Still stunned
Recognizing the tools of political division in the campaign against Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure underscores how astonishing the decision is.
On April 26, UNC's Hussman School of Journalism and Media announced that it had recruited Pulitzer prizewinner, MacArthur Fellow, and New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to be the school's Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.
This week, the UNC Board of Trustees did not hold a vote to approve tenure for Hannah-Jones despite the overwhelming approval of the Hussman school's faculty and leadership. In a collective statement, the faculty noted that "The failure to offer Hannah-Jones tenure with her appointment as a Knight chair unfairly moves the goalposts and violates long-standing norms and established processes relating to tenure and promotion at UNC Chapel Hill."
The Knight Foundation, which sponsors the Knight Chair, weighed in, with president Alberto Ibarguen urging that "There is an opportunity to reverse course and do the right thing."
How did we get here?
Hannah-Jones's UNC tenure is a real and ongoing disappointment, and it's also a case study in media manipulation. Or as one key group organizing against Hannah-Jones’s appointment acknowledged, “there is another perspective, one that almost seems to belong to another world than the one where academia resides.”
This ‘other perspective’ pivots on a single piece from Hannah-Jones’s lauded career: the 1619 Project, published by The New York Times in 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. That collection, and especially Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, received criticism from a small group of historians, and after review of the specific factual errors they alleged, the New York Times stood by the work they’d published with an explanation of their views.
From this kernel of dispute, a coordinated campaign sprouted—no longer rooted in any factual criticism of specific details but a broad-brush claim that the entire project represents a dangerous, ahistorical deceit. In 2021, Republican state lawmakers have introduced bills that would cut funding from schools that use lessons from 1619 Project in five states.
As documented by Joan Donovan and Brandi Collins-Dexter of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, right-wing media dominate search results for the term “1619.” They describe the campaign:
For the right-wing, criticizing the project became a cause célébre, taken up by figures like New York Times Opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who termed 1619 a “failed” project, and Newt Gingrich, who remarked, during a “Fox and Friends” interview, “The whole project is a lie.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times journalist who conceived of the project, endured racist harassment and death threats across social media.
Those death threats and the complaints made to UNC’s Board of Trustees share a common origin: they are not the product of good-faith criticism of the 1619 Project or Hannah-Jones’s body of work but racist pushback against critical historical narratives and those who publish them. Silke-Maria Weineck summed it up in the Chronicle of Higher Education that these elites have decided “the correct way to address systemic racism is not only to deny its existence but to legally mandate this denial.” Closer to campus, N.C. Policy Watch covered how affiliates of the UNC Board of Governors have worked to advance those views.
We know the mechanics of these movements well—they are practices CITAP researchers have studied extensively. Alice Marwick and Becca Lewis show how media manipulators create and spread radical viewpoints, while Francesca Tripodi explains how alternative media networks and especially Prager U take advantage of conservatives’ search practices to maximize the exposure of their viewpoints.
Or as Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor wrote last fall:
This is not to say that misinformation is something nobody should worry about. It’s that the factual element shouldn’t be the focus. Journalists and voters should pay more attention to the motivations, content, and drivers of mis- and disinformation… why and how certain groups in this country seek to deepen political and social divides, at times using misinformation as a tool.
Recognizing these familiar patterns of manipulated outrage in the campaign against Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure underscores how stunning the decision is.
Recent publications and appearances
"There have been other folks who have been tenured from various professional realms that have also not had a whole lot of academic experience. So that justification doesn't really hold a lot of water.” Deen Freelon spoke to NBC/Peacock about the UNC Board of Trustees’ failure to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones.
“When you’re trying to get attention, exploiting a divide or a difference of opinion is a good way to spread whatever it is you want to spread — your news article or your YouTube video...It’s about tying it to some kind of controversy. Exploiting racial division or divisions of identity is a really effective way to do it.” Alice Marwick discusses media manipulation in an article about Instagram and narrative-building in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
“Rather than see communities as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘susceptible’ to false information, approaches that bring together histories of migration and lived experiences allow us to see how political analyses develop, as well as identify the role of social and cultural hierarchies of power, such as race, class, caste, religion, and ethnicity.” Rachel Kuo discusses possibilities for future directions in Critical Disinformation Studies.
“That ship survived an initial attack by the Cylons (humanoid robots) simply because it was old and had just been decommissioned in the process of being turned into a museum. Being older, it had never been networked into the system. The ‘shutdown’ command sent by the attackers never reached it, and, unlike every other battleship in the human fleet, it was thus spared. In pandemic terms, Galactica was an island with no travel to it.” Zeynep Tufekci uses lessons from Battlestar Galactica to explore the vulnerability of networked systems.
“Policing speech in the absence of procedure and transparency is deeply problematic. But giving Covid-19 deniers, insurrectionists, and inciters of violence the right to disseminate disinformation on social media unless the platforms hosting them can show their speech has caused an identifiable and immediate harm to another person can come at the expense of the truth.” Faculty affiliate Enrique Armijo analyzes how linking bans to harms caused by users’ speech also could make the problem of social media dissemination of disinformation worse in the long run.
“The spread will be contained much faster if multiple measures are combined. Then, at a time to be determined by epidemiologists, we can get to the point that those who are not vaccinated, for whatever reason, can be far better protected because there will be far less virus in circulation.” Zeynep Tufekci discusses how the concept of exponential decay applies to public health measures and pandemic messaging.
Dr. Freelon appeared on a panel for the Oxford Internet Institute to discuss social media activism.