The Latest in the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni Saga (PART TWO)

We're all complicit....

I’m writing this while the children watch Floor is Lava. Happy Christmas Eve y’all. Love you.

I want to start this newsletter with a story. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, otherwise known as the mid-aughts tabloids on the island of Manhattan, just about every entertainment journalist I knew got the same news tip. It was juicy and terrible, heartbreaking and sinister.

The story involved a heterosexual male celebrity hooking up with a guy while in rehab for crack cocaine and maybe heroin and then beating the hell out of him and putting him in the hospital.

Who was behind it? No idea. The leaker was anonymous.

Everything about the story was awful and salacious. It was also unverifiable. No one ended up running it because it couldn’t be confirmed. During the age of traditional media a lot of mistakes were made, but there was also a system of checks and balances that prevented unfettered reputation destruction using the media as a weapon.

Alas. Today’s weapons have no such checks and balances.

It is so much easier to destroy someone in the age of social media than it ever was in the days of print. Make no mistake, it was still possible back then, but it took way more work and actual relationships with the press. Now you can pay an influencer, set it and forget it. You can land one piece of nasty gossip and then get the Internet to start commenting and dissecting and shaping opinions for you. The algorithms that drive social media feed on hate and contention. They essentially damage reputations while we sleep.

I think it’s worth asking ourselves how many of us had negative feelings about Blake Lively over the summer while this smear campaign was underway?

We’re seeing a ton of journalist mea culpas right now.

Laura Snapes wrote in the Guardian that she’s ashamed for what she said about Blake Lively:

Lively’s complaint has left my head spinning. What can you really trust? How do we question accepted narratives without descending into tin-hatted conspiracy theory? Why do so many people hate women this much? How much internalised misogyny roils under my own skin every day? I’d like to reach for a cute ending, to say that through assiduous, informed questioning and acute media literacy, cases like Lively’s might, you know, end with us. But the truth is I don’t think we stand a chance.

Sometimes it does feel like we don’t stand a chance. Now let’s talk about the latest in the Baldoni/Lively situation.