Dreams That Didn't Come True
media, and the politics of its workforce, are on the ropes
It was last September when I finally accepted that, as annoying as I find the term, we really are living through a “vibe shift.” The inevitable backswing of the pendulum has arrived in many ways; the discourse of social justice yelling, exhausted, is finally retrenching. This plays out in a lot of issues of actual substance, can be seen in real-world politics and certainly in both the interpersonal and public communications of upper-middle and upper class liberals. But I personally was convinced by an essay in The New York Times. It’s not actually about politics at all, but rather the end of “prestige television.” I find its analysis convincing enough, the piece not bad. What’s remarkable is who wrote it and what he was able to get away with in writing it. The essay was written by Roy Price, the former head of Amazon Studios who was forced out after allegations of sexual misconduct during the height of MeToo. He addresses this in his piece by writing “I left Amazon Studios in 2017 (after accusations I dispute), and five years later….” And he’s off to the races after that. I read that, then read it again, then Googled the accusations, then read it one more time, and I said, golly! Not because I had strong feelings about the Times publishing this guy (who cares) but because it demonstrated how much media culture had changed in a short time.
Let me tell you some things I know for sure. In 2018, Roy Price almost certainly doesn’t get published by The New York Times. If he does, he definitely doesn’t get to dismiss allegations of sexual misconduct against him in a literal parenthetical. And if that piece does appear in the paper of record, in that form, while the Media Twitter of years past still reigned, there’s a multi-day meltdown about it. A big, ugly, classic Twitter meltdown, thousands of tweets of embittered recrimination, mostly launched by people who are only following the trend but still enthusiastic, demanding #restorativejustice for Roy Price’s victims. If the NYT had published such a thing from 2013ish to 2021ish, there’s a huge Twitter storm and every writer and journo feels compelled to add their voice to the chorus of disapproval and there’s a hashtag and people would start getting competitive about who could launch the most excoriating tweet, nakedly exploiting the controversy to farm likes and follows. While the Times is probably too imperious to pull the piece, they would likely eventually remove the reference to the allegations and append an obsequious note to the end of the thing. Eventually the cycle would enter the half-ironic joke stage that signals to the pack that it’s safe to stop really caring and then the meta stage where people would talk more about the reaction to the Times “platforming” a MeToo’d executive than to that decision itself. That’s what would have happened just a few short years ago.
What happened in 2023? In the week it was published, I searched for the piece on Twitter a half-dozen times, thanks to my continuing surprise that it had been published. In that time, I found exactly two tweets complaining about it. One, from somebody who worked in media, had a few dozen desultory retweets and one or two people saying “yeah wtf!” in the replies. (That tweet appears to have since been deleted.) The other, tweeted by a low-follower account, has no likes, retweets, or replies. Even Price’s own tweet attracted zero negative attention. Once upon a time, the initial clueless tweet in which the offending party shared a reviled piece would be ground zero, the gleeful site of the distasteful grave dancing that always demonstrated that a lot of people engaged in that sort of thing because it was fun, not for “justice.” The conversation that did take place on Twitter, such as it was, was about what Price had actually written. If any publications put out anything at the time that criticized the Times for their decision, I’ve been unable to find it. Amusingly, in 2018 the NYT had included Price in its own feel-good roundup of MeToo’d “powerful men” who had been replaced by women. Times, and the Times, truly had changed.
You can certainly say that the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter played a major role in this lack of outrage. Following his acquisition of the network, many journos and other assorted liberals left; more, Musk’s draconian throttling of links from disfavored publications (like the Times), and later all external links, made “X” a terrible place to react to a published piece. And the ongoing and terrible collapse of media’s financial model has certainly put a damper on the ingroup social signaling that drove so much of the ceaseless screaming. A lot of the original cohort that decided, in the middle of the Obama administration, that the proper role of journalists and pundits was to spend their days looking for targets of performative outrage have also aged out, too busy with kids and trips to Costco to participate much any more. But that’s all sort of the point, right - social, economic, and technological changes are forever driving political change. I’m not suggesting that the collapse of the central committee of elite liberal tastemaking is itself necessarily a matter of staggering political importance. (“Twitter is not real life” is true and goes both ways.) I am saying that it’s an interesting case study in a broader culture where people finally seem exhausted of the constant yelling, where more and more young people appear to grok that the definition of left politics as hectoring obsession over language and moral hygiene has been a disaster for the left and its constituencies.
It won’t surprise you to hear that I think the loosening I’m describing is mostly a good thing, but of course it’s complicated. A piece I’ve been working on for somebody about the total intellectual bankruptcy of the whole anti-progressive “heterodox” sphere got mothballed recently and I’m unsure if I’ll rework it and publish elsewhere or what. But in general I think that whole world has demonstrated the folly of pure anti-politics. Because it’s motivated by (occasionally understandable) anger at how the moral fashion of a few thousand overeducated and overcaffeinated Democrats with Slack accounts bent the entire worlds of journalism, academia, and the creative arts out of shape, the heterodox thing has targets but no goals. That culture is reactionary not in the sense of being conservative (though it’s often conservative) but in the sense that it has no idea what it wants to do, as itself, for itself. Amusingly, now that its professional structures are growing beyond small-time newsletters and buzzy podcasts, the contrarian politically homeless world has begun to fracture into a bunch of warring sects who fight over vaccines and gender issues and the proper stance towards Israel. Well, that’s what happens when you become an ideology, guys.
Of course many or most would slot me into that world without thinking about it. This is, as I’ve frequently said, a record of the poverty of this whole approach to politics, of this moment. I am a lifelong socialist who has engaged in more actual left-wing organizing than probably 80% of the people who yell about politics online; more importantly, the people who classify me as a reactionary never rise to my challenge of telling me what actual issues of substance we disagree on, and they don’t because they know they can’t. They just happen to believe that my position on substantive political questions is irrelevant when it comes to how I should be taxonomized by others. The only thing that matters for that kind of categorization is the various signals one displays that are then passed through a social filter, a process which results in a Venn diagram where “who you like” and “who’s your political ally” overlap perfectly. Like I said, a record of poverty. I am the left. I was born here. I decide what the left is. If you find that fact annoying remember the inherent insult is that nothing I want is anything I ever get.
For the record, for the entire life of this newsletter but especially this year I have been relentlessly attacked by members of that whole “heterodox” thing, for my advocacy for Palestine, for my defense of trans people and their rights, for my belief in mass immigration to the United States, and other things. I’ve been doing this a long time and I assure you that I do not use the word “relentless” lightly. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve talked to people at Substack about turning off certain discovery features here to try and stem the tide, and they’ve had to undo “subscription bombs” from TERFs that I’ve been hit with this year. I’m not asking for the cavalry. (I feel sorry for the people who come after me.) But please just fuck off with the insistence that I have the same politics as Bari Weiss. That’s a you problem, not a me problem.
As for Roy Price, I’m certainly wouldn’t say that I’m glad that he was given a place in that forum, much less making a comment on whether he was guilty of what he was accused of. But I’m also not upset about it. Because the basic reality is that my opinion on that issue is meaningless and expressing an opinion about such questions is not politics. This is what I’ve been saying for almost 16 years now: the cultural bric a brac that our political class obsessively debates is not politics and even if it was politics screaming on the internet would not be a way to do anything about it. Every day, it becomes a little clearer to me that essentially everyone knows that the vision of both left politics and media careers as matters of relentless moralism is a dead end. People know that yelling has failed. I think they may be ready to take the next step, which is to understand that it wasn’t even the yelling; it was the notion that politics is a matter of moralizing at all. The idea that to engage as a political person is to say “this and they are Bad” is a type of witless juvenalia that the left no longer has the luxury of entertaining.
But they’re scared to go first. And they’re particularly scared to go first in an industry that’s as deeply sick as media.
When I was plotting out my last book, one thing I was sure of was that it would be entering a crowded field. By the first months of 2022, when the proposal was ready to be shopped, it was clear that the “reckoning” that journos never stopped writing about was not actually coming to pass. No major federal legislation had been enacted; the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, itself considered a watered-down compromise bill by many BlackLivesMatter-affiliated activists, had failed two serious efforts in Congress. Many local and state reforms were being rolled back and had not remotely met the scale of protester demands in the first place. Early positive opinion polling, some of which included a remarkable amount of support from Republicans, had largely evaporated. (Today support for BLM is way down and opposition is way up.) Various activist groups within the umbrella of BlackLivesMatter had been credibly accused of financial impropriety. After a Democratic primary that had seen a crowded field of candidates scramble to be the most social justice-y candidate, the nomination and the presidency had been captured by old white man Joe Biden, generally seen as the steadying centrist presence Americans quietly yearned for. No one was protesting in the streets anymore. I was writing a book about why the “reckoning” had failed because it objectively had.
Derek Chauvin thankfully was convicted, and there were some other successes in the domain of sending killer cops to prison. There’s some encouraging signs that policing is a little less violent and a little more accountable. Hollywood has made significant efforts to diversify, which continue to this day. A lot of scholarships and internships and similar got set up for Black recipients. Nonprofits hired armies of new employees, most of them people of color, in positions vaguely related to racial justice. This is all certainly not nothing, but it’s also hard to call it something. After all, as I patiently explained over and over again on my media tour for the book, the protesters and their many advocates in media and academia and politics had very explicitly said that reform wouldn’t do. The explicit demand was a total remaking of society’s relationship to race. The explicit demand was revolutionary change. So I thought, well, here comes a bunch of books that will compete with mine, other attempts to do a postmortem for a failed political moment and to offer better approaches that might work in the future. There’s gonna be other left figures looking to sketch out a more effective movement with more practical demands so that we make real progress going forward.
And that really didn’t happen.
There have been a few books of this type. Cedric Johnson’s After BlackLivesMatter from Verso is highly recommended. But mostly, you’ve got conservative books ranting about how the barbarians were tearing down society, and then you have progressive books that were clearly sold during the initial period of passionate foment under the assumption that something very meaningful was happening and took a little too long to get published. That leads to amusing titles (which I won’t mention by name) that have been published in the past year or two that speak to the no-doubt permanent power of a movement that now barely seems to exist. As far as respectful and sympathetic criticism goes, constructive but harsh criticism, what’s been written is very thin on the ground, in book or essay form.
I have always had to confront the what-people-say-publicly vs what-they-think-privately divide, which has often led to people making fun of me for referring to private communications that I couldn’t share. But it simply is true that many, many people who were full-throated advocates during the George Floyd moment now look back at that period with vague embarrassment; they would generally prefer not to be reminded about it. More to the point, they’re scared. The lingering memory of how people could have their reputations suddenly destroyed by saying the wrong thing during that period still lives on in progressive social institutions, and many are afraid to violate those norms even as they quietly walk around knowing that an unprecedented opportunity failed and was failed. They know it didn’t work.
As for me, well, you can check the various community reviews of the book and see for yourself - an awful lot of them complain that I’m not caustic or funny enough when I talk about the activists. But, you see, I wrote the book from a place of profound sympathy for them specifically and as someone who has labored in on-the-ground protests since I was a teenager. I wasn’t funny because I wasn’t there to make fun. Yet to the extent that it exists in the mass consciousness of the media (which isn’t much), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement is regarded as a belittling dismissal of BlackLivesMatter and MeToo and goodness itself. Once again in my career, I’ve been middled. I am however happy that I can say that both my willingness to critique the activists of 2020 and my refusal to mock them stemmed from the same place: I take them seriously.
This connects, eventually. Give me a little rope.
As I was composing this, a long New York magazine profile by Kerry Howley on the Stanford professor and pop neuroscience podcaster Andrew Huberman was released. To save you some confused scrolling, the bombshell is that a suddenly-famous and wealthy man was repetitively unfaithful to one woman and then to multiple woman. I had always hoped that we would stop doing this sort of thing, the faux-MeToo essay, written and marketed coyly so as to suggest that sexual misconduct or domestic violence is coming when they never actually arrive. Representing infidelity as a kind of misconduct of that degree and kind only gives aid to those who dismiss accusations of actual sexual misconduct, blurring lines in a way that helps the accuser and not the accused. This will not hurt Andrew Huberman, if that was the point, and I’m not sure why that should be the point other than playing to media insider culture. Infidelity is shitty and you shouldn’t treat people that way, but it lives very comfortably in the zone of “bad behavior but not bad news.” It’s shitty but decidedly not my business. Oh well.
The profile, overly long and written with a deliberate back-and-forth, facts-then-gossip cadence that I find mannered and unconvincing, has that sweaty quality of an exposé in search of something to expose. I say this as someone who has never heard a minute of Huberman’s podcast and wouldn’t enjoy it if I did; I in fact find that whole world really daft and shun self-help talk of all kinds. Howley does mention an actually meaningful critique of Huberman - he makes claims on his podcast about how to live that far outstrip the strength of the data he refers to. This is true and important but also rather quotidian stuff, and it could certainly also be applied to (say) the contemporary progressive discourse on “trauma,” an empty grab bag of quasi-psychiatric observations wedded to horseshit New Age affirmation philosophy and a consumerist approach to disability politics. But then, the people who are really invested in trauma talk are not Howley’s culture war enemies, and Huberman’s Joe Rogan-adjacent fans are. So you know who gets the knife.
This was not always the case, mind you. Howley was once an enthusiastic libertarian, one who spent her time rubbing digital elbows with the likes of Bryan Caplan and other fringey figures. That past now appears uncomfortable to her. She’s mothballed her old personal blog posts; amusingly, her Wikipedia page has been stripped of any reference to her libertarian days, noting that she has written for the precious literary quarterly Granta but eliding her multiple pieces for the (much higher-circulation) libertarian magazine Reason. In her careful erasure of a past that might align her with the culture war enemies of the kind of people who (oh I don’t know) choose the long lists for the PEN Awards, I see a more graceful effort than that undertaken by her husband Will Wilkinson, who went from a career spent serially pushing up his glasses in defense of capitalism at the Cato Institution to, in the Trump era, suddenly tacking hard towards social justice bromides. It’s a living. Anyway, I suppose I can’t blame Howley. It couldn’t be easy to be a libertarian professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
I personally think it would be bad form to pick individual passages from years past that would seem incriminating in 2024 and represent them as somehow reflecting on Howley now. That would be stupid and unfair. Then again, that’s exactly the business of the sector of the media that Howley’s a part of now, the business of prosecution based on bad faith. Bad faith similar, I would say, to very strongly hinting throughout a long profile that some sort of accusation of genuine misconduct was coming, even though no such accusation is made. But everybody chooses the dogs they want to lie down with. Did I find things she would probably prefer not to be reminded of in her blog archives? Yeah. Good part about being me, I only have to care about what I actually care about.
The editors of New York are not dummies. They must have known - they must have known - that Howley’s story would ultimately redound to Huberman’s benefit, that it would simply contribute to the bunker mentality of the kind of people who worship him. It looks like a piece that contains a serious accusation, it looks like a takedown designed to maybe cost Huberman sponsors and his job at Stanford, but no such provocation is there to be found. I can hardly imagine a text better designed to inspire certain people to rally around Huberman. It’s a “Woke Magazine Publishes Hit Piece About Beloved Neuroscientist” headline waiting to happen. And this is where I bring us back to the theme here. New York is, to me, a paradigmatic case of 2024 publication still trying to understand what the post-2010s rules are. The Huberman profile is a 2019-ass piece, man, one that assumes without questioning that the purpose of a big-time magazine is to identify targets who are seen as violating contemporary liberal cultural mores and finding some identity-based charge for prosecution-by-media. Politics is moving away from that; it has moved away from that. You can lament it, but you must grapple with it. (I should really just rename this newsletter Is/Ought at this point.)
And I say this not because I think New York is bad but because I think New York is good, genuinely good, staffed with competent people. They were acquired by a larger business entity without losing their specific character, which is hard to do. They’ve always hired well. In the past year or two they had the rare taste, discernment, and wisdom to publish me several times, and I was proud to be involved. But I also think that their present culture was built in a period where people really thought that the strange populist form of academic identity politics that colonized the industry in the past fifteen years was going to just keep on ascending. If that was true, the continued effort to treat magazine writing as an exercise in bending every last aspect of human culture into a vehicle for the pursuit of social justice would be misguided but understandable. But it was never true. That’s not how politics works. Social justice was not exempt from the ordinary ebb and flood of political ideals, and in hindsight it’s powerfully strange that so many people felt otherwise. The worm turns. Yes, eventually it turns back. But things are never the same. And I genuinely worry for a lot of people who seem to have built their emotional foundation on the idea that the era of social-justice-in-everything would never end.
For the record, yes, New York employs Jon Chait. But he is, to use a term I hate, the exception that proves the rule. It’s to their credit that they still publish him, and I say this as someone who has been making fun of Jon Chait since the George W. Bush administration. But of course he sticks out like a sore thumb on their homepage, and while I’m sure he’s bringing in some welcome traffic from people of the center-left persuasion, that kind of discomfort rarely lasts forever. Andrew Sullivan was the white raven of the magazine for awhile; he left because, in his words, “A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me.” That was in the height of 2020 hysteria, when everybody with a staff writer job in this country decided they were Bobby Seale for a few months. Would he survive under the conditions of 2024? Hard to say. The operative question for New York is, would they want him to? And if the world has changed, how would they know? This isn’t a plea for “balance” or an argument that a magazine with New York’s purview should employ more conservatives. I am, instead, wondering if they can think outside of the thinking that became hegemonic in media in the 2010s, when they ask themselves what they want to be.
New York is in the same fundamental bind of media is as a whole: it’s hard to imagine them listening to anyone who’s not The Right Kind of Person, someone who holds the conventional lukewarm social justicey opinions and fealty to media kaffeeklatsch culture that has dominated everywhere but explicitly conservative publications since I got into the business in 2008. This is a very deep problem and I’m not sure that there’s a single person in media who cares to confront it. How do you ever notice that times have changed when your personal and professional incentives point directly towards not noticing it? How can you evolve in a way that makes your publication more healthy and more true if you have assumed away the possibility that anyone truly challenging a decaying political orthodoxy could be a good person? They wouldn’t ever listen to me, for a raft of reasons that are mostly my fault. But the biggest one is that the culture of our moment insists that I be sorted into the “Anti-Woke White Man” manila folder. But who else is going to tell you things that you don’t want to hear, other than someone who is inevitably going to be considered Bad? And how confident are you that you can move into the future, financially, by serving only those people who share the politics of The Cut?
Here’s what I can tell you for certain, though neither Howley nor anyone at New York will ever admit to it: they invested a lot of time and effort on the Huberman piece and have spent the last few weeks leading up to publication fretting over the fact that there’s no smoking gun. Whether that should have told them something deeper about the endeavor, only they can say.
In the 2010s media’s workforce communally decided that its professional purpose was to act as a social-media Eumenides, that to be a member in good standing of the journalist and commentator community required you to serially accuse and judge and hector and yell, all day long, primarily on Twitter. I watched all of this happen in real time. I said it was weird while it was happening; it’s weirder in hindsight. Vast swaths of the industry suddenly developed an attachment to a previously-obscure type of academic radical liberalism. I watched as huge numbers of people employed at newspapers and magazines and digital media outlets morphed suddenly from center-left incrementalist Obama liberals into relentlessly-yelling activists, and I saw them act as though they had never been anything but. They were technocratic wonks who were passionate about globalization and deregulation and then, suddenly, they were doing Gloria Anzaldua cosplay. I saw people adopt an abstruse and alienating vocabulary, piece by piece, and again they pretended like that had always been the way they talked. (There was one specific day in the middle of last decade where you could watch “BIPOC” spread like wildfire across the digital media community on Twitter, literally one day that took it from unheard of to ubiquitous.) I saw the adoption of critical theory-derived ivory tower politics happen en masse, because people were afraid to look uncool. I saw social justice become a matter of fashion. I saw hundreds of people pretending that they had read James Baldwin. Just a wild, strange, bumbling, frenetic time. I’ve often wondered what percentage of the people who took part did so for sincere reasons rather than out of fear or self-interest. 10%?
The essential part - the part that I wrote a book about, it meant so much to me - is that none of this stuff worked. The problem with trying to make a moral vision into a political platform is that to make political change you have to have a plan. And because so many people became identity-fixated radlibs not due to a conventional political conversion but instead because that’s what all the cool kids were doing, there was a remarkable paucity of strategic thinking. Every political movement has petty hypocrisies, meanwhile, but when your form of engagement always stems from the attitude that you are the world’s last moral being, speaking truth out into the vast of night, those have a tendency to look much worse; Tara Reade was a woman the “Believe All Woman” types had no trouble not believing. But at the core of things, there’s always efficacy - “when justice is gone, there’s always force” - and this speaks to the greatest demerit of this approach: it didn’t work. Even accepting all of its values and beliefs, the social justice approach to politics of the past fifteen years has utterly failed on its own terms. And I don’t understand why more of the smart people who are genuinely dedicated to social justice values don’t ask hard questions about why there’s been so little progress, by their own reckoning.
Moira Donegan, the creator of the Shitty Media Men list, has a book under contract about MeToo. And I’m really eager to see what she has to say about the list’s efficacy. Not its morality. Not whether it was fair. Not whether it was illiberal. Not whether it was feminist. Not whether it was made with the best intentions. Whether it actually made women in media safer, materially, from sexual misconduct. Whether it worked. And, just as important… how would she know if it did?
To a great degree, the culture of the industry lies on the same stale foundation of values as it has for more than a decade, even as more and more people feel empowered to violate those values. To be clear, none of this is the reason that media is now facing extremely tough financial times. Not even close. The reason that media’s finances are collapsing is because, first, the internet has rendered the finances of all creative industries vulnerable thanks to the endless replicability of digital creation. That some industries are doing well (video games) and some OK (movies) and some very badly (newspapers) doesn’t change the fact that they share the condition of precarity brought on by unfettered lossless reproduction and the availability of limitless room for supply. More immediately relevant, a tiny handful of massive tech companies exert monopsony power over the world of advertising, and they use their control of infrastructure and networks to ensure that advertising dollars go into their coffers and not into those of newspapers, magazines, or digital publications. Meanwhile the proliferation of self-publishing tools, including newsletter companies like Substack but also the endless number of podcasting platforms and YouTube, has introduced competition for eyeballs that is typically incredibly low-cost to produce. This has contributed to the unbundling that so threatens actual newsgathering, which has always relied on being subsidized by cheaper-to-produce content.
That’s why media is in deep trouble. It doesn’t matter if we make Ben Shapiro the editor in chief of every remaining newspaper in the United States, they’d still be mortally threatened. A few publications are a big enough deal that they can charge subscription fees and survive. Some independent writers like me will succeed with crowdfunding, though we’re a drop in the bucket of the whole industry. Until and unless someone successfully challenges Google and Meta, who appear to be actively dedicated to killing off publications financed with digital advertising, then there’s no hope for growth for this business. “Woke” has nothing to do with it.
But, yes, I think that this industry would really benefit from some serious introspection about what exactly happened in the past decade and a half, and I think the benefits of that conversation would accrue even to those who simply believe that the social justice turn in media was the right thing at the right time. Twitter is inextricable from the story of what happened; I am entirely convinced that were it not for the rise of that platform as an indispensable part of media careers, the entire color of 21st-century American liberalism would be different. It proved to be a ruthlessly effective tool for creating conformity within the profession, especially because certain intrinsic aspects of what exactly it means to be a writer or a pundit or a journalist attract those who want very badly to be accepted, to be popular, to fit in. Well, I have no easy answers for media’s macro problems, other than that government probably has to confront these tech firms but probably won’t. I can tell you this, though: too many people in the business are trying to make late-2010s rules work in the mid-2020s. “This Thing is Problematic” isn’t walking the dog anymore guys, sorry. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody is clicking on yet more pieces that say “You know that thing/person you love? Here’s why it’s 100% pure evil.” The audience has stopped caring about what you personally find beneath your exalted moral standards. There are too many real problems in the world. Nobody cares.
I need someone, someone with utterly impeccable social justice values and an impregnable reputation, to write a piece for the New York Times or The New Yorker or New York that seriously and critically asks, what the hell happened to the politics of media in the past couple of decades? Why did it happen? Did it help the industry? Did it help the political causes? Did anything go wrong with it, at all? This writer can’t be remotely “heterodox,” to be listened to. They have to be a dyed-in-the-wool social justice liberal Democrat. But they also have to be willing to ask hard questions about when and how that approach to left politics has failed. They also have to be willing to say things that are unpopular to and about their peers in this business, in particular regarding why so many of them had sudden and complete political evolutions at precisely the time that it became professionally expedient to have one, at precisely the time that people started yelling at anyone who didn’t on the internet. Whoever wrote such a piece would no doubt come to different conclusions than I might, and would certainly have more respect for the underlying premises of the whole social justice approach than I do. That’s fine. Someone who will be listened to has to ask what the fuck happened to this industry, why it was suddenly gripped by some of the harshest social capture I’ve ever seen. And somebody has to point out that we haven’t gotten social justice and we need to try different things to achieve it.
I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would look at media in the 2010s as the good ol’ days, but either way the fact is that we’re never going back. As the man sang, when life is hard, you have to change. I don’t know what else to tell you. There’s nothing more that I can do.