Let’s be edifying about lesser
female media workers—taking a sour song and making it sweeter
[This preface is subject to editing in the next few days,
but the real meat of this story is in the actual entries, A through C. Subpart A is
here, on my other blog; subparts B and C follow on this blog. Edits done 4/17/13.]
In this account of a set of experiences from almost 24 years
ago, we can find a number of things typical of the media world (certainly in New Jersey)—both “sins”
and certain fundamental metes and bounds. They are not less so for my being new
to this world at the time (as if maybe I misinterpreted some of what was going
on because I was new to it).
Here we have: (1) the fact that what you encounter in the
media work world—good and bad—does not at all enter your life as if having done
well in school leads directly and “entitlement-creating” to it—in a sense you
are going from the paved road of school to the very rocky and inconsistent road
of media work; (2) not being accorded minimal respect (as you can reasonably
expect) for what your work experience is, maybe because your supervisor is
primarily assessing you in line with what she wants out of you (if not also in line with simple stupidity or lack
of consideration); (3) a lack of any sort of protections for your rights within
the workplace—such as a sense of legal standards being followed, or an
ombudsman, or “court of adjudication” (as you might get at a competent human resources
department of a large corporation), for when disputes may arise—instead, you
could be handled summarily as if by a tin-horn dictator; (4) low pay, and (though I don't include in these entries an especially illustrative example of this) maybe
being gypped out of pay in some passing instance; and (5) a female managing
editor seeming to make decisions shaped in too large a part by emotion, or on
some basis comprising false issues or some crass fear for her job or the like.
Even in line with these “thematic points,” this 1989 set of
experiences was quite tacky. And what add to the validation of my account of
the whole thing are the experiences of other workers at the time, and
especially the history of Skoder in later years. Skoder wasn’t simply some
“young Turk” who was immature, and who would learn how to be a better
professional (including in relating to others) with experience; she was in her
mid-thirties when this 1989 stuff happened, and she would continue to exhibit
unprofessional behaviors, in different milieux, over the next two decades, as
later subsections of this set of entries will show.
As Freud had said the structure of the human personality is
shown in cases of sick individuals, the general less-respectable tendencies of the media world,
and of some of its workers, are revealed in the lesser-quality cases. But I
have to advise you, this was as bad as I ever saw, and anyone who contemplates
a career in the publishing or other-media industries should realize that, while
the bad tendencies can head in this direction, it’s rare to see them quite this
bad.
