If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel
Nah, man.
There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.
Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.
The most likely reason, though—one that often overshadows the other ones—is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.
Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes. Bilton has had a successful media career, certainly, but the nature of his success has never been “he is a super smart journalist,” nor has it ever been “he is experienced in television news.” I have never felt it necessary to follow his work closely, so I do not want to caricature him unfairly, but he has always been slotted in my mind in the category of “People who are successful because they put a lot of effort into having fashionable eyewear.” (This will take you far, if you’re in the right rooms.) Hiring Nick Bilton to lead the most storied and respective investigative program in television news history is kind of like hiring a NASCAR driver as CEO of General Motors. I mean, yes, you have some experience in the field, but…………….
This job also comes with a lot of CONTEXT, which looms over CBS headquarters today like Godzilla about to breathe fire. David Ellison, the rich kid of one of the world’s richest men, wanted government approval for a merger of Paramount and Warner Bros, and so he has decided, as a calculated business decision, to disembowel CBS news’s credibility and make it more flattering to the Trump administration, and to carry out that task he put Bari Weiss in charge of the network, and she is well on her way to disgracing and ruining the institution already. As the crown jewel of CBS News’s journalistic image, the ongoing dismantling of 60 Minutes’ credibility has been particularly striking. Bari breezed in and started meddling with stories for political reasons and firing journalists who objected and generally smashing up, in a few months, editorial prestige that has taken decades to build. There is every indication that 60 Minutes is on its way to being transformed into something more like CBS Sunday Morning—a show with nice stories about kittens and celebrities and interesting trifles of Americana, but nothing that would offend anyone who holds the sort of power that might affect the business interests of David Ellison.
(I wouldn’t worry too much about CBS becoming another Fox News. Roger Ailes, who created Fox News, was a genius—an evil genius, but a genius nonetheless in the practice of manipulating the medium of television for political ends. Bari Weiss is not this sort of genius. Rather than being transformed into a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, it is more likely that CBS News is just made dumb and pointless.)
So as you can imagine all of the real journalists at CBS News, and at 60 Minutes in particular, are on edge. And in comes Nick Bilton, a guy with carefully groomed stubble and no TV newsroom experience, as if everything is fine and dandy, and he hits them with a staff memo that says things like, “On the very first episode of 60 Minutes Mike Wallace said: ‘If this broadcast does what we hope it will do it will report reality.’ I can’t think of a better north star for 60 Minutes than that. Above all, that means a commitment to fairness—in story selection, in the edit room, and in the broadcast.”
These are the words of a hatchet man. There are more red flags flying over this memo than a Soviet military parade. Heyo! Let me mention two. First, the most glaring: If you walk into a newsroom that values editorial credibility and has very recently had that editorial credibility fucked with by Bari Weiss under the guise of “fairness,” and you make “fairness” the center of your memo, you are telling everyone in a not very subtle way that you are there to continue the corporate project of fucking with the editorial credibility. Second, and only slightly more subtle—by not directly mentioning the CONTEXT monster that is in the forefront of the minds of every journalist at CBS, Bilton reveals himself as a goon, a soft-peddler, a PR man, an obfuscator; the opposite of everything that 60 Minutes is supposed to be.
Journalism—real journalism—is, above everything else, allergic to bullshit. Bullshit is the mortal enemy of journalism. Real journalism aspires to be the opposite of bullshit. You can be a great journalist without being attractive, friendly, likeable, charismatic, as long as you possess a determination to root out and expose bullshit wherever it is found. Indeed, many journalists are unlikeable because they have this quality. The ideal leader of a hard-hitting investigative journalism operation is someone who is smart, driven, and virtually unemployable in any other context due to their pathological hatred of the corporate niceties used to obscure the lies of the rich and powerful. A willingness to studiously ignore the devastating political proclivities of your billionaire bosses may be good for most careers, but it is a very bad sign if your career is supposed to involve doing real journalism.
If you decide not to promote and defend bullshit, there are some jobs that you will not be offered. And if you decide to make a career of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable and whatnot, there are some jobs that you should not take, under any circumstances. Not if you have self-respect. Not if you care about any of the stuff that all of us have been saying we care about. This is not some high-minded rhetoric meant to imply that journalists are heroic; it is a baseline standard that thousands and thousands of journalists who are not and never will be famous have adhered to for their entire careers. Because they are journalists! Why else would you do this? For 98% of them—all the ones who will never get jobs at anywhere as famous as the New York Times or 60 Minutes—this industry is one of low pay, little prestige, and high instability. The only benefit to being a journalist is that you get to call bullshit on powerful people. If you’re not interested in that, do something else!
Once you take the hatchet man job, everyone is going to know what sort of person you are. A high salary can’t buy back respect.
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Fucker looks right out of central casting. "Needed: someone to play intelligent moderator at a CES panel on global market cap for Intelligent tracking devices. Must have some gray, at least one pair of Tom Ford Fausto glasses, and has firm grasp of rudiments of tech panel moderator gestures: the crossed leg position, the inverted hand 'I'm making this interesting point now' move, the 'I'm parsing I'm parsing, but yes I agree and also want to kiss you' slightly pursed lips, and socks that are colorful, don't match either each other or your Ferragamo slacks."
As Jimi Hendrix is credited with saying, "It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play." Any good corporate "news" person knows exactly what not to say, mainly any truth inconvenient for those up the chain of command and ownership. Their training is so complete they don't even think thoughts that would upset the power structure. It's Hendrix in reverse, the notes they play are the wrong ones, and you will never hear them produce anything else.