The Interpreter: The NBA’s China problem & NBC’s Lauer problem

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October 11, 2019

Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name.

On our minds: Still impeachment, of course. But in the meantime we're going to talk about the N.B.A., China, NBC and Matt Lauer.

Salience and Silence

The N.B.A. flagship retail store in Beijing on Wednesday. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Our big takeaway from this week's (non-impeachment-related) headlines: When hierarchies shift, things get weird.

The other two big stories dominating the news this week are the N.B.A.'s conflict with the Chinese government, and the allegations from Ronan Farrow's new book that NBC tried to kill a story about Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct because the network feared that might expose star the anchor Matt Lauer's own wrongdoing.

There are of course, significant differences between them.

The NBA-China controversy is about a powerful entity trying to silence criticism — in this case, the Chinese government retaliating against the NBA because Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a message on Twitter saying "Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong."

The Farrow revelations, by contrast, are a part of the broader #MeToo movement's efforts to break the silence that has protected powerful abusers for years.

But we don't think these stories are just gaining attention because of outrage over the conduct involved. We think it's because of salience.

Salience, in political science terms, is something that is prominent or noticeable. Issues that are broadly salient tend to have political significance — they can shape elections and affect votes, as well as the broader cultural context that shapes law and policy — so researchers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how it works.

One answer: Change leads to salience. For instance, studies have found that nativist backlashes are most likely in places where there has been a sudden increase in the immigrant population, even if the overall percentage of immigrant residents remains low. By contrast, a community that has a large but stable immigrant population rarely supports nativist politics.

Change is unsettling and exciting. It freaks us out. So when things change, we pay attention.

That helps explain why the N.B.A. controversy and Mr. Farrow's allegations against NBC are getting so much coverage.

"Wait," you might be thinking, "of course they're capturing our attention. They just happened! They involve huge companies! How could we not pay attention?"

Sure. But there wasn't nearly as much of a furor when the Chinese government shut down Marriott's website for weeks in early 2018 after a customer survey listed China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet as different countries. Or when Gap and United Airlines encountered similar trouble.

That's most likely because those incidents weren't as much of a shift from the status quo. As Amy Qin and Julie Creswell wrote in The Times this week, "for international companies looking to do business in China, the rules were once simple. Don't talk about the 3 T's: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square crackdown." When Marriott and Gap got in trouble for violating that rule, people weren't particularly surprised. The story quickly faded from the news: "Situation plays out as expected" just isn't a grabby headline.

This latest episode, however, is a bit different. An N.B.A. employee's tweet on a personal account triggered a backlash from the government and the Chinese public. Shortly thereafter, the video game company Blizzard stripped a player of his prize money after he expressed support for the Hong Kong protesters. These weren't violations of the 3 Ts, or even corporate actions at all. Rather, China was asking private companies to police private individuals' speech.

How far will China be able to go in deputizing foreign companies to police individuals' speech? The answer is uncertain. And that possibility of further unpredictable changes makes the issue salient.

In the case of Mr. Farrow's story about NBC and Mr. Lauer, the change is more positive: a power shift away from men who could once expect that their employers would actively work to insulate them from the consequences of their abusive actions. NBC was hardly alone: Fox News helped cover up sexual misconduct by Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes; CBS that of Les Moonves and Charlie Rose.

Even when the abuse and enabling were being discussed right out in the open, they remained somehow invisible. When Seth Macfarlane joked about Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct at the 2013 Oscars, congratulating the Best Supporting Actress nominees on "no longer having to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein," it got a laugh, but nothing else happened.

But when the Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story of Mr. Weinstein's sexual misconduct in The Times, more and more women stepped forward to say "me too" and tell their stories.

The invisible protections became visible — then started to crumble.

Now norms are shifting. More and more, what used to be private dangers for women are turning into public career disasters for men. People once so powerful that they were untouchable have become outcasts. And although every society in the world remains deeply unequal, and the majority of abuses likely still go unreported and unpunished, movements like #MeToo and Times Up have brought a sense that there is more change still to come.

But eventually there will be a new baseline. Norms will settle into a new equilibrium — hopefully one in which would-be accusers are deterred by the increased likelihood of punishment, but we don't know that yet. Once that happens, the salience will fade, and the system will become invisible again.

What We're Reading

In keeping with the social-change theme, we were excited to come across two papers by Alice Evans, a political scientist at King's College London, examining how cities in Zambia and Cambodia became more supportive of gender equality. She argues that because cities are expensive, women are more likely to work outside the home, which then helps erode gender stereotypes and normalizes women's participation in public life.
"She Said," the new book by our colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, reads like a tightly plotted procedural. We admit we are suckers for stories about journalism, but it was fascinating to get a window into their investigative process alongside their stories of the women Harvey Weinstein abused and the much larger ecosystem of people who helped him avoid consequences for his actions.

How are we doing?

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Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

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