Bill Keller's Bully Pulpit
Last week Emma Keller, the wife of New York Times columnist and former Times executive editor Bill Keller, wrote a post for the Guardian about Lisa Adams, a young Connecticut mother who has been tweeting for years about her breast cancer treatment and the ways she has been dealing with her illness. Adams' cancer metastasized in 2012, and she has been receiving palliative treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, where she has also assisted and advocated for research efforts. Emma Keller questioned Adams' approach. As Greg Miller of the Nation explains,
Emma Keller compares it to a 'Reality TV show.' She complains that Adams posted an update on her condition that morning and then had the nerve to post another one just hours later -- and wonders if her too-many tweets are 'a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies.' And she charges: 'You can put a "no visitors sign" on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch.'
Keller also asked, "Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI?" (too much information). In fact, as Hamilton Nolan of Gawker pointed out last week, Emma Keller tried to couch her criticisms as rhetorical questions.
Readers weren't impressed. Responses to Emma's post were understandably harsh, and the Guardian -- in a rare move -- deleted Keller's post with Lisa Adams' consent because, the editors wrote, the post was "inconsistent with The Guardian editorial code." Later the editors wrote that the post had "been removed pending investigation," perhaps because Emma Keller had published, without Adams' consent or knowledge, personal e-mails between the Adams and Keller. Keller apologized for this aspect of her post, which Daniel D'Addario of Salon characterizes as "a breach of ethics of a high order," but not for its content, which researcher Zeynep Tufekci writes, "also greatly misrepresented what was happening with Lisa Adams."
There is a certain sick irony in Emma Keller's complaints about Adams. Keller herself had a double mastectomy and wrote in September that not having to go through radiation and chemotherapy (as Adams has) filled her with guilt. Keller wrote in the September Guardian post,
What I've learnt over the past year or so is that those whose lives are upended by breast cancer are constantly hunting for information about how to live with it. The best way I can contribute is to help inform.
To that end, Emma Keller hosted three Guardian live chats. So breast cancer patients are "constantly hunting for information about how to live with it," and Adams is daily relating how she lives with her advanced-stage cancer. Adams' Twitter account has quite a following, so presumably many people appreciate the "information" she provides. But. As far as I can tell, Emma Keller thinks that she should be the arbiter of taste as to how people confront their illnesses, and she should be the conduit for dispensing just "the right amount" of information.
One supposes Emma Keller would be chastened by the criticisms of her post. Maybe she was and has simply declined to say so. But comes now husband Bill Keller to her defense -- and to the offense of Lisa Adams and most of the rest of us.
Bill Keller used his platform at the New York Times to contrast Lisa Adams' "fierce and very public cage fight" with his elderly "father-in-law's calm death.... His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America." By contrast, Bill Keller writes, "Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures." Keller mocks Adams, suggesting she is a foolish woman who, in a "morphine haze," can't face the fact that she is dying: "Lisa Adams is still alive, still blogging, and insists she is not dying, but the blog has become less about prolonging her survival and more about managing her excruciating pain. Her poetry has become darker.... I cannot imagine Lisa Adams reaching a point where resistance gives way to acceptance." He goes on to describe just how sick she is. He seems to be rooting for the Grim Reaper.
The responses to Bill and Emma Keller's attacks on Adams were swift. Greg Mitchell records some of the early tweeted responses. The Huffington Post has more. "... what's really undignified here is a married couple idly trashing a woman with Stage 4 cancer because they have a notion of what is the proper way to die," Daniel D'Addario writes.
They seem to believe that Ms Adams is being a diva, not just for tweeting about her illness but for her desire to struggle against the disease to the very end. They advise that she should go gently into this good night instead -- much as an elderly person who has reached the natural end of his life evidently. That these privileged jerks should even venture an opinion about how someone else should deal with a life-threatening illness reveals exactly what's so wrong with our elites. It really is all about them -- even how we should die. -- Digby
Zeynep Tufekci describes Bill Keller's post as
... what I can only call cancer-shaming: Don't tweet so much. He also pretty much calls on Adams to accept her fate 'with grace and courage,' quoting someone who 'perused' Adams' blog, directly implying that Lisa Adams is neither graceful nor courageous.... Both Kellers miss every point Lisa Adams makes -- and write articles unrelated to her actual experience, or the community around her.... Emma Keller's ... piece … is about Emma G. Keller's existential anxieties....
Bill Keller, on the other hand, has something he wants to say about how end of life is perhaps unwisely prolonged in small, painful increments with massive technological intervention in this country, so he projects this situation to Lisa Adams -- except that is not applicable in this case....
Bill Keller's piece is worse [than his wife's] in other ways because instead of trying to understand why his wife's piece drew such ire, he furthers the misunderstandings which are not just wrong, but are hurtful to a gravely ill person who is not yet dead, thank you very much. Also, Bill Keller has a huge platform so he should have spent more time actually researching the piece rather than what seems like an ill-advised rush to defend his wife.
Read Tufekci's whole post. He outlines everything the Kellers got wrong about Lisa Adams. Which is, well, everything.
Molly O'Reilly writes in Commonweal: Bill Keller "seems not to have thought for very long about how a mother with kids at home, however many there are, might legitimately approach her diagnosis differently than an elderly man like his father-in-law, whose choices Keller believes are dishonored by Adams's."
... the Keller family has written a bang-up pair of obituaries for her, if obituaries were think pieces about their writers. -- Hamilton Nolan
Margaret Sullivan, the Times' public editor, who emphasizes that it is "not my job" to critique columnists' opinions, nevertheless criticizes Keller for "issues ... of tone and sensitivity." Sullivan also cites proofs that Keller was unfamiliar with Adams' writings and of her personal history. Sullivan strongly implies Keller didn't know WTF he was writing about: "Mr. Keller's views here fall within what journalists would call 'fair comment' only to the extent that they are based on facts," she writes circumspectly.
Keller himself is not repentant for using, misrepresenting and abusing Adams. He suggests to Margaret Sullivan that many readers aren't very smart; they "misread my point, and some -- the most vociferous -- seem to believe that anything short of an unqualified 'right on, Lisa!' is inhumane or sacrilegious." To justify his attack, he pretends that Lisa Adams is a public figure, thus a legitimate target: "By living her disease in such a public way, by turning her hospital room into a classroom, she invites us to think about and debate some big, contentious issues." He denies that he and his wife "slammed" Adams.
Molly O'Reilly responds to Keller's self-defense,
Here I thought we'd have to wait till next week for Bill Keller to issue an 'I'm the real victim here, but I'm being big about it' nonresponse to his many critics, but Sullivan got it out of him before the day was out. Let's see, patting himself on the back for having 'touched a nerve'? Check. Smug disparagement of Twitter as a venue for response? Check. Why, it's almost as though he doesn't feel the least bit accountable to either readers or the actual facts.
Despite Keller's attempts to cast her as such, Lisa Adams is not a public figure. She is a private individual who has chosen to share her private thoughts. Her reasons for doing so are multiple. As Meghan O'Rourke of the New Yorker remarks, Lisa Adams "may be allowing us to overhear her decisions, but she is not asking us to callously debate them as if she were not still here."
That doesn't mean one can never ridicule or criticize private citizens. I do it occasionally, as when a bunch of wealthy people claimed "hardship" that they had to pay a little more for health insurance. You don't have to be a genius to see the difference between, say, wealthy whiners and people suffering genuine hardship. Neither must you be an excessively sensitive or thoughtful person to know it is heartless and cruel to disparage a person who is coping with debilitating illness. You don't have to approve of her methods of coping, but if you don't, you keep your mouth shut and wish her well. You offer what support you can. You let her know you're on her side. You offer encouragement, sympathy, empathy. That's not extraordinary; it's common decency. Almost everybody gets that and practices it.
A bully is a person who picks on people with less power than he. Bill Keller is a bully. He used Lisa Adams to promote his wife's work when he wrote approvingly of Emma's writing about Lisa Adams and linked to Emma's (now-deleted) post. Bill Keller misrepresented Lisa Adams' personal situation and her writings. And he abused her in other ways I've tried to outline above. That he did all this from the heights of his bully pulpit at perhaps the world's most prestigious big media outlet, that he did this to a private citizen who is struggling with illness and whom his wife had already decked, is unconscionable. I'll give Digby the last word:
Why would they think that using their perches at the top of the media food chain to bully some poor woman who is dealing with a deadly disease is even slightly appropriate? It's just bizarre.
Note: Below, I am reposting earlier comments on Bill Keller's column. Thanks to Barbarossa for bringing Keller's column to our attention.
Share Article