Racing into journalistic oblivion

INDIGNITY VOL. 4, NO. 41

THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK™

What Was the Media?

THE SECOND MOST dispiriting thing to read this week wasn't a story, it was what happened if you tried to go to the URL for a story. Kate Wagner wrote about going on a sponsor-funded trip to a Formula One car race in Austin, Texas, for Road & Track, and the same day her account of the experience went up, it vanished. The link now redirects to the general motorsports page for Road & Track, on which there is no sign that a long, lavishly laid out feature story by a well-known writer ever been published. 

The news that the story had ceased to exist arrived, for me, at the same moment I learned that the story had ever existed, through Choire Sicha's Dinner Party newsletter for New York magazine on Friday. By Monday, Today in Tabs was sharing the Internet Archive link to the original piece. It's an excellent piece of scene reporting, with Wagner combining her eye as an architecture critic with her expertise as a bicycle-racing journalist with her overall dread of The Way We Live Now to convey both the genuine thrills of Formula One and the moral and ethical horrors of the junket through the plutocratic VIP section, all against the landscape of contemporary Austin:

I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.

But in the middle of catching up with Wagner's lost story, I ran into the most dispiriting thing about it. Casey Johnston, the author of the She's a Beast newsletter, posted on Bluesky:

10 years ago, if a story got taken down, esp for questioning power too much, there'd be weeks-long rioting. now it's like the part in Clue where the gang goes in the kitchen, finds a new dead body, and instead of freaking out, trudges sullenly back to the drawing room

Johnston was absolutely, devastatingly correct. An admired writer had just had a piece censored by a major magazine, after publication, almost certainly because the powerful subjects of the story objected to it. Yet somehow, in the journalism world of 2024, it wasn't really a scandal. And even this didn't quite reach the bottom of the problem: I'm not sure an old-fashioned media scandal can happen anymore.