Anna Lind-Guzik was never fooled by the campaign and tactics utilized by our 45th president.
“My concern started when he was still running,” she says. “I knew he had a shot and any shot felt too much for me. I had a moment, it was after he won and the New York Times was reporting on Mar a Lago and his wish to call it the Winter White House. I had a trauma reaction. I was looking at it on my phone and I threw my phone.”
Lind-Guzik is the executive editor of the nonprofit feminist outlet The Conversationalist and host of the Unbreaking Media podcast. She’s also the child of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who has a background in law and academia. As such, she’s aware of the ways in which the past has become present. She also knows how and why that’s dangerous.
One of her favorite writers is Vasily Grossman, a Soviet Jew who was persecuted by the state after World War II, partly for his novels but also because he dared to write about the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war. He spoke to “the way writing and fiction can compete with propaganda for the truth,” she says.
She launched The Conversationalist after Donald Trump won the presidency in part because she was “concerned about what was happening in the States and I was concerned it was not being reported on accurately and that, specifically, American Exceptionalism was getting in the way. The idea that we are superior and have nothing to learn from other countries and we are not comparable. I thought that was wrong and a very narrow look on what was happening in our country,” she says. The Conversationalist started as a Medium blog but has become a nonprofit with a team of freelancers taking deeper dives and writing longer pieces, sometimes about news but other times about topics that matter more to women and groups that might be sidelined or not taken as seriously by mainstream media.
“We wanted to create a platform for experts, people with skin in the game, people who knew their subjects deeply, to be writing the stories that were not getting published elsewhere,” Lind-Guzik says. That means the writers are “primarily women, women of color, people whose expertise is more easily dismissed for reasons outside of their knowledge itself.”
Putting the F word — feminism — front and center might drive away some potential readers, but that’s not a concern for Lind-Guzik’s.
“We’re probably not for those people,” she laughs. “When I think of feminism, to me, it’s very much about the personal and the political. The way our lives play out, the way our relationships, our work is not separate from politics. It is not separate from the larger dynamics at play.”
Lind-Guzik also sees the problems with the way mainstream reporters do their jobs, while admitting there’s a double-edged sword involved.
“When it comes to political reporting, it’s too deferential in many ways. I think both-sides journalism is also a real problem in that it gives weight to issues that do not have equally weighted sides, that might have 15 different sides. It reduces the complexity and then also creates false equivalence. I do not think our industry is well-equipped to handle authoritarianism.”
But those reporters who aren’t deferential might find themselves on the outside looking in, as was demonstrated by the reporters whose press credentials to the White House were revoked or suspended under the previous president.
“The bigger problem with access journalism is, with someone like that, they don’t keep you around unless they’re gaining more from you than you are from them,” Lind-Guzik. “If you’ve done your job, you’re going to get thrown out.”
