Why Does The Dropout Keep Calling Her “Elizabeth”?

ABC’s The Dropout is a true crime podcast investigating the business failures and alleged fraud of Elizabeth Holmes, former founder and CEO of Theranos. Hosted by ABC News’s chief business, technology, and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis presents years worth of investigative journalism into the case and the business, including exclusive interviews with former employees and other sources. The podcast was released in conjunction with an ABC News Nightline documentary, and the podcast itself has been acquired by Hulu for a limited series initially to star Kate McKinnon, now to star Amanda Seyfried. Now, The Dropout has returned to analyze and comment on the trial of Elizabeth Holmes as it unfolds.

I am not typically a fan of true crime, but The Dropout has compelled me since its first episode. Elizabeth Holmes herself is the core inspiration for my audio drama’s main antagonist, and keeping up on the failings of Theranos and the trial of Elizabeth Holmes is not just an interest, but integral to my writing.

The first season of The Dropout ended in February 2019, giving me enough time to forget one of my biggest pet peeves about the show until its new season landed in my podcatcher. The Dropout keeps calling Elizabeth Holmes just “Elizabeth,” and it’s fucking weird.

Why do journalists use surnames?

Most journalism follows the Associated Press (also known as AP) style guide, which advises:

Always use a person’s first and last name the first time they are mentioned in a story. Only use last names on second reference. Do not use courtesy titles such as Mr., Mrs., Miss or Ms. unless they are part of a direct quotation or are needed to differentiate between people who have the same last name.

Certain publications, like The New York Times, do deviate slightly from the AP style guide. For The New York Times and others, this typically means adding an honorific before the subject’s surname, e.g. “Ms. Holmes” versus just “Holmes.” It’s also important to note that many style guides only apply the surname rule to adults, not minors.

Style guides are industry-wide sets of best practices meant to unify a specific voice. First and foremost, it should be said that style guides should always have room for change and adaptation; language is organic, and it’s also powerful. Second, it should be noted that much of prescriptive grammar moves away from a goal of communicability and towards a darker, more nefarious goal of deeming what is and is not “real” or “correct” language. This codifying of respectability politics in language is, of course, often used for linguistic oppression against underrepresented demographics like Black people, Latinx people, and other people of color.

But adaptation should not come without reason–especially when the standards set in place actually do exist for a reason. So, why do journalists use a subject’s full name first, then subsequently just their surname? It’s a matter of clarity, distance, and respect. NPR’s own style guide succinctly names all three of these concepts:

The default setting for any of our news reports is simple: We use family names on second reference. That promotes clarity and helps us maintain an objective distance from those we report about.

We’ve previously discussed why one likely 2016 presidential contender is “Clinton,” not “Hillary” on second reference. The reasons in that case apply to most newsmakers: “There’s the matter of respect … and we don’t want to be perceived as being either for or against someone because of the way we refer to him or her. Everyone is treated the same.”

Mark Memmott, “Three Thoughts About When It’s OK And Not OK To Use First Names On Second Reference”

Clarity

For most people in the United States, sharing a first name is more common than sharing a surname. It’s much more likely that you will find a story that involves two people named John than two people with the surname Smith. Using surnames is a simple trick to make following subjects clearer for the reader, often quickly weeding out room for confusion in this specific regard.

Distance

For many journalists, maintaining a level of unbiased objectivity is a goal. I do believe that the concept of “unbiased objectivity” is an impossible myth, but a certain level of distance from a subject still makes it clear that a journalist is not talking about their friends or acquaintances. When covering topics like court cases, it should be clear that the journalist is discussing a stranger–or, at least, someone with whom they have a very specific type of professional and analytical relationship–and not someone they know well, someone they hang out with, someone with whom they are familiar enough to call by a first name.

Respect

By using surnames for every subject in the piece, you eliminate having to figure out who is worthy of being referred to as a surname versus a given name. Using a given name can sometimes indicate a level of familiarity and a lack of formality that creates a dissonance for the reader: as much as good ol’ Uncle Joe wants to come across as a cool pal just here to kick it with his buds, it would feel weird to write about him as anything but Biden, President Biden, or if you’re The New York Times, Mr. Biden.

The problem journalists can run into with looping surnames into respect is when the lines between different strata of power become blurred. We’ll refer to the President by their surname, certainly–but what about teachers, who we are trained to call their surname plus an honorific? If we use a college professor’s surname but not an adult college student’s, what are we saying about the status and respectability of that student–and how does that difference inform the piece and the reader?

By using surnames for everyone, we give everyone’s name the same level of respect.

“I won’t call him OJ”

So, why does this matter? Calling Elizabeth Holmes, a person whose alleged fraud or ineptitude lead to not just workplace abuse but also actual deaths of actual people, by her first name makes her seem like a friend. I imagine that the script for each episode is not written by Jarvis–or, I suppose, Rebecca–but instead by other members of the team. The issue is that a podcast is not is just its script; it is also what the audience hears, and in The Dropout, the audience hears a news corresponded referring to Elizabeth Holmes the way she’d refer to a sibling.

Throughout The Dropout, Jarvis does refer to every subject by their first name, not just Holmes. Elizabeth. So why does it bother me in regards to Holmes specifically? When a first name is used for Holmes, it makes the case seem like gossip instead of the very serious, very tragic failures of Theranos that, again, resulted in lives being lost. Using Holmes’s first name draws her in to the listener in a way that feels irresponsible given Holmes’s documented history of lying and manipulating her way into the wallets of vulnerable, desperate people. Why are we giving her more tools to do so? Why are we rewarding that behavior?

Using Holmes’s first name reminded me of something I heard during one of You’re Wrong About‘s episodes on the O.J. Simpson trial, “The Disappearance of Chandra Levy.” The episode is worth listening to in full, but specifically, it cites a moment in which journalist Dominick Dunne explains why he refused to call O.J. Simpson just O.J. Kim Goldman, younger sister to Simpsons’s murder victim Ron Goldman, informed Dunne’s decision. She said that calling the murderer of her older brother just O.J. was “too friendly,” a concept Dunne, whose daughter was also murdered, could understand:

A lot of the time, I sat next to Kim. What a wonderful young heartbroken woman she was. What a sister she must have been to Ron. I adored her like the daughter I had lost to murder. We whispered to each other throughout the day about what was going on in front of us. One day, she told me she couldn’t stand it when I referred to O.J. Simpson as O.J. when I talked about him. She said it was too familiar, too friendly. I thought so too. It didn’t work for us to call him Simpson. I said to Kim, What about referring to him as the killer when we talk? From then on, whenever he entered the courtroom, we’d say to each other, “Here comes the killer.”

Dominick Dunne, in the afterword of O.J. Simpsons’s If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer

There’s a gendered element at play here as well. Gossip is seen as a largely female practice, and contrary to popular belief, it has its merits. Likewise, one of the key themes throughout coverage of Elizabeth Holmes is gender: from her gender presentation to her idolization of male CEOs to her #GirlBoss energy, Holmes’s gender as a cis woman is an inescapable part of how her story is being conveyed. It’s difficult to imagine ABC News, a journalistic organization, using given names instead of first names for any cis man in the same position as Holmes. By using first names in The Dropout, an air of casual and confusing, messy misogyny lies under the writing and production as cringey subtext.

The Dropout and pop true crime

The Dropout‘s choice to refer to Elizabeth Holmes by her given name is not made out of unprofessionalism or ignorance. Host Rebecca Jarvis has been in journalism since 2003. Jarvis did not go to journalism school (and neither did I), but did grow up with a journalist mother before working in the field herself. The Dropout is produced by ABC News, a broadcast news network that has been around since 1945 and is a household name. Everyone on this team knew the standard was to use Holmes’s surname. So why didn’t they?

My hypothesis is that this decision came from the success of true crime podcasters and commentary YouTube channels.

ABC News, like any other legacy newsroom, is driven by profit. If a trend emerges that is profitable, ABC News is likely to try adopting that trend, especially in situations that seem less “risky.” The Dropout is a podcast, and what is more popular and attractive in podcasting than true crime? While the documentary version of The Dropout used this same convention for subjects’ names, the written articles about the Holmes trial, including by producer and writer Taylor Dunn, do not.

Unlike most employees of ABC News, true crime podcasters often don’t have the education or occupational training to know how or why a subject is referred to by their surname. And in many cases, doing so would be antithetical to that podcast’s tone. If podcasts like My Favorite Murder actively lean in to a conversational, gossipy feel, using a subject’s first name is a more tonally appropriate choice. Perhaps not ethically appropriate, as discussed before, but, well . . . that’s honestly what I expect from most popular true crime podcasts anyway. And now, what I expect from even true crime podcasts by journalistic powerhouses.