Unequal Opportunities
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Unequal Opportunities
A job listing from Harper's offering a substandard wage for an "assistant editor" exemplifies gatekeeping in the media industry; foreign policy on the podcast
Harper’s Magazine over the weekend posted a job listing for an assistant editor that was a perfect example of the way the media industry is set up for the comfortable classes.
The listing offers $40,000 a year for a position that must be based in New York City. As a salaried job, the rate is almost certain to require working over 40 hours a week, making the possibility of getting another job to help cover expenses essentially nil. And there’s a high probability that the work will increase while the pay does not: “The Assistant Editor may have opportunities to take on editorial responsibilities as he or she grows in the role.”
Adding insult to injury, Harper’s tweeted out the listing and tagged a number of groups including Writers of Color, Disabled Journalists, Study Hall, and more.
For a publication that rather self-importantly served as the home of the infamous “Harper’s Letter” to list a position that excludes struggling writers in the working class is, in fact, the definition of cancel culture.
Offering overwork for meager pay at a publication that is implicitly holding up the prestige of working there as the real hook means people who actually need to earn a living will look elsewhere.
It’s an example of anti-affirmative action; aimed at ensuring the only people who have a right to be heard are those who already do most of the talking.
It was a foreign policy focused week on the podcast.
On Monday, I talked to AJ+’s Sana Saeed about the way Tucker Carlson is being portrayed as an “anti-war” voice. We were joined by Media Matters for America researcher Nikki McCann Ramirez and author Jonathan Katz.
Then, on Thursday, Empire Files journalist Abby Martin came on to talk about Joe Biden’s foreign policy in a time of war.
This afternoon at 5pm EST, I’m joined by VICE’s Edward Ongweso, Jr. to talk about the crypto and NFT ads from the Super Bowl. The room will be live, call in with your questions and comments!
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Email me at eoinhiggins@gmail.com
Unequal Opportunities
Thank you Eoin Higgins for going after East Coast Liberal Establishment poster orgs like Harper's Magazine. Back when I was writing free-lance for a rate of a nickel a word to the non-union S.F. Weekly and Bay Guardian in the late 1980's and 90's one could not get anyone to publicly criticize the so-called Alternative Press for always jumping in late to side with Labor when these sole proprietor shops never tolerated SF or NoCal Newspaper Guild representation for the full-time staff that worked way over 50 hours a week to crank out those ad-heavy rags. That time frame was before the cash cow Classifieds went to online platforms.
I also recall a chat with the bete noir muck raker for The Nation, namely the Socialist often usefully investigative analyzer of entrenched public policy and Zombie Economics Alexander Cockburn. He was appearing at a Bay Area progressive panel discussion at a community center raising money for another "commodifier of social conscience" (to borrow Pauline Kael's descriptive term of her former employer, the volunteer-run Pacifica Community Radio network) about how The Nation Foundation decades of non-paid apprenticeship programs for college students and young cub reporters, often over the summer, prime time for students to make some money working service jobs or in lumber or sleepaway camps and seeking a livable salary in the cities where Cockburn's work had its strongest and most activist readership fostered this blue-blood monied family pedigree. How could any working class kid (my own parents were refugees working factory jobs in what was still a garment center of manufacturing in NYC) afford to take such a so-called progressive journalism apprenticeship and use it as a step toward finding a living (not a killing) in policy-centered journalism, as opposed to info-tainment?
Keep on raking the muck, regardless of the branding of even non-profit (yet very well-endowed as is the case with Harper's and The Nation foundations) organizations and their self-serving concentrations of wealth at the expense of a vital progressive truly ALTERNATIVE journalistic sub-culture that is not ashamed to offer livelihoods to generations who've raised their heads above the surrounding Weapons of Mass Distraction!
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee