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Sunday, 4 August 2019

Sunday Times Staff Say A Recent Column About The Problems With Unpaid Work Basically Describes Their Newsroom

In fact, the practice is remarkably formalised. The Sunday Times is hardly the only news outlet to get young journalists to do unpaid work experience in exchange for the notorious “exposure” or “a foot in the door” that they offer. But a source said the placements – management describes it as “shadowing” – are tracked in a spreadsheet circulated in order to track the names of the young, unpaid journalists who’ll be in the newsroom that week.

“But there is little active outreach or attempt to be meritocratic.”

"There are certain desks that are very privileged. You have to be privately and Oxbridge educated to secure work experience,” a Sunday Times source said. “Others aren't that bad per se, and are more just first come first served.

Former staffers have said that many of the conditions, drawbacks and consequences of unpaid work laid out in Gannon’s Sunday Times column are currently widespread in the Sunday Times newsroom.

“We were just laughing at the hypocrisy,” the journalist told BuzzFeed News. Asked whether the Sunday Times used unpaid workers, one journalist on the newspaper replied over text: “The Sunday Times certainly uses unpaid interns. Lots of them.”

The former Times staffer immediately copy-pasted the Sunday Times link to WhatsApp and shared it around to journalist friends.

Gannon’s column was titled, “Only rich kids can afford to take unpaid internships. How elitist is that?” and not only called out the practice of companies using unpaid workers and interns, but said the practice should be made illegal.

When columnist Emma Gannon posted her latest Sunday Times piece to Twitter yesterday, it immediately caught the eye of a former Times journalist.

URGENT looking for a work experience replacement to help out at The Sunday Times Style from 14th - 25th January. Email me @ roisin.kelly@sunday-times.co.uk xx

When the opportunities aren’t going to those with family-friend connections, management turn to tweeting call-outs with the offers. The tweets will also often include the #journorequest hash-tag in an effort to get the attention of young journalists on Twitter.

A Sunday Times journalist said those who show up in the newsroom for the work will often, unsurprisingly, have “establishment connections”.

Or, as Gannon wrote in her piece: “Unpaid internships put a harsh spotlight on a huge social mobility issue: the cost cuts out a huge number of people who simply cannot afford to work for nothing and are unable to enter certain industries. It is elitist.”

The journalist added: “I don't think it'd be possible for there to be a less meritocratic system in terms of internships – people use establishment connections to get their goddaughters two weeks on the features desk.”

In her column, Gannon continued: “There is an argument that interning isn’t ‘real’ work but, looking back, it most certainly was, and still is. These lower-down-the-food-chain jobs are important in keeping things ticking along.”

One journalist who did more than one unpaid Times placement spoke to BuzzFeed News about their experience. According to them, at the start of the week there’d be a group of them waiting in the lobby for the “tour and health and safety talk” for the building.

“I mainly did research tasks and they published a lot of my work,” they said. “Nothing was paid; no expenses, no canteen, no salary, and I worked 10am to 6pm.”

“I wasn’t given any money for any of my work that was published. They published both short and long pieces from those of us who did the placements.”

Gannon’s column also argued that if they’re not directly related to staff, those who end up in unpaid placements in London are the so-called “rich kids” who can do a week of full-time work without getting paid.

“My parents live near London, travel only cost about £10 a day and the value it’s added to my CV is so much more than that,” a young journalist who did more than one of the unpaid placements told BuzzFeed News.

“I’m by no means rich, but I am very aware that I am very lucky to have been in a position to have been able to do it and stay with my parents.”

The Times declined to answer questions on the record for this article, including saying how many unpaid journalists were working, or “shadowing”, at the Times or Sunday Times at any one time, and whether they would take the advice of the column and end the practice.

“You have the same type of middle-class white girls coming through all the time; it can make you despair about the whole industry,” one source said. “And yet, on the other hand, it’s good experience.”

The Big Idiot President Is Not Getting Himself Impeached On Purpose, C'mon

Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty)

Would you get a load of this shit:

Donald Trump is not trying to get impeached. He does not want to be impeached, and he definitely does not have a sophisticated dastardly plot to turn his impeachment into greater personal power or as a strategy to create a more solidified and motivated political base. He does not have a sophisticated dastardly plot to do anything, or any other kind of plot. The man is not capable of sophistication, or any but the basest sensation-seeking dastardliness; it’s all he can do to get the fast food from its cardboard container to the appropriate face-hole. He is a big stupid idiot, is what I am saying, and he likes things that feel good and wants them right now and doesn’t like things that don’t feel good and doesn’t want them ever, and that is the extent of him.

Donald Trump has been portraying himself, accurately, as a degenerate, penny-ante dullard for his entire life. When he opens his mouth, when he talks about himself: “I am a degenerate, penny-ante dullard” is the only thing he can say. When he insists he is actually a tremendously smart man, he is saying “I’m a degenerate, penny-ante dullard.” When he says Buy these fabulous mail-order steaks, really truly high-class steaks, many people, fabulous, do we love them, you hear them saying Trump—big guys, tough, they’re saying—you know, Trump, does he have the best steaks or what, he is saying “I’m a degenerate, penny-ante dullard.” When he makes business decisions, when he makes dinner orders, when he attempts to stand up as normal humans do, when he combs his hair: he has made of himself and of his life a monument to the smallness of his perspective and intellect and character. Because he is a soft, breathless, foam-boned inheritance baby with a brain like a wet saltine cracker, because he has been crippled and made monstrous by money and endless permission and therefore cannot conceive of there being any truth or morality beyond what he wants right now, he never knows that this is what he’s doing and also never will. That’s exactly why it’s the only thing he has ever done.

None of this is a part of some scheme. There is never a scheme. He is not sandbagging. He is not playing four-dimensional chess. Donald Trump is not capable of four-dimensional chess. Put Donald Trump in a thumb war against a department-store mannequin and he will be lucky to escape with a draw. He will call it victory. What’s infinitely depressing is how many of his nominal political opponents will believe him.

The weirdest, saddest, and most unhelpful people, maybe in all the world, are: boomer liberals (like the leadership of the Democratic party, for example) who look upon Donald Trump’s lifelong track record of failing at petty crook shit—doing petty crook shit and not only getting away with it but in many cases declaring his failure a great success, and then being rewarded with greater fame and stature in turn—and insist they are seeing the work of a mastermind, rather than the tides of American life and culture carrying yet another born-rich shit-for-brains white asshole past and above any and all demands and consequences. The idea of Trump is the sucker-ass belief in meritocracy, in hoary old Great Man bullshit, twisted into its most horrible gargoyle incarnation. He’s rich and famous, he’s the president of the country, and therefore it just simply must be the case that he has earned this station for himself, one way or another, via some expression of traits that make him equal to it. He has to be some kind of genius, even if it’s the evil kind. There is no way that a braying worthless dope, a man with no qualities of any kind to recommend him, could have ended up where Trump has ended up.

And now that investigations into Donald Trump’s campaign and also into his efforts to thwart and obstruct those same investigations—investigations about which he has been in a panicky and very public rage since well before his inauguration—have moved him into the crosshairs of impeachment, the meritocracy dead-enders in the opposition party believe that this must be happening because he wills it. His almost comically brazen and plainly illegal attempts to silence, discredit, and outright threaten the people doing and/or cooperating with the investigations must reflect some active and strategic desire to be impeached. He must be laying a trap: If Congress impeaches him, he will not be mad, he will be laughing actually. The alternative is that the very obviously hopelessly dimwitted lifelong failure currently sitting atop a pile of inherited and/or pilfered cash in the most powerful office on earth is precisely as stupid and balloon-handed and incompetent as he has spent his entire adult life proving himself to be. America just doesn’t work like that.

That’s the thing being fought over, ultimately. The question of whether to impeach Donald Trump is, among other things, the question of how to defeat him. The question of how to defeat him is, among other things, the question of what he really is in the first place: Is he just Donald Trump The Illiterate Racist Sex Clown or is he the Republican Party or is he the deeper and more fundamental articles of American life and history? That, in turn, is the question of what kind of society this really is. Is it one in which vast material inequalities are mere flukes of circumstance, or is that situation the just allocation of reward, or is it the residue of systemic theft by a class of cruel moral dwarves, or what?

Which is to say: When you credit Donald Trump, in the absence of absolutely any evidence, with possessing the Mephistophelian cunning to bring about his own impeachment, deliberately, for the purpose of bringing to fruition some long-simmering plot to consolidate his political support, you are finally saying that you agree with him. Not just on the baseless claim that he’s actually in possession of one (1) Whole Adult Brain, but on his broader infantile idea of what kind of place this country is. He believes that he deserves what he has because he has it, and his every decision flows from that belief; he believes that being rich and famous, alone, is proof that he should be rich and famous. To see him as he sees himself—as a sinister mastermind—and treat him as he believes he should be treated is to agree with him on all that.

More than that, it’s believing in a world where Donald Trump surely must be three steps ahead of his opposition, precisely because he’s richer and more powerful and more famous than them. It’s believing that, because he got elected president even though other smart and rich people were trying to defeat him, he therefore must be the very best at all of this—better at it, surely, than the people who want to defeat him.

In which case, sure, oppose impeaching him. Why wouldn’t you want him to be president, anyway?

Donald Trump Wants This More Than Anything

Photo: Victoria Jones- WPA Pool (Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s taste is difficult to describe. You know it when you see it, but that’s not quite the same thing as knowing what it is. If you’re looking at a tufted velvet settee that looks like one of Michael Jackson’s bedazzled military-style blazers from the Dangerous tour, you are looking at Some Trump Stuff. If you see a big stone sculpture of a lion that is both indoors and near a golf club’s pro shop, you are seeing it. Something that looks like a heraldic coat of arms but then when you look closer it turns out there are golf clubs in there? That’s some Trump shit you’ve got there, buddy.

But also: What? Why does that couch have fringe-adorned epaulets? Why is there carpeting in the bathroom? Why is there a carving station with a heat lamp and a damp roast and a man in a toque set up next to what appears to be a marble replica of Rome’s Trevi Fountain, and also why is there an oil painting of Donald Trump himself peering rakishly over a croquet mallet hanging nearby? Obviously that is all just Some Trump Shit, and the stuff that the man himself likes and thinks is cool. But no one else would do any of this, so where did all this come from?

Photo: Jeff Gilbert (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Trump’s current state visit to the United Kingdom does only a little bit to answer these questions, which to be fair may be unanswerable. One of the most inexplicably stubborn fallacies about Trump, both among his political opponents and the broader community that’s just interested in rubbernecking at his blowzy public feuds, is the idea that Trump does things for a reason. There is no evidence of this.

It’s unquestionably true that Trump wants things. He wants to be noticed, on television if possible, and he wants to appear impressive when he is noticed. He does not want anyone to seem to have more money than he does. He wants a big beautiful piece of the most amazing chocolate cake you ever saw. All of these things he wants very much. But he is accustomed to demanding these things and then either receiving them (the biggest slice of cake, the television appearances) or believing that he has (the respect of other people). All of this goonish entitlement would be kind of darkly funny if Trump were not also president, but that is not the world we live in. It is not clear even today how much Trump wanted to be president, although he also clearly did not want to lose the election he somehow wound up in. It’s always seemed more accurate to say that he’d prefer to be a king, or some other less readily beheadable royal.

Photo: Toby Melville (AP)

The decorative colonnades and gratuitous reflecting pools and endless gaudy sconces, the all-upholstered-everything interiors that somehow still offer no comfortable place to sit, all those overstuffed corridors connecting gilded banquet chambers to other grand and uninhabitable spaces, the sheer stuffy tackiness of his various pretenses—if there’s any sort of precedent for the grandiose style that Trump prefers, it’s royalty. It would be inaccurate to say that Trump seemed at home during his various ceremonial visits to Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, because he only really ever seems comfortable when he is making what he imagines is a stern face behind a large desk or driving a little golf cart around. This visit involved a lot of walking around observing ceremonial things and standing still while being photographed, and neither walking nor standing are particular strong suits of the president’s.

Photo: Chris Jackson (Getty Images)

But to the extent that Trump has ever seemed happy or even content during his time as president, it has been in ceremonial moments like this that match his florid self-conception—arriving at fancy engagements by limousine, shaking various rich people’s hands and saying “terrific, good luck, enjoy it,” getting up and Making A Few Remarks before staff in formalwear bring him two big scoops of vanilla ice cream in a bowl of the finest bone china. Trump brought not just some of the usual aides and his wife along on this trip, but all of his adult children as well. There’s a photo of them standing at the entrance to a long corridor in Buckingham Palace, all in their avant-garde Trump stances—Donald Jr. appears to be astride a very small horse, Eric wobbling atop some kind of malfunctioning hoverboard—and fancy clothes before going into a state dinner with Britain’s royal family. The words “No Photography” appear on a sign that is otherwise obscured by Tiffany Trump’s head.

Given that he’s not paying for it, it’s no real surprise that Trump would bring a bunch of people with him on a trip like this; both Trump policy aide and aspiring genocidaire Stephen Miller and Christopher Ruddy, CEO of the elderly-skewing Trump juche website Newsmax, were also at that state dinner for some reason. The stuff with the kids feels different, though, because Trump’s weird pretensions of royalty go beyond his inexcusable and otherwise inexplicable tastes. “He wants Ivanka, Tiffany, Eric and Donald Junior to hold a ‘next generation’ meeting with Princes William and Harry,” the Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun reported after an interview with Trump. “The President said: ‘I think my children will be meeting them. It would be nice.’”

Photo: Victoria Jones (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Although it’s been honored more in theory than in practice, the United States does not technically do hereditary “next generations” in our politics. Or, more accurately, this is the sort of thing that everyone makes a big deal out of saying immediately before electing or not-electing people to office who have the same last names as people who have been elected to similar offices before. But these goofy and unconcealed ambitions of royalty fit Trump better than he knows, if not in the ways he likely imagines they do.

It’s true that he seems at home in these cavernous rooms dripping in dreary oil paintings and lit by chandeliers, because he has lived his life amid just that sort of claustrophobic grandiosity. He’s cultivated it not so much because he likes it—what does Trump really like?—but because it’s what he believes he deserves. He has never really seemed to have any idea what the rest of the world was like, or much interest in knowing it. He has never really seemed to care about other people beyond what he can extract from them, and at this stage in his broader occlusion and hardening that will not change. But in these gaudy rooms, surrounded by other rich people with nothing much to say and no real inclination to listen, Trump is at least at home.

Photo: Tolga Akmen (WPA Pool/Getty Images)

This is true when he’s in the United States, too; he is happy, if he’s ever happy, when there are other rich people around to give him compliments and tell him how rich he looks and how well he’s doing. This is his class, but they are not really his people. Even with the servile dermatologists and thrice-divorced yacht ghouls and buttery finance lordlings that crowd his social orbit and pay to belong to Trump’s clubs, there are still some latent traces of dirt under their fingernails—these people have to work to make the money to pay those dues, even if that work amounts to a few moments of strained patter during a Botox injection or taking long lunch meetings while underlings hide other rich people’s money from taxation. They’re rich, in many cases entirely richer than any ethical society would permit, but they’re not where Trump imagines himself to be. They’re not where he sees the Next Generation of his legacy.

In the narrow and technical sense, America does not have royalty. The country is still too young, and still kind of passively invested in opposition to the idea. But look at Trump squinting and scowling and plodding around in his cummerbund; look at his kids leering and jutting in their fancy clothes. And then look at the royals, made feeble and translucent and uncanny after generations of fixation on the same sort of bullshit—The Best Genes and Good Stock and The Right Families—that Trump has always offered as explanation for his amazing and unprecedented success. No one in those rooms does anything, really. None of them have to do anything. Their whole lives are about having what they have, and being admired for it.

There is no place in the world where Donald Trump would really feel at home but this. He believes that he belongs with all these rich people in some cold and crowded room with the whole boiling world shut away outside, each shaking the other’s hands, everyone saying what a pleasure it is, what an unbelievable pleasure and honor it is, to be in such wonderful company.