Gawker to Vox: Stay off our lawn

“Lunch on the roof at Gawker HQ. Photo by Scott Kidder via Instagram.”

Gawker’s Leah Finnegan strongly objects to a post by Max Fischer at Vox describing how events in Ferguson might be reported on if the U.S. were just another country in the world.

I’m not in the habit of coming to Max Fischer’s defense, but when grade A chattering class bullshit presents itself I have a hard time holding back. While arguably not the best executed on idea, Fischer’s satire nonetheless succeeds on a very basic level at highlighting a number of the media’s double standards. Oppression abroad is fiercely detailed while oppression at home is glossed over or euphemized. Social strife and ethnic tensions are regularly played up in places like Africa and the Middle East while talking semi-seriously about a post-racial and/or color blind America is somehow still a tenable ‘centrist’ position to hold when it comes to the states,

“The crisis began a week ago in Ferguson, a remote Missouri village that has been a hotbed of sectarian tension. State security forces shot and killed an unarmed man, which regional analysts say has angered the local population by surfacing deep-seated sectarian grievances. Regime security forces cracked down brutally on largely peaceful protests, worsening the crisis.”

Not Jonathan Swift levels of subversive wit by any stretch, but I appreciate the general sentiment. But apparently for Finnegan the piece has some Very Serious problems,

“Well, problem No. 1 is that for a satire this is unfunny as shit. Problem No. 2 is that for a news story parody it’s not even a good fake-serious news story.”

Finnegan is apparently offended by how uncool the post ended up being more than anything else. Where, after all, does Vox dot com get off publishing such lame, epic fails? Stop being such an affront to the Internet all you Ezra Klein groupies!

Actually though, Finnegan has another problem with the post that she deigned not to explicitly number. Problem No. 3 is “the smugness,”

“During a crisis of police brutality and criminal justice there are better points to make than ‘the U.S. media is out of touch with the rest of the world,’ and better qualities to demonstrate than self-satisfied cosmopolitanism.”

If only I weren’t such an epic failure as well, I’d probably be able to come up with something more witty and cutting than an allusion to kettles and pots. Get it? Because, you know, smug cosmopolitanism is, like, totally Gawker’s thing?

And in truth, is the Internet really too small to have two sites that appeal to the self-satisfied sophisticate in all of us? Now three might be one too many, let alone entire media brands aimed at supplying hip, well-to-do twenty something year olds with their daily fix of social justice reportage AND fish eating sharks?

Why shouldn’t we be able to have superficial summaries of complicated geopolitical events spoon fed to us while we worry about what exotic bugs might be crawling under our computer desks, waiting for just the right moment to strike and end our joyless but lucrative paper-pushing lives?

Surely we live in a world with enough semblance of dime store justice that, even if some people with guns and missiles will remain intent on firing those guns and missiles at other people who don’t have guns and missiles, we can still find a way for righteous media provocateurs to live in relative peace and harmony with one another.