left.<\/p>\n
On the other hand: I have a hunch that the particular circumstances of Wilder\u2019s narrative will have more resonance than your standard Outrage of the Week. Because it merges two storylines \u2014 the long-running, intractable standoff between Israelis and Palestinians, and the newer, intractable fight over fairness and objectivity in journalism that is being hashed out on Twitter and in Slack rooms and in the real world. What do fairness and objectivity in journalism really mean? And do those two ideas have to be linked at the hip? That is: Can you be fair in your reporting but abandon \u201cthe unreasonable and hideously stupid expectation that reporters must harbor no strong opinions about the things they care about,\u201d as journalist Laura Wagner put it in Defector?<\/p>\n
Answers that might have made sense a few years ago don\u2019t seem to work anymore, so journalists, their bosses, and their readers are coming up with answers on the fly \u2014 and, in this case, failing miserably. <\/p>\n
First, the chronology, as relayed by Wilder in press interviews and via Twitter:<\/p>\n
The AP says it fired Wilder for violating the company\u2019s social media policy while employed there \u2014 that is, not for tweets she made prior to getting hired \u2014 but wouldn\u2019t spell out specific infractions. A rep passed along this statement: <\/p>\n
\nWhile AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder\u2019s comments on Thursday that she was dismissed for violations of AP\u2019s social media policy during her time at AP. We have this policy so the comments of one person cannot create dangerous conditions for our journalists covering the story. Every AP journalist is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report on this conflict, or any other, with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So we\u2019re left to guess at Wilder\u2019s supposed infractions. The most likely candidate is this May 16 tweet \u2014 posted the day before the Stanford College Republicans went after her \u2014 critiquing the way mainstream media covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: <\/p>\n
Which presumably conflicts with the AP\u2019s policy that \u201cemployees must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilder has also retweeted several other tweets about the conflict, and the AP says that \u201cRetweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you\u2019re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you\u2019re relaying … unadorned retweets must be avoided.\u201d<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s be clear: Wilder was working out of the AP\u2019s Phoenix newsroom, half a world away from its former offices in Gaza, which were destroyed this month by Israeli airstrikes. Firing her doesn\u2019t \u201csafeguard\u201d the AP\u2019s ability to report on the conflict in any way. All of this tweet-parsing is ridiculous and shameful. The most charitable explanation is that her managers really didn\u2019t like a handful of tweets their new hire had made \u2014 which is something they could resolve without firing her. But firing her days after she became the target of a political campaign is an explicit capitulation, and a green light for other groups to target other journalists with similar efforts \u2014 which they most certainly will. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth noting that we still haven\u2019t heard directly from anyone at the AP about its side of the story in any detail. In a memo distributed to AP employees this weekend, executives wrote that \u201cmuch of the coverage and commentary does not accurately portray what took place,\u201d but didn\u2019t offer their own version of events.<\/p>\n
But if the premise of the AP\u2019s actions is that the appearance of wrongdoing is as important as the act itself, then the AP is the guilty party here: It\u2019s signaled that it will throw its journalists under the bus at a moment\u2019s notice if people on Twitter complain loudly enough. And while the AP has told employees it intends to have an internal \u201cconversation\u201d about its social media policy, my hunch is that it\u2019s still going to be fundamentally uncomfortable with a point of view common among journalists in 2021 \u2014 which is that they have points of view, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.<\/p>\n
Wilder\u2019s firing is one inflection point in a complex and evolving debate about journalistic objectivity that\u2019s usually addressed sideways, rather than head-on. It highlights the strain newsrooms in the US are experiencing as they try to figure out how to tell journalists what beliefs they can express publicly. And which ones they\u2019re either not supposed to have or that they\u2019re supposed to pretend not to have.<\/p>\n
Consider: Last year, in the aftermath of George Floyd\u2019s murder, Americans on social media aligned, at least temporarily, behind the Black Lives Matter moment. There were few willing to defend the actions of the Minneapolis police officers who killed him or didn\u2019t stop his murder. And social media services were bursting with people proclaiming their opposition to systemic racism and support for the Black Lives Matter movement \u2014 a movement that had been considered left-of-mainstream just a few years earlier. <\/p>\n
That momentum swept up middle-of-the-road mega-companies, like Walmart and Amazon. And it definitely included newsrooms, including my own: Last June, Vox.com managers sent out a memo reminding us that Vox journalists aren\u2019t supposed to participate in political rallies, and to \u201crefrain from using hashtags associated with movements and organizations we are actively covering, or publicly endorsing them.\u201d That said, the memo added: \u201cRacism is not a \u2018both sides\u2019 issue, and employees are free to speak out against racism and inequality.\u201d It was a major shift.<\/p>\n
In the recent past, some mainstream journalists would announce, in public, that they didn\u2019t vote because they didn\u2019t want their work to be biased \u2014 or because they wanted to prevent anyone, ever, from accusing them of bias. And some of that thinking still, amazingly, exists. But it\u2019s wildly out of step with the present moment, where debates about ideology and politics have been replaced with debates between facts and fiction. <\/p>\n
Half of Republicans, for instance, believe that the Capitol Riot \u201cwas largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists \u2018trying to make Trump look bad.\u2019\u201d And that\u2019s a story that requires no work at all to understand \u2014 you have to work hard not<\/em> to comprehend what happened on January 6. <\/p>\n
But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, there\u2019s nothing like that kind of clarity, even among people who generally see the world the same way you do: Declare your support for children killed by Israeli artillery in Gaza, and you may find your Slackmate or Instagram followers have a lot to say about Hamas rockets aimed at Israel, or about a spike in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide since the most recent conflict. Or, just as likely, you may hear an uncomfortable silence. And my hunch is that those responses may surprise a younger generation of journalists. <\/p>\n
Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for decades, but we haven\u2019t seen much of the conflict unfold during the social media age that really started in the 2010s, years after the last full-scale intifada: People have certainly employed social media as a weapon in the conflict, but that was before social media was all-encompassing, and before algorithmic design brought stuff to you before you knew you wanted to see it. Which means there\u2019s a generation of Twitterers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers fully accustomed to sharing their views and advocating for causes online, but who haven\u2019t seen pushback from most of their peers or bosses before.<\/p>\n
See, for example, a recent tweet from the New Yorker Union declaring support for Palestine by expressing \u201csolidarity for Palestinians from the river to the sea.\u201d After critics argued that the phrase was anti-Semitic \u2014 whether that\u2019s true is also up for debate \u2014 the union deleted it.<\/p>\n
Then again, things are changing. It used to be that mainstream American politics had room for just one response when it came to Israel and Palestine. Now some Democrats, at least, are willing to critique Israeli behavior instead of supporting the country\u2019s actions without reservation.<\/p>\n
So are some celebrities, though there are limits to how freely they can express that. Earlier this month, Mark Ruffalo, who has a starring role in Disney\u2019s Marvel universe, compared Israel to South African apartheid. Now he seems to have either walked back that post or something else:<\/p>\n
Which is a pretty good summary, maybe, of the mess we\u2019re in right now: Americans have conflicting feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they aren\u2019t quite sure about how to express that \u2014 and how publicly to do it. So of course journalists are in the same boat, but they\u2019re also the ones who are often called on to pretend that they don\u2019t have any opinion at all. <\/p>\n
That might have worked in the past. But it certainly doesn\u2019t now. Which is why Emily Wilder\u2019s story may stick with us for a while longer.<\/p>\n