The Hand-Wringing Media Freak-Out over Substack

T he first rule of Monopoly Club is that nobody else is allowed to be in Monopoly Club.

How else to understand the growing resistance to Substack — an online service that permits writers to bypass the traditional media and distribute newsletters and articles directly to subscribers — than as white-hot antipathy toward an upstart rival? Over the last few weeks, the eyes of the establishment have been focused on the platform and its renegade users, and, boy, have those eyes found it wanting. Summing up the opprobrium, Dr. Sarah Roberts of UCLA described Substack as “a dangerous threat to traditional news media,” “a threat to journalism,” and “incredibly dangerous and damaging to the fourth estate (journalism),” which she suggested is “one of the few failsafes against anti-democratic maneuvers.” “Please,” Roberts demanded, “do not write for or pay for Substack. I have to say it. I believe it’s dangerous.”

And why is it dangerous? That depends. In Brian Stelter’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, CNN’s Kerry Flynn proposed recently that Substack is a problem because it provides a living for figures who “attack journalists, or stoke fears about transgender people,” and do so without the type of editorial oversight she’d prefer. In an article from last year, the Columbia Journalism Review complained that Substack’s users are too white, male, and conservative to need such an outlet, because they have already “been well-served by existing media power structure.” And, in a piece published on Substack itself, the baseball writer Craig Calcaterra groused that some of the site’s other users — but not him, of course — are “engaged in some pretty objectionable discourse.”

Which, of course, is the real issue here.

Judging by the panicked language that they so often use to describe the industry’s parvenus, traditional media figures seem to be horrified by the mere existence of venues over which they are unable to exert control. Tali Arbel, an AP tech writer, worried earlier this year that “Apple and Google” had “left open a major loophole” for unapproved speech: “Podcasts.” (Just wait until Arbel finds out about bars!) Writing last month about the voice-chat app Clubhouse, the New York Times’s digital-gossip columnist Taylor Lorenz fretted wildly about its “freewheeling and unpredictable” nature, which Lorenz complained, was leading to users having “unconstrained” and “unfettered conversations.” At Poynter, meanwhile, Cristina Tardáguila and Harrison Mantas griped that, because Clubhouse does not keep recordings for their benefit, “there’s no path to accountability” and “no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all.”

Which forces one to ask: “Accountability” to whom? I am sure that Cristina Tardáguila and Harrison Mantas are nice enough people, but, as a private citizen who may or may not choose to use a given tech product, I owe them precisely nothing. At times, listening to our self-appointed arbiters of acceptable speech agonize over the behavior of people with whom they have no meaningful connection can be a little bit like listening to old-school Soviet commissars trying to work out how and where the peasants keep meeting in secret — and what they are talking about when they do. There is a great deal to like about having a free press, and there is a great deal to like about the constitutional guarantees that keep it in business. And yet one cannot help but notice that many within its ranks see their institution less as one of the numerous that is protected by the First Amendment, and more as an anointed caste in possession of a unique mandate. All hail the Newspaper Man’s Burden!

Critics of the censorious manner in which America’s large corporations have begun so habitually to behave are often told that, if they wish to effect change, they should “build their own” outlets. And so they should. But one might be forgiven for suspecting that the purveyors of this advice are not entirely on the level, given that, when such services do hit the market, the same people immediately rush to marginalize them. Consider, by way of sterling example, the pernicious behavior of CNN’s Oliver Darcy — a man who ostensibly “covers” the media beat for his network, but, in practice, is paid to damage his employer’s competition. Like a turn-of-the-century oil baron complaining mawkishly that his adversaries’ rigs are unsafe, Darcy spends his days engaging in “analyses” of CNN’s rivals as a pretext for recommending they should be deplatformed. Not since the days of Baptists and Bootleggers has rank self-interest been so easily or enthusiastically characterized as altruistic virtue.

And so it has come to pass that, each and every time a new outlet pops up, the old guard tries promptly to strike it down. Information is power, those that provide information are powerful, and powerful people rarely relinquish their positions without a fight. Survey the last few decades and you will notice that, while the objections to innovation may vary, the message is always at heart the same. The old is good, the new is bad, those guys are too risky, listen to us instead.