Don't Let The Door Hit Ya Where The Good Lord Split Ya

Stacy McCain has some sage advise for anyone who may be disgruntled at their job;

Every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition. It’s been that way forever, and is true everywhere.

Nobody goes into the news business with the goal of being the headline writer on the obituary page, but somebody’s got to do it, and the phenomenon of the “disgruntled staffer” is not really interesting unless the guy shows up for work one day with a high-powered rifle, four or five clips of ammo, and a grim determination to finally get his name on the front page.

It was in this light that I read McKay Coppins’s BuzzFeed article today about “disgruntled staffers” at Breitbart.com.

To make a long story short: So what?

There’s nothing in this article that was really news to me. I know nearly everyone at Breitbart.com, and like all of them — just for example, I was hanging out with Andrew at the 2007 YAF West Coast conference where he first met Alex Marlow — and if some of them don’t like other . . . again, so what?

Is there some rule that everybody in a news operation must like each other? Or that the staff writers must always agree with the editorial choices of management? If so, nobody ever told me about it, and I’ve been in the news business since 1986.

In other words, whatever your opinion of the internal quarrels of the Breitbart.com staff — who’s right or wrong, who’s good or bad — it’s really just the typical grumbling common to all news operations.

The same backstage rivalry goes on every day at Fox News or CNN or the Iowa Hog Farmers Gazette.

And what McKay Coppins has done is to exploit that for profit at BuzzFeed, playing “concern troll,” as if he admired Andrew Breitbart and shared Breitbart’s goals or ideals. He didn’t.

Finally, to my friends at Breitbart: If you don’t like your job or you don’t like your boss, you can always quit.

I might add some advise from my late father…don’t quit your present job until you’ve found another job to replace it, because a heaping serving of pride with salt and pepper doesn’t fill the belly very well.

 

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