Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Part 9 - A Little Story

 A LIttle Story:

My father (a Baby Boomer) is a distinguished and extremely well-regarded (retired) investigative journalist. I’ll refrain from outing him by name. He worked at a number of newspapers around the country during his career. He broke some huge stories and his focus was always on protecting those who could not protect themselves. One of the stories he broke in the 1980’s was how asbestos in insulation was making people get lung cancer when it broke loose of plumbing pipes or as it aged out in walls. He broke the story of cigarette manufacturers who used asbestos in their filters, killing hundreds if not thousands of their factory workers who made these cigarettes in the fifties and sixties. He broke the story of ATV safety and how the major ATV manufacturers are largely immune to safety regulations that car manufacturers are required to adhere to, thereby allowing them to build vehicles that were top-heavy and would roll over and cut your arm off.

Enough said, right? He is in many ways a juggernaut force for good in making people safer and better taken care of by our society. 

Well, when my dad retired from newspaper work, he wasn’t ready to call it quits. He’s a bulldog and needs to be helping as long as he’s able. He started a news site that engaged in original reporting around consumer affairs. He operated this tiny outfit with the help of a few younger, engaging journalists who were passionate about the mission of protecting the public from corporate malfeasance. It was a struggle from day one. In the media landscape of infotainment, fake news and the death of the newspaper, finding money to run a news operation of 500k a year or something was incredibly difficult. But guess what? He did it anyway. He went to everyone he knew with a little money and got them to contribute to the cause. And it worked. Well, fast forward to nearly ten years later, and he’s ready to retire. His organization has a set mission of consumer affairs reporting, which intertwines but doesn’t focus directly on issues regarding equity for marginalized people. He interviews a younger reporter for an editing job. After not being offered the position, this younger reporter posts to his 30k followers on Twitter that this man, who has worked tirelessly over forty years to protect those who need protection from big business, is racist and non-inclusive in his organization for not agreeing to change the organization’s mission statement to suit this privileged, white, bitter tweetstar.

POOF. Whole enterprise gone in a tweet. Now, think about this for a second, and if you really want to know the details you can probably find the information without me giving it away. Does this seem right to you? At whatever age or generation you are. Does this seem like the right and proper way to go about changing our society? To throw an ally under the bus to virtue signal your fan base? End of Story