Friday, September 30, 2011

Russel Smith: dude, who cares what you think?

Here's an article by Russel Smith in the Blob and Snail that I read while sitting in the doctor's office yesterday.  Happily, I didn't have to buy the paper, because it generated a very strong wave of "WHAT! EVER!" through my neural network.  To wit:

We old farts did that tiring reporting/interviewing stuff for years before we were allowed to write our opinions on things. I still don't even aspire to this ideal of not being edited; not being edited doesn't seem like a benefit to me. I still have a deep-rooted (and unjustified) instinct telling me that something published has value only if it has been commissioned by someone else.

I am biased in this debate: I don't care so much about the young people's careers, I care about mine, and if they don't play along in the work-for-pay convention, then all of our incomes are undercut. This is why other trades have unions. But creators are not very good at solidarity.

Now, speaking as an Old Fart who writes for free, and purely for the purpose of expressing my opinion before the top of my freakin' head blows off, I have only this to say:

Dear Russel, if it wasn't for the likes of you infesting the Canadian publishing establishment for the last 50+ years, making the whole thing into nothing more than a machine for cranking out Liberal Party of Canada propaganda, maybe your career wouldn't be circling the bowl along with every other print media worker in this country.  You and yours have made Canadian newspapers, magazines, television and radio into a monolithic boulder on the Left side of the political spectrum.  Anybody who wants to do something that hasn't been given official approval by the LPC re-election committee is doing it on the Internet, and there's nobody to blame but YOURSELVES.  I bet almost as many people will read this little rant of mine as read your blather in the Blob, too.

Its probably not too late to change your career to welding.  Better hit the gym, steel is heavy.

The Exploding Phantom

2 comments:

WiFi Lunchbox Guy said...

I think a squishy lib calling HuffPo "the Mordor of magazines" rates some kind of honourable mention.

HuffPo made $315 million from its sale, at least $67 million from funding rounds before that, and ongoing advertising revenue through it all. The contributors made...nothing!

The deeper truth is most MSM outlets operate in a similar way. Russel gets paid, while the interns uploading his article will never be paid. Someday Russel will be downsized; his replacement will either be an intern or rebranded agency content.

So we come full circle to your point. The senior writers/editors/publishers across the MSM push a JournoListastic liberal line, yet within their own organizations they do not act on these ideas. Gee, maybe that might influence the young to seek greener pastures elsewere.

Bob Devine said...

I do not mind those guys writing what they do. What pees me of is that they call it news. We can get some real news from Fox, a bit more from Sun News but except for a very rare article all we see any where else is opinion. The MSM is welcome to their opinions but that does not make it true and I do not pay a dime towards any of it except for CBC and I have no choice in that.