A Compendium of Media Nepotism
29th March 2023
It’s one of the least polite questions one can pose at any media gathering: “How did your parents’ success in media affect your own career?” For months, we’ve been asking it of people who’ve traversed familial paths. Some replied tersely (“pass, thanks”), others declined to comment with kindness or never replied at all. (Don’t worry: we’ll be naming them all.) But some agreed to share the thoughts that come from a lifetime of anxieties and striving, and their stories spilled out as if unleashed from an electric tension.
It’s not hard to understand why nepotism is such a social taboo in media circles. Privileges of all shapes are under stricter scrutiny lately, and notions that individuals should credit their good fortune to something other than their own talent and work ethic especially rankle. But the subject of nepotism in journalism has long brought out streaks of apoplexy in even habitually mild observers. “Nepotism is by no means confined to politics,” wrote John Bakeless, editor of The Living Age before becoming a journalism professor at New York University, in his 1931 book Magazine Making. He complained it “is especially rampant in publishing, largely because of the attractive character of the work and the prestige which for some odd reason attaches to it. The most grotesquely unqualified people are perpetually struggling to ‘get into editorial work.’” For example, he added, “I have known a proof-reader who could neither spell nor use reference books.”