Something flipped in establishment media this week

The WHCD thing, the revelation major studios are pushing explicitly right-cultural media, NBC fighting back all “My hope is this is the moment that defuses #MeToo” over Brokaw, whatever’s up with MAGA Kanye, Douthat in the NYT saying the incels have a legitimate claim under modern rules

All of it signaling to anyone else that backlash is on the mainstream menu

NYMag/Tablet/Atlantic/NYTOpinion seem to have had a sense they need to step in to rescue the culture, this civic sense being tainted by dream of individual glory at the usual rate, more and more jumping on the bandwagon all the time

Now what I’m suspicious might be a cause, Gawker’s Children have been pushing newsmedia unionization for the last year or two, a few successes but even then the bossmen have pushed back more than you’d expect from the brands (exactly as much as you’d expect from bossmen)

But the unions of and by and for the kind of writers that write for Vox and Splinter and etc. have signaled that they want to aggressively move to control hiring and editorial lines, and also the uses to which they should be put (diversity! and fighting the patriarchy!, respectively!)

Which is to say they openly did the work of aligning the media capitalholders that’d been propping them up (since slate and Salon in the ‘90s, basically no online journalism makes money, it all runs off VC) with the reactionary grumbling audiences. In the face of industry contraction (coming after the Facebook realgorithmization, so many “pivot to video” failures, Buzzfeed missing revenue targets) they wrote their own damn Powell Memorandum, ain’t that something.