Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. So it is rare that a long form
essay published on I believe a British owned company's website
gets the kind of attention and views that this piece
that I have now in front of me got over
the last forty eight hours. It's called The Lost Generation
and was published at Compactmagazine compactmag dot com. And it
was written by Jacob Savage, a white male heterosexual. And
that's important. I'm telling you that for a reason, white
male heterosexual gen Z creative type okay. And he talks
about how back in January of twenty sixteen, he was
thirty one, he had been living in Los Angeles for
five years writing scripts. I take it back. He may
be a millennial, he may be gen z I don't know,
but he's one of those, and that's what the focus
of this piece is on. So he's thirty one, living
in LA for five years and he's just been writing scripts.
He wants to be a TV show writer, and he's
trying to get work. And the way I guess you
do that is you do all of these menial jobs,
you know, wait tables and all that, while you're doing
all of this writing and trying to hone your craft
and get ideas pitched in front of people, and you know,
somebody picks it up. And he had been writing with
his best friend, so there was like a duo and
they were just writing straight constantly five years. They wrote
a pilot script and a veteran show runner said yeah,
let let's talk, and so they were like excited at first.
The project though, fizzled, but then they were surprised when
out of the blue, an executive emailed them and wanted
to meet with them. The show runner said that he
had submitted the two writers, Jacob and his friend for
an upcoming writer's room that he was going to run,
and that this executive really liked that pilot script that
the two had written and heed to hire the duo,
so they thought, this is our break, right, So their
project was dead. But they met with the executive anyway,
who is described here as a gen X white guy,
who told us how much he loved our pilot. But
the writer's room was small, and the higher level writers,
the veteran writers in the room, the ones with the
most seniority, well they were all white guys too, and
they couldn't have an all white male room. But you know,
maybe if we get another season, we may be able
to bring you on. And then they never did, he says.
The door seemed to close everywhere and all at once.
In twenty eleven, the year I moved to Los Angeles,
white men were forty eight percent of lower level TV writers.
So the thing to keep in mind and all of
this is this is about the talent pipeline. Okay, forty
eight percent of the lower level TV writers white men
in twenty eleven. By twenty twenty four, so thirteen years later,
it went from forty eight percent white dudes to twelve
percent white dudes. The Atlantic's editorial staff the newspaper, it
went from fifty three percent mail and eighty nine percent
white down to thirty six percent male and sixty six
percent white. White men fell from thirty nine percent of
tenure track positions in the humanities at Harvard went from
thirty nine percent down to eighteen percent over the course
of a decade. He says in retrospec twenty fourteen was
the hinge, the year DEI became institutional on across American
life in industry, after industry gatekeepers promised extra consideration to
anyone who wasn't a white guy and then provided just
that quote with every announcement of promotions. There was a
desire to put extra emphasis on gender or race. That's
according to a former management consultant who went on to say, quote,
and when you don't fall into those groups, that message
gets louder and louder and gains more and more emphasis.
On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who
have been at a disadvantage, and on the other hand,
you look and say, wow, the world is not rooting
for you. In fact, it's deliberately rooting against you, he says.
As the Trump administration takes a chainsaw to the DEI apparatus,
there's a tendency to portray DEI as a series of
well meaning but ineffectual HR modules. And then he has
a quote from Kianga Yamata Taylor in The New Yorker. Now,
if you do a Google search of this woman, you
find out like she's in African American studies, professor I
think at Yale and big in the DEI activism. Okay,
and she says, undoubtedly there has been ham fisted DEI
programming that is intrusive or even alienating, but for the
most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to
increase diversity while also sending a message that workplaces should
be fair and open to everyone. Except it hasn't been.
So here's the problem. It hasn't been. He goes on
to say, this may be how boomers and Gen X
white guys experienced DEI, but for white male millenniums, DEI
wasn't a gentle rebalancing. It was a profound shift in
how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of
the thousands of articles and think pieces about diversity have
considered the issue by cohort, in other words, by the
by the generational cohort, the millennials, the Gen zs, the
Gen wise, the Gen a's. I'm not calling them Alpha's
jen a is what I call them. For now. We'll
see if they can pick up another title at some point.
But he's exactly right, because I've I've read a lot
of stuff. I've covered the DEI stuff for years now.
And I am a white dude, gen xer myself, so
I you know, I was already in you know, into
well into my career when all of this stuff started happening.
And because of my age, I am already in sort
of the you know, the upper levels, if you will,
of a seniority kind of a place. Much like he
goes on to explain, in newsrooms, in media companies, in
television and movie production, in academia, and what keeps coming
through and this is a piece. It's like it took
an hour to read this thing. It's a massive essay.
And what he keeps coming back to is that for
gen xers and boomers, white men, they're the ones that
are still in place because they've got the seniority and
the tenure. And so what happens when you try to
rebalance for DEI purposes, Well, if you have people already
on the job, you're not firing all of those people
because they're white guys that would probably get you sued, right,
But what happens is everybody that comes along after then
has to be an offset to your existing your existing
employee demographic. And what does that mean for young white guys.
Means there's there's no path for them because there's gen
X and boomer white guys already on the payroll. This, this,
and this, what he's describing here, It proves the warning
that I was making about DEI and people like me
were saying, this is not good. You do not want
to have everybody viewing everything through these prisms of race
and gender and sexual orientation. That cannot be the way
that you view people, right, particularly in hiring decisions. But
also this helps explain what is being used as sort
of the jet fuel for you know, these more radical
influencer types that have emerged over the last couple of years.
I'm talking about guys like Nick Fouentes and the Manna
Sphere and all of these like misogynist norm breakers and
all of that, like they like, they are the ones
that have come up in this environment. And lo and behold,
look when when you tell everybody to view each other
through racialized prisms, that also is going to lead the
white guys to start looking at themselves like that too,
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Compact Magazine's piece by Jacob Savage, This thing has gotten
a lot of discussion in various places over the last
forty eight hours, so I bring it to you. I'm
going over this with you so you know what this
is about. And also I think it offers a different
perspective on the blast zone of the DEI policies that
you know, people like me and many in the audience
were arguing against because we saw the corrosive effects on
the society. But this is like, this is beyond what
even I thought would occur, he says. Institutions pursuing diversity
decided that there would be no backsliding. If a position
was vacated by a woman or a person of color,
the expectation was it would be filled by another woman
or person of color. The hope was always that you
were going to hire a diverse candidate. A senior hiring
editor at a major outlet told me. This is in
the section he's talking about media. He says, if there
was a black woman at the beginning of her career
you wanted to hire, you could find someone. But if
she was good, you knew that she would get accelerated
to the New York Times or the Washington Post in
pretty short order. The truth is, after years of concerted effort,
most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity.
By twenty nineteen, the newsrooms of Pro Publica, the Washington Post,
and the New York Times were majority female, as were
new media upstarts like Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post.
And then twenty twenty happened and the wheels came off.
He says, that was the summer of fiery but mostly
peaceful riots, And when I was reading this, I had
completely forgotten. But I did have a pretty close experience
to this myself after I left WBT the first time,
when I was on my timeout, as John Hancock called
his timeout, that's what he called it. So I was
also on a similar timeout. And so when I was
looking for a job and I got one, but I
was told by a manager that they really had to
go to bat for me. They really had to like
twist some arms in their corporate HR because I was
replacing a black female employee. And they just said it
like that, like wait, so my race and my sex
would would prohibit me from getting this job somehow like
like that that was a factor that was discussed. I
think that's illegal. But I got the job. But I
think it was also because I had a lot of
experience in the in the field. But I don't know.
I mean, this was before a lot of the DEI
stuff really ramped up. It's about five years prior. And
then he says, of course, twenty twenty happened, and the
wheels came off. In the aftermath of George Floyd's death,
newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a quote unquote reckoning.
And then he goes on to quote all of the
statements that came out promising, you know, more diverse hires
at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Bon Appetite, NPR,
Conde Nast, La Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Pro Publica
as I mentioned, and The Atlantic. They were all out
there saying, you know, this is what we're going to do,
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dot com. Going over this piece called the Lost Generation
at compactmag dot com by Jacob Savage. Called the Lost Generation,
he says, for a typical job, he's got a quote
in here from a hiring editor at this in this
section is a very lengthy piece. He's got it broken
down into media, academia, and a couple other sectors. So
this is the media section. And these are all cultural institutions, right,
These are the things that drive narratives, that impact the culture, right,
that tell stories to help people make sense of what's
going on. And so this hiring editor says, for a
typical job, we would get a couple hundred applications, probably
at least eighty from white guys. It was a given
that we weren't gonna hire the best person. It was
jarring how we would talk about excluding the white guys.
The pipeline hadn't changed much. White men were still about
half of the applicants, but they were now filling closer
to only ten percent of the open positions. And he
has various quotes from various white, straight guys telling their
stories in all of these different industries. He doesn't give
their full names, and he talks at a later point
in the piece about how he's never had so many
of his sources callback and change their anonymous name, make
it something else, so it's not anything. Take out that
detail because that could be identifiable. Like nobody wanted to
be seen as that guy complaining that they didn't get
the job, saying, oh, it's because of you know, discrimination,
when it is and they're telling you, like these hiring people,
they they're telling these young white guys, sorry, you know
you're you're a white, straight guy, you're not getting the job.
Like that's that's what they're they're talking about. So one
of these people that he talked to, his name is Andrew,
worked in a newsroom. He says everything was driven by identity.
There were endless diversity trainings, there was a racial climate assessment.
At one point, reporters were told that they had to
catalog in detail the identity characteristics of all of their sources.
Why would you need to do that. Andrew had been
instrumental in forming the union at his company, and he
objected when negotia shifted from severance pay and parental leave,
which I think are things that unions typically tried to implement,
you know, but they were trying to shift the negotiations
away from that and onto racial quotas. They wanted to
do emergency hires of black people, emergency hires quick. Everybody,
we're racist, we're systematically institutionally racists. We need to hire
some more black people, like this is what they were
saying in a newsroom. When he questioned these new priorities.
The response was swift. He says, on a zoom call,
women would clap back at something I was saying, and
then other women would snap their fingers in the chat window.
It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale. He
goes on to say later in the piece, the irony
was where older white men remained in charge. Actually, where
they remained in charge, there was almost no room to
move up. They were already filling the white guy quota.
All the upper management types that were implementing these policies
that are stiff arming younger white males. And this plays
out in example after example after example. Other pipelines dried
up as well, the alt weeklies. I don't believe we
have a dead tree copy of such magazine here in Charlotte. Anymore.
It used to be called creative loafing way back in
the day. But then they went belly up and think
some of their writers went over and started was a
Queen city nerve, I think is what it is. But
I think it's only online. The old weeklies that gave
misfit young men their start have now shed them entirely.
There are no white men on the editorial staff of
the Seattle Stranger, or on staff of Indie week which
publishes in North Carolina. As late as twenty seventeen, there
were six white men atop the masthead for the Portland
Mercury twenty seventeen. Seven years later there was one. And
that's the white eye Boomer. Not our traffic eye boomer,
but a baby Boomer generation. And he's the editor in chief,
so the boss. By the early twenty twenties, many journalists
I spoke to noticed something else. The young white men
who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had simply stopped applying.
Gen Z men had absorbed the message the journalism was
not for them. I have noticed this as well. You
know who else noticed this? Like I don't know twenty
years ago, Rush Limbaugh, do you remember what he called it,
the chickification. He called it the chickification of news. A
well known gen X reporter with impeccable liberal bona Fides
confided quote, the femaleness is striking. It's like, Wow, where
have the guys gone? In less than a decade, the
entire face of the industry changed. And he then goes
over all the data. I mean, the piece is packed
with data. I'm just I'm trying to limit the percentages
and the years and stuff because numbers are difficult to
convey on radio. They're easier to understand and digest when
you are looking at them. So I'm not going over
But he's got New York Times and the male to
female ratio changing, and it's all going in one direction.
It's all the same, no matter which media operation he's
looking at. The demographic shift reshaped, not only who told
the stories. But here's the key, what do I always say, right,
The greatest media bias is in the stories that don't
get covered, Right, He says, the demographics shift from male
to female reshaped, not only who told the stories, but
which stories got told. Andrew at a colleague at this
news department, We'll call him Lucas, and he was assigned
to go write a piece after George Floyd's death about
why you should never call the cops. He says, I
remember having to interview one of these abolitionists, the prison abolitionists,
for a story about how if somebody breaks into your
car or your house, that it's white supremacy to call
the cops, even if you need the police report for
an insurance report. He says, that always made me feel gross.
I think back on that with a lot of regret.
Newsrooms were center left places in two thousand and five,
the prominent gen X reporter said, now they're incredibly lefty places.
I imagine one reason newsrooms have gotten more explicitly lefty
is that you have white guys and white women adopting
a kind of protective coloration allyship mindset, just to get
in the door. All right. If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too. And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias. Which
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The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. Kevin says, well, Pete, I've really enjoyed your show.
Hopefully you'll find employment soon after you're firing. That's well,
I mean it's going to happen at some point. Chris says.
When it comes to DEI I look at it as
the chickens have come back home to roost or karma
if you will the same way black people were treated
based on the color of their skin. Now white people
find themselves in the same predicament. I'm black, and I'm
not saying what's happening is right, I smell a butt.
I don't really agree with DEI I believe in content
of character, quality of work, and being qualified. Transgressions of
the past will eventually come back to bite you in
the butt, though, Right, So this is Kendyism. What Chris
is articulating, I think here is that's Ibra Mex Kendy,
who in his you Know, Anti Racism book that he
was invited to share with all of the educators in
the Charlotte Mecklenberg school system, for example, among many other
places that brought in Kendy to to sell this slop,
he says that the remedy for past discrimination is current discrimination.
See this is why, like this is an unethical view, okay,
because if that's the case, then you never end up
without discrimination. And again, if you want to live in
a racialized society where rights and jobs and opportunities and
all this other stuff is dependent on on whatever racial
demographic has power, like that is a completely unethical system
to advocate. And you darn sure, I better not be
talking about equality under the law for everybody either. See.
I am of the opinion that you should not discriminate
based on any of these characteristics. Like we need to
be as Chris says in his message that a meritocracy,
if somebody is producing the work and they are good
at what they do, then that's the person you would want,
right obviously, because then what ends up happening is now
you will have the cycle just continuing. Let me see here,
this is from seven oh four number. My aunt was
a teacher years ago. She was turned down for a
position because they said that they had to hire a minority,
even though they said she was far more qualified for
the job. This from Ken five years ago. It was
called affirmative action. I mean up until a couple of
years ago it still is. I mean yeah, I mean
this was the outcome of affirmative action, which again you
may agree with the reasoning behind it, which was to
you know, correct the past transgressions. But that's still discrimination.
That's what that is in practice, as was laid bare
in the Supreme Court arguments. Ken says, I applied to
a company that my father and uncle worked for. I
did not get hired. My uncle was friends with the
hiring manager, and he asked him why this is what
He stated that even though I had one of the
highest test scores, he could not hire me because I
was white. Walter wants to know, as a middle aged
white guy, where do I apply for my reparation. I
don't think I don't think that's gonna I don't think
that's how that works. Walter. So in this in this
piece called the Lost Generation, it's at Compactmagazine compactmag dot
com by Jacob Savage. I mentioned he talks about and
I just kind of went over the media and the
news organizations. He then pivots over to academia the Ivory Tower.
He calls this section and he says, there are a
lot of stories we tell ourselves about race and gender,
especially in academia. But the one thing everybody that I
spoke to seem to agree on it's best not to
talk about it, at least not in public. And that's
why I'm talking about it in public right now. All right,
that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
for listening. I could not do the show without your
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