AN article published in its op-ed section rocked The New York Times recently.

The piece, written by Republican Senator Tom Cotton in response to the US protests over George Floyd’s killing, said the military should be used to quell the unrest. Many – including a substantial number of its own staff – criticised NYT for publishing the article, more so when the sensational headline “Send In the Troops” was used.

NYT opinion editor James Bennet had to resign, and the paper admitted that the editorial process that led to the article’s publication had been “rushed and flawed”.

I’m bringing this up in today’s column because platforming (which means hosting an opinion or opinion leader) is something we don’t talk enough about.

Philosophies to deal with it often lie between the risk-taking “diversity for its own sake” argument (which may result in hosting controversial figures on your platform) and the risk-aversive “hard no” to any perceived problematic figures and opinions (which may result in echo chambers or accusations of censorship).

In my opinion, holding on to these entrenched positions does not really help navigate a complex and changing media landscape. It does not clarify the issue strategically (which means you care about the consequences of hosting someone or their opinion) or ethically (meaning the moral consequence is paramount).

Of course, if the idea of running a media company is not to propagate fair and balanced reporting, but to adhere to a narrow political cause or ideology, then this conversation wouldn’t matter at all. Many outlets out there are merely strategic, with ethics thrown out the window. I am not denying that.

Getting past preconceptions

To think productively about platforming, we must first get past three preconceptions.

First, it’s pointless to think that the act of platforming is apolitical. It does not mean news portals need not strive to be above political partisanship, but the act of choosing one voice over others is always a political act.

Even if it does not play by the pro-government/pro-opposition divide (which is a lame way of thinking about politics, really), the editorial team has made a political choice when it reckons that some voices are more important than others. And that’s okay. That’s the point of having editors, so that these choices are made consciously and conscientiously.

Second, portals are not the gatekeepers of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech must be kept so that the media can operate. But, it is not for the media alone to uphold. It can never fulfil the spirit of “freedom for all”, as when it comes to representing voices, the media is always selective. For example, the news will always report the prime minister’s speech on Mak Cik Kiah, but are the real Mak Cik Kiahs actually quoted? I guess not.

The media may risk over-evaluating its importance by thinking that it is safeguarding freedom of speech by offering a platform. That importance has long slipped its clutches.

Many opinion leaders have no problem platforming themselves these days, via social media, blogs or podcasts. Some even have more followers than news portals. For example, NYT has about 47 million followers on Twitter. US President Donald Trump has almost double that at 92 million.

It’s not the job of portals to maintain a “free for all” passageway for opinions, as that passageway is already largely free. The job of news reporting is to maintain freedom of information, which means asking questions that are not asked and scrutinising answers when they are given. Like it or not, portals must separate the wheat from the chaff. It has to discriminate. It always does.

Third, disagreement should not be the only yardstick when deciding the issue of platforming. Mere disagreement with an opinion should not be the first filter, unless that opinion crosses serious ethical lines (such as advocating racism or sexism, or a take that is full of mistruths or half-truths).

But disagreement does not guarantee an opinion’s platforming either (the “diversification for its own sake” argument). There are many views an editor can disagree with; which ones to publish is the more important question. And yes, that choice is ultimately political. Pretending otherwise is just fooling oneself.

Platforming ideas or people?

The decision to platform can be further broken down into two subsets of questions.

First, what form of platforming? Do you give a person a fixed column, or do you publish just a single op-ed piece by them? The two decisions have different gravitas.

Keeping a column indicates a news portal’s tacit endorsement of the validity of the contributor’s thoughts. Endorsing an opinion’s validity does not necessarily entail agreement, but it does mean readers will assess the portal’s frame of acceptability based on that. You can’t help but judge the intention of a portal that publishes an opinion endorsing sexism, for example.

There is also the opinion implied by Bennet that op-eds can craft better public engagement (and even outcry) because “having to stand up an argument in an essay is very different than making a point in a tweet”. As an academic who relies a lot on newspaper archives for research, I can get behind the basic principles of this idea. I find that ideas are better engaged with and preserved for posterity in news portals rather than social media, which is transient in nature. Arguing with someone in the comment section is very different from making an argument in a full-length article.

But a lot of caution must be exercised. Are these opinions really hidden from the public eye? Or are we giving more visibility to the already visible? Will it cause harm? And, do they have the quality to warrant archiving? After all, platforming contentious intellectual theses (such as this and this) is different from platforming an opinion championing violence or racist demagoguery.

Second, do we consider an opinion on its own or do we have to take into account the opinion-giver as well? In this day and age, it’s almost impossible to separate an opinion from its giver, considering that many opinion leaders maintain a public persona. And I don’t mean they are just famous (some famous people are notoriously private). I mean they maintain an active social media presence, with thousands of engagements in their posts, which are set to public. Those should be considered op-eds in their own right.

It’s naïve to think that by providing a platform for a problematic figure, they will necessarily moderate their opinions. Many are perfectly fine with keeping a Jekyll and Hyde facade. Many have done so, including academics who write deeply racist stuff in public Facebook posts, but still maintain a “respectable” air when giving their opinions to reporters.

The least that news portals can do before platforming these people is acknowledge that they are “influencers”, and platforming them increases their following. It is imperative to know what they have written in other spaces, more so when these writings are available for public viewing.

Not easy, but necessary

Ultimately, portals have to acknowledge that their readership is concentrated in certain demographics. Such is the regrettable nature of the media landscape these days.

Like it or not, by platforming someone or an idea, you are doing it with a specific set of readers in mind. You are either saying “I think you will like this” (affirmation is important to maintain readership, unfortunately) or “I think you will benefit from reading this” (this is where the dense and/or dissenting ideas come in). A good editor needs to balance both.

I am not saying any of this isn’t difficult. There is an inherent contradiction here, in that we want both free and high-quality news. But going back to the theme of wheat and chaff, a portal that has done the hard work of going through the difficult debates on ethics and strategy will no doubt stand taller than the rest. – June 11, 2020.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.