Letters respond to Jill Lepore’s piece on the state of journalism and Joshua Rothman’s exploration of the art of decision-making.
Jill Lepore, in her insightful piece on journalism in the age of social media and fake news, writes, “Speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump” BuzzFeed News (“Hard News,” January 28th). This speculation is incorrect. Whatever challenges we face in this difficult environment for digital media, BuzzFeed News remains a key part of the future of BuzzFeed. Its investigative reporting has freed men from prison, changed the way sexual assault is handled in Congress, given the public incredible insight into the Mueller investigation, and detailed Donald Trump’s business dealings in Russia during the 2016 campaign. I’m excited to see what our journalists do in the years to come.
Lepore gets a lot right about the many challenges, and a few of the threats, facing journalism today. But the grim picture that she paints of HuffPost underestimates its commitment not just to journalism but to the journalists who produce excellent, agenda-setting reporting each day. The claim that HuffPost, or the publication’s earlier incarnation, the Huffington Post, “paid most of its writers nothing for years” is misleading. While the blog platform, shut down in 2018, was explicitly a place where outside contributors could share their views with a large audience, HuffPost’s unprecedented rise as a leading national publication has been fuelled by the work of top-tier journalists who command (and receive) competitive salaries. We take pride in our newsroom, which today numbers more than two hundred journalists in the United States and many more abroad, and in our commitment to game-changing journalism. The media are indeed facing powerful headwinds, but the need for incisive, balanced reporting has never been greater. At HuffPost, that’s where we see our future.
As I read Joshua Rothman’s piece about how people make decisions, I couldn’t help but think about the unique challenges of end-of-life decision-making (“Choose Wisely,” January 21st). There is no preparing for the experience of being critically ill or close to death, and advance directives often fall far short of anticipating not just the circumstances of illness but also the ways in which those circumstances can change a person’s values and preferences. The decision-science approaches that Rothman describes may help. But, since dying people are not usually able to participate in discussions about their own care, family members and health-care providers often must intuit their values in order to make decisions on their behalf. It is hard enough for us to make end-of-life choices for ourselves; it is all the more difficult to do so for someone else. As decision science develops further, we would do well to keep this issue in mind.
Rothman refers to several factors, often vague ones, that people consider in their decisions about having children. Oddly, all the factors he mentions—I count nineteen—concern the would-be parents. The experience that the child will have does not appear to be a major consideration. It seems to me that one question should supersede all others: What kind of life—what kind of world—will my child endure as an adult? It requires a kind of willful myopia not to be concerned about the answer.