Jul 6, 2023·edited Jul 6, 2023Liked by Parker Molloy
The GQ piece is in many respects the worst of all possible worlds. Instead of the censorship happening before hand (as Chomsky noted) it took place clumsily and ridiculously right out in plain sight. And was preserved for future generations to see
And the story got more attention (and confirmation ) by being censored than it would have if Zaslav had left it alone.
And the magazine managed to not only lose whatever journalistic credibility it had, but looked pathetic in the process.
"But Parker, isn't 'don't upset your boss' a standard practice across industries? Why is it different here?" Yes, "don't upset your boss" is sensible advice for most individuals in most fields.
This really does emphasise how authoritarian management powers have been utterly normalised. "Don't upset your local noble or the king" would not be an acceptable basis for a political structure, but "don't upset your boss" is a wholly normal work structure. While your employer can't kill you (unlike a feudal noble), they can fire you, which still does an awful lot of damage. Why should the person who happens to be your current boss, who has only had that role for a few months, have the right to take away a job that you may have had for decades?
Why should employers in general have the right to fire people? Why isn't a job a property right that you have to be compensated for giving up?
No, a job is either the outcome of a signed contract, or one that is implied. You get hired because the boss believes you will perform your job in the manner the company expects.
The idea is, it's employment at will, which means they have the right to fire you, but by the same token, you have the right to quit. A job is not a "property right."
A job obviously can’t be a “property right”, but a basic income and healthcare ought to be. If basic survival is dependent on not “crossing the boss”, freedom is a child’s bedtime story.
A job and basic income aren't the same thing. If I hire you and you agree to work for me, you agree to perform the job in a reasonable manner, and in return I will pay you and provide the benefits I promised you. Except for reasons prohibited by law (civil rights, right to not be discriminated against), I can fire you, even without giving a reason, just as you can quit without giving a reason. Remember, it's employment at will.
What on earth does freedom have to do with fulfilling the obligations of performing a job? Even if you're self employed, you still have to do the work necessary to make your work pay you.
But I’m NOT free to quit “at will”, because I need a job to keep a roof over my head, food on my table, and in America, healthcare. My employer, however, is free to fire me for any reason, or no reason at all, if it helps his bottom line. Look up the history of layoffs for the past couple decades or so.
Jesus, what the hell do you want? The vast majority of employers don't fire people unless it's for cause. You're whining like somebody who expects to be taken care of. Of course employers can fire you if they can't maintain profits, you must think you're entitled to a job despite an employer's ability to pay you. If you owned a business and it wasn't making enough money, you would lay off people if it was the only way you could avoid bankruptcy or going out of business. All businesses need to be profitable. Grow up.
I cancelled my WaPo subscription a year ago after becoming increasingly irate over how many right wing knuckleheads Bezos had installed in the op-ed section. "Democracy dies in darkness" is WaPo's motto, yet the actual voice from the paper is something else entirely. I cancelled the NYT for the same reason.
Yes, they have gotten far too addicted to both-siderism disease, when they hired even more awful right-wing Murdoch apparatchiks, straight from the WSJ. I cancelled in Feb. after one of Tom Cotton's hate-filled editorial propaganda pieces that never should have been published.
Well, the GQ piece was both more egregious and less egregious in parts.
*Less* egregious, because every corporate media CEO has been the "most hated man in Hollywood" for at least a few minutes, and those stories follow the same form - brazen CEO does thing that pisses off community, gets criticized, backtracks, "but will he ever be able to fix what the broke?"
*More* egregious because it really was a poorly written hit piece that uses "people are saying" semantics to just elide past any actual reporting to justify conclusions described as "much-derided," "slop," "almost as if" or "bafflingly." There are reasons behind all of these corporate decisions, and the reader deserves more than an OMG U SUK, ZASLAV in terms of analysis.
Also, not sure if the WaPo article itself changed, but the "Zaslav associate" referred to in the newsletter doesn't appear in the linked Sommer WaPo piece (maybe he changed his article after publication? 😁). The narrative he writes is that WBD Corporate Comms called up to complain, which is a normal thing. Sommer did not write about the Welch connection reported by Variety, which is weirder and bad, but increasingly common as business reporters have a freer hand in developing coverage for movie and TV.
Did we read the same piece? It starts out with a description of Zaslav being booed at a commencement. It goes on to detail all of the egregious things that have, in fact, happened under Zaslav's tenure. And there have been literally dozens of other articles that I've read recently - about the TCM nonsense, the silly rebranding of "HBO Max" as "Max" (something that I, as a HBO Max subscriber, had to deal with, as I had to re-subscribe after the change took place), the removal of content - that support everything in the original GQ piece. And yes, the writer took an extremely snarky tone, but that's really no different than lots of other media analysis these days.
The point is that a published piece ("poorly written hit piece" or not) was removed from a website because the subject of that piece complained about it, and because of the incestuous relationships of the corporations involved. That's the issue. There's nothing "normal" about a piece being removed, post-publication, because of a complaint, regardless of where said complaint came from.
But that's just the thing. Are all those "people are saying" things bad? According to who?
The "much derided" infographic was appropriately using a "skew" and "lean forward" definition that's a very normal and common term in TV.
"Slop" is just . . . sloppy. When Zaslav came in, the net was already very much in its motorcycle building reality phase, and while their current slate has evolved along with the industry, it's perfectly fine for basic cable. Deadliest Catch has at least a few dozen Emmy noms - not sure about the rest of their programming.
"[A]lmost as if the reality-skewing CEO was ashamed of the streamer’s affiliation with high-quality, high-profile scripted programming" is without any support or basis beyond the author's reference to the "Max" rebranding. And I dunno, maybe the rebrand is a terrible idea. But those of us in the space remember how almost every media journalist *derided* Hulu for selecting that name, and it seems to be working fine.
"Bafflingly" suggests that there's no basis to the writing off of shows and movies. But there is (and it's not primarily for tax purposes). Any analyst or investor could have explained.
In all of these cases, the reporter could have provided a statistic, a 3rd party quote, a company explanation, anything to justify the conclusions. Agents LOVE to participate in stories like this and can provide context. Tell me about how all of this affected noms, BO or ratings. Give me *anything* concrete to quantify the premise of this slasher of an article.
Under these circumstances, it's a given that the company would complain, and the lack of prior outreach makes responding to those complaints complex and fraught for GQ. Yes, the fact that they removed the article is strange, but the "incestuous" premise is circumstantial at this point, and it appears that the article would remain up had the reporter not insisted that it be removed.
I hear you, but that's a squishy place to be, particularly in GQ. The piece wasn't differentiated from straight news, and every outlet's gonna have their own standards for how accurate and well-sourced news analysis needs to be. It would have been perfect at old-skool Defamer, but not at WSJ. Honestly, who knows whether this met the standard at GQ. It did until it didn't. As I said up top, I think the take is a bad take, but understand that there's a place for it somewhere.
The response from WBD corporate is pretty normal as these things go, although the author's request to withdraw the story is wild (and kind of impressive regardless of what you think of his conclusions).
The GQ piece is in many respects the worst of all possible worlds. Instead of the censorship happening before hand (as Chomsky noted) it took place clumsily and ridiculously right out in plain sight. And was preserved for future generations to see
And the story got more attention (and confirmation ) by being censored than it would have if Zaslav had left it alone.
And the magazine managed to not only lose whatever journalistic credibility it had, but looked pathetic in the process.
My takedown of the "arguably most hated man in Hollywood" article is raising questions answered by my takedown...
"But Parker, isn't 'don't upset your boss' a standard practice across industries? Why is it different here?" Yes, "don't upset your boss" is sensible advice for most individuals in most fields.
This really does emphasise how authoritarian management powers have been utterly normalised. "Don't upset your local noble or the king" would not be an acceptable basis for a political structure, but "don't upset your boss" is a wholly normal work structure. While your employer can't kill you (unlike a feudal noble), they can fire you, which still does an awful lot of damage. Why should the person who happens to be your current boss, who has only had that role for a few months, have the right to take away a job that you may have had for decades?
Why should employers in general have the right to fire people? Why isn't a job a property right that you have to be compensated for giving up?
No, a job is either the outcome of a signed contract, or one that is implied. You get hired because the boss believes you will perform your job in the manner the company expects.
The idea is, it's employment at will, which means they have the right to fire you, but by the same token, you have the right to quit. A job is not a "property right."
A job obviously can’t be a “property right”, but a basic income and healthcare ought to be. If basic survival is dependent on not “crossing the boss”, freedom is a child’s bedtime story.
A job and basic income aren't the same thing. If I hire you and you agree to work for me, you agree to perform the job in a reasonable manner, and in return I will pay you and provide the benefits I promised you. Except for reasons prohibited by law (civil rights, right to not be discriminated against), I can fire you, even without giving a reason, just as you can quit without giving a reason. Remember, it's employment at will.
What on earth does freedom have to do with fulfilling the obligations of performing a job? Even if you're self employed, you still have to do the work necessary to make your work pay you.
But I’m NOT free to quit “at will”, because I need a job to keep a roof over my head, food on my table, and in America, healthcare. My employer, however, is free to fire me for any reason, or no reason at all, if it helps his bottom line. Look up the history of layoffs for the past couple decades or so.
Jesus, what the hell do you want? The vast majority of employers don't fire people unless it's for cause. You're whining like somebody who expects to be taken care of. Of course employers can fire you if they can't maintain profits, you must think you're entitled to a job despite an employer's ability to pay you. If you owned a business and it wasn't making enough money, you would lay off people if it was the only way you could avoid bankruptcy or going out of business. All businesses need to be profitable. Grow up.
it's pretty cool how media conglomerates basically act on "because of the implication." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE&ab_channel=t91
And the ones who aren't afraid of being sued are inevitably the right wing rags.
I cancelled my WaPo subscription a year ago after becoming increasingly irate over how many right wing knuckleheads Bezos had installed in the op-ed section. "Democracy dies in darkness" is WaPo's motto, yet the actual voice from the paper is something else entirely. I cancelled the NYT for the same reason.
Yes, they have gotten far too addicted to both-siderism disease, when they hired even more awful right-wing Murdoch apparatchiks, straight from the WSJ. I cancelled in Feb. after one of Tom Cotton's hate-filled editorial propaganda pieces that never should have been published.
Well, the GQ piece was both more egregious and less egregious in parts.
*Less* egregious, because every corporate media CEO has been the "most hated man in Hollywood" for at least a few minutes, and those stories follow the same form - brazen CEO does thing that pisses off community, gets criticized, backtracks, "but will he ever be able to fix what the broke?"
*More* egregious because it really was a poorly written hit piece that uses "people are saying" semantics to just elide past any actual reporting to justify conclusions described as "much-derided," "slop," "almost as if" or "bafflingly." There are reasons behind all of these corporate decisions, and the reader deserves more than an OMG U SUK, ZASLAV in terms of analysis.
Also, not sure if the WaPo article itself changed, but the "Zaslav associate" referred to in the newsletter doesn't appear in the linked Sommer WaPo piece (maybe he changed his article after publication? 😁). The narrative he writes is that WBD Corporate Comms called up to complain, which is a normal thing. Sommer did not write about the Welch connection reported by Variety, which is weirder and bad, but increasingly common as business reporters have a freer hand in developing coverage for movie and TV.
Did we read the same piece? It starts out with a description of Zaslav being booed at a commencement. It goes on to detail all of the egregious things that have, in fact, happened under Zaslav's tenure. And there have been literally dozens of other articles that I've read recently - about the TCM nonsense, the silly rebranding of "HBO Max" as "Max" (something that I, as a HBO Max subscriber, had to deal with, as I had to re-subscribe after the change took place), the removal of content - that support everything in the original GQ piece. And yes, the writer took an extremely snarky tone, but that's really no different than lots of other media analysis these days.
The point is that a published piece ("poorly written hit piece" or not) was removed from a website because the subject of that piece complained about it, and because of the incestuous relationships of the corporations involved. That's the issue. There's nothing "normal" about a piece being removed, post-publication, because of a complaint, regardless of where said complaint came from.
But that's just the thing. Are all those "people are saying" things bad? According to who?
The "much derided" infographic was appropriately using a "skew" and "lean forward" definition that's a very normal and common term in TV.
"Slop" is just . . . sloppy. When Zaslav came in, the net was already very much in its motorcycle building reality phase, and while their current slate has evolved along with the industry, it's perfectly fine for basic cable. Deadliest Catch has at least a few dozen Emmy noms - not sure about the rest of their programming.
"[A]lmost as if the reality-skewing CEO was ashamed of the streamer’s affiliation with high-quality, high-profile scripted programming" is without any support or basis beyond the author's reference to the "Max" rebranding. And I dunno, maybe the rebrand is a terrible idea. But those of us in the space remember how almost every media journalist *derided* Hulu for selecting that name, and it seems to be working fine.
"Bafflingly" suggests that there's no basis to the writing off of shows and movies. But there is (and it's not primarily for tax purposes). Any analyst or investor could have explained.
In all of these cases, the reporter could have provided a statistic, a 3rd party quote, a company explanation, anything to justify the conclusions. Agents LOVE to participate in stories like this and can provide context. Tell me about how all of this affected noms, BO or ratings. Give me *anything* concrete to quantify the premise of this slasher of an article.
Under these circumstances, it's a given that the company would complain, and the lack of prior outreach makes responding to those complaints complex and fraught for GQ. Yes, the fact that they removed the article is strange, but the "incestuous" premise is circumstantial at this point, and it appears that the article would remain up had the reporter not insisted that it be removed.
But it wasn't a straight news piece. It was a take.
I hear you, but that's a squishy place to be, particularly in GQ. The piece wasn't differentiated from straight news, and every outlet's gonna have their own standards for how accurate and well-sourced news analysis needs to be. It would have been perfect at old-skool Defamer, but not at WSJ. Honestly, who knows whether this met the standard at GQ. It did until it didn't. As I said up top, I think the take is a bad take, but understand that there's a place for it somewhere.
The response from WBD corporate is pretty normal as these things go, although the author's request to withdraw the story is wild (and kind of impressive regardless of what you think of his conclusions).