Everyone Hates Journalists, Maybe for Good Reason

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

Something called Eating With Experts pissed off a bunch of food writers the other week when it posted a carousel of text to Instagram decrying the state of food media. “Most people in the media world have never spent even a day working the line,” Eating With Experts wrote. “At the end of the day most of the people defining where we should, and should not, eat have little expertise in the arena in which they operate… We’ve gone from the captivating writing of Ruth Reichl that takes you on a journey to The NY Times boiling down a chef or restaurateur’s life’s work into their new short review of 250 words.”

The sentiment of that Instagram post is common enough among restaurant owners and other hospitality professionals — a lot of whom liked the post. These are people who work extraordinarily hard to make food and create welcoming spaces, often without being paid all that well. After pouring themselves into their work, that work then gets judged by random people on Yelp, self-declared “content creators” on social media, and journalists who may or may not know what they’re talking about. Imagine doing a shift as a pastry chef, coming home to your crappy apartment exhausted and smelling like a chocolate factory crime scene, then looking at your phone to learn the Infatuation has declared your tiramisu to be “soft, soggy, and bland — exactly how I don’t like my men.” Eating With Experts’ remedy is to cut those dastardly journalists out of the equation and have chefs themselves recommend places to eat.

Food writers in the comments of the post defended themselves on a couple of grounds. Firstly, many of them have worked in restaurants before. Secondly, they don’t want to write little blurbs either — the problem is that the declining fortunes of the media industry mean that very few outlets can pay for long reviews or essays about restaurants.

But I think this frustration with food journalism is part of a widely shared dislike of journalism in general.

The job of a journalist is to learn about something and then explain the topic to an audience. We take raw materials — interviews, court or financial documents, occasionally our own experiences — and distill them into content that is both informative and entertaining. We may speak to different people who have different perspectives on the topic and attempt to describe the contours of a disagreement. We might report on allegations of misconduct or incompetence. All of this has the potential to make some people upset.

In the process of translating reporting into a podcast, article, or video, all the information we’ve gathered is necessarily compressed and often simplified. Context may be left out. Controversies may be explained in ways that satisfy neither side of the argument. If you read an article about yourself or an issue you are passionate about, you will almost certainly be disappointed that the journalist did not include your entire viewpoint in the finished piece. You might feel like Mac from this old It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode, where he is interviewed for the local TV news about a bus accident he saw, “goes off for like 20 minutes,” and is dismayed when the broadcast edits his interview down to “it was crazy.”

This is often what makes journalists’ subjects suspicious and resentful of journalists — they don’t write the things the subjects want them to. A responsible journalist will be up front with subjects before running a negative or critical story, but sometimes true and accurate stories make people look bad. Sometimes a true and accurate story will make you or your friend look bad, or will be inconvenient to your political cause or business interests. You might wonder, Why is this asshole journalist writing this mean story when they could be writing about, like, climate change or something important?

Most good journalists try to stay on good terms with their sources and subjects and make good faith efforts to correctly describe their points of view. But we are not writing¹ for the subjects — we’re writing for our audience. In the course of serving that audience, occasionally we will publish stories that cut against some of our sources’ interests, because we are not PR professionals paid to be their mouthpieces. Journalists can’t be truly “objective,” but they should at least try to be impartial about their areas of coverage, not joined at the hip to any particular faction or individual.

In the context of food writing, if an outlet says it publishes restaurant reviews but only ever runs 100-percent positive ones, it would seem a little phony. Food critics (a vanishing profession) are supposed to have a high level of culinary knowledge and they’re supposed to make multiple visits over the course of a period of time so as not to be biased by a single bad experience². If the fish consistently comes out overdone or the dining room is incredibly loud, a critic has an obligation to their readers to publish those notes. They owe it to readers to share what they know about a restaurant, positive and negative. This is how Kirstie Kimball, an independent restaurant critic in Minnesota, describes how she builds trust with her audience:

My readers trust me precisely because they are the only people I’m accountable to, and because I’m not afraid to get into the mud, punch up, or say when a restaurant has had a misstep. “You have my back,” one of my readers said when I met her while sitting at the bar at The Briar. “I know if you say something is good, it’s because it is.” I asked her what I ask everyone when they say this to me, “Why?” And her answer was, “Because when it’s not good, you say so.” To have one, you have to have the other.

This is the work of criticism and the work of journalism. As a journalist, you have an obligation to not bury a story or spin it just because it makes someone you know look bad. This is why journalists, traditionally, are not popular, and why you need to develop a thick skin to become one. Sometimes the job attracts idealists who want to “speak truth to power,” where “power” is a stand-in for “things about the world I don’t like.” Unfortunately, you have to speak truth all the time, to everyone.

I’m describing a kind of idealized version of the profession here. Journalists screw up like everyone else and occasionally publish untrue things, in which case they typically issue a correction as soon as they can. In rare cases, journalists will make things up, and when this is discovered they should be driven out of the business.

More typically, some journalists, or “journalists” realize that by being hyper-partisan, they can garner a lot of attention — people who agree with them will support their work, and some people who disagree will criticize them online, boosting their engagement. Even more commonly, journalists feel pressure to earn views and social media shares and so will try to make their stories as click-friendly as possible while remaining factually accurate. The economic incentives of social media encourage bombast, fake controversy, and overselling.

This is more or less what Eating With Experts is doing. It’s not factually untrue to say there are food writers who haven’t worked in kitchens, or that food writing, like a lot of writing on the internet, has been starved of resources. One response to noting this state of affairs would be to think about how you might train chefs to become writers, or how you could offer food journalists culinary training so they better understand their beats. But if you know anything about food media, you know the primary problem isn’t that food writers are ignorant, it’s that food writing jobs are disappearing. The challenge is on the audience side — can you build a business model that allows you to pay food journalists for their work? There are multiple outlets attempting to do this, and sometimes these outlets employ chefs as writers, like Caper does with its new “Chef in Residence” column. All of these new food publications are more interesting than Eating With Experts.

If you go to the Eating With Experts Instagram page, the posts are mostly videos of chefs sharing where they eat. That’s fine, people like that stuff, it’s been a staple of food videos for years — my former employer Eater, one of the most famous food media brands in the country, has a whole series called Chef’s Day Off that is literally just this idea. On Eating With Experts’ Substack, it’s the same concept, with chefs sharing dining recommendations, mostly in New York City. Here’s one of those recommendations, from a chef and restaurant owner named Eric Huang:

Chef Huang had four simple words to describe Super Taste: “Great name, great food.”

Almost everything on the menu — noodles, dumplings, soups — is under $10. We always go for the peanut noodles and the dumplings here. Slathering the dumplings in chili oil is a must.

That’s it, that’s the whole description of the Chinatown restaurant Super Taste. It’s 45 words, if you’re counting, from the people who complain that food media is too superficial and blurb-focused. Super Taste, by the way, is not an obscure hole in the wall but a pretty well known place that gets on best-of lists, though these list-makers generally include more information than Eating With the Experts provides. The Infatuation’s review is not a work of art, but it at least manages to inform the reader that the house speciality is hand-pulled noodles. If you go over to Eater, you can learn that this is the place that brought Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles to Chinatown in 2003. Eric Huang seems to be a successful restaurant owner and he has his own Substack; I’m sure he could tell you a lot about Super Taste’s food if you sat down with him. But the Eating With the Experts blurb winds up telling the reader almost nothing at all. That’s because writing restaurant blurbs that entertain and inform is challenging work that not everyone can do.

Being a journalist is not dissimilar to working at a restaurant. The pay generally stinks. A lot of people get into the work because they love it, and find the work doesn’t love them back. And in both cases, you have to deal with people who assume they can do your job — talented home cooks who think they could open a restaurant, passionate hobbyist writers who imagine they’d be great journalists. Sometimes, people can make that transition from amateur to pro. More often, they flounder, realizing they didn’t really understand the job.

We need more journalists. If the restaurant professionals at Eating With the Experts want to become journalists, I wish them the best, sincerely. I only hope that they enjoyed the experience of a bunch of strangers insulting them online, because there’s a lot more of that in their future.

1. Or podcasting, or making videos, etc.

2. Famously, some food critics have tried to conceal their identities by booking reservations under fake names or even wearing disguises, though I’m not sure how many critics actually do that stuff anymore.