Fighting for the story. The New York Times again became the story this week, as the already-fraught dialogue between the media and tech erupted in its most significant clash to date. This particular firestorm began when Taylor Lorenz, a reporter covering new media (aka Tik Tok, which I think is a legitimately valuable beat?, though we are apparently no longer allowed to speak of this), blasted out an Instagram story of Steph Korey’s to her 160 thousand twitter followers.

Balaji Srinivisan, who has been publicly criticizing the media at increasing volume since his own run-in with bad-faith journalists earlier this year, took issue with the attack and countered, mimicking Taylor’s language.

Taylor accused Balaji of harassment, which is where this all took a turn for the nuclear.

With the signal up, journalists rushed to Taylor’s defense. Folks in tech rushed to the defense of Balaji. I myself was wasted offline, as it was my birthday (tell your friends to subscribe). But I arrived home just in time to catch the tail end of Balaji’s discussion on Clubhouse that night – a popular chat app currently in beta – which Taylor framed publicly as further harassment (though she has similarly spoken of Balaji on Clubhouse chats of her own). It was a “toxic environment” she said of the app 99% composed of people speaking sweetly to each other about their feelings in hush, breathy voices. Casey Newton, a reporter for the Verge, referred to it all as a content moderation crisis. Journalists compared this to Gamergate. This particular Clubhouse chat was recorded and leaked to the press, and never mind that Felicia Horowitz was moderating. “Toxic masculinity” was invoked. Meanwhile, folks in tech openly wondered if the recording might not be… illegal? I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave that discussion to the experts. I’m just interested in a few things, here: 1) the harassment, 2) what is going on between the media and tech?, 3) how do we fix this?

In terms of harassment, my feeling is really just this:

Folks in tech have been relentlessly accused of “thin skin” by many in the media, Kara Swisher being a sort of thought leader in the space of ridiculing people she purports to know and then accusing them of whining when they clap back. But frankly, somewhere in the midst of all of the compliments she retweets about herself, Kara may have stumbled upon a rare grain of truth. There are men and women in the technology industry with incredible power. They need to be able to weather some criticism. But can it really be said the likes of Steph Korey — who has by the way been fired since this drama began — are in any meaningful sense of the word powerful? And is trashing her on twitter really a form of criticism deserving of respect? There are good journalists doing good work. That is not what we saw this week. What we saw this week was personality-driven Twitter feuding, from all sides, in front of massive, online audiences living for the drama. But why is a relentless, 48-hour media assault on Balaji, including a wave of stories and literally a leaked conversation, not harassment, but the fairly benign initial clap back against Taylor, who works for one of the most powerful media entities in the world, has a massive online platform of her own, and an army of friends with massive online platforms in lock-step support of her, in some way beyond the pale? To be clear, I don’t think Balaji is being harassed. He’s now a public figure speaking on a heated topic. But so are the celebrity journalists at the New York Times. This is a public dialogue we are all engaged in. We need to be able to respond to each other.

In a related chat today, Mike Isaac said something I strongly agree with:

The technology industry is unique from most industries, in particular the finance industry it is often compared to, in that people working in tech really do think they’re a part of something important. We ascribe meaning from what we do. Our work is part of our identity. But this is also the case with the media, in particular journalism. Journalists looking at, for example, a disaster like Theranos see a trend, whereas people in tech see an aberration. Many journalists quietly doing good work at once-highly respected institutions like the New York Times look at the childish Twitter rantings of their colleagues and see an aberration, while folks in tech see a trend. We all retreat into our biases and feel unjustly vilified by the other team. I’m a part of it myself. My read of this entire drama is the media launched an unhinged attack, and folks in tech simply reacted. But many journalists on Twitter are currently arguing a read of this situation in diametric opposition to my own. Am I right? Are they? Is anyone?

And are we all not simply fighting for the story? We want the things we read about ourselves online to feel true – to read as what we see when we look in the mirror, to read as what we know to be true about ourselves. With more and more people online, and with voices outside of powerful media institutions increasingly amplified by social media, there has been a tremendous pushback against “truth” as reported by a handful of men and women largely removed from the stories they are covering. But the pushback from tech didn’t stop at rejecting what has been perceived for years now as an unfair narrative. It included a new story about the press – about the people who had until quite recently been telling their story. Folks in media have been reading what folks in tech have been saying about them. From where they’re sitting, it’s not fair. It’s not true! They don’t care about clickbait. They care about the truth, and sharing that truth with the public. This is core to the identity of many journalists. That this identity has been challenged, is consistently challenged!, is infuriating. They’re as mad as we’ve all been in tech, and the angrier we get the worse we make it. We all feel we’re right, because we probably all are. But we’re also all wrong. It’s just, frankly, a total clusterfuck.

I genuinely believe the only thing that can possibly help is drinking together in the park. Hmu.

MVP of the week. Katherine Boyle, ex-Washington Post reporter / current venture capitalist, had a great thread on some of what’s happening right now. She’s brilliant. Follow her!

Oh, and btw the CHAZ is over. Pour one out for the Marxist revolution of Capitol Hill that ended, I suppose predictably, in violence, destruction, and literal murder. But then, today we’re talking seriously about destroying Mount Rushmore. So in a way, I guess, a little CHAZ lives on inside us all.

-SOLANA