Sean Rocha

The fall of men at the NYRB

Well, that didn’t last long.  Not even a month ago I was celebrating my unexpected pleasure, as a loyal reader of the New York Review of Books, in seeing that a long great publication had gotten even better under its new editor Ian Buruma.  I stand by this assessment: to pick just two recent issues, the July 19, 2018 issue and the August 16, 2018 issue — the NYRB publishes infrequently over the summer — brought me no end of joy and improbable discovery.  This was not inevitable: co-founding editor Robert Silvers ran the magazine so well for so long that, as I wrote before, I used to worry about his health — and thus, the fate of the magazine — many years before he passed away in 2017.  But now Ian Buruma is out, after barely a year.

Buruma’s departure is fallout from the decision to publish a first-person essay by Canadian radio personality Jian Ghomeshi called “Reflections from a Hashtag” about his experience as the accused in a #MeToo moment in Canada in 2014-15 that led to a trial in 2016 and eventual acquittal with, in one case, an apology without acknowledging guilt.  Quite a lot has been written on this already, some of it wise and some questionable, but from the narrow perspective of a lover of the New York Review of Books I can say that I am sorry it has come to this.  An article of this sort was always going to be an editorially risky proposition in the current climate but there were a number of decisions that, I believe, sent it off the rails, not least that it ran under the rubric The Fall of Men which would seem to reposition men as the principal victims of a society-wide pattern of behavior for which one might more reasonably regard men as principally responsible.  But the most immediate and obvious error is that Ghomeshi wrote “In the aftermath of my firing, and amid a media storm, several more people accused me of sexual misconduct.”  The actual number, apparently, is more than twenty people so “several” is both factually wrong (thus should have been fact checked and more accurately quantified) but also frames the piece as literally diminishing the scale of the problem (which an editor should have challenged at first draft).  This framing poorly serves everyone: the victims most of all, of course, and the readers secondarily, but I would contend that it also fatally subverts the legitimacy of the point Ghomeshi seems at pains to get across, which is how hard it is when you’re trapped in the eye of a media tornado to express sincere contrition for what you did without validating whatever charges you feel are false or misrepresented.  That is a legitimate point in fact and I, for one, would have been interested to read a better articulation of that experience.  Media storms grow quickly and exponentially, drawing in claims of varying degrees of rumor and speculation that get taken as fact.  But you can’t try to get a hearing for the need to differentiate fact from rumor if you don’t get the known, documented facts straight about how many people came forward to accuse you.

This was only the first of a number of specious claims that should have been challenged by the editors before this got to print.  So, OK, it was certainly a mistake to publish this essay as written and it deserved a lot more skepticism throughout the editorial process than seems to have been brought to bear on it.  I don’t know what happened there but it would seem, from the outside, like an editorial process that could have been repaired. Instead, the editor is out after many decades of writing for the publication he came to helm.  Certainly, the situation was made immeasurably worse by the disastrous interview Ian Buruma gave to Slate’s Isaac Chotiner: when I first read it, before the controversy really broke, I thought, “Gosh, Ian Buruma sounds like a man from an older generation who sort of just doesn’t get what has changed here.”  And maybe he is that clueless in all aspects of life, I don’t know, but I suspect not, based on the sensitivity of his own writing and the promise shown in the issues he published as editor of the NYRB.

This #MeToo moment is about a lot of things but one of them, surely, is trying to educate men in their 60s, like Buruma, who may not have an intuitive feel for where the solid ground now lies.  That’s part of the process and not, to me, unforgivable.  From what I’ve heard, Buruma felt obliged to resign once the academic book publishers on which the NYRB relies for revenue started pulling advertising — or, maybe, just threatened to, as reports vary — and if this is the case I can hardly imagine anything more self-defeating.  There can’t be anyone in the serious book world who believes the general intellectual tenor of America would be improved by the demise of the NYRB, no matter how many ill-conceived Jian Ghomeshi essays it publishes.  I have personally gotten many people to subscribe to the NYRB with the simple argument that if you want it to exist you need to give them money to enable them to continue.  In the end, the relatively small circulation and hopelessly uncommercial nature of the venture is what makes it indispensable: it is not obliged to dumb anything down to reach a wider audience or pander to skittish advertisers.  True, every once in a while it might do something dumb, as now, but that’s a relatively minor transgression compared to the replenishing intellectual heroism the New York Review of Books has demonstrated for decades on end.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2018 at 12:50 pm. It is filed under Close Reader and tagged with Ian Buruma, MeToo, NYRB, politics, Slate, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.