A certain ex-BuzzFeed journalist, Amy Rose Spiegel, has been gaining heat for a certain "What's the Deal with Jazz?" post. And as BuzzFeed recently had a proverbial book-burning of old articles earlier this year, the site's already suspect editorial operation has become even more skewed.
Will Oremus at Slate details an interview he conducted with Spiegel, in which she uses words such as "bullied," "embarrassed," "ashamed" and that the poor reception was "really deserved." If integrity were a horse, this one's been shot, sullied and beaten-after-death without any proper discourse.
Spiegel was quoted: "And so the reaction that it got was really deserved, and I totally understood it. I was really ashamed at having my name on it. I'm sorry I did it. It was the ultimate, like, Amiri Baraka 'Jazz and the White Critic' kind of thing."
"I was so sorry about having done it, and I didn't want it in the world, and I also didn't feel like I should be taking full responsibility for it because I had been bullied into doing it after saying no. So I deleted it, and I knew that was against BuzzFeed's editorial policy, but I didn't care," she concluded.
We bring this up now because of a recent Sonny Rollins post from the New Yorker, where Django Gold (a popular writer coming from an even more popular satirical publication called The Onion) is still getting some serious heat for defaming jazz under the guise of Rollins, "himself."
Of course, many may not understand the trials of being a new writer. In Speigel's case, writing for a major site that yields a sizeable readership, posts like "What's the Deal with Jazz?"--despite the negative criticism--still bring viewers to the site, pumping up numbers and ad portfolios.
What was that about Baraka? "Who Blew Up America?" indeed.
