There are a lot of personal stories that start feature articles — here in “the biz” we call it an “anecdotal lede” — and there are times when you read one and it reads a little off, but humans have fallible memories, and maybe it’s how they saw it but not exactly how things went down.
It’s not every day that you get one that immediately scans as so absolutely, hilariously false that you have to share it with other people because you can’t believe a supposed institution of journalism could proudly print something so absurd.
Well, folks, we got one today, from those brave truth-tellers at The Atlantic, who are heroically making sure conservatives have a place to tell their stories (that isn’t the Wall Street Journal, or Fox News, or Newsmax, or OANN, or Truth Social, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Newsweek, or The Federalist, or every Sinclair TV station, or The Baltimore Sun, or … I have to quit here or else this will stop being a short review.)
So, this is the lede.
Anyway, that didn’t happen. That has never happened. Nothing remotely like that has ever happened in any newsroom anywhere, ever.
It is nice that he openly admitted conservative op-eds got special treatment in the Times and that he didn’t know what he was doing because he came up in conservative media and had no idea what journalism actually is. That, I believe!
Snapping at orientation? That didn’t happen, but in yellow.
Those damn beatniks at the Times
[snap snap snap snap]
I remember an excerpt from Dinesh D’Souza’s book back in the day which sparked the PC outrage. He used as proof that PC had taken over Dartmouth (Dartmouth!) the time he claimed he said something deregogatory and he “imagined” the whispers behind his back that he wasn’t being PC. The proof, somehow, was all in his head.
Rubenstein is the guy who James Bennet hired from an exclusively right wing pipeline designed to bring more conservatives into the Opinion section – he was literally an affirmative action hire.
And he’s the guy who brought in Tom Cotton’s piece calling to send troops into cities to stop peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, which Tom Scocca rightly noted was a part of Cotton’s campaign to escalate police violence and add troops to the mix.
Yeah, he’s a reliable source. In his own head.
https://popula.com/2022/10/28/james-bennet-was-wrong-and-it-was-good-he-lost-his-job/
A lot of modern conservatism boils down to them hoping they’ll someday be able to make it illegal for anyone to disagree with them or tell them how vile their views are.
aww man…..group orientation…..dunno who came up with that horrible idea
i noped out of mine….but then..in my job being anti social and private isnt held against me…usually….and it generally amuses me that most people i work with dont know they’ve been calling me by my surname for 5 years now and dont actually know my name…
also didnt know chick fil a hates gay people….not that we have them here…chick fil a i mean…pretty sure we have gay people
So with two points: Group orientation is … rare for a job like that? It’s possible he had something where he was introduced to new colleagues, but there is 0% chance that anyone snapped like they were at a beatnik 1950s poetry slam. That did not happen. Nor would any HR person step in to “no that’s wrongthink” that person; that’s entirely out of the conservative imagination of what liberal spaces are like. No chance it happened.
Also, yes Chik-Fil-A is notoriously bigoted and spent a lot of money fighting gay marriage and other things deemed un-Christian. (They have actually toned down a lot of their spending on that, I should note, but personally I’ve never eaten there and never will.) That being said: Most liberal types I know are in the “I don’t like their politics but their sandwiches are so good!” so that part of his story also scans as bogus. Plus, a $19 sandwich in NYC is like … not outrageously expensive? And he’d lived in NYC for years beforehand so it wasn’t like he was suddenly embarrassed at that.
Anyway, didn’t happen but in yellow.
The other thing is that tons of people in NYC eat Chik Fil A. They’re all over the city. Nobody cares. It’s like claiming Times staffers freaked out to see someone wearing a Chicago White Sox hat.
I’m willing to believe there are more people in NYC that would refuse to eat at one than in, like, Oklahoma City or Dallas or whatever, but the company used to have exactly 1 location in the city — oddly enough on NYU’s campus — and now they have dozens of them all over. Even my little sleepy outpost in the vast upstate NY wasteland has two now with several more on the way. Clearly the company isn’t all that concerned about liberals snapping at them!
I could easily see someone saying later they didn’t like the sauce, or that they thought Popeyes was a million times better, or that they would like to try them if they ever had a vegetarian option. I can imagine them relaying some rumor about a health department inspection, disagreeing with the Sunday closings, or wondering if the one eight blocks away had dealt with the weird smell coming out of the sewer grate.
I can imagine someone trying to show off their knowledge and digging into the corporate debt to earnings ratio, or questioning whether they had hedged correctly to ensure their rents didn’t skyrocket when their leases ran out.
But this story? I could actually imagine a smarter person putting together a damning account of the Times, but I suspect The Atlantic would get balk at publishing something that landed a serious blow on the people in power at The Times.
Uh, yeah. Group orientation? What group? Even the NYT isn’t hiring huge numbers of people, and haven’t been for years.
My “orientation” at a newspaper consisted of an editor showing me my desk and how to log into the computer system and submit stories. Then I was told to cover a school board meeting that night and that I either needed to file the story that night after the meeting or in the morning before 10 am deadline (it published every afternoon, not in the morning). That was the entire “orientation.” I don’t think they even told me where the school board meeting was — I had to track it down (most were held at the county administration building but they also used to rotate through county schools). I figured that was a test. I passed.
Jamelle Bouie noted on BlueSky that his NYT orientation was basically paperwork and picking up his work laptop. Which is about what I’ve done at every journalism job I’ve ever had, too!