Critics say this is the best essay you’ll read all year

Pundits should not get to be anonymous in news articles.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

By Shalise Manza Young

If you’re reading The Contrarian, it’s probably a safe assumption that it’s because you value journalism. Actual journalism, the stuff some of us learned on the first day of college classes: our job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That kind of approach is sadly in short supply these days, at least among what are called legacy outlets. It’s easy to attribute it to the constant threats from the current occupant of the White House, but it began well before that. Once family-owned newspapers and local television stations began selling to publicly traded corporations, the bottom line seemingly became more important than the work. Newsrooms across the country have been carved to the bone, leaving skeleton staffs to try to get the best possible product to their audiences.

You don’t get into journalism to become rich. (Ask me how I know.) You get into it to shine a light into corners that have often intentionally been darkened; to expose the truth, good or bad; and to tell the stories of the people and places contributing to our communities in big and small ways.

When reporting a story that uses sources, those sources should be used for factual information. Admittedly, every source has a bias, which is why best practice is to speak to more than one person to paint the fullest picture possible.

There are times when sources are providing sensitive information and need the protection of anonymity. Reporters and their editors know who these sources are but do not reveal identifying information within the report. Reporters give as many details as possible about the source to convey to the audience that the source is legitimate.

But informants are not the same as “critics.”

An October New York Times article about the educational background of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani took aim at Mamdani’s alma mater, Bowdoin College, from which Mamdani earned a degree in Africana studies.

The article said: “(Mamdani’s) experience there—readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus—is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.

“Critics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy.”

In the next paragraph, the article claimed that “critics charge” that majors like Africana or women’s studies “promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history.”

Setting aside the assumption that the preferred, antiquated, and usually half-true perspectives of these “critics” are those of white men, this is an example of why so many people have become skeptical of media in this country.

Which critics? The article never says. Those critics, such as they exist, are giving an opinion. Factually, colleges are not “feckless workshops of leftist ideology,” which isn’t even a measurable thing.

Save for ultra-conservative schools, universities educate students on the ways of the world. Sometimes that means opening their eyes to things they’ve never experienced before but are no less valid than their own experiences. Sometimes it means learning through daily interactions that Black people, Muslims, Hispanics, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ rainbow are not, in fact, the spawn of the devil, as some right-wing media would have us believe. Sometimes it means discovering that the classmate you’d written off as a bigoted redneck isn’t nearly as narrow-minded as you’d expected.

The problem of protecting pundits is not confined to the article. As a sportswriter who spent over a decade covering the National Football League, I am very familiar with those I see as the highly paid stenographers of major outlets parroting the opinions of coaches, scouts, and executives and often attributing them to the most nebulous of categories: league source.

It is most prevalent in the run-up to the annual college draft, and it is almost always used to trash a prospect. Why does someone—statistically, probably a white man—giving his opinion, usually negative, about a young player—usually a Black man—get to be nameless?

Take this example, from an NFL Network reporter Tom Pelissero before this year’s draft. According to a longtime assistant coach Pelissero spoke to, Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders “was ‘the worst formal interview I’ve ever been in in my life. He’s so entitled.… He has horrible body language. He blames teammates…. But the biggest thing is, he’s not that good.’”

Other than blaming his teammates, which can be affirmed if Sanders did it in front of microphones, the rest of that is opinion. You want to malign a 23-year-old via the league-owned network, for the sake of, apparently, knocking him down a peg or two, but won’t stand on it?

At this point, the “critics” the article cited could be just about anyone, particularly those who live on Planet MAGA. Vice President JD Vance, who got his law degree at Yale, loves to rail about “elite” universities. Defense secretary Pete Hegeth, who has an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s from Harvard, has called Ivy League schools “educational cartels” that indoctrinate students.

And these days, MAGA types call seemingly every institute of higher learning “elite,” and just as “woke” is now a stand-in for Black, elite seems to be a stand-in for “teaches anything we don’t like.”

(Of course, they’ve also made deriding Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for being a bartender into a cottage industry, so if you’re looking for logical consistency, you won’t find it there.)

But a skeptical reader or viewer could think the “critic” is the writer, disguising his own opinion in what is supposed to be an objective news story, and that’s where mistrust is perpetuated.

Part of the reason we’re seeing a rise in independent media outlets is because we’ve seen far too many legacy outlets abandon the principles of journalism in pursuit of profits or to maintain access, which ultimately is working in service of their interests and not the audience’s.

Critics say it’s a grave disservice to journalism writ large and the American people specifically.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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