A List Of People I Am Mad At, 3/8/24

This is a weekly (sometimes) list of people I am mad at. This is the list for March 8, 2024.

1. I went on vacation with my friend, who has two children and seems to have somehow been stuck in amber around 2003. A Robbie Williams song came on at the hotel and she asked, out loud, “Is that Ricky-Go-Lucky?”

2. Shannon Sharpe played football? I thought he was a therapist for comedians but with barrels for arms.

3. Last week, The Globe and Mail’s op-ed section ran an essay by a former CBC news anchor. She wrote about how she doesn’t watch television news anymore despite having anchored their flagship program for years. Her piece doesn’t have any solutions in it, just several rhetorical questions: “Can a large newsroom or network connect with a large Canadian audience? Can it face controversy and offer two sides on difficult discussions? And if it can, who will pay for it?”
   
   Nowhere in the op-ed is why the anchor is no longer at the CBC: she said the n-word in a meeting. “It could have been a more productive process, in which the CBC used the moment to help foster greater dialogue about a difficult topic,” she wrote at the time, in a different Globe op-ed. “Instead, it was all about blame, shame and regret. Had things gone different, maybe my last story at the CBC could have been as meaningful as all the stories I’d told in the past 38 years.” Indeed! I wonder who was responsible for how her time at the CBC ended! Who, I wonder, was to blame?????????????
   
   I pitched a story to the Globe in response. They politely declined, saying that they don’t publish responses to their own stories; this, I find, is a bit like pooping in a corner and refusing to engage meaningfully with cleaning it up, but who am I to argue.
   
   What I really found odd about the former anchor’s column, ultimately, was her inability to take any personal responsibility. Fuck taking ownership over saying the n-word in a meeting — she can’t seem to accept that the very news she’s criticizing is the news that she helped build. She started at the CBC in 1979, and worked there until 2020. I’ve worked with this particular anchor in the past too, and it was clear that she was a powerful force within that newsroom. She, alone, could dictate how the news was told, who it spoke to, who it spoke about. If she wanted to make a difference in the news business, she could have; she had almost forty years to do it.
   
   I rarely honk the horn of personal responsibility; when it comes to something like climate change, for example, I consider it a lie used to sell recycled paper towel rolls and for gas executives to keep lighting the ocean on fire. But the news is not oil or electricity or money or grief. It isn’t finite, nor is it too vast to understand. There are people making the terrible decisions that have led to this current cycle of industry atrophy. Vice handed out a million dollars in bonuses to executives last summer before they filed for bankruptcy, and then fired everyone in recent weeks. The Messenger somehow couldn’t maintain its staff despite $50 million in investor funds given to them a few months before closing. The LA Times had deep cuts this year because they couldn’t keep losing $40 million a year. Whenever there are layoffs in news, the first blame goes to a confused advertising market and cruel, indifferent tech execs who are drowning news sources. There’s no doubt that VC funding has cratered the journalism industry — I saw it at BuzzFeed News, in the seven years I worked there before it shut down, and we’ll keep seeing it with all those up-starts that once offered free lunch and Apple Watches. But that’s only part of the story.
   
   I took my pitch to the Globe’s competitor. “I am not sure what you are arguing,” he wrote back to me. “Layoff [sic] have plagued the industry mainly because the business model is broken, not the journalism model. The advertising market is fractured, digital advertising has been hoovered up by tech giants like Facebook, Amazon etc., print display advertising is a fraction of what it once was.” Some of that is certainly true! Facebook’s algorithmic tweaks would fundamentally reshape how BuzzFeed News would publish, Google forever had their foot on our necks with SEO performance, and still, no one wants to pay for news anymore. But isn’t there room to discuss what media companies choose to do with what little money is left? How do you fuck up a brand as recognizable as Vice? How do you burn $50 million dollars in less than a year, with nothing to show for it? How can journalists be expected to look critically at other industries if we can’t recognize our own faults? See, I can ask a bunch of rhetorical questions too.
   
   I’m happy to yell at billionaires as much as the next unemployed loser, but trapped in that argument is a more nuanced reality. The failures within media are about the kinds of decisions regular-ass people make in newsrooms every day. The failures of capitalism, the crunch of the ad market, the whims of social media companies are half of the story — the other half is a story like this one, about how botched the New York Times’ coverage of October 7th actually was. The upper-most echelons of media companies sometimes make bad decisions and bad calls; this all means they spend money in the wrong places.
   
   Consider what media executives did with all that VC funding when they first got it, in 2010 or 2013 or 2017: some of them bought employees things like those Apple Watches instead of dolling out much-needed raises to people who were making $50,000 in New York, which is an amount of money that will allow you to buy one (1) singular bagel, which will not be very good. That’s another thing they don’t tell you about New York — if you’re used to a Montreal-style bagel, the ones in New York will taste like chewing on a brick, and everyone will tell you how good they are. Those people are often from California.
   
   Wrapped around all those tech complications are: decisions. Decisions we make all the time as people who work in news. We decide on headlines and content and story choice. We decide what words to use. We decide if we call an utterly unequal conflict a “war.” We decide to be stenographers for governments dedicated to starving Palestinians to death. Maybe, in her unemployment due to her use of the n-word, the CBC anchor is thinking about all the things she could have done. Maybe she’s thinking about the power she once had, about how she squandered it. I think about it too — I could have always done more within my own newsroom, and often I didn’t. Now I am professionally stateless; I do what I can, where I can. It feels small. Sometimes I’m hopeless. But it’s all I have, for now.
   
   Anyway, that second editor, in rejecting my pitch, misspelled my name. This was really just a roundabout way of me saying: it’s in my fucking email! Just copy and paste it, Jesus Christ.

4. Ben Affleck. I watched This Is Me…Now for a third time and then I watched the documentary. He’s down bad, and I think that’s just pathetic.

Okay, hmm, what else. I helped launch a new podcast with the BBC called Where To Be A Woman, which will be a delight to anyone interested in tangible solutions to our gender quandaries. (No TERFs!) Here’s a little story I wrote for Slate about how the Law & Order universe is steadily falling apart thanks to PROGRESSIVES, and a review of the new Jennine Capó Crucet for the Times, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Scamfluencers will be back in a few weeks, but the archive is fat and happy with encore episodes.

Herath mubarak — this is a holiday about overcoming ignorance, about meditating on non-injury, on refusing sleep in order to see the truth. There’s nothing more valuable, or more needed, than the truth. Anyway, you should give me some money.