Year: 2017

Vanity Fair decided to do a year-end video dedicated to Hillary Clinton.

Maybe it's time for Hillary Clinton to take up a new hobby in 2018 pic.twitter.com/sbE78rA5At

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) December 23, 2017

It has not gone over well.

Probably before the young women in this video were born, around the time she was their age, Hillary Clinton worked to set up the first rape crisis hotline in Arkansas history. That’s not all. See: https://t.co/PehUMyL6Lc #CancelVanityFair https://t.co/3Q0CNlUs2n

— TR (@yottapoint) December 27, 2017

An even better New Years Resolution? #CancelVanityFair Let's see if this tweet from my tiny account can garner more than the 244 likes Vanity Fair was able to pry out of their 5 million followers https://t.co/y5i1M0FAM3

— JAM (@Eviljohna) December 26, 2017

Hey, @VanityFair, did you suggest hobbies for Mitt Romney, John McCain, John Kerry or even Al Gore…..?Just asking for the 65 mil ppl that voted for the ONLY female candidate of a national pol party to win the popular vote by 3 million. #CancelVanityFair #ourvoicesmatter

— Vector Ø (@We_are_Vector) December 27, 2017

I particularly liked pushing the stereotype of women in technology. That was a nice touch.

One of the Hive editors, before she took her Twitter account private, expressed resentment that the video was taken out of context, as it was part of a series. What she and the others don’t seem to realize is that the other targets of a not-especially-funny set of videos are all still public servants. As such, they can expect to be the focus of year-end zingers.

More importantly, it wasn’t all that long ago when Time magazine featured women on its cover, and in a completely different context. How absolutely tone deaf can the Vanity Fair crew be to follow that elegant and profound piece with, at best, a juvenile, snarky piece targeting our country’s first woman Presidential candidate?

Even if you don’t care for Clinton, hell even if you voted for Trump, seeing six smug young people condescendingly telling a former Senator, Secretary of State, and Presidential candidate to take up knitting should piss you off. Not unless you’re the worst misogynist in the nation.

Donald Trump will love it.

Enjoy those magazine cancellations, Vanity Fair. Maybe with all that free time, you can take up crocheting. Or learning humility.

Update:

NYLON’s Sara Beauchamp writes about the backlash to the Vanity Fair video:

So next time you read a headline or watch a video that’s being quote-tweeted like crazy, before you’re quick to react, stop to consider what you’re getting outraged about. Look into the context before you join the pile on, because there are real people on the other end of our internet outrage. And, especially if they’re a woman, it’s important to remember that they’re already going through enough online, so maybe don’t make it worse.

I haven’t seen any tweets reflecting the editor’s weight, which is the backlash NYLON is responding to. If there are, then these need to be deleted.

However, the Vanity Fair people are professionals. They’re also adults. They’re learning about having to accept the consequences of their actions. If they’re feeling hurt about attacks against them, they might want to consider their attack against private citizen Hillary Clinton, particularly after years of Clinton being bashed the the media.

So no, they earned this pile-on. Best they just suck it up.

The Washington Post published an in-depth piece about Putin’s misinformation campaign that impacted on the 2016 Presidential campaign. In it they mentioned a writer going by the name of Alice Donovan. Rather than the ‘beginning freelance writer’ this Donovan claimed to be, the individual was a fake, a contrived persona, and a source of misinformation.

Donovan duped several far-left sites into publishing ‘her’ material. CounterPunch danced all around the issue in its effort to excuse it’s lax vetting. Ultimately, it accepted some blame…after first blaming the FBI.

If the FBI was so worried about the risks posed by Alice Donovan’s false persona, they could have tipped off some of the media outlets she was corresponding with. But in this case they refrained for nearly two years. Perhaps they concluded that Donovan was the hapless and ineffectual persona she appears to be. More likely, they wanted to continue tracking her. But they couldn’t do that without also snooping on American journalists and that represents an icy intrusion on the First Amendment. For a free press to function, journalists need to be free to communicate with whomever they want, without fear that their exchanges are being monitored by federal agencies. A free press needs to be free to make mistakes and learn from them. We did.

No, CounterPunch, you don’t get off that easy. In your effort to continuously publish, you accepted work from a ‘journalist’ whose only qualification seems to be they’ll allow you to publish their work without being paid.

Online writers don’t have to publish under their own name, but if so-called ‘news’ sites want to be treated credibly, they have to know the actual person submitting the work. They have to vet not only the sources of the news they print, but the people writing the stories.

Another far left group, We are Change, also published Donovan’s work. It scrubbed her stories from their site, but you can see them in the Wayback Machine.

By scrubbing Donovan’s stories it would seem as if We Are Change is acknowledging its errors in spreading misinformation. But what’s We Are Change NYC’s lead tweet today? A link to a 2016 piece attacking Hillary Clinton using unproven information that lacked any vetting.

A flashback showing what happens when truth comes out…It threatens the global elites control over us, so this is how they react… #WeAreChange #WRC https://t.co/BnaWwwCfCC

— WeAreChange NYC (@WeAreChangeNYC) December 26, 2017

What’s in one of its lead stories? A video claiming that Clinton is in hot water over Uranium One. This, even though this story was debunked. And among the sources for the video is RT, a well known Russian propaganda organization.

For all of our valid criticism of mainstream media—in particular its obsessiveness with ‘both sides’—most of its members flatly acknowledge when they screwed up. And they promise to do better.

Sites like CounterPunch and We Are Change need to do the same.