Quote:
Originally Posted by GioforPM
I’m drowning in the hyperbole.
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No hyperbole.
One of my regular clients is the founder/publisher/editor of a significant webzine. You've never heard of it, but it's big in its field; publishes fiction primarily. It has a reputation for developing young writers who go on to win significant awards.
A few years ago, a Twitter mob attacked her for editing a story by a writer from the Caribbean, because the story was written in the patois of one particular island and she felt that some of the words needed to be either explained or translated into international English. To the mob, editing the story was a racist act, and proved that the publisher was a white-supremacist bigot.
I should mention that the person who actually did the line-edit on the story was a black woman from another Caribbean island – Trinidad, IIRC – who requested the changes because even
she wasn't familiar with the patois of that particular island, and if she couldn't understand it, very few of the magazine's readers would.
But nothing would satisfy the Twitter mob, who had sniffed a racist and were determined to have blood. The magazine lost subscribers, it lost writers, it was loudly attacked online by people who had never read it and had no idea of the facts of the case. The bad publicity did tremendous damage to the value of my client's brand; but she survived, only because she was not part of a media conglomerate and there was nobody to fire her.
Fast-forward to this year. My client made a remark at a conference, to the effect that she doesn't like stories with token LGBT characters. By this she meant that if you have a character in a story whose sexual orientation is irrelevant to the action, it serves no good purpose to casually mention that the character happens to be gay, and you don't get ‘diversity points’ for including an LGBT character that way. The magazine has frequently published stories with LGBT main characters, in which their sexual activities played an important part in the plot; my client has no problem at all with those. But the same boobs on Twitter started crying for her blood
again.
This time, they not only accused my client (falsely) of being homophobic, they actually demanded that she
fire herself as editor and hire a replacement editor of
their choosing, to print the stories that
they wanted the magazine to contain – but of course she could continue to pay all the bills herself (plus wages for the new editor).
Imagine if someone organized a Twitter campaign to force you to take clients and cases of their choosing, and to do all that work on a pro-bono basis. That's what these people were demanding from my client – and all on the basis of a completely false accusation that they could not be arsed to investigate. They just wanted to bully someone.
No mob should have that kind of power over anyone. I won't defend Mr. Imoo's words or actions, but I will take his side against those who want to kick him out of his profession, because
nobody deserves that kind of treatment, and none of us are safe against false accusations or suddenly changing standards.
Now go ahead and sneer at me some more from your position of comfortable champagne-socialist superiority.
