[motohagiography]

It'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.

[tantalor]

> 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?

[motohagiography]

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.

[plonkle2]

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.

[afavour]

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.

[burkaman]

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.

[ianai]

Google: “ Bernadette Morra. Editor in Chief, FASHION magazine. ”

The twitter poster is a buzzfeed news politics journalist.

[motohagiography]

> 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.

[albedoa]

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.

[Eric_WVGG]

This sort of thinking fails the Occam’s Razor pretty hard.

[pjc50]

> 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.

[throwaway0a5e]

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.