A Hoax
Posted by Craig Mazin on 04 Jan 2008 at 10:06 am | Tagged as: The MBA, WGA Issues
It’s been essentially confirmed that the Nikki story regarding a secret cabal of A-listers plotting the WGA’s doom is based on a hoax.
Nikki hasn’t retracted the story yet. At least, I don’t see a retraction. She ought to.
Even stranger, the hoax involved…
…you know what? I’m not gonna add more grist to that particular rumor mill. I’m sure all parties involved, anonymous and otherwise, have had a strange enough week without me piling on.
But I will say that I had nothing to do with it.
That should go without saying, but one of the problems with the rumor culture is that people will attempt to fill in names for “stuff.” I spent a dizzy afternoon first defending the names of good friends of mine who were suspected as the ringleaders of some dissident group, and now I’m reading vague accusations about me and this hoax on another website.
I’ve deliberately avoided commenting on Nikki’s more rumor-y stuff, because I’m not Perez Hilton or TMZ. I’m way wonkier (and my next piece about this whole Jay Leno brouhaha will be appropriately MBA-nerdy). I’ve never met Nikki, and frankly, I have nothing against her. She can do whatever she wants. What’s crucial for the rest of us is to keep in mind that her website doesn’t solely exist to inform and educate, but to sell advertising clicks to L.A. Weekly, Fox Searchlight (member of the AMPTP), Amazon and whoever else is in her advertising queue. I don’t know what her standards of publish/don’t publish are, but again…it’s her site. All I know is that everything there has to be taken with at least a grain of salt until there’s independent corroboration.
The way you guys should take everything I say with a grain of salt…until there’s independent corroboration. I’ve gotten things wrong before.
In the meantime, there may come a day when like-minded writers get together to magnify their political power in this union. Should that come to pass, it wouldn’t (couldn’t!) possibly happen until there was actually something to argue for, like a reasonable offer from the AMPTP.
There hasn’t been one yet. That’s something everyone can agree on.
Well, that…and that Britney Spears is a bona fide nutjob.
