The Celebrity Profile Is A Partial Truth
Just Like Ballerina Farm's Instagram
In an excellent piece about how celebrity profiles reflect the ever shifting power dynamic between celebrities and the media,
asserts that, “the more control the stars have over their own press, the more boring that press will be.”This truth is especially enlightening in the light of the second NYT profile of Hannah Neeleman*, which is perhaps even less critically curious than the first (the fact that NYT deemed it necessary to devote two profiles to BF in the span of one year is another story altogether).
Hannah and Daniel Neeleman have a considerable amount of power over their own press. They’ve been assiduously crafting their image through their Instagram accounts (and TikTok and Youtube) for years, building reputations as the Queen (and Prince Consort) of all things nuclear family Americana. And as the Neelemans have grown in celebrity and reach, they’ve brought on a public relations team, photographers, videographers, and likely both a stylist and artistic designer. Hannah’s personal style was never as prairie goddess coherent as it is now (scroll down in this piece to see what I mean). And the Ballerina Farm logo and branding used to be a poorly drawn ballerina that might be at home atop a child’s music box. There was an actual pig.
So in the wake of the most recent NYT profile of Hannah Neeleman, it’s worth interrogating how a generally fawning piece about the Neelemans as plucky, altruistic entrepreneurs comes to exist. What sort of mechanisms are at work to throw into relief all that is unobjectionable and innocuous about the Ballerina Farm empire? And how do those same mechanisms obfuscate what is implicitly insidious about BF and the proliferation of trad content, which has steadily grown in both popularity and volume since 2020?
A celebrity profile is not the work of one writer. As Anne Helen writes, there are many cooks in the kitchen. There are, in fact, multiple kitchens.
Profile writing is not, and has never been, neutral. It’s like the rest of journalism in that way: the journalist has conversations with the subject, and in addition to choosing the questions for which they want answers, they also choose how to interweave their conversations with “secondaries” (interviews with people who know or have analyzed the subject) and “scenes” (descriptions of interactions or moments with the subject of the profile, all of which have been chosen by the subject (and their publicist) and/or the author (and their editor). The questions, answers, secondaries, and scenes — alongside general authorial observations, transitions between sections, etc. etc. — shape the narrative of the piece, the feel of the profile.
I’ve written two profiles of minor celebrities, neither of whom have a combined 22 million followers on social media, and neither of whom are as polarizing as Hannah Neeleman. I was given relatively free reign to craft my own questions, but had to gain access to my secondary interviews through the subjects’ publicists (the publicists were not, of course, going to offer me anyone critical of those subjects). Writers also have no way of knowing the conditions under which the subjects agreed to the profiles in the first place. Then of course, I was restrained by word count, the amount of time I was granted access to the subject, and by the function each profile was meant to serve in the publication.
Whereas I can frame and shape a story in this newsletter according to (for better or worse) my own biases, belief systems, and intellectual interests, a single writer doesn’t have that type of leeway for big legacy publications like the NYT. Writing a profile is hard, which is one of the many reasons so many celebrity profiles feel unsatisfying and opaque to readers (except not this one!!!!). And whatever ends up being published is the result of many people’s subjective analyses.
In the case of the recent BF profile, which was written by food reporter Julia Moskin, and which appeared in NYT’s food section, the function was to highlight Hannah Neeleman’s history with food, cooking, and business acumen. Plenty of similar profiles have been written about the Gaineses, the couple who walked so the Neelemans could run. While Joanna Gaines hasn’t elicited quite as many opinions as Hannah Neeleman, the Gaineses are certainly not free from controversy. But the majority of glossy profiles of Joanna, Chip, and their domestic empire typically elude that controversy.
The recent Ballerina Farm profile was likely not intended to be a cultural critique or a deep dive into the political impact of trad influencer culture. And I can only assume that the profile landing in the food section was the result of a brilliant tactical move from the BF publicity team. By ostensibly pitching the NYT food section, Ballerina Farm PR all but ensured that the focus would remain on BF protein powder, Hannah’s love of food, that fucking sourdough, and the wholesome roots of her propensity for home cooking. Rather than . . . everything else.
, who covers influencer culture for Teen Vogue, found the inclusion of the profile in the food section curious. “Ideally,” she said via email, “I would’ve loved a food writer, a Styles writer, and a business writer to collaborate because that’s the truth of Ballerina Farm – she is the intersection of all three things and I think only focusing on one of those things is what gave us this limited view.”The food section of it all might have provided a bit of a journalistic buffer for the Neelemans, but even so,
, who covered celebrity journalism for years (and still does in her newsletter), told me via email that she was surprised at just how fluffy the NYT profile was.It had the cadence of a women’s magazine puff piece profile. The kinds that always start with I spent the day with C celebrity and was surprised at how many French fries they ate. Those glossy mags relied on celebrity cooperation to land the cover stars they needed to sell magazines. So they created a veneer of access while maintaining the exact image a celebrity and their team wanted. But the Times doesn’t rely on celebrities for their bread and butter so the puffery doesn’t really make sense.
Fortesa concurred, telling me she feels like “the profile treated Hannah with kid-gloves, which is unfair both to readers and to Hannah herself because she is a tycoon and she is also a trad wife, or at least she has become a tycoon through performing trad wifedom.”
In a celebrity profile, of course, we never know what “spends a day with” actually means. Maybe it’s three half hour interviews spread throughout the day. Maybe it’s two meals. Maybe it’s every waking moment from sunup to sundown. The point is, we don’t know. We can’t know. The Times made the extremely tired point that the shiny veneer of life shared on social media is never the whole truth, but the same can be said of the celebrity profile.
While Jo, Fortesa, and I were all surprised by the blandness of this BF profile, many others were decidedly not. When I posted about my general bafflement on Instagram, several people DMed me to question my bafflement, indicating that this type of soft support of culturally divisive and hugely influential public figures is something they've come to expect from the Times.
NYT has come under attack in recent years for its sometimes uncritical approach to alt right extremist positions, which some have argued has the effect of normalizing, if not tacitly okaying those positions. The angle, lens, and framing through which the media reports a story can be hugely responsible for how dramatically any given Overton window shifts. There is no such thing as true objectivity in journalism. No matter how hard the NYT or any other media outlet tries. Even the decision to devote newspaper space to this topic rather than that topic is a subjective choice made by a person (or people) with opinions, and such choices have real outcomes.
The Times has also been criticized for its dubious record on trans rights coverage, helping to drum up moral panics about children seeking healthcare while failing to shed nearly as much light on the violence and stigma negatively impacting the trans community.
The Neelemans’ impact on the culture at large is so vast, though, that the Times sort of HAD to include at least a little prickly context. But the delivery of that context does little to interrogate the scope or impact of the Neelemans’ power.
In the profile, Julia Moskin poses hypothetical questions about Hannah Neeleman’s role in the culture wars but doesn’t really answer those questions: “Is Hannah Neeleman a modern homemaker choosing her own path? A deluded prisoner in a gilded cage of faith and family?” She also refers to the London Times profile, which contributed to the public perception of Hannah’s so-called imprisonment, as a “debacle.” A debacle for whom?
Moskin notes the Neelemans’ extreme privilege literally in parenthesis. “(Her husband is the son of the JetBlue founder David Neeleman, and widely presumed to be independently wealthy).” But Moskin doesn’t question how that privileges acts to distort the reality of mothering in America, which is made nearly impossible without some modicum of wealth.
And listen, maybe Moskin tried to answer some of these questions in an earlier draft. Maybe she wrote an entirely different piece that was attacked by several red pens. Maybe she was prohibited by the Neelemans’ publicist (hired after the London Times profile) by asking any particularly searing questions. We can’t know.
But however this particular profile sausage was made, the scant real estate given to the Neelemans’ massive influence in a country divided by people gripped by white pronatalist fervor and people who would love to try the American experiment from scratch, felt - glaring. Ballerina Farm is not in the headlines because of their passion for family farming. They’re not in the headlines because of Hannah Neeleman’s recipes. Ballerina Farm is in the headlines because a large faction of Americans want all women to follow Hannah’s maternal and domestic example, a large faction view Ballerina Farm’s popularity as a frightening reminder that they might be legally mandated to follow Hannah’s maternal and domestic example, and a large faction are probably somewhere in the middle. Dissatisfied with their increasingly difficult lives, longing for something different and more sustainable, and open to the idea that maybe the housewives of yesteryear really did have it better off than women today.
Maybe NYT is heralding the Neelemans as public-spirited dairy innovators rather than a barometer of the country’s fractured definitions of a flourishing America, simply because mainstream news sources still haven’t quite figured out how to cover influencers. Jo Piazza says she thinks “the Times continues to discount the impact of influencers on culture and voters. They still see them as separate from politics when we know that the right is winning the culture wars through their use of influencers and digital media.”
Fortesa Latifi thinks mainstream outlets still see influencer culture as somehow different from culture with a capital C. “It isn’t possible anymore to separate online culture and influencer culture from ‘regular’ culture. They’re the same. Influencer culture is not a niche, it is culture and we should treat it like the force it is. In other words, Ballerina Farm is about a lot more than dairy barns, community education projects, and homemade mozzarella being an efficient way to feed a large family.
In reference to Hannah Neeleman gracing the cover of Evie, a right-wing magazine which has offered public, effusive support for the Trump administration, the Times says merely this: “She’s on the cover of the current issue of Evie, a kind of Cosmopolitan for conservative women, looking sultry while milking a cow.”
But the Times doesn’t consider what it means that the country’s most visible momfluencer has publicly aligned herself with a conspiratorial, dubiously editorially rigorous magazine that regularly publishes misleading articles about women’s health, gender politics, and the nuclear family being the best family. Or, as
argues about Evie, a front for a “massive anti-birth control propaganda campaign.”
In reference to the heated ongoing debate on the cultural impact of Ballerina Farm, the Times says this: “But to Ms. Neeleman’s mind, she is simply doing what generations of Mormon women, and other women in traditional societies, have done before her.” Following in her Mormon foremothers’ footsteps is all well and good for Hannah, but what about the countless other women subjected to coercive control at the hands of oppressive patriarchal religions? Will their canning practices protect them from abuse and disenfranchisement? What about the Church Of Latter Day Saints’ history with feminism, domestic abuse, racism, and gender roles? What about the juggernaut that is the Mormon public relations machine?
When I emailed
, author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy, and asked her if the NYT profile might do a disservice to real women living real “trad” lives, she said this:The disservice is primarily the con itself. They’re [Ballerina Farm] marketing without honesty. That includes the invisible labor they mask but also the alarming measures required to make eight children “never whine.” So, women at home who do not enjoy such privilege are tasked (or inspired to attempt) the same results without the same resources, but the results themselves are a facade masking reality.
According to the Times, though, it’s all good. “Dr. Kline [a Professor at Claremont University who studies Mormonism and women’s roles in the church] said that in recent years, women have put pressure on the church to expand their roles, making room for equality within marriage.” I’d be willing to bet Dr. Kline said a bit more than that. But due to editing and story shaping, Times’ readers merely get an unabashed defense of one of the most powerful patriarchal Christian religions in the country. Grit. Rugged individualism. Hard work. Tomato sauce that never comes from a can. It’s the “New” American Dream.
The Neelemans clearly hated the London Times profile, and many BF fans excoriated it as some sort of hit piece, but I’d argue that writer Megan Agnew simply adhered to one of the first rules of writing: show don’t tell. As Anne Helen writes in her piece on the politics of the celebrity profile, a meaty profile is one in which the subject’s own words (or the subject’s husband’s own words) do the heavy lifting.
The New Yorker is historically excellent at this particular approach, sometimes described as letting the subject hang themselves with their own words: all you have to do is let those words lie there on the page (accompanied, of course, by writing and secondaries and scenes that elegantly accentuate them) and allow them to do their worst.
Megan Agnew didn’t have to offer her personal opinion about whether or not Daniel Neeleman was controlling or whether or not the Neelemans’ marriage might be defined by rigid gender roles, or whether or not Hannah was pressured to give up her ballet dreams because Daniel wanted to get married right this very second. Daniel handled all of that on his own.
Many lines in the NYT profile seem to have been cherry picked as direct responses to the London Times profile. Daniel is described as “gently herding” the reporter, photographer, and publicity team (he came across as anything other than “gentle” in the London Times piece). Hannah is described as “as tired as most parents of young children, but hardly trapped.”
Whereas the London Times quoted Hannah as saying “My goal was New York City . . . and I was going to be a ballerina,” the NYT quotes Hannah as saying, “I always knew that ballet wasn’t my life’s goal . . . this is the life I always wanted” but NYT doesn’t note the discrepancy. The Times says, “the family has part-time babysitting help and a teacher who home-schools the children three days a week.” They don’t say, “The Neelemans told us they have part-time babysitting help” or “The Neelemans claim they have part-time babysitting help”. But maybe I should stop splitting hairs and just forget that not so long ago Daniel (ON RECORD) casually referenced that Hannah sometimes is bedridden for a week due to exhaustion.
Except some readers will never forget that. How could they? And those readers are people who remain convinced that Ballerina Farm’s existence as a nostalgic reminder of everything that made America great and as a current model for how to make America great again is dangerous for folks who want to live unburdened by gendered expectations and state-mandated motherhood.
The vast majority of Ballerina Farm critics don’t care about whether or not Hannah Neeleman chose motherhood and wifehood over ballet. I don’t care if motherhood, domestic work, and entrepreneurship really do come as naturally to Hannah as it appears online. I care that the alt right has always weaponized idealized depictions of white motherhood to their political advantage, and Hannah Neeleman is simply the most famous arbiter of the most romanticized example of maternity we currently have. Which means I won’t stop talking about Ballerina Farm until the power of Hannah’s particular blend of maternal excellence ceases to have direct political consequences on our daily lives. And when the paper of renown publishes a profile that the Ballerina Farm PR team hardly could’ve improved upon, I’m gonna talk about that too.
“but also the alarming measures required to make eight children “never whine.” “
This instantly made me think of the Duggers and how of course those kids grew up to not only have all sorts of problems, but also to tell the truth of what really happened. Which of course these kids will too but by then everyone will have moved on to the next version of propaganda, conveniently ignoring the victims of what for most is simply entertainment and fantasy and for others is a means of power and control.
Love your analysis, as always