loading . . . Trey Harris (@treyharris) I wrote yesterday about why Bari Weiss’s choice of Nick Bilton to run 60 Minutes landed so oddly for me personally. The one and only time in my life I’ve ever complained to a publication about its journalism was March 2015, when I wrote to The New York Times about a ridiculous article their technology reporter had written, lending credence to silly woo-woo claims about cell phones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth causing cancer. That reporter was Nick Bilton.
The Public Editor (the Times’ unfortunately now-ended ombudsman), @Margaret Sullivan, gave me a call, and I suggested some good tech journalists she could check with to verify how strange the claims, and how disreputable his ‘expert’ sources, were. She soon published something about the article, quoting me liberally (even in the headline, no less!).¹
(This was a banner week for me — my name and words appeared in the Times the day before I proposed to my husband.)
Bilton gave Sullivan a quote: “as I noted in my column, after doing my own reporting on this topic, I’m no longer going to talk on my cellphone for long periods of time without a headset. And I will likely also keep my soon-to-be-born son away from cellphone use until his brain develops, as erring on the side of caution, until more research is done, seems to me to be the smart and intelligent approach to this issue.”
He wrote “doing my own reporting,” let’s note, before “doing my own research” was a meme — but still. The expert Bilton relied on most in his article was a known quack, Joseph Mercola. (He was a favorite of RFK Jr.’s early slide into madness.)
In response, the Times conducted a brief investigation that led to the article’s gaining a lengthy editor’s note. (I don’t know how elite journalism’s processes work, but others have told me it was the tiniest step short of a full retraction.)
Everyone makes mistakes and is wrong about things, so I’m not going to claim that this incident tells you everything you need to know about Bilton, let alone how he’ll manage 60 Minutes. But re-reading his article, it still seems amazingly credulous and non-scientific for the Times. This is a guy who wrote he thought ChatGPT might be sentient — in 2022. It’s just… unserious in a way that I now deeply associate with Bari Weiss and MAHA and other “thought leaders” in Trumpland.
You know, it’s weirdly gratifying to find that I was at odds with someone who appears to be Trump’s newest propaganda man months before Trump even rode the golden escalator. It’s a bit of a “I was a Nirvana fan before anyone knew who they were” flex.²
Who knows? Maybe Nick Bilton will be a savant at running 60 Minutes. Chris Licht saved Colbert’s Late Show and built it into the show it became. (Of course, Licht’s later adventures at CNN are not the most encouraging precedent.) But I’m not optimistic.
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¹ If you care to read it, it isn’t paywalled; it’s at: <https://nyti.ms/43CkYuY>.
² And, for the record, I was. It was my first concert I drove myself to at 16 at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, just weeks after I got disowned, but I’d bought the tickets before that and, dammit, my friends and I were going. It was the night of my first kiss and the night I learned I’m allergic to beer. Kurt Cobain got naked on stage. Ah, grunge… https://substack.com/@treyharris/note/c-267239053?r=1ftdt
