Billy and Karen and The New York Times

1,000 years ago when I was a programmer for a now-defunct insurance company in Evanston Illinois, our team had a morale problem.  Most of us were working our asses off.  Fixing fuck ups, having special "urgent/drop everything" projects dropped on our desks every day, coming in at 2:00 AM to deal with system crashes.  That sort of thing.

And then there was Billy and Karen.  

Billy and Karen were the fuck ups we were constantly cleaning up after.  And the reason this drove the rest of us nuts was that investigating problems, figuring out root causes and then fixing them was our profession.    And not to put too fine a point on it, but Billy and Karen (and Juliana, the vice president who had hired them) very clearly were problem.  

They showed up late, flaked off most of the time, what work they did was never better than half-assed, and they routinely skipped early.   Everyone knew it.  But when some of us younger folk piped up about it, we were consistently and firmly told to mind our own business.  What  Billy and Karen were up to was none of our affair, despite the fact that a great deal of our own business was cleaning up after these two clowns.  

And almost every place I have ever worked since there have been Billies and Karens.   Goofs who had no business holding the titles they held or drawing the salaries they drew.  Chronic fuck ups that everyone else was forced to accommodate.  And when the question of why they existed at all inevitably came up, the answer was always the same.  MYOB.  Stick to your knitting.  

Like all worker bees everywhere, we enjoyed the inalienable right to bitch about the conditions of our labor generally.  Or, while safely out to lunch with fellow sufferers, mutter under our breath about these two millstones that were dragging everyone else down.  Or to shout "Can you believe that asshole fucked it up again?" at an empty office at 2:00 AM as we   made our way through a core dump printed out on a mountain of green-bar paper looking for the exact spot where Billy or Karen has screwed the pooch this time.  

But never let yourself get caught speaking the plain facts in front of management, because there was something else going on here.  Some "X" factor at play about which you were not pivvy.  A little club, of sorts, that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of protecting Billy and Karen, and to which you were not invited.  

So what does that have to do with The New York Times?  Or the Washington Post?

Well, every day on social media you can find people with very impressive media titles complaining about the state of their profession.  How the Washington Post has failed us again in thus-and-so manner, and can you believe how bad The New York Times has gotten?   Among the chorus are an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who is also a contributing editor for the Atlantic. There's an ex-editor at Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times. There is a host of a prime time program on MSNBC who is also married to a Supreme Court contributor for ABC News. There's a journalist. public speaker. and ex- WSJ/NYT/NBC/CNN.

Now anyone (myself included) can bellow on social media about the sorry state of The New York Fucking Times all day long.  Hundreds of people do.  Hand waving about "legacy media" and "money" and "ownership", all of which are necessary, but insufficient.  Because what you'll almost never hear are the names of the specific individual human beings at the Times or the Post or Politico who are assigning the work, writing the articles, making the editorial decisions and composing the headlines that are doing the damage.  Because whatever shows up in your paper or news feed on any given day -- right down to the word-choice and punctuation -- is the result of a chain of decisions made by individual men and women.  

Who, specifically, are the Billies and the Karens at these places who are A) capable of wrecking such havoc with the institutions credibility and yet, B) are simultaneously immune from the specific, by-their-name-and-deed criticism that is the only way things will ever change.

This is nothing you or I can do, but give all  people with very impressive media people with all their impressive bona fides, I cannot believe that not one of them is journalist enough or, y'know, knows anyone at any of these fucked up institutions well enough to get on the blower and investigate who at those fucked up institutions is driving those fucked up decisions.  

Then they could, I dunno, share that information with the rest of us.

There used to be a word for that kind of activity. 

It  started with a "J" as I recall.

But I guess  there is something else going on here.  

Some "X" factor at play about which we are not pivvy.  

Perhaps some sort of little club.
 

I Am The Liberal Media