Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
twitter.comIt's quite an artifact of its time. Someone appears to be making a play for her magazine editor role and this is basically oppo-research on behalf of whomever they want in place. This kind of scandal playing is sort of how the media game is played, where these were society plum jobs, and journalism in Canada has been a traditional stepping stone to parliament.
I was distantly acquainted with some of that crowd, and there was an incentive from editors at the time to be provocatively glib because the conflict and outrage sold papers, when those were still a thing. Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write. Internationally, Toronto was a relative backwater full of people who had come from other relative backwaters to reinvent themselves in the reflected images of magazine covers. The article in question was written by someone trying to become the reflection they saw. This was in a time when Sex in the City represented feminine success, and many women I knew would follow magazine and newspaper columnists as a kind of rage-read, and I think they related to those figures in fairly complex ways. Vogue at the time functioned as a kind of ministry of desire that told women what they wanted. However, that no one seems to have written critically about this doesn't so much ignore a decade when womens' media dominated the culture, as it mercifully overlooks its excesses. Having known several fashion editors and writers, their craft is a narrative of cohering symbols of power and desire, and the art is walking a tightrope above a pit of firey cringe. This article was definitely one of those cringe-hell fails that wise old-timers use to scare interns over drinks.
If you took the series Mad Men from the 1960s era, transplanted it to the late 90's and made it about women working at fashion magazines and relegated to the style sections of newspapers, you would get a fairly nuanced view of how, like we take for granted the influence of advertisers on our thinking, we might also understand what the women shaping narratives of desire in the 90s did. Terrible article, but maybe enough time has passed to look at what all that really was.
> Someone appears to be making a play for her magazine editor role and this is basically oppo-research on behalf of whomever they want in place.
What, are you just making this up?
Who digs up a scan of a pre-internet article to post on twitter to take a shot at someone who is at best a marginal and obscure public figure with an influential job? I wasn't the one who tried to slander someone with decades old pre-internet comments, but I am certainly hypothesizing that the person behind the twitter account is, and that is bog standard politics, as are low quality sock puppet comments in forums.
So wait, you not only think a BuzzFeed reporter known for being on the politics beat for years is somehow interested in who is editor-in-chief at a Canadian fashion magazine, but you also think anything about retelling a factual story in a critical light is slander?
How do you think this went down? How did the person co-opting McLeod approach? I’ve got the scoop of the century, they said? Do you think he fumbled his iPad excitedly on the way to break this, in your words, obvious oppo? (Do you think he’d miss that?)
In general, and I’m not just talking to you here, if you don’t know how journalism works, maybe don’t comment on it nor speculate on its big moves. You say things like “bog standard” to communicate certainty, but your imagined narrative literally falls apart with ten seconds of critical thinking.
Maybe someone who remembers reading this story at the time and remembers how absolutely absurd it was? And maybe thought people (like myself) might be interested to read it? The person who tweeted this is Canadian and of the right age to have read it at the time.
I think you're imagining conspiracies here. It's an interesting and kind of funny historical artifact, that's all. And what definition of "slander" are you working with here? Nothing posted is untrue.
I would, I do that kind of thing all the time. Finding obscure interesting things on the internet is fun, it's like solving a puzzle, and it feels good to show people who thought something was too old and lost forever.
Google: “ Bernadette Morra. Editor in Chief, FASHION magazine. ”
The twitter poster is a buzzfeed news politics journalist.
> The twitter poster is a buzzfeed news politics journalist.
I would say, that this sentence is meaningful expresses the gulf in perspectives on the question quite well. To me, that statement doesn't mean anything. The twitter poster was being small and bullying, and if I'm a conspiracy theorist for making a comment that embarasses some people who got off on it, call me Fox frickin' Mulder.
The larger gulf is between who you believe to be embarrassed by your comments and who is actually embarrassed. It's incredibly weird to publicly spout baseless conspiracy theories and then make the equally unfounded claim that others feel shamed by your spouting.
This sort of thinking fails the Occam’s Razor pretty hard.
> Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write
This has got much worse, and spread to politics and public life as a whole.
I agree it's gotten worse but is it a bad thing? I think the AOCs and MTGs and other politicians who's popularity is based on the fact that they are a caricature their base can rally around are not serve an important "court jester" function that keeps the witches and the turtles slightly less unchecked than they otherwise would be.
I actually kind of like this; she's honest about what she experienced and she recognizes that fashion will take a back-burner for awhile.
People experience shock in various ways and not everyone tries to make everything directly about whatever is happening; most of America at least pretended to plug away at their jobs that day.
It's also inappropriate to expect someone in the moment to be capable of fully comprehending the ultimate/long term ramifications and appropriate reactions to things. That's often just not possible - for even physiological reasons outside their control. i.e. Shock.
Someone who survived being stabbed multiple times during a robbery told me, at the time, they didn't even know they'd been stabbed until they got home. I think it had been dark (possibly pitch black), amongst other things.
So yeah it's possible to go back to major historical events and find immediate responses that don't age well. I would argue it's not worth dredging up decades later with an eye toward public persecution - which is front of mind in any twitter thread.
I actually think it's unfortunate that she didn't focus more on fashion.
There are so, so many accounts of 9/11 that focus on the facts and the immediate tragedy. But I'm willing to bet that 9/11 impacted industries and people significantly even if they weren't directly involved.
I have little to no interest in fashion, but I'd find an article on the impact of 9/11 on the fashion capital of North America a much more interesting read than another collection of facts.
I think the point was that she was so bad at her job that she wasn't going to write anything about the attack, at all, whatsoever. She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone. She didn't have the initiative to walk to ground zero. And then what she did write was a story about how she was sad the fun events were cancelled but she wasn't that sad because she had appletinis.
She just didn't care. Her focus was on the fun events that she had planned to attend and absolutely nothing else.
I'm not picking on you deliberately, only choosing to reply to this thread because your wording succinctly sums up the underlying mistake in most people commenting here:
> so bad at her job
Her job was as a fashion journalist. Not a news reporter, not a war correspondent, not somebody who was remotely trained or prepared to deal with a situation like this. How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bosses saying "hey, you're an IT person, can't you just do (this thing that is not remotely related to your skill set)".
It's irrelevant whether you or anyone else here thinks fashion is valuable, or interesting, or worth writing about. It is relevant to question whether all "journalists" are, or should be, interchangeable in the eyes of people working in a completely unrelated profession.
A lot of the underlying principles of journalism are the same regardless of your focus, though. I can't imagine a journalist being at the site of something as momentous as 9/11 and not paying attention to it. Especially knowing you are the only resource your paper has in the area.
>How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bosses saying "hey, you're an IT person, can't you just do (this thing that is not remotely related to your skill set)".
I don't get annoyed when I am asked to do something in emergency situations of significantly smaller scales than 9/11. I'm not an electrician or electronics engineer, but I have to apply troubleshooting methodology in a way day to day that a lot of people don't, so there have been times where I was the best suited person to try and figure out Weird Electronic Issue X when shit hit the fan. It doesn't annoy me, I just set expectations that I'm not an expert and I might not be able to fully resolve it.
And a lot of the fundamental principles of journalism are just as, if not more, applicable when crossing between fashion and the massive world event happening right beside you. This sort of event is outside of her area of expertise, sure. But no one is knocking her for having attempted to cover it, and not doing so as well as a news reporter or war correspondent would have.
The underlying problem with this piece is that it isn't really about fashion, and it isn't really about 9/11. It's a journal of her day, with weirdly tone-deaf bits about riding in expensive limos and raising glasses of appletinis and then being thankful that she is Canadian.
To the grandparent's point, though: she didn't even write about fashion. Even if she didn't write yet another news story, she seems like she was entirely prepared to write absolutely nothing. There was no natural sense of curiosity: even though I'm no SRE, I'm still going to observe the worst outage in software engineering history. Maybe there's lessons that I can take away. Maybe there's an interesting observation relevant to my expertise that I can point out.
If your job is to write about fashion, and you can't even be bothered to really write about that, what are you doing?
> Her job was as a fashion journalist.
The reason this doesn't excuse her for me, is that a journalist - of any type - is supposed to absorb events, place them in their context, and convey the result to a general public.
So she may have been hired as a fashion journalist, but this shows her to not rise above a fashion writer. That is, someone who produces stories, not someone who reports on events.
Or, to put it differently: I reject the notion that fashion journalism is completely unrelated to other forms of journalism. These professions share a common core, and the actions discussed in this twitter thread show the person in question completely missing that core.
I mean she's a journalist, but not all journalist sign up for in-the-trenches investigations. I doubt anyone here would expect Marques Brownlee to write about a terrorist attack and be disappointed he didn't try to find his way past police barriers.
But she didn't even have to do in-the-trenches investigations. Like you said: you wished she had written more about fashion in the context of the attack. She didn't. She wasn't looking at how people dressed or how they used their clothes after the attack. She really didn't even try. The best she did was note that the stores on Fifth Avenue were closed before describing an expensive limo ride. I would bet that if she hadn't been pressed by her editors, she wouldn't have mentioned 9/11 at all.
To be placed front and center to write one of the most important stories of your career and then do the absolute bare minimum at the behest of your bosses is either laziness, apathy, or profound ignorance.
> She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone
Falling back to ingrained habits is quite a normal response to stress. It also is part of why after an emergency landing aircraft passengers may pick up their luggage before getting out of the plane.
I think that also could explain the martini drinking in the limo. That might be the ‘program’ fashion journalists always run when in long limo rides.
As to the entire article: It’s not brilliant writing, but she mentions what she did, show some compassion with the victims, realizes that he drinking wasn’t very appropriate, and concludes that fashion may never be the same.
I don’t see that as being reason to vilify her.
That may even have been the brief she got from her editor.
> I actually think it's unfortunate that she didn't focus more on fashion.
There's plenty to say about the impact on fashion in the wake of 9/11, but there's nothing really to say regarding the day of the attack itself. I don't think that the fashion of the victims in the hospital would have been an insightful thing to write about.
I disagree. I found the comment on how Häute Couture stores like YSK were closed yet people were lining up at Macy's to buy underwear a very telling emotional response to 9/11.
She doesn't write about the fashion of the victims at all. Rather she talks about about the trauma. She talks about how the delays for fashions show. Hints at controversy with some designers dropping out and hosting their own releases.
She's writing this article on September 20 so it's not like she can talk about long term effects either.
Edit: Reread your comment and I realized I misunderstood. I think we're in agreement that there wasn't any immediate effects to the fashion industry that she could write about. Although... Now I'm curious what the long term impacts actually were
I suppose you can't really fault a person whose professional life requires her to view every event with the question, "How does this affect the fashion industry?" for viewing the attack on the twin towers in exactly that way — especially in this article, which was published as the "Fashion Notebook" column. The tweetstorm blames her for not relating what was told her by survivors and first responders, but those stories were probably passed on to her editors and used in other articles. This article is, obviously, shallow, which is not a fault: fashion is literally not even skin deep.
It surprised me because I'd always assumed a lot of people in a newsroom were extremely similar, despite their different beats.
In my mind it's interchangable whether that report on Ukraine counts as world news, war, current affairs, or politics. I assumed this was the 'journalist' skill set in action.
But perhaps being fashion editor is no better a current affairs reporter than the crossword setter or cartoonist would be.
I think crossword editors and cartoonists necessarily have a broader world view, albeit with less experience in long-form writing.
I mean, there's tattoos and piercings... those are at least skin deep.
A lot of journalists covered 9/11, so I'm not sure that this particular fashion reporter didn't seem to care is all that interesting.
I do think it's an interesting case in the level of acceptability in the actions and admissions of semi-public figures like journalists. Today there's lots of commotion about people posting their hot takes on the Queen's death, a lot of which obviously regrettable. There's lots of events over the last few years point to a high level of self and contextual awareness being necessary to keep your job in semi-public roles.
Yet, in 2001, days after September 11, you have a journalist that published, after I presume being edited and approved by multiple other people at the paper, about celebrating with Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo ride driving away from the terrorist event (I'm I reading that right?). And nobody during the editing process thought, hey, this is a pretty inappropriate thing to publish?
Such a completely different world.
Depends on the context, I think. She took the limo ride because it's was available. Alcohol is alcohol. What if it was another person sitting in an ordinary cab drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle saying to his/her friends "Thank God we're getting out of THAT, right?"
> Alcohol is alcohol
The reporter could've left out that they were toasting Sour Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo, but she didn't, so we know they weren't somberly drinking from whiskey bottles. That might be the craziest part to me. They could've not included the limo ride or passed it off as something else, but it's explicitly pumped up as something luxurious.
> explicitly pumped up as something luxurious
I read it as something deliberately escapist. It didn’t matter what it was, there was too much to process and focusing on a limo and drinks meant they didn’t have to focus on what had happened. She included details because that was her job to describe the scene.
People process grief/stress/trauma differently. I wouldn’t read too much into the details.
> A lot of journalists covered 9/11, so I'm not sure that this particular fashion reporter didn't seem to care is all that interesting.
To an extent I agree with you but as one tweet in the thread notes she sat in a hospital and spoke to survivors but didn't actually recount any of their stories. That feels like kind of a journalistic failure to me.
Well, you can't get much more vapid than fashion world
I honestly admire the fashion editor. Her life is laser focused on looking great and tracking the developments of high fashion. Events that shake the hoi polloi to their core barely even register to her. A queen.
I was going to nitpick about your usage of the hoi polloi, because “hoi” means “the.”
But this is the wiki entry: “Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[11] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet "the alcohol" is universally accepted as good grammar.[12]”
We say "The La Brea Tar Pits" without a second thought.
But the “The” applies to “tar pits”, not “La Brea”, as in “The Panama Canal” or “The Seattle Seahawks”.
It translates as "The The Tar Tar Pits".
Ah, yeah that makes sense. I just assumed La Brea was a nearby city or area; I didn’t know it translated to “tar”.
I think you may be on to something however - but we do still say “I’m going to drive the El Camino down to the El Camino Real.”
This is one of my favorite Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...
If you're learning linguistics from wikipedia maybe check out "prescriptivism" and see how many contemporary mainstream linguists work within that framework for native speaker usages.
How does prescriptivism interact with wikipedia? Since wikipedia can (in the ideal at least) be edited by anyone, I'd expect it to match common usage more closely than a normal encyclopedia.
I mean just reading the article about it would tell you how useless it is try to nitpick things like this.
It is useless because it is nitpicking. But still, descriptive rules for a language can still be pretty specific and complicated, so even if we toss out all prescriptivism that won't free us from corrections I think.
It will because no "correction" is necessary. If the speaker's intent was understood by their audience then their usage was correct. If it was not understood, the audience will seek clarification and the intended meaning will emerge that way.
This sort of unsolicited "correction" of other people's language is unnecessary and basically never helpful outside of an explicit educational/language-learning context. The goal isn't to perfectly communicate according to a specific set of rules, and trying to ossify the descriptive "rules" in that way is just prescriptivism but slower. The goal is to understand and be understood, which will always be a context-dependent moving target.
There are always other factors being communicated besides the pure meaning. Shibboleths like this one can be class/education level indicators.
That's an interesting perspective, I see where you are coming from now. Thanks for elaborating.
Genuine question: When have you ever heard Hoi Polloi being used without being preceded by "the" ? Seems to universally be used as "the hoi polloi" (albeit, in English)
I just want everyone having this wonderful discussion about how to use 'hoi polloi' correctly in a sentence to know that 1.) I love you and 2.) I learned that word literally last night while watching "Better Call Saul". I'm very educated.
The suggestion is that in the face of something overwhelmingly weird, you cling to whatever structure you've got.
I think that's an insightful thought. This is a person, who like the rest of us that day, was scared and pretty shocked
I read a bit of it and just thought "okay I guess she wasn't prepared for 9/11, just like everyone else." Is it supposed to be funny that this single person who didn't work in that kind of journalism was somehow not ready to walk to ground zero?
I like her piece much more than the commentary from that twitter account. I’m not sure they understand what it was like that day. Most of us were helpless, regardless of proximity, and just got on with our pre-siting assignment if we weren’t able to or allowed to fixate on the TV or hold a vigil yet. It happens that she was able to document her helplessness—so what?
Honestly, kind of enjoyed that. So many stories of that day have been left out of the historical record because they don’t fit the narrative of heroic deeds in the face of terror (writing only from an NYC perspective).
She is focused on a level I envy. Just our interests differ. Won’t judge that.
I don't know what sickens me more: That someone is digging up a 20 year old article to throw tomatoes at some poor woman, or that this is front page on HN...
I hate to make everything gendered but I have to wonder if a sports reporter who wrote about the impact of 9/11 on the baseball and football seasons would have received the same level of derision. This twitter thread boils down to "person who doesn't care about <subject> derides article written about <subject>". Why has this taken up so much of his headspace?