Long ago, when I was starting out in the world of journalism, I discovered the anonymous but irreplaceable character of the “slot man.”
On the various section desks of the daily newspaper, editors were seated in a horseshoe arrangement of desks. When reporters weren’t out on a story, they worked there too. The slot man, or “slot” for short, put the section together: gathering stories, deciding on placement, laying out the pages. The best slot was also an editorial maestro. Moving paragraphs around, demanding a quote or a fact to strengthen a point, adding a nut graf, sharpening definitions, and shifting emphasis, he could make a good story great.
Legendary slots went even further. They took locally reported material and blended it with information from wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters, The New York Times, and more. With a broad and deep knowledge of the news — and history and human nature and storytelling — they could fashion a compelling, fair-minded, and sprightly summary of the latest news developments. If the byline didn’t carry the local scribe’s name, it would simply read: “From Wire Services.”
A friend once told me about the slot man on The Tennessean, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who reworked the stories of a young reporter named David Halberstam. Starting out, Halberstam’s stories needed help: better reporting, better leads and transitions, better quotes, better background information. Later, Halberstam became a superstar reporter in Vietnam for The New York Times. He wrote a series of bestsellers, like The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and (my favorite) The Breaks of the Game. But Halberstam needed that boost from the slot man in Nashville.
That gets us to the matter of Seth Abramson, the professor/author/podcaster/columnist/tweeter/lawyer/poet/gadfly who has attempted, in his own way, to provide a comprehensive overview of the many sprawling and tangled scandals of Donald Trump. This story, of course, reaches back to Russian beauty pageants, Saudi development deals, sketchy bank loans, crashed gambling dens, lawsuits, bag men, and enforcers.
To describe his work, Abramson uses the term “curatorial journalism.” With some exceptions, Abramson doesn’t pound the pavement and work sources for his information. He gathers news and legal documents from all over the world and tries to fit them into a larger whole.
Abramson’s great insight is that, too often, journalists forget about their stories almost as soon as they get posted. Reporters constantly chase the next new story and don’t have the time or inclination to weave old revelations into new stories. Abramson decided he would do just that, gather all of the great scoops and revelations from all the amazing reporters and bring them together into a single compelling narrative.
He is, in other words, a modern freelance slot man.
Abramson’s output has been overwhelming. He has written three dense books — Proof of Collusion, Proof of Conspiracy, and Proof of Corruption — that detail the crimes, high and low, of Trump businesses and political operations. He has a hit podcast and a feed on Substack. And he has almost a million followers on Twitter, where he spins out lengthy “threads” of tweets to make exhaustive arguments. He even did a Playboy interview.
Some people don’t understand what he does, but it’s really quite simple: He compiles info, wherever he can get it, and works it into stories. He checks his sources, as much as anyone can check sources about shady meetings in the Middle East to fix presidential elections for Russian assets. He’s serious about getting his facts right.
Abramson rankles some. The term “curatorial journalist” has a rarefied feel to it; curators, after all, acquire and arrange art in fancy, hushed museums. He also talks a lot about poetics and meta-journalism and metamodernism. If you care about literary and cultural theory, these ideas all offer some good chin-scratching opportunities. But for ordinary people, trying to make sense of this dangerous autocratic moment, such language can feel abstract and egotistical.
The old-time slot would not have talked like that. He would have said: “Look, I’m just tryna make sense of this mess. Who did what, when, and why? You know, follow the money. Connect the dots. That’s all.”
Hit Job?
Enter Lyz Lenz, an Iowa-based writer whose work has appeared in the Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and The Washington Post. She is also the author of a new book on pregnancy called Belabored. Her writing has a certain snarky pizzazz.
Lenz wrote a long takedown of Abramson, titled “Thread Man,” in the Columbia Journalism Review. Her main contention is that Abramson splices together unverified rumors and hearsay, as well as real facts, in his work on Trump.
She claims, for example, that he embraced the Steele Dossier as if it were proven fact. “The reliability of the Steele dossier is, to put it mildly, in question; a report by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found that the dossier was dubious, unvetted, and shady as hell.” Actually, Abramson has carefully tracked what parts of the dossier have been verified independently and which parts have not. He says about 70 percent of the dossier has been confirmed. I’ve heard other experts say the same.
In the guise of demanding better accountability from Abramson, she absolves Trump: Oh, just forget about the Steele Dossier. That’s just gossip.
Abramson says he has spent about $75,000 to hire his own fact checkers. He did not want to get caught making an avoidable error in his books. Without doubt, his book will have some errors. Journalism is still just the first draft of history. As Abramson says, we now understand only the surface of the recent period in our history. It will take years of work, by legions of historians and journalists, to get to the bottom of it all.
Lenz has a hard time understanding Abramson’s logic. She complains that he uses others’ work. Well, that’s his point: to gather and synthesize an otherwise sea of confusion, like the slot man of yore. That’s his project. If she wants a different kind of book on Trump’s business and political activities, maybe she should write it. To undermine his deep dive, she says his extensive sourcing is actually, deep down, a trick.
Abramson is meticulous about sourcing, yet it feels a little disingenuous: he can say that his assertions have been verified by “major media reporting” and if he’s wrong, it’s not his fault; if he’s right, the facts were always there in front of us, and only he was smart enough to see the big picture. (How can he be a conspiracy theorist, he asked me, if “it’s all reporting from major media outlets”?) Slap a label of “proof” on the cover and call it meta-journalism—when really what you’ve done is news aggregation, selling three books based on other people’s work and claiming to offer proof of things that these very same journalists have said they cannot, did not, find.
Read that passage carefully. Abramson’s citations don’t count because “it feels a little disingenuous.” When he offers credit to the countless reporters who have reported on this topic, she holds that against him too. She says Abramson takes credit when the facts prove true and avoids responsibility if they fall short. That’s Lyn Lenz reading Seth Abramson, not reporting or even analysis.
Is Lenz doing performance art here? Take a look at how she impugns his character without evidence: “He denies doing it for the money, insisting that he is a public servant and educator. He just wants the truth to get out there, he told me. But his virality speaks to a different kind of validation, one that is less about monetary reward than cultural capital.” Work backwards to see her logic: His work is viral, therefore he must be in it for fame, if not money.
By the way, did Lenz actually meet Abramson? Yes, I realize we’re all locked down in the pandemic. But from her story and Abramson’s accounts, it doesn’t seem like there was a real effort to meet him on his own turf. Zoom’s fine, so’s the phone, even email. But if you’re doing to do a long-distance profile, make sure to connect in a meaningful way with the subject. Especially (LOL) if one of your complaints is that he doesn’t get out of the house for research.
Deep down, Lyz Lenz seems to resent Abramson for his Twitter fame. He has 928,000 followers but she has only 63,000. Reason for jealousy, right? You can practically feel her snarky anger bubbling up …
Ha! Gotcha! Actually, I have no idea about her motive. But Lyz Lenz makes these kinds of rhetorical moves often in her CJR takedown.
Abramson is hopping mad. He is threatening to take her to court. He is sending a detailed recitation of Lenz’s alleged errors and misstatements to the general counsel at Columbia University. He points out numerous instances where he tried to explain himself, both to Lenz and a fact-checker for CJR, to no effect. He lists a number of cases where she flat-out misstates the record. And, he says, he has the receipts. Working on his books about Trumpism, he had no choice but to carefully track every source, every fact. So he’s armed for bear.
Back to Basics
Seth Abramson, a man of unusual energy and stamina, took a risk and tried to do something no one else wanted to do — that is, to lay out a complete record of the Russiagate, using every scrap of information he could find. Most journalists don’t do that. Too often, journalists slight the scoop they did not get. Abramson did not have the opportunity or the inclination to get out and act like Bob Woodward, so he decided to do something different. He decided to be the slot man for the Trump era.
But something about Abramson rankles people. He sometimes acts like a know-it-all on Twitter. He waves his credentials around. He uses abstruse academic jargon (surprise, surprise). Lenz joins the Daily Beast in accusing him of exaggerating his place in various artistic events, like he’s Zelig. That bothers me, but others do it too (hello, Papa Hemingway; step right up, Truman Capote) — not an excuse, but also not the main point when assessing his actual work.
In a brief email exchange last summer, I told Abramson that I wish he had given his story a leaner arc, alternating tight narratives with essential definitions and background information. That’s the ultimate formula for complicated stories: Trees, forest, trees, forest, trees …
To his credit, Abramson wanted to avoid contriving scenes: “When Bob Woodward wrote Fear, he was stuck taking Steve Bannon’s word for how Bannon’s conversations with federal agents unfolded, with the predictable result that in those conversations Bannon sounds like Aristotle and Mueller and his assistants—some of the best legal minds in America—uniformly sound like Deputy Dog.” I mostly disagree but I get his point. So ixnay on the Woodward-style scenes. As Lyz Lenz notes and he acknowledges, that can make his writing dense and hard to read.
But you know what? Seth Abramson did a good job putting pieces together, as a first draft of history. Now it’s time for a break. Let’s get everyone to go to their corners. Let the pieces hang for a while. Then, as Trump and his gang get hauled into court and investigators, reporters, and historians do their thing, let’s see how the pieces come together. My bet is that Abramson’s work will offer a worthwhile roadmap.
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