- Mon Jul 03, 2023 12:27 am
#47434
Strip it right back to its essence, though, and what we have here is an archetypal Newspaper Sadface story. Our plucky hero has always done this, and now The Man has said he can't any more. Naturally, our hero gets to entirely control the story, because The Man, by custom, policy or statute, is bound to respect legal processes and client confidentiality.
You can't note that without noting the other truths universal to Sadface Stories. Our heroes are rarely, if ever, completely honest about he nature of their grievance, nor how suddenly and unexpectedly the retribution of The Man rained upon them. They are rarely, if ever, genuinely put upon by the events, and reach their impasse through arrogance, apathy, hubris or belligerence in various admixture. Most likely, they could have avoided their fate quite simply.
The final truth is the most important, though. Once you're sadfacing, it is a tacit admission that no legitimate channel exists to get out of the fix our hero is in, either because they know they're bang to rights, or because they've already tried and failed.
We regard capitalist journalism as an effective weapon in the hands of a well-informed, but utterly unscrupulous, enemy, rather than merely as an unbiased recorder of passing events.