Paul Farhi details the numerous reporting mistakes that ABC’s Brian Ross has made over the years. Erik Wemple explains why suspending Ross is the wrong move for the network: “Suspensions help media companies take the air out of social-media backlash against their mistakes, give the chief screwup artist an anguished exile from the newsroom, and otherwise postpone the reckoning and re-org that the organizations must undertake to avoid the next suspension-worthy gaffe.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah will lead the judging panel for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
Joy Williams has won the Paris Review’s Hadada Award. The prize will be presented to Williams next April.
Rebecca Carroll reflects on her experience working as a producer on Charlie Rose, and explores how even during “this watershed moment of examination and reckoning” the effects of sexual harassment and hostile work environments on black women are still being ignored. “If I pushed back on anything race-related, I was silenced or punished,” she remembers. “It was an environment that all but erased me, while simultaneously exploiting me as a black woman.”
The New York Times talks to actress Gabrielle Union about her new memoir, We’re Going to Need More Wine. Union said that on her book tour she often had trouble finding copies of her own book in stores, even after it spent three weeks on the bestseller list. Literary agent Kima Jones told the Times that it wasn’t surprising that Union’s book wasn’t receiving attention, but it was disappointing. “I hate to use the word ‘timely,’ because this is something that should have been part of the cultural conversation for a long time—but it is very ripe and very timely,” Jones said of We’re Going to Need More Wine, which deals with Union’s own experience of sexual assault. “There’s actually no reason we shouldn’t be talking about Gabrielle Union’s book beside Roxane Gay’s work or Leslie Jamison or Maggie Nelson’s work or any of the other women who are talking as critics of popular culture.”
At BuzzFeed, Katie Notopoulos looks at Twitter’s inconsistent policies for dealing with offensive tweets. After one of her posts from 2011 was reported as offensive by alt-right users last month, Notopoulos was banned from the service and spent over a week waiting for a response to her appeal. She compares her experience to that of Trump, who has a history of tweeting highly offensive content and yet has never been banned from the service for varying reasons. “I’m not mad that the system works slightly differently for the president than it does for me. He also gets to drive through red lights on his motorcade and I’m not bitching about that,” she writes. “But the way Twitter decides what stays and what goes seems to be pretty arbitrary.”