Two Years On, Facing the Fear, the Cynicism, the Silence
An update on a failure of establishment journalism.
Last night, I had a good time watching the Super Bowl with some friends, friends of friends, a few of their kids, and a bunch of dogs. Sorry about the loss, Bengals. At least you swept the Steelers this year!
At one point, a guy I don’t know particularly well went off on a tangent about cancel culture and how it’s basically a myth created by right-wingers. I don’t remember what incited this rant. It set my teeth on edge though I didn’t bother arguing with him, because frankly who wants to have that conversation in the middle of a Super Bowl party? If I got into arguments with every liberal I encountered who is in denial about this, I’d drive myself off the deep end. Also, there’s some truth in what he was saying - conservatives do indeed distort the issue. The problem is that progressives do as well, albeit in different ways. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether to blame them, because the corporate media that gets fed to normie Democrats commits copious lies of omission when covering the topic.
The last week of January marked two years since I came forward with my story of being falsely accused of criminal charges with no evidence or scrutiny on a hastily cobbled together spreadsheet publicized by national media outlets. More than a few prominent women “journalists” still openly encourage people to believe all the allegations on the list despite no investigation and despite the fact that even some men had access to the list in the brief window when it could be edited.
Months after I self-published my experience, establishment liberal media blatantly changed their standards in covering sexual misconduct allegations to protect Joe Biden, who at that point was clinching the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Part of liberal media’s campaign to cover their ass was to claim the slogan “Believe All Women” was a canard pushed by conservatives. Presumptive guilt and immediate condemnation of accused men, liberal outlets asserted, was never a thing. That’s a brazen lie, of course, and anyone who was paying attention to MeToo from late 2017 until early 2020 surely knows it, but Democrats wanted to defeat Donald Trump above all else, so they swallowed the new narrative. Publications like Bustle went as far as to stealth edit things they had published in previous years.
Never mind that MeToo post-Biden continues to be murky ground, with corporate journalists serving as the self-interested arbiters. Some heinous predators are brought down, sure, while other men are toppled for debatable offenses, messy but consensual relationships, and some evidence-free assertions.
Bring up Tara Reade today and a distressing number of liberals will tell you that she has been “proven wrong” (she hasn’t) or that she is a Russian asset, the standard Democrat conspiracy explanation for any inconvenient phenomenon, because she now contributes to RT and has said nice things about Vladimir Putin in the past. Obviously I have no idea what, if anything, happened between Reade and Biden, but she has as much corroboration as Christine Blasey Ford, who liberals automatically granted victim status when she accused a political rival of rape.
If you’ve been reading this Substack or following me elsewhere online, you know I’ve spent a lot of the last two years very angry, about the completely one-sided and dishonest coverage Democrat-aligned media has had about The Shitty Media Men List, and broader conversations about MeToo, cancelling, identity politics, and a host of other things.
Not surprisingly, progressives get defensive and hostile with me for talking about this. They tell me to shut up, stop whining, and get over it. Believe me, I would love to. Talking about this brings me no joy whatsoever, but I know there are important issues at stake. One big problem with cancelling someone under false pretenses is that, with their career and livelihood in ruins, they have a lot of time to dwell on the injustice of it all.
A few have accused me of trying to make this whole ordeal into my brand, which is ridiculous. Unless I overtly embraced right-wing culture war politics, “man falsely accused of sex crimes” is not a monetizable or enviable persona by any means. Those close to me, the ones who didn’t cut me off, don’t talk to me about this. My family doesn’t discuss this. It’s not a fun conversation to have, and there’s little to no cultural sympathy for men in my situation, at least in liberal circles where identity politics has become for many the singular way of approaching the world. I took a considerable risk coming forward because my experience touches on several important debates progressives need to have. Based on my online behavior, one might assume I talk about this all the time in my day-to-day life. I don’t, because it’s depressing as hell and most people don’t know what to say.
Those responsible for my plight don’t have to answer for anything. Megan Greenwell has not commented, and no one is pressuring her to do so. Drew Magary has ducked me for a year and a half after I called him out about his hypocritical pro-cancelling essay and his involvement in my conflict with Greenwell. Moira Donegan has been constantly gassed up by the media class, and never has to address any negatives of the list. She immediately blocked me on Twitter when I came forward, even though I said I didn’t support the lawsuit filed against her. Moira publicly praises the bravery of the women accusing Andrew Cuomo while retaining the services of a lawyer who privately helped the former governor smear them. She has never addressed that her lawyer had to resign from the board of Times Up. Moira scoffs at invocations of cancel culture as a social problem despite being responsible for one of the more glaring examples of it. Moira helped bury Tara Reade.
The media class that pushed and defended the list endlessly has been, aside from a snarky tweet by one of the Gawker assholes, completely silent on my story. They were glad to cover the lawsuit filed by Stephen Elliott because they can deceitfully frame it as “grrrrrr bitter vengeful man wants to punish women who were simply trying to protect each other!” They can’t do that with me, so they simply don’t acknowledge me at all. These are figures who screech about accountability when someone loses a job over a decade-old offensive tweet, but they aren’t accountable to anyone for their lying and the personal destruction they cause.
If the so-called journalists responsible for what happened to me published even one article about it, that would at least make it easier to mentally process. The crushing silence, the endless lying - all by the same overeducated professional class types who made gaslighting a vogue (and often misused) buzzword - it’s crazymaking!
This climate of dishonesty, fear, and ideological conformity hardly advances any useful political projects and doesn’t make anyone happy, aside from maybe the small pack of opportunists who exploit concern for mass movements to make it so their claims can never be rebutted, their motives can never be questioned.
So I think it’s helpful to discuss my dealings with a few prominent media figures and institutions over the past two years. If nothing else, it will show that mine is clearly a worthy story, and the failure to cover it can only be attributed to the anti-journalistic values of dishonesty, fear, and cynical calculation.
New York Magazine
Shortly after I came forward in January 2020 and my piece got some attention on Twitter, I was approached by an editor from New York. The editor mentioned she knew a man who had been MeToo’d and that she found the seemingly never-ending nature of the punishment troubling. The editor told me the magazine was dedicating an upcoming issue to the theme of forgiveness, certainly a value that has been lacking in mainstream culture in recent years.
She asked me to submit 1,000 words expounding on my experience and what avenues the accused have to rebuild their lives. I sent on my draft in early February, and she said the issue was slated to run in late March. Then the pandemic swiftly enveloped the world; the issue was scraped and my piece was held indefinitely. I felt crushed. I thought journalists would finally reckon with the complexities of what they did, and just like that it was off the table. The editor gestured at possibly revisiting the piece when we reach “a new normal.” Vague language, to be sure, but if we haven’t reached whatever level of normalcy that would satisfy her and her bosses in the ensuing two years, we probably never will. I sent her an email that April expressing some astonishment at how the media was handling the Biden accusation. She didn’t respond to that and I haven’t heard from her since.
Ben Smith
As I’ve mentioned on here before, the former top editor of BuzzFeed News has quite a bit of responsibility for what an embarrassing mess The Shitty Media Men List became from a journalistic standpoint, since it was the publication he oversaw that first wrote about the spreadsheet while it was still live in October 2017, drawing tons of attention to it and making it yet another culture war battleground.
So it was more than a little enraging last year to see Smith, then the media columnist at The New York Times, engaging in revisionist history about the role of journalists during the height of MeToo. According to him, journalists always treated accusations with the utmost care, making sure to factcheck, consult with credible sources, make sure the allegation was part of a pattern and not a misunderstanding - before publishing. But of course there were notable examples when they did not do that at all, and Smith seemed like he was trying to sweep those under the rug after the double standard with Biden. I emailed him in June to express outrage and point out ways that his descriptions were not accurate. When I didn’t get a response in over a month, I copied what I sent him in a post here, and tagged him on Twitter. A little over a week later, he sent me this non-reply:
Not sure what I was supposed to make of that. He didn’t address any of my issues and didn’t even bother to defend himself. Smith might as well have shrugged and said, “That’s nice.” Somehow it was even more insulting than no response at all.
The following month, to help promote the latest reboot of Gawker, Smith interviewed incoming top editor Leah Finnegan for his column. In what struck me as a cheap attempt at showing the new Gawker would be more mature and restrained than the often reckless and malicious old Gawker, Smith asked Finnegan if she would publish The Shitty Media Men List in her newer, nicer version of the site. She replied that she would have in 2017, but not now. The fuck? What kind of editorial standard is that? It’s only okay to do irresponsible and reckless things once? Or when the moral panic is at its peak? You and your friends get the public shaming out of your system, then no one else gets to do it?
I emailed Smith again:
I read your interview with Leah Finnegan and your question whether she would publish The Shitty Media Men List. I found her answer a little bizarre. After all, the list has indeed been amplified and weaponized by major outlets and her peers - it's not a hypothetical - yet she appears uninterested in exploring any of its complexities on her site. What's more, Darcie Wilder, the current social media manager at Gawker, mocked me last year for coming forward about my experience and being upset it was completely unacknowledged by the very people responsible for what happened. Doesn't strike me as a convincing turn to "nice" for the Gawker reboot.
No response this time from Ben. I saw a few days later in a writeup that he attended the fancy launch party for the new Gawker. Must be nice to hobnob with your media buddies that you run protection for and promote.
What a scumbag.
The Washington Post
The Post was one of several outlets where I pitched my first piece before, out of frustration and exhaustion, I decided to self-publish. An editor there said my submission didn’t meet the paper’s ethical and editorial standards. “If he doesn’t know who accused him, or of what, I don’t think he can make all these categorical denials,” the editor commented about a draft. So once again, the burden of proof on me is impossible to satisfy but my accuser can toss around whatever claim they want with absolutely zero scrutiny and it gets spread far and wide? How does that work? The editor also griped that I was being “problematically cagey” about the culture of Kissing Suzy Kolber and my departure from WaPo. No idea what he was getting at there, but I’m very upfront about the fact that it was a frequently crass dick joke blog. I’m sure the tension has nothing to do with me making a headache for The Post after they forced me to resign in 2008 for being a raunchy blogger on the side.
Worth noting that WaPo’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan defended The Shitty Media Men List in the paper in 2018 and lionized Moira Donegan after she revealed herself as the creator of it. She let Donegan repeat the lie that the list was never meant to go public, ignoring evidence to the contrary offered by critics. So tossing around unvetted accusations is ethical? Offering dishonest one-sided narratives meets your editorial standards when the politics is right?
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Sullivan is awful chummy with Megan Greenwell, that The Post covered Greenwell’s tenure as top editor of Deadspin in glowing terms, and considered it news when she left in 2019. Somehow, the previous iterations of Deadspin didn’t require such breathless coverage from one of the nation’s biggest newspapers.
I’m sure it’s also just a coinkydink that Sullivan in early 2021 provided Defector, the spiritual successor of Deadspin which credits Greenwell as its “godmother,” a full column of gushing free publicity. Funny how these media columnists work hard to promote the same suffocating clique of radlib scolds.
Vox
The liberal site’s top editor was at The Atlantic when I pitched my piece to that publication, and she was the one who ultimately issued the incredibly wishy-washy rejection that the publication didn’t have “the bandwidth for stories of this complexity.”
I’m plenty aware tensions were high during the Trump years, and challenging liberal pieties as a liberal outlet probably meant blowback on social media, but if you call yourself a journalist, eventually you have to confront these challenging dynamics. Otherwise you’re just a propagandist, either for a political party, corporate interests, or both.
Vox is usually in the business of denying cancel culture exists, or waving off concerns by defining it as always deserved accountability. So it was odd to see last month, in the wake of young NYC women running a shaming campaign of West Elm Caleb on TikTok, Vox decried the social media site’s “cancel culture problem.” Oh, so you’re losing contain on a social phenomenon that you helped foster, and you’re passing the blame onto someone else? Who do you think all these Gen Z women learned these tactics from? Journalists never want to examine how they might have created this monster and passed it on to the next generation. Or maybe they know all too well, and don’t want the finger pointed at them.
Podcasters
Back in November, after I named Megan Greenwell as the almost certain source of the claims against me, a podcaster invited me to appear on his show. He gets some fairly big name guests, and he’s also critical of themes I touch on, so it felt like a useful fit. I recorded an hour and a half with him after rushing home from my first day at a new job to accomodate his schedule. Seemed like it went pretty well.
Days passed, then a few weeks. I was curious that the episode hadn’t been released, while other new eps were posted. Maybe he had a few others in the can, I figured. Eventually I pressed him, and he told me he wouldn’t be releasing it. This is someone who frequently challenges wokeness and liberal orthodoxy, so it struck me as strange. He said he wasn’t afraid of confronting the relevant issues. He just didn’t think the episode worked. I’m admittedly not the most polished talker, and this is a subject that hits home so I can get worked up about it but I can’t say I’m totally convinced of his reasoning.
A lot of the current discourse about getting Joe Rogan off Spotify acknowledges that he’s too big to cancel. Even if liberals remove him from Spotify, his huge audience will travel with him wherever he ends up, and right-wingers and intellectual dark web types will rush to his aid. The cancel debates always seem to center on celebrities like Rogan, Aaron Rodgers, and Dave Chappelle. This allows liberals to dismiss concerns because “see, we can’t even cancel them! Cancel culture doesn’t exist!” Ignore obvious realities and the chilling effects that such censorship and unpersoning drives can have. And it allows conservatives to muddy the waters by making dire pronouncements about entertainers who will remain active and wealthy regardless of how much they rattle the left.
Clearly, I was not too big to cancel when I was sideswiped in 2017. In fact, I was a freelancer at that point, an especially vulnerable point in my career. And many of my former supporters fell under the spell of the ideological campaign that ousted me. Had I known it would come to that, I suppose the smart advice to myself would have been to act more cynically and get myself to a place where I would have been invulnerable. The result is that I now feel like a sucker for trying to be faithful to my values and being the best, most honest person I could. That’s an awful takeaway but I’m at a loss for finding other conclusions. Most of the worst, most transparent careerists in media have prospered. That will only be more the case with social dynamics like these.
Somehow, I was important enough that I ended up on a list that was only available to an elitist, highly privileged slice of the industry. But I’m not important enough to be worth the inevitable grief someone will get for platforming me, or whatever you want to call it, to talk about it and demand answers. I don’t have name recognition. A surge of listeners won’t accompany the condemnations. I’m not worth the trouble.
This podcaster told me I should stop talking about my story, and focus on other subjects. It felt a little condescending, but not totally wrong. At this point, I can keep pointing out all the lies and hypocrisy, and nothing will happen. Perhaps a cultural shift will come someday to change that, yet the longer I wait the more stagnant everything seems. So I’m venting one more time, then I’m back to searching for purpose in life again.