Having Your #Russiagate and Eating It Too

New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel certainly feels the precarity and angst of the average working gal. It's getting to be a real juggle of a struggle in the neoliberal jungle, people!

  Last week she had to juggle rewriting and padding the "blockbuster" Microsoft press release about more Russian hacking, with caring for her infant daughter, with tweeting up a storm on behalf of the corporate security state, with booking TV appearances to plug the Microsoft story in the interest of the corporate sponsors. She arrived at one early morning gig at MSNBC (formerly Microsoft-NBC) after breaking numerous traffic laws, only to find out they didn't have the right makeup on hand. So it was a battle against both time and finding the requisite under-eye fatigue concealer.

  Just reading her "Times Insider" story about how hectic life can be for a dedicated yet frenzied #Russiagate journalist left me feeling exhausted. Her juggling routine left me juggling only two reactionary balls in my own head, compared to her hundred: whether to write her a note and advise her to prioritize her rat-race priorities for the sake of her mental and physical health, or to just ignore her. Tweeting her is not an option, since I have always had a deliberately moribund account.

  So pragmatic juggler that I am, I just decided to split the difference, drop the balls, and let off some steam on a blog she doesn't read. Who has time? Certainly not Sheera Frenkel, already so busy it's a wonder she still has time to breathe.

Her description of a #Russiagate-intensive day in the life of a Times working mom-reporter:

I’ve learned a lot about “the juggle” in the year since my daughter was born. I joined The Times as a cybersecurity correspondent last year when I was eight months pregnant, fully aware I was taking a high-pressure job just as everything in my life was about to change. But I have a supportive husband, family and friends. My editors and colleagues are understanding, and my husband and I were lucky enough to be able to afford a nanny. I looked around and saw so many moms doing it under circumstances so much tougher than the ones I was facing.

Her story itself is a juggling act within a juggling act. How does a working mom Times reporter accomplish kvetch-bragging about her privileged struggle without sounding so privileged and whiney about it? By juxtaposing her struggles with those of "ordinary" working moms who are not quite so well-paid, well-supported, well-understood, married, nannied, credentialed and befriended, of course!

There is a reason parents describe it as a juggle. Even with all the help, there is constantly a ball in the air you are in danger of dropping. Most days, the only way to get through is to remove one of those balls. Stories need to be written, baby needs to get bathed; we can go one more day without filling the car up with gas, buying groceries, doing laundry. The first thing to go is always the personal errands we used to prioritize: dinner with friends, a visit to the gym or a haircut. Those are now icing on the cake, if and when we get to them.

 And what about all those extras, those little things we all do to advance our careers that fall outside of the 9-to-5 requirements laid out in our job descriptions? There are the after-work drinks, the last-minute dinners with a visiting boss. The out-of-town conferences and meetings that aren’t mandatory, technically.

 Oh, and those annoying appearances on MSNBC and CNN, which are practically mandatory in Consolidated Corporate Media World. Tellingly, Sheera Frenkel does not write about how "supportive" her employer is in providing any kind of onsite nursery care, or subsidized long-term maternity leave. It's a competitive, dog-eat-dog out there, and "just saying no" to overwork, no matter how well-compensated, seems never to occur to her. She couldn't even say no when her bosses asked her write a sidebar story about juggling and tweeting for the weekend edition. They want you to know that there are dedicated professionals behind the #Russiagate propaganda, and that they are human beings just like you and me.

The subtext of her piece is that there's always some other talented journalist out there, waiting in the wings, salivating to steal your job right out from under you. So she and others in the professional "knowledge class" are resigned to the fact that they are essentially on call to their corporate propaganda masters 24 hours a day and seven days a week. She writes unquestioningly:

 In journalism, which is never a 9-to-5 job, it’s even harder. News breaks at all hours of the day, and any phone call might be an important source with blockbuster news. Journalists are increasingly pushed to have a presence on social media. They are called to speak on television news shows to promote their stories. To be the face behind the byline means being in a studio early in the morning or late in the evening — exactly the hours of the day most parents carve out to be with their kids.

Sheera Frenkel sounds like most professional people, a "willing slave of capital." She doesn't need her "caring" editors to order her to work like a slave. She has totally internalized the ethos, her only solution being how to creatively carve out some spare time for the baby.

As cultural critic Franco Berardi tells it in "Futurability," we are now in an era where

 The power of knowledge has been uncoupled from social welfare.We have entered an age of techno-barbarianism: innovation has provoked precarity, richness has created mass misery, solidarity has become competition, the connected brain has uncoupled from the social. 

The conjunction among bodies has become fragile, while the connection among disembodied brains has grown permanent, all-encompassing, and obsessional, to the point of replacing life with the spectral projection of life on the ubiquitous screen.

  So after her harried onscreen MSNBC appearance to plug the latest New York Times hysteria, all she could do to express her frustration was to take to the ubiquitous Twitter screen and vent into the void. And lo and behold, other working parents came out of the cyber-depths to vent right back. For one bright shining moment, Sheera Frenkel was no longer alone, no longer just a cog in the capitalist machine, no longer an ant in the mindless ant farm, no longer an atomized dehumanized automaton. The cyber-security expert was herself fleetingly cyber-secure.

Of course, those are not her words, but mine. Here are her words:

Lots of moms, and some dads, wrote me to say that they could relate to the impossibility of trying to give your all both at work and at home. Some people wrote to tell me that I was a terrible mother, and that I should have stayed home with my child. Others wrote to tell me I was a terrible journalist, skirting my responsibility to inform the public in order to be with my child.

That's another thing. Besides print reporters plugging #Russiagate to TV reporters, and print reporters then plugging and quoting TV reporters in the newspaper in order to cement the "narrative," it is also the duty of journalists working the #Russiagate franchise to tweet incessantly and thereby portray themselves as central actors - sympathetic, put-upon victims of both the reading public and Trump - in whatever story they are writing. It does not occur to them to quit Twitter, let alone their jobs, or after-hours drinks and TV appearances. At most, as the uber-productive Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently did, they will "pull back" from social media until such time as they can recover from the 24/7 chore of feeding the trolls and then having to write more Times articles about the chore of feeding the trolls and pulling back from Twitter.

But to hear Sheera Frenkel cheerfully tell it, it's all been worth it. Or so she says. To admit otherwise might put a damper on her career. 

That's sad. Back when I was a working-mom journalist, my most memorably frantic career moment came when I had to abandon an article and leave work early when the school nurse called me to pick up my daughter, on whose head lice had been discovered. I drove the 20 miles to pick her up, envisioning juggling my nitpicking editor with the physical picking of nits. Luckily, the "lice" turned out to be just remnants of shampoo, which as a juggling working mom I had failed to completely rinse out the previous night. The school nurse's name was, aptly enough, Mrs. Dudman. I doubt that she reads this blog or even tweets, let alone breathes. She'd be at least 97.


 Back then, (in the temporarily booming deregulated Clintonoid 90s) I was even allowed to work from home on days that my kids were sick. This being before the Internet, the paper would actually send a courier over to pick up my copy.

Reporters covering local news aren't the only ones out of a job these days. What's a courier, anyway?

Foreign democracy-meddler Rupert Murdoch eventually bought the local paper, which was drastically downsized and assimilated into the consolidated corporate media borg. I didn't even have the outlet of Twitter to unleash my angst and my wrath. I think that was probably a blessing and still is, because unleashing your angst on Twitter and expecting to hold on to your brilliant career when, ten years from now your angst is deemed un-PC, is not conducive to a continued brilliant career in any field.

I wouldn't trade places with Sheera Frenkel for a million bucks or a thousand cable TV spots.