When I was teaching, I would often assign Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1989) for the start of any narrative journalism course. Malcolm’s book –while I disagreed with the breadth of its conclusions—was invaluable in getting my students to think about journalistic norms, about literary and journalistic meanings of “the story,” and course about the on-the-ground relationships that journalists form with their informants.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about a possible alternative one might also start with: parts or all of Andrew Marantz’s bracing book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (2019). (Amazon link here.)Written by a New Yorker staffer, the book provides a terrifying tour of the online world inhabited and produced by the “far right,” a category that Marantz splinters down into various “alt” or “lite” versions as well. Here’s a passage capturing the premise of the book:

Our country [the U.S.] was undergoing a painful and sudden shift. The old national vocabulary was being dismantled .  . . I sometimes imagined the process as a barbaric form of surgery, an unauthorized organ transplant. The ribcage of the body politic had been pried open; the alt-light demi-celebrities were trying to sneak into the operating theater, insert their thinly disguised demagoguery, and then sew up the wound before anyone noticed. They weren’t actual doctors, but you couldn’t necessarily see that at first glance; they wore convincing-looking uniforms and spoke with authority, and for some people that was enough. Nobody, not even the alt-light themselves, knew whether the transplanted organ would be assimilated or rejected. We would all have to wait to find out.

Leaving aside whatever one makes of Marantz’s investigative methods or his taxonomy of online extremism, Anti-Social has at least three topics that could be very intriguing to “open up” in a contemporary narrative-journalism class:

• First, I found the relationship between Marantz’s reporting technique and his interpretive metaphors fascinating. For example, his research often involves attending parties hosted by his extremist subjects. But in turn, Marantz then says online identity formation is itself like a “party” (in the social sense) in that it has hosts, featured guests, and gate crashers who make others uncomfortable. Or, his discussion touches time and again on the concept of the so-called “Overton Window,” a metaphorical applied to the way the current avalanche of online media commentary, including those sites or posts dispensing sheer hate and misinformation, can have a way of shifting the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. (See a description in the New York Times.) Simply by sheer repetition and amplification, previously banned or taboo or even ridiculous ideas can be made to worthy to be talked about, even “acceptable.”  (Trump’s gambit: “Many people have been saying…”) .  In all, therefore, I think it would be very interesting to send students in search of these interpretive metaphors, and how they both reflect Marantz’s own legwork and organize his story-form.
  
• Second, Marantz is clearly operating within a “window” that has started to characterize the so-called “mainstream” media quite differently. That is, these days, those news institutions are being characterized as legacy media forms.  Students might be asked “what is at stake” in that change in the US cultural vocabulary—or, again to focus on the word choice, what “legacy” such media forms are supposedly representing. For example, Marantz says at one point that he had heard the following:that a recent election “was like the article running against the comments section.” What is the idea embedded here? Is there something at work here, for instance, about the “democratic” claims journalists often make for their work?
  
• Third and finally: one of those most interesting elements in Anti-Social is how Marantz’s investigation boomerangs back on the very form he is using: a slightly wry, deeply detailed immersive “profile” that is the signature of the New Yorker. In fact, Marantz comes around not just to exhibiting those norms in how he writes, but to explicitly defending them against the kind of writing his subjects/informants favor.  Students might be asked why he does that—and what they think of his implicit defense of his own methods.   What does a profile show, and how might his subjects criticize the story-form Marantz has chosen?

Now, I have to say that I have several disagreements with the ways that Marantz’s metaphors shape his argument, and how he often ends up clinging even harder to the norms he began with.  But that’s not the point here. Rather, it is that the book might well prove, as Malcolm’s book often does, both a provocative account of current news practices and an example of what often happens to reporters who immerse themselves and find their own identity under assault.

Thanks!