Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
|
Shoot me now.
Hard to argue with what Obama actually said, and I'm not sure why you share the NPR article, but you'd have to be blind to miss that many people who act badly are using complaints about "cancel culture" to divert attention from what they've done (
for example) or to attack people they disagree with (Trump, Lauren). And then there's Taibbi. Your Politico article:
Quote:
Cancel culture has seized the attention of many journalists, and I shared the results with two writers who have been prominent in the recent debate but on opposite sides of it. Matt Taibbi, a longtime Rolling Stone writer who also has an independent platform on Substack, said he wasn’t surprised that the poll suggests there’s a backlash against cancel culture. His concern as a writer who often bucks liberal conventional wisdom — he was highly skeptical of the Russia-Trump connection — is that institutions need an intellectual environment with a wide enough spectrum of views to sometimes allow for bad, even terrible, arguments.
“One of the reasons I took up the subject,” he said in an interview, “is that I have a lot of discussions with people who work in the media who in the last few months have said they are afraid to pitch a certain kind of story because they don’t want it to get around that they’re interested in a certain topic because they might end up on the radar of people in the union or those who are very politically engaged in the newsroom.”
He gave the example of a colleague who wanted to do a story about a pharmacy in a small town that was damaged during protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and resulted in the sick and elderly unable to fill prescriptions.
“It’s not about James Bennet or Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan specifically,” he said. “But it only takes a couple of high-profile examples to dramatically impact how people think and behave, especially in this job climate. A lot of people thought I was defending the Tom Cotton editorial. I wasn’t. What I was saying is that the editor watching that is going to see wherever the line is and say, ‘I should stay far away from it.’ And as soon as that mindset takes hold what you get is a whole lot of people who are afraid to say anything that everyone else isn’t already saying and that’s dangerous for our business."
Taibbi added, “You have to be able to screw up occasionally.”
|
It was nice of Politico to present Taibbi as an independent expert, rather than someone with
a well-documented history of treating people poorly,
for which he doesn't seem to be sorry.
Threaded Mode