

"Reporting on sexual violence and misconduct is an incredibly delicate undertaking that requires a working understanding of how best to do it. At its most basic level, this means that reporters must be careful not to re-traumatize subjects, which includes consideration of the ways that their reports will be received — that is, often with skepticism and disbelief — and account for that with journalists' sharpest tools: fidelity to confirmable facts, thorough arguments, and an abiding lack of sensationalism."

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If you know someone else who'd like this sort of thing in their inbox once-a-week-ish, forward it, share it on Facebook, talk about it at the Super Bowl. You can subscribe them here . Also, Boise! I'm going to be talking about unruliness, Idaho politics, why Boise is cool, and much more this Friday. You can buy a ticket here ; proceeds benefit the Women's and Children's Alliance. And if you have further thoughts about Dowd or this shitshow of a piece, I'd love to hear them — just reply to this email.

- Julianna Escobedo Shepherd, " Babe, What Are You Doing? ", JezebelI woke up yesterday to an alert from an app called Nuzzel. I love and hate this app, because it alerts me whenever a bunch of people that I follow on Twitter have shared the same article (I don't know the exact algorithm, but I think it senses when 15-20 people do it in an hour). I rely on the app to make sure that I know what people are talking about without actually having to obsessively check Twitter, but I also selectively ignore it, because sometimes you don't need to know that 55 people in your feed have shared the same Washington Post article about some finer point in the Mueller investigation.This time, this alert was for Uma Thurman. If you've been following the Weinstein revelations, you've been waiting for this. A clip of Thurman, barely keeping her rage in check while interviewed on the red carpet, circulated widely: "I am not a child," Thurman said, "And I have learned that when I've spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So, I've been waiting to feel less angry, and when I'm ready, I'll say what I have to say."On Thanksgiving, she posted a follow-up message on Instagram: "I feel it's important to take your time, to be fair, to be exact, so ... Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!" (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators — I'm glad it's going slowly — you don't deserve a bullet)." Shortly thereafter, she left her longtime agency, CAA, which had been implicated as helping maintain the silence around Weinstein.And then, nothing — until Saturday morning. But this wasn't a follow-up to the New York Times' and Ronan Farrow's extensive investigative reporting on Weinstein. It wasn't a first person op-ed like Salma Hayek's or Lupita Nyong'o's.Thurman's claims, in short: Weinstein attempted to/did(?) assault her several times, and she was forced to continue working with/in proximity to him; Quentin Tarantino knew of Weinstein's behavior and did little to stop it. He also forced her into an unsafe situation on set involving a car (?).I put the question marks in there not because I don't believe Thurman, but because Dowd did such a poor job of clarifying what actually happened. So bad, in fact, that it was difficult to summarize. Sometimes, "difficult to summarize" suggests nuance and artful ambiguity. This suggests neither.A journalist rarely, if ever, simply transcribes an interview when writing a piece. A journalist's work is transforming what they've gleaned (from interviews, from research, from previous reporting) into a piece that contributes new knowledge, that "moves the story forward," in editor-speak. Not in a false or overblown way, but in a cogent and fair way.Of course, there are mitigating factors when reporting this sort of story: Journalism of this variety is incredibly hard, in part because you're doing it with a team of lawyers monitoring every word in order to protect the journalist, the subject, and the paper from legal action. Otherwise intelligible prose gets mangled; parathenticals and "requests for comment went unanswered" weigh down the organization. But that oversight is necessary, and can, with care, be incorporated in a way that preserves the coherence.But let's look at the section where Thurman describes — or rather, does not describe — a second incident with Weinstein:You've got the competing and distracting disclaimers from Weinstein, but they're not the problem. The problem is that we have no idea what "her memory of the incident stops here" means — and how, by extension, the reader is meant to interpret what happened. Has she blocked it out? Does she not want to talk about it publicly? Did her lawyers prevent her from naming it? The lack of clarity leaves what happened in that room up to the reader and their subjective inclinations, which may or may not be correct. The statement from Herman suggests that something aggressive happened, but leaves it wide open for speculation, counter-argument, disbelief.Which isn't to say that Thurman should have been forced to detail what happened — if she was able to in the first place. This is a place when the journalist and her editors make a call: what does this narrative do? Does the inability to report it with accuracy actually call the subject's authority — on her own experience — into question? Does it transform a piece that's intended to tell allow a victim of sexual harassment and abuse to tell her story into one that invites readers to doubt her?Don't misinterpret this: when there are discrepancies in a subject's story, that's when a reporter should push farther, dig deeper, keep reporting. Good reporters don't ignore the inconvenient or contradictory parts of a subject's interview; they dig deeper into them. That's not what seems to be happening in this Thurman story. Rather, Dowd veers into a part of the narrative that Thurman can't or won't disclose, and allows the ambiguity to remain in a way that's at once titillating and open to personal interpretation: two things reporting on sexual assault should never do.Similar ambiguity infuses the end section of the piece: "the Quentin of it all." That phrase itself is vague and generally unhelpful, even if it is a great quote. (Journalists are often faced with the dilemma of how to preserve "good copy," that is, a great-sounding quote, while maintaining clarity. Dowd could have kept this quote if the sections that followed made sense).Again, Thurman's own accounting of what happened with Tarantino might be vague. Like so many of us, she might talk around the traumatizing thing instead of speaking it plainly and clearly. That doesn't make her an unreliable witness; it makes her a careful one. But it was Dowd's responsibility to ask questions, in the most respectful way possible, in order to clarify. Or to organize Thurman's recollections in a way that would do more to connect the dots between her experience in the car with what happened with Weinstein — and Tarantino's tolerance of it.As is, the car section is again open to interpretation — it makes the entire piece feel, well, like a movie, but with large scenes excised, the sort of scenes that would allow readers to grasp the entirety of the narrative and its significance. That is not Uma Thurman's task: No one's trauma unfurls in neat, cinematic form. But it is the task of the journalist who's been asked to convey that story to the public.Not to make it into a glamorous blockbuster — that's for journalists writing about heists and athletes, stories with clear narrative arcs of rising and falling. It's for what journalists call "yarns." When you're writing about something as grim and fucked-up as sexual assault, it should feel like an unembellished documentary, not a Tom Cruise (or, more to the point, Quentin Tarantino) movie. (To my mind, Rachel Aviv's reporting — on elder abuse, on Filipino migrants, on the rights of the brain-dead, on solitary confinement — is the standard to which all others should inspire: deeply humanizing narratives that are never indulgent, never sensationalist. The stories Aviv tackles are always complicated. But the stakes — and the specifics — are always clear.)But Dowd is no documentarian. She treats Thurman's story like she's writing a hackneyed Vanity Fair profile. She describes Thurman "stretching out her lanky frame on a brown velvet couch in front of the fire." She contrasts Thurman's "anguish" with her "elegant apartment" as she "vaped tobacco, sipped white wine, and fed empty pizza boxes into the fireplace." For seemingly no reason at all, she mentions that her then-husband Ethan Hawke flew to her side from "the Abbey of Gethsemani."Such details are sometimes called "color": ways of making an otherwise dull story feel alive, dynamic, human. Color has no place in this story. "Color" frames the narrative as an casual interview, not a news story; it suggests Thurman's recollections as casual gossip, not the latest in a long stream of horrifying allegations against one of Hollywood's most powerful producers. Women's otherwise serious stories have long been rendered frivolous by associating them with clothes, the body, glamour, emotion — which is precisely the effect of Dowd's "color." It trivializes trauma.I've used the word "journalist" throughout to think through all that's gone wrong without saying the obvious: Dowd, at least in her capacity as an Op-Ed Writer, is not a journalist. Opinion writers, after all, aren't tasked with "reporting": they make arguments, and wield facts, interviews, and rhetoric in order to advance those arguments, whether they're about why climate change might not exist or why Democrats should abandon women's reproductive rights . Op-ed writers have little, if any, editing. They decide their own topics. They are fact-checked, and their pieces, like all pieces, go through legal checks. Outside op-ed contributors receive editorial assistance but it's unclear how much in-depth editing goes into pieces written by those on editorial staff. Whatever editorial oversight was applied to Dowd's piece, the result was the same: an ill-formed, inappropriately written, confusingly constructed rendering of a woman's story that deserved better.Thurman may have sought Dowd out. They may know each other personally; she might trust Dowd. But if Dowd — who has long produced and codified misogyny against Hillary Clinton, including women who have been placed in vulnerable positions by men in power — respected Thurman, she would've passed it to journalists with the skills and wherewithal to write and report it with the regard and rigor that Thurman, and all of the women abused by Weinstein, deserve.To be clear: what happened to Uma Thurman is horrible. I believe her. I'm so angry with her. But you can be horrified by what happened to a woman and also be horrified by the way another woman wrote about it. Whether or you're a celebrity or not, whether you're the first to talk or the 20th, whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're straight or queer, whether you're an adult or a child, whether you're rich or you're not, whether you're employed or not, whether you're a conservative or a progressive, no matter your past or your parents' past or your connections or your lack thereof, if you are speaking publicly about your sexual assault, that story deserves respect.And if you're telling that story to a reporter, it is their responsibility to labor — with the help of editors, fact-checkers, copy-editors, photographers, design teams, lawyers, social media teams — to establish and model that respect. If they cannot, then they should not report it. That should have been true for years, but it's especially true now. #MeToo is all about reckoning: about declaring that things can no longer be how they were before, about calling out bullshit, about indicting the mechanisms within industries at large that allow abuse to continue, and allow subjects of abuse to be further victimized. Dowd's treatment of Thurman's story suggests just much work remains.- Did not expect to be this moved by a letter of recommendation for a hysterectomy - Baby books can be so ideologically fucked up - In love with this essay about Dads and Costco and lack and abundance- The Farce, and the Grandeur , of Black History Month under Trump- Michael Chabon wrote the most beautiful thing I read this week- This nerd loves learning just how similar Hearst's presidential campaign was to Trump's