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already seeing folks seize on this whole thing has a "cancel culture" parable makes me want to go back to bed, ugh https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/business/washingtonian-staff-protests.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/0...
1 - merrill wasn& #39;t simply "expressing her opinion." she took to a national newspaper to threaten to downgrade her staff to contractors, taking away their benefits while we& #39;re still in the midst of a global pandemic. and basically, to encourage other CEOs to do the same.
as is the problem with most "cancel culture" framing, merill was not "canceled." her staff collectively organized to respond to her op-ed, well within their federally protected rights to do so. merill apologized. the end. that& #39;s it!
a CEO publicly threatened to illegally reclassify her employees, and her they responded by reminding her of the error or her ways. if merril is the one you feel sorry for -- not the staff full of people worried about losing their livelihoods -- you may have cancel culture brain
because really this stupid cancel culture framing is ultimately a way of garnering disproportionate sympathy for the people who have nothing to lose. i promise you if somehow this resulted in merril& #39;s ouster, guess what? she& #39;d go be a CEO somewhere else.
but if she went ahead and did what she talked about doing? made everyone a contractor? baby that would just be business as usual in journalism. no one thinks of those staff members as having been "canceled."
if those people eventually left the industry because it suddenly became untenable to support themselves, their families on a journalism career? no one would ever use the word "canceled" to describe those losses.
all these "cancel culture" narratives are power narratives, please don& #39;t be so foolish and naive as to throw in your lot with those who already have all the power.
also ask yourself what that actually means -- is she canceled because lots of people disagree with her? what does that mean -- they all came into her house and took her keyboard away? no. she still runs a newsroom. her op-ed ran in the washington post. no one canceled her.
lots of folks on this website who claim to love "discourse" and "debate" also really love to characterize bad ideas as having some inherent value either because:
1.) those ideas came from people in power
2.) they& #39;re getting a backlash, so they must have some truth in them
1.) those ideas came from people in power
2.) they& #39;re getting a backlash, so they must have some truth in them
it& #39;s not a novel idea to turn all the people in your newsroom into contractors! in fact, this is one of the many blights upon the future of this industry. in an op-ed, she doesn& #39;t have to provide any of this context! it& #39;s all about her bottom dollar at the end of the day
much of the backlash i have seen is from journalists trying to provide this context - journalists who have already had something like this happen to them! merrill hasn& #39;t had to experience it first hand, but these folks have. is that not "discourse" and "debate?"
debate doesn& #39;t mean treating all ideas equally, promise.
2 - ask yourself why she wrote an op-ed in a national paper addressed to other CEOs instead of talking about these ideas with people in her own newsroom? why do we accept at face value that CEOs can just talk above their employees& #39; heads instead of...talking TO them?
this is where the power dynamic becomes crystal clear -- she feels like other CEOs are the only ones who are going to get where she& #39;s coming from.
and that& #39;s what exposed this all as a pile of bad ideas from the start -- is this how CEOs talk about you when you& #39;re not there? like a line item expense? (yes, it is)
she exposed so much of how she thinks about her own staff, but also how leaders broadly think about their employees. because we employees weren& #39;t meant to be in on the conversation.
it& #39;s no wonder the staff felt like they were being sold out. because in a way, they were. even if she didn& #39;t act on anything she suggested, she still took to a national paper to question whether or not they really needed salaries and health insurance.
and as we broadly made a lot of reassessments about work, work culture, and what we can tolerate for which wage -- to hear a CEO talk this way about their staff is a great reminder of WHY we& #39;re reassessing all of it.
