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Conversation with Aja Romano
Aja Romano is a freelance journalist, formerly with Vox, who writes about cultural norms of discourse. This is an edited transcript of a discussion with her in a recent episode of Project Save the World’s video series.
METTA SPENCER: Today, let’s talk about why we get to read about what we get to read in the mainstream press. But first, Aja, you’ve been writing about ‘cancel culture’, which is not necessarily about journalism. It may be about universities, for example, that cancel or fire academics for ideas that are not popular. That’s part of the whole ‘woke’ notion, is it fair to say?
ROMANO: Both concepts emerged from online black culture and had a history of being used one way in black culture. But once they emerged into the mainstream, the words andbecame points for moral and cultural hysteria.
SPENCER: I was a professor at the University of Toronto for many years, and I do see a difference in some of the assumptions that are made now. I was appalled when I first discovered it, because it violated my notion of the responsibility of academics to address all plausible points of view. I was talking with people who favored excluding certain credible points of view that they disagreed with. I thought at the time: this is not the way professional intellectuals are supposed to function. In universities lately, some professors say that if a topic is going to make your students uncomfortable, you shouldn’t bring it up and upset them. And I thought, well, that’s the whole point of being in academia and being a student. You go there to get your ideas jarred.
ROMANO: Yeah, exactly. But the impetus in the conversation around cancel culture has been to demonize DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion. They’re talking about de-centering minority experiences and perspectives in the discourse that’s the way the conversation usually gets framed that “these things are taking over the schools and becoming the law. You have to teach things from this perspective or else”.
SPENCER: But when I’ve gone back to present to college classes, it’s talking about such things that makes people upset. Students are really resistant to having that perspective presented to them. So, it’s strange that that’s being presented as having “taken over” education, when in my experience, it hasn’t at all.
ROMANO: I’ll be glad to be persuaded that it hasn’t. I don’t know why we’re talking about this right now, but I’m glad we are.
SPENCER: Here’s a situation that is three or four years old. I invited to the show an indigenous woman who had just taken a position in a medical school to teach about traditional indigenous health care practices. I said, “Well, I’d be very interested in finding indigenous practices that maybe should be adopted more widely.” So, I asked her how they’d test whether their traditional medical practices are working or not.
This was absolutely the wrong question because she was deeply offended and thought I was saying that traditional medicine should be abolished, which I wasn’t. I meant to say, “Maybe we could learn something from you. Tell me how you know whether something is working in your tradition.” But she said, “I don’t feel safe here.” And she walked off the show.
ROMANO: I think you’ve hit on something – the presence or absence of good faith between people who are having a discussion.
SPENCER: Exactly. Normally it would have been ironed out right there.
ROMANO: There’s a difference between coming to a conversation with Good faith and coming with bad faith. When they have faith that the person in the conversation with them has an open mind and is willing to listen, then even when someone says something offensive or phrases things in the wrong way, everyone understands that they’re coming from a place of respect, which allows for mutual trust, so you can have disagreements without animosity or hostility.
But often people who are minorities have bad faith because good faith can be weaponized against them. Like, “You’re mad at me because my tone is a certain way.” Such nuances can place pressure on people who are from a minority group to swallow their anger and be polite for the sake of letting the conversation move forward, and that can create bad faith.
Sometimes people come to a conversation expecting everything to be hostile. That fear animates a lot of cultural conversation these days, because people are afraid to say the wrong thing or not know enough about a situation. That’s undergirding the conversation about canceling.
I’m not an academic myself, so I’m extrapolating a lot from common culture and personal experiences that people have shared about their own time as undergrad or postgradslike university power structures. Systemic power is often used to marginalize people. Think of all the women who have been sexually harassed while trying to get their degree. Power teaches you to trust Authority figures and believe them when they say, “Oh, I’m not flunking you out of this course because you didn’t respond to my sexual harassment. I’m flunking you out of this course because you’re a bad mathematician.” That type of thing causes people to be marginalized in the system. It’s how people with power wield it over others. For a long time, people didn’t understand what was happening to them. But in the era of the internet, the smartphone, and social media, such stories can more easily come to light, and we can have a more advanced conversation about the way power structures fail people individually.
People are more open now. They’re hearing more from voices outside of their own lives. They’re understanding their own perspectives by seeing what’s happening to other people, and they can go, “Oh, that resonates with my own experience as well.” The MeToo movement was largely about people understanding their own experiences in the context of other people using the same hashtag. When you have such a large, visible cultural conversation, people’s perspectives can change rapidly, and they can more confidently articulate their own experiences about systemic power and what society has done to its most vulnerable members.
SPENCER: But you’re assuming that it’s all true.
ROMANO: No, I’m just saying that that’s why people feel confident in assuming that it’s true.
SPENCER: Okay, I entered university a week after my eighteenth birthday in 1949, and I’ve lived in academic circles almost all my life. I cannot recall a single time when any woman whom I knew personally thought she was not being treated right as a student or professor because of her gender. I just didn’t see it. Also, I taught sociology, and all of the current allegations of antisemitism in universities are alien to me. I saw discrimination against Chinese people, Pakistani people, and a few other ethnic groups. But in forty-plus years teaching in universities, I never heard one word that sounded antisemitic by a student or any faculty member. When I’d go to Russia, I’d hear my friends talking that way, and in fact, even a friend whose family members were Jewish, so I know it happened, but not in my universities. Maybe it’s happening now, I don’t know. But I have my own experience, and I was also never given a hard time because of being a woman.
ROMANO: It’s important not to undermine your own experience, or anyone else’s experience, right? It’s like they say in a family: No two siblings have the same parents. At the most micro level, you can have a different experience than someone else who’s in the exact same situation as you. So, that’s one thing that could be happening. Another thing is that the world has intensively regressed, in terms of accepting extremism these days. I’ve never lived at a time where the ‘Overton Window’ of acceptability felt this wide and open to ugliness. Watching academia from afar, I would assume that a lot of what’s culturally acceptable to say ‘on the ground’ is shut out of academia, just because those ideas aren’t considered credible.
SPENCER: Maybe. I’ve been retired a long time, so maybe people go around saying antisemitic things now. They certainly didn’t when I was involved.
ROMANO: Well, the entire Charlie Kirk movement was going around campuses under the guise of free speech, but really introducing bigotry, racial tension, and hatred. Now it’s assumed that if you I can’t talk uncivilly to you, then my Free speech is being violated! For generations, probably until the ‘90s, we had a cultural consensus that some ideas just shouldn’t be aired in public. They were just too unacceptable, and you should be publicly shamed for them. We’ve moved away from that now. Possibly people in academia have also moved away from that under the guise of ‘supporting all perspectives’. But let’s come back to your phrasing of ideas as being ‘credible’ or not. Whether an idea is credible is crucial, and I think that also gets lost in the conversation.
SPENCER: Well, now we’re into an interesting area where it may be a question of what intellectual ideas can be suppressed. About 30 years ago, there was a book called The Bell Curve, which argued that African genetics provided a basis for black people having lower IQ.
ROMANO: Yes, I remember the book.
SPENCER: The question was whether it was okay to talk about it if that’s what you think you’ve discovered. I’d say, let’s look at the evidence and figure it out, but that view was not acceptable. That was one place where you could say there was cancel culture in academia, in that certain ideological or theoretical positions were considered too socially fraught to bring up. There were serious academics who wanted to keep such things from being discussed.
ROMANO: My understanding What other academics took issue with was the methodology used in The Bell Curve and weren’t able to replicate it, and that it was basically discredited science that they attacked on the scientific research front because the fundamental assumptions behind the science were faulty, so the science itself was at issue. But the difference now is that you have things like phrenology and transhumanism coming back – racist, arcane, outdated and discredited science now coming to the fore again and treated as legitimate by people who should know better. I think that one of the challenges of academia is, how do you keep junk science from making its way into accepted academic thought?
SPENCER: What you’ve described is exactly what should always happen. The methodology should be examined and that should be the basis for deciding whether to trash it. In fact, science progresses precisely by falsifying bad research, either through logic or by empirical discoveries. But my memory was that the methodological critique was influenced by other motivations. Assumptions can be excluded before there’s a chance to examine them. Moreover, there are certain slippery slopes where, if you open your mind to a certain possibility, then you don’t know how to close off other less reasonable possibilities. For example, I would not be surprised if we discover someday that past civilizations have been influenced by alien visitors. I would not be surprised if, thousands of years ago, beings from other parts of the universe visited Earth. We’ll probably never know, but I consider it an acceptable idea to play with. But then, if I let myself think that way, then I don’t know how to discredit other goofy things that are less plausible, such as flying saucers landing and taking people out of their beds and implanting chips in their heads. If I accept one far-out theory, why do I reject the other? I can’t justify it, but I do.
ROMANO: I think the danger is not the idea itself, but people manipulating the idea, like the ancient alien thing. I actually wrote an article about this. They had a quote, unquote, ‘presentation’ a few years ago. (Where was it? Peru? I forget which country.) They had a grand unboxing of supposed aliens that had been found. But if you researched the thing, it was obviously a scam that had been put together over years. But it had a lot of surprising support behind it. One of their researchers was a scientist from Russia who was signing his name to a lot of junk science – essentially constructed mummies, taxidermy from animal parts – and passing them off as aliens. That was an attempt to dupe people in order to make money.
SPENCER: It’s getting way worse now. I watch a lot of YouTube, and in the last six or eight months, the credibility of shows has dropped. Clearly, lies are being told. I watch videos made about ancient Sumer and every few days, there’s a new, two-hour-long video about ancient Mesopotamian ideas. They seemed to believe that they were ruled by visitors from outer space, and the videos lead you to question some of our current theories. For example, today it’s still impossible to lift some huge stones that are, in fact, right there in monuments. Somebody did it. How did they do it? Good question! But then, these videos go on to describe these alien rulers as if they’d known them personally. They slip over into unverifiable speculation. This drives me crazy. Some of it is invented. Some of it is deep fake images that are actually generated fraudulently. I think we need a system. Whoever posts something should have to post its provenance: who created this video and who has owned it and had a chance to tinker with it before it was posted?
ROMANO: But people would lie. There’s no way of verifying whether something is or isn’t AI-generated.
SPENCER: They would lie, but they can also get caught. In Taiwan’s system, if you post something and lie about where it came from, or how much of it is fake, either you go to prison or something awful will happen to you. They really enforce that law. So, it’s apparently possible to enforce it. I hear that some places in Europe also do that. I wish we’d do it too, because now I’m suspicious about everything on YouTube. They can take photos and manipulate them to make people look like they are crying or even dancing.
ROMANO: There was a whole viral video of pets choosing their owners. They had a crowd of people sitting in a pet shelter. They unleashed the dogs, and the dogs, one by one, went around and chose their owners, and the owners were crying. It was the most beautiful thing. But it was completely fake, completely AI-generated! I didn’t know that for two weeks, and then I felt bad that I had been taken in. It’s a misinformation abyss that we’re entering.
SPENCER: When we started, I expected we’d start talking about what makes something newsworthy, and how come certain topics get covered in the mainstream press. And then we’d probably drift into this conversation about the culture war. So, let’s start again with the newsworthy question. I’m a journalist, just because that’s what I do now. It started as a hobby, but I work at it pretty damn hard now to call it a hobby. I’m an academic, was never trained as a journalist, and have no credentials as such, so I don’t know why journalists are publishing what they do, and why they don’t cover things that should be covered. When I talk to my real journalist friends (I have a few who are quite eminent), they give me varying answers. A lot depends, apparently, on the editor who assigns reporters to cover certain beats.
I deal with global threats to humankind: wars, famine, global warming, AI, cyber risks, radiation exposure risks, etc., and there are lots of dangers that people need to be alerted to. The mainstream press is eminently qualified to investigate those matters. So why don’t they?
ROMANO: The fundamental mission of a journalist is to provide objective reporting. Ideally, you observe and accurately report all sides of a situation if you’re a beat reporter observing specific incidents. You want to communicate factually accurate information to the public.
However, since the advent of the 24/7 news cycle in the late ‘90s, around the time of 9/11, the media industry has been driven by the pursuit of content – not being the most accurate or thorough or nuanced. It’s to be speediest, to have the hottest take, to get the most attention and the most viewers.
SPENCER: Why now? I would have assumed that there’d always been that orientation to some extent. When newspapers first emerged, the reporters wanted them to be read, didn’t they? I would assume they’d tailor things to appeal to the most readers. But now you say there’s a change.
ROMANO: I think the change has come from multiple directions. On the one hand, you have editorial decisions coming down from the top, Driving much of what gets reported. The New York Times, for example, covered the Minneapolis protests, but often the reports were getting shunted to, say, page A14. And they were brief write-ups, not front and center on the news or the major headlines. If you were just following the protest from The New York Times, you would not get the impression that it was sort of a world upheaval, which it was for many people on the ground observing it. The intensity just wasn’t being communicated through the paper. I think that type of deliberate framing comes from the top. And increasingly, many people at the top of these media outlets don’t actually have journalism experience themselves.
Yesterday it was announced that the new head of the BBC will be a guy from Google who has no journalism experience. Now you have Bari Weiss running CBS, who has minimal actual journalism experience outside of creating hot takes, and that’s been causing some upheaval within CBS. And you had the whole Sixty Minutes debacle, where they pulled a very thoroughly reported story because Bari Weiss didn’t think they had done enough to get the White House’s perspective. That was her imposing her own political bias onto a world-class journalism studio.
SPENCER: Some journalists won’t even say that it’s a policy thing from the top.
ROMANO: Things can shift. Even if you feel that you’re at the most comfortably liberal paper in the world that’s dedicated to the pursuit of objective truth, people at the top can shift.
SPENCER: I read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, sometimes The Guardian and the LA Times and The Wall Street Journal. They sure don’t cover protests! In my email inbox, probably right now, there are three or four notes about the No Kings demonstration, which is coming up in a week. There may be several million people in the streets of American cities protesting against the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump is immune to prosecution. We have a king! But how come that’s not covered by The New York Times? By not covering it, they’re not helping the organizers get people ready to go out in the streets. They could increase the size of the demonstrations just by covering them in advance. But even afterward they don’t report it! If they publish anything at all, it’ll be on a back page. Why? If you’re talking about a million or more people, surely that’s news, but it’s apparently not news to The New York Times. Now, how does that decision get made?
ROMANO: I’m not on the editorial board of the New York Times, but I think one key factor is that the culture wars have been effective. According to many people on the right, Fox media is too far left, and they’re seeking even more conservative outlets because they are driven by outrage and emotion. Mainstream media’s objective reporting on a protest doesn’t give them that. So, for decades, mainstream journalists have felt obliged to cater to this invisible audience of people who continually move further to the right. So, they make their journalism as broad as possible.
SPENCER: Logically, that makes sense. But it’s also obviously true that the journalists are thereby influencing them to move to the right. If they’d publicize the No Kings demonstration in advance, they would help draw people to the streets, but most people won’t see it, so they won’t go. A dear friend of mine, one of Canada’s most prominent journalists, won’t cover protests. Well, maybe if it looks like it’s threatening the existence of the government, as for example, in Iran, where demonstrations tried to throw out the Ayatollah, then he might cover that. But unless it’s going to influence geopolitical reality, he doesn’t want to deal with it. He doesn’t even like protesters.
ROMANO: I suppose there’s an element of simple burnout involved. When the Charlottesville protest happened and the death of Heather Heyer was caused by the white supremacists who were there, that was an example of a protest that hadn’t reached mass mainstream news coverage. But as soon as it reached mass news coverage, it became a point of contention. I still have relatives whom I cannot convince that the Charlottesville protest was a counter-protest against a white supremacist rally. They just thought those were patriots. But it’s an actual established fact that the people at the original, scheduled Charlottesville demonstration were white supremacists – the Proud Boys and Unite the Right. My relatives believe that, as soon as the counter protesters showed up, the protests became all about ‘woke gone mad.’ And “how should we punish the counter protesters? Well, probably we shouldn’t run them over with cars, but how should we deal with them?” Then we had the whole stretch of states trying, sometimes successfully, to pass laws against wearing masks in public – to really criminalize protest. That has not been covered in mainstream media with the context that it deserves, which is that there’s been a mass nationwide attempt to criminalize protests and make them less effective. But whenever a protest comes, on Fox the takes are like, “Why is the mass media giving so much attention to the Minneapolis protests when they didn’t give this much attention to the fraud in Minneapolis?” The culture wars create friction and outrage out of these situations. The mainstream press doesn’t want to alienate either those who want them to cover it from the right or left, so often it just waters down the coverage, almost to the point of nonexistence. Then the takeaway for these outlets is, “Oh, no one wants to read about this.” Not “maybe we should cover it better,” but “We shouldn’t cover it at all.”
SPENCER: The New York Times has three or four moderately conservative columnists but no real right wingers. I think Bret Stephens is the most right wing, but most other analysts slant toward the center-left. What I don’t understand is the actual reportage. For example, the new pope was chosen last year. For weeks thereafter, every mainstream newspaper on any given day had three or four columns with whole biography of the new pope. They cover the same material endlessly, rather than report on something like, say, the flotilla of boats taking food and medicine to Gaza, which was in a famine. But that didn’t get covered. It was clearly geopolitically important. My friends came in talking about it and I had read all these newspapers that had not mentioned it. Why not?
ROMANO: Again, it’s the assumption that their readers won’t reward them for covering such stories. It’s the decades of culture war motivating people to feel outrage. The Daily Mail for many years has been the first- or second-most read publication in the world, and its mission is just generating outrage.
SPENCER: Well, I deal with controversial issues, and when I see injustice, I think it’s appropriate to be outraged.
ROMANO: I fully agree, but the type of outrage I’m talking about comes from a sense of aggrieved entitlement. I’m mainly referring to the regression in right wing culture, because that’s where the majority of Americans and the mainstream media are. Most mainstream media shows a conservative slant, and with a story like relief boats for Gaza, American conservatives want that news to be presented in a certain way. Can you present that news to them in a way that satisfies their bias? Not always. So perhaps the solution is not to present it at all. That’s the thinking.
SPENCER: Well, this is a social problem. The world needs to know reality.
ROMANO: I definitely agree.
SPENCER: We’ve got a problem if information is being deliberately withheld from the people who make democratic decisions. I do these little conversations as a contribution to solving it, but they are a tiny drop in the ocean. What can we do to make a difference? How can we inform ordinary people on a day-to-day basis?
ROMANO: It’s worth noticing the Minnesota Star Tribune. In 2024 they announced that they were actually expanding their newsroom and their staff, doubling their investment in the company, and changing the name from the Minneapolis Star Tribune to the Minnesota Star Tribune because they wanted to expand their collaboration with other newsrooms around the state. They wanted to increase their local coverage at a time when many metro coverage regions were laying people off.
Then, of course, during the Minneapolis protests, the Star Tribune was right there with experienced reporters who had covered the George Floyd protests. The protesters had formed dense networks of community action teams, based on their own experiences with the George Floyd protest.
So, these came together in this moment that made the Star Tribune a really good first responder in media. Between December and January, the Star Tribune’s traffic rose like 126% and it was up 64% overall from the previous January, because so many Americans were going to it for the reporting that they couldn’t get in national outlets. That’s where the quality work was being done. The Star Tribune actually invested in gas masks for their staff so they had the tools to do the reporting safely. But then the protests ended and the traffic plummeted again. From January to February, they went from being one of the top 50 news outlets in the country to falling off the roster because the crisis seems to have ended. We need reporters like that, but how do you sustain them in times that aren’t motivated by crisis?
SPENCER: I don’t know the answer, and I wish I could end with something that people could do that would make a difference. But I can’t usually do that anyway.
ROMANO: You can tell people to support their local news outlets. Everybody has a different region of the country or region of the world that they feel invested in.
SPENCER: But people differ in terms of how local they are in their interests. My interests are more international, and sometimes I don’t even know who my city councilor is or when the school board should be voted out.
ROMANO: Another interesting outlet that has benefited from the last month of global crisis is Al Jazeera. Their traffic has also skyrocketed. People want what they see as objective, unbiased reporting. I know people have different opinions on how biased Al Jazeera is or isn’t, but obviously there’s a need there at the global news level as well.
SPENCER: Yes. I’ve been trying to reach old friends in Israel for a conversation like this, but they may be in a basement someplace. I can’t contact them or my friends in Russia either. Thank you for this fascinating and important discussion. Come and talk to me again sometime. I’ve enjoyed it very much.
ROMANO: Okay, thanks for having me on. Bye.