Friday, January 18, 2008

Outsiders and insiders

Saturday's New York Times features a profile of Patric Verrone and David Young, the two "outsiders" who have led the Writers Guild of America, west in its current conflict.

It occurs to me that only in Hollywood could someone who began his career writing for Johnny Carson be labelled as an outsider.

As was noted in an earlier comment, Mark Evanier (who isn't an oustider either) has weighed in on the DGA deal.

BREAKING NEWS: The Los Angeles Times is quoting Verrone as saying that the WGA will be meeting on Monday, not with the AMPTP, but with News Corp. President Peter Chernin "and other studio chiefs".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually Verrone began his Hollywood career at a Fox talk show hosted by a lousy female stand-up comic who is best forgotten. When that show was cancelled he got a job on the Tonight Show. Wikipedia often gets these things wrong.

But to the more important point. Read the New York Times union coverage, any union, it doesn't matter which union. When ever a union is on strike those union leaders are "marginalized." It doesn't matter if the union leaders are good or bad, if the strikes are righteous or mistake, the NYT will always marginalize the union and its leaders. You are a union activist yourself so it would be best if you recognize this. There is a reason why we in the old USW used to call the local press "the bosses' mouthpiece," because they always speak first for the bosses.... Always!

Jeff Massie said...

But I always thought Peter Chernin respected me ... ;)

Seriously, the MSM coverage of this strike (and esp. the trades) is no different than how they've covered any strike, ever.

What I find most amusing is that anyone would be surprised by this.

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