The Roald Dahl books controversy revisited

There have been some interesting followups to the controversy over the decision of the Roald Dahl’s estate and publishers to revise his books to remove some language and ideas that are now seen as offensive.

One item that emerged was that Dahl in his own lifetime was willing to change his books in response to opposition and to accommodate the changing cultural ethos so that his books would continue to sell and be adapted to other media.

Amid the outcry over Dahl’s books being edited, many seem to have forgotten that the author previously edited his work himself to make it less offensive. He edited his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1973, just shy of a decade after its initial publication. Meanwhile, the edits took place just two years after the film adaption, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was released. In his initial book, the Oompa Loompas were depicted as African Pygmy people who were snuck out of Africa in crates by Willy Wonka and basically forced into servitude in his factory.
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The full extent of the rot at Fox News

David Corn provides the most exhaustive analysis I have seen of the public version of the legal brief filed by Dominion Voting Systems on February 16, 2023 in its $1.6. billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The internal communications of the top people at Fox reveal the extent of the utterly cynical lying campaign that they waged in the wake of the 2020 election, where they went all in on promoting Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was rigged, even as they knew that it was not, since their own in-house election analysis team got the results right. Indeed, in response to a question as to whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected, Suzanne Scott, Fox News CEO, replied “Yes, I believe that.”

As Corn says:

No other self-proclaimed news organization has ever been so fully discredited as Fox has been with this one legal brief. (You should read the document.) This is not the case of one reporter, one editor, or one story going off the rails. This is an indictment of an entire outfit. The full barrel of apples is rotten to the core. What this filing demonstrates is that the Fox universe is racked with corruption, greed, fear, irrationality, cynicism, and ignorance—from top to bottom. That ought to be the ultimate takeaway.
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Changing the language in children’s books

Books by children’s author Roald Dahl are being revised to remove material that might be offensive to current generations of children.

Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.

Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.

Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
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Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.

Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”.

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Fox News personalities are craven liars, and other non-news

During the discovery process leading up to the trial where the Dominion voting company is suing Fox News for defamation, documents have been released from depositions showing that in internal communications, Fox News personalities knew from the get-go that the claims of election fraud that were being propagated by Donald Trump and his cronies were utterly bogus but they spread them anyway.

Hosts at Fox News privately ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen while simultaneously peddling the same lies on air, according to court filings in a defamation lawsuit against the network.

Rightwing personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are among those named in the $1.6bn action brought by Dominion Voting Systems, the seller of electronic voting hardware and software that is suing Fox News and parent company Fox Corporation for maligning its reputation.

“He’s acting like an insane person,” Hannity allegedly wrote of Trump in the weeks following the election as the host continued to push the so-called “big lie” during his top-rated prime time show, aided by a succession of election deniers he had on as guests.
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Ted Baxter is the archetype for TV personalities who pretend to be journalists

Many of the people whom one sees on cable TV ‘news’ shows are not really journalists but people selected for their looks and attitudes. Some old timers may remember the Mary Tyler Moore TV comedy series in which she plays an assistant producer on a local TV new station. Much of the humor in that show comes from their TV news anchor Ted Baxter (played by Ted Knight) who was pompous and ignorant but had the look and the voice of a TV anchor, at least by the standards of that time when they were pretty much all middle-aged white men.

Chris Kaltenbach writes that in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell models his character on Baxter.

Burgundy’s is a character profile that fans of television’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” know well. For seven seasons, pompous blowhard Ted Baxter anchored the news on Minneapolis’ WJM-TV, mangling the English language, acting as his own biggest fan, placing more importance on the color of his blazer than on his understanding of the news. He was an insufferable buffoon who rarely did anything right, who believed the world existed for him and him alone.

Fans of the show loved him. Critics loved him. His peers loved him, awarding actor Ted Knight a pair of Emmys for his portrayal. Who knew that Knight and the show’s writers were creating an archetype that would still be going strong three decades later?
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[Show co-creator Allan] Burns, who would go on to win a pair of writing Emmys for the show, says he and Brooks patterned Baxter after a pair of news anchors popular in Los Angeles at the time the show debuted in 1970.

“[Moore’s] aunt was the assistant to the president of the local CBS affiliate here in L.A., and so Jim and I spent a lot of time hanging around that newsroom just to try and get the flavor of it,” he says. “There was an anchorman there, Jerry Dunphy — Jerry was one of those stentorian, firm-jawed, gray-haired guys who looked right on camera, but who was not a newsman, like so many of the anchors are not. They’re really newsreaders more than anything else.

Baxter would constantly mangle the script written for him to read, to the chagrin of the writers. In this clip, Baxter reads the script oblivious that the visuals accompanying it are wrong.

Heather Hendershot makes the case that the fictional Baxter, for all his faults, is better than the current crop of media news pundits.

A funny and interesting Twitter experiment

Kenneth Osgood is a historian who, he says, “writes sleep-inducing books and articles weighed down by pages of footnotes”. He rarely tweets and has just 139 followers who are mostly historians like him. He is kind of like me. Although I have tweeted more than him, every one of my tweets is simply a link to my blog posts. I have never tweeted anything funny or a hot take on an issue, which seems to be the dominant form of the medium. It is hardly surprising that I have even fewer followers than Osgood, just 130.

Osgood was angered by Musk’s decision to reinstate Donald Trump, a man who had incited violence against his own vice president and instigated a riot on the Capitol. He decided to quit Twitter but found that doing so is a pain. Social media sites do not make it easy to leave. So he decided to test whether it might be easier to get booted off the platform since Twitter owner Elon Musk seems to be trigger-happy with the ‘ban’ button.
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The trolling of Musk goes on

I might as well join the pile on of trolling of Elon Musk. A prankster calling themselves a ‘projection activist’ projected a rolling caption with insults onto the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

This prank was no doubt timed to coincide with Musk’s statement that he would be in the building over the weekend to meet personally with the remaining engineers in the company who were commanded to come there at short notice.

It is not clear what would be accomplished by such meetings. There is no way that Musk could properly gauge the quality of a person by seeing a few lines of code during a brief meeting, especially since Twitter is not like any of the companies he already runs and has an entirely different culture. It seems like Musk is jerking people around just because he can. It is a petty tyrant move whose only result is likely to make even more people quit.

There is an old saying that people do not leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. And, boy, is Musk a lousy manager, at least as far as Twitter is concerned.. How the other companies he runs have survived so far beats me.

Goodbye, Twitter. Hello … Mastodon?

Social media sites start out as places where people can meet and interact online and form communities of like-minded people. These are all noble goals and these sites still do serve those goals. But over time, as these platforms become larger and larger, like Twitter and Facebook became, they grow toxic. It seems like that negative spiral is an inevitable consequence of the relentless logic that arises from their dependence on advertising revenue that leads to a Catch-22. To attract advertisers, they need a large user base and for those users to spend a lot of time on the site. That results in the companies creating algorithms that encourage so-called ‘virality’ where large numbers are drawn to some hot topic. This in turn encourages mean and vicious hot takes because that is what seems to get the attention of many people and so pretty soon it is nasty people who dominate the platform and this alienates advertisers who do not want to be associated with hateful content, and they leave.

Some disgruntled users of Twitter have been looking for another home and one that is getting some attention is another platform called Mastodon. This is a decentralized federated network run by volunteers, quite different to the behemoths of the other social media with their centralized management and operational structure and massive servers that are expensive to run. It is not ad-based and is specifically designed to discourage virality and to encourage small groups of like minded people to engage in more meaningful conversations with one another.
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The Twitter soap opera goes on

Although I am the most minimal of users on the platform and would be unaffected if the company went under, I continue to be fascinated by the way Twitter continues to lurch from one crisis to another under the erratic leadership of its new owner Elon Musk, as he tries desperately to recover from what seems like a disastrous investment.

He seems to think that people work best under edicts and threats. In his latest move, he told employees that he only wanted people who were “extremely hardcore” and be “willing to work long hours at high intensity” to build what he calls Twitter 2.0. That could be seen as a hyperbolic motivating speech, like football coaches asking players to give 110%, except that Musk followed up by giving them an ultimatum that they had to sign such a pledge by Thursday or they would be fired. That is just insulting.

Such a management style is the opposite tack that leaders should take in a time of uncertainty, noted Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy of workplace management at Gallup. Poor leadership provides an opportunity for employees to quit, especially when the job market remains tight, as it currently is.

“Saying ‘work harder,’ especially coming out of a pandemic, is tone deaf and it’s hard to undo that damage to your culture,” Wigert said. 

Musk’s implication that Twitter workers aren’t doing their jobs does not “reflect a strong employer brand and culture,” he added. “They don’t reflect that inspiring organization you want to work for.”

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The verdict is in: Trump’s big announcement was boring

The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.

Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.

In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel.

Here is Seth Meyers.