Cancel culture remains on the march. Barring any sort of intervention, it appears that the next victim will be the website Blue Lives Matter, dedicated to highlighting assaults on police officers and offering support for their families. You might be wondering what anyone would find so offensive about a site specializing in that sort of content. Well, you actually probably aren’t wondering if you’ve been following all of the protests in the news lately. All cops are bad now. And some people working at other publications owned by the media company responsible for the site (Defense Maven) noticed the existence of BLM and expressed their “embarrassment and horror” at realizing their employer published such claptrap. They immediately demanded that the site be shut down. (NY Post)
Employees of a media company that owns Sports Illustrated and Maxim want the publisher to shut down a pro-police website.
The call to pull the plug on Defense Maven, a website also known as Blue Lives Matter, came during a staff meeting Friday where Maven Media Brands announced an across-the-board 15% salary cut to counter the deep losses in advertising revenue triggered by the coronavirus, the Daily Beast reported, citing sources at the meeting.
The workers pointed to the nationwide George Floyd protests as the reason behind their demand, Daily Beast reported.
In a chat that took place simultaneously, the Daily Beast said, workers used the words “embarrassing,” “a disgrace” and “horrible” to describe the Blue Lives Matter website and criticized lax editorial restrictions that they said allow readers to make racist comments “with no monitoring” and no fact-checking.
There are a couple of bits of irony to note in this story. The workers who complained about how embarrassing, disgraceful and horrible the Blue Lives Matter site is work for Maxim and Sports Illustrated. (Both fine publications to be sure, but the woke crowd who worries about feminist ideals might not be so wild about Maxim nor the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.) But somehow, reporting on news about attacks on police officers and honoring the fallen is… disgraceful.
So what were their specific complaints about the content on the site? The only thing they could cite were entries from the comments section. Apparently they dredged up one comment where a reader had suggested that snipers and armed drones be deployed to shoot looters to “set an example for the world to see.” Notice that the commenter didn’t even say “protesters.” They specifically said “looters.” Now, that’s not something the police are going to do for property crimes, but it’s also just somebody in the comments section. Show me a site that never has questionable comments and I’ll show you a site without a comment section.
Defense Maven’s CEO and founder, James Heckman, apparently engaged in an Olympic level flip-flop on this subject. He initially acknowledged the concerns of the workers about the “tone” of the site, but stressed their belief in their “mission to promote an open dialogue and break down ideological bubbles with different perspectives.” Upon receiving complaints from the liberal media, however, that position only lasted for a couple of hours. He later came out and said that he would ask the Board of Directors to remove the site.
Maybe it’s just me, but I would have guessed that the publisher of Maxim would have a bit more spine than that. But in any event, Blue Lives Matter will presently be without a home it seems. I should really drop a note to Salem and see if they want to pick up a new outlet. I think they would find a fine home here.
