November 9, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: An Army of Davids.

The New Hotness? An Army of Crybullies! I’m both in stitches, and for the first time somewhat sympathetic to the Kamala campaign, knowing that so many of its staffers are in the vein of this young man:

As Josh Barro wrote in 2022 when the WaPo was going through a de rigueur 202o-style DNC-MSM struggle session:

We have seen in the tech industry what it looks like for a company to rein in a culture of freewheeling, chaotic fighting. Google stopped telling employees to bring their whole selves to work, started telling them not to have bitter fights about politics, and punished those who wouldn’t follow the new rules. “Activist” employees got frustrated and left the company — good.1 Basecamp, a much smaller firm, drew a lot of attention for its declaration that political fights wouldn’t be allowed anymore, leading to much garment-rending and the departure of left-wing employees — something that was for the best, as it was an opportunity for workers and their organizations to be better aligned on values.

There are models for newsrooms where employees behave in a normal and professional manner on social media, in Slack, and in their general communications with and about each other. You don’t see, for instance, Wall Street Journal or Axiosreporters criticizing each other in public or decrying management for failing to run the outlet in exactly the way they would like. You also don’t see them sharing tasteless jokes. There are expectations of professionalism set from the top, and they’re followed. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei explained on a recent episode of the Very Serious podcast how they keep newsroom drama to a minimum — it starts with a clear expectation that reporters won’t “pop off” about their opinions and won’t badmouth each other. And the WSJ is a union shop, so I don’t want to hear about how it’s impossible to develop a culture where reporters stick to their knitting if they are unionized.

It’s ultimately on Post management that they never set the expectations they ended up wanting to enforce. But it’s not too late to start.

I would finally note one thing: Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one. And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.

Add to the safetyism-obsessed themes of the addled young man in the video above the campaign’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Looming Orange Hitler, and imagine how schizophrenic the young staffers felt when it was all over, and hey, let bygones be bygones, and good luck to the next president!

UPDATE:

Good luck with that.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll