Something flipped in establishment media this week
The WHCD thing, the revelation major studios are pushing explicitly right-cultural media, NBC fighting back all \u201cMy hope is this is the moment that defuses #MeToo\u201d over Brokaw, whatever\u2019s 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\u2019m suspicious might be a cause, Gawker\u2019s 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\u2019d expect from the brands (exactly as much as you\u2019d 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\u2019d been propping them up (since slate and Salon in the \u201890s, 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 \u201cpivot to video\u201d failures, Buzzfeed missing revenue targets) they wrote their own damn Powell Memorandum, ain\u2019t that something.