Sarah Weinman (~190k followers on Twitter) is Publishers Marketplace’s news editor. I don’t know what the first sentence of her tweet references. I think many who read it will passively decide to avoid my books and view me as distrustful (understandably, I feel, given the information’s source and how it’s stated without evidence, almost tiredly, like an old/common knowledge).
Earlier I was thinking: What if I had kids to support? What if something happens to someone in my family resulting in huge medical bills? What if, due to intermittent libel the next fifteen years, I’m unable, for example, to financially support my parents, or my own family? I think I’d feel very angry probably toward Sarah Weinman’s tweet, which I think is 100% untrue and, if unchallenged, will probably negatively affect (1) my long-term financial situation (2) the level of equality/”fairness” in the world.
Based on what I know about her I think Sarah Weinman (like most people I know in publishing, including myself) probably would support greater equality/”fairness” in the world. Probably almost every person reading this right now (despite how libelous each of you are) would.
I’ve read so much libel—so many false, unsupported statements that damage an other individual’s reputation or financial status—recently, almost exclusively by those in positions of greater power and influence than their targets, that I want to discuss this specific instance with Sarah Weinman in like a Gmail chat, or at least “call her out” on it.
As news editor of an influential venue in publishing, her tweet is maybe equivalent to, say, the New York Times printing an article that reads in entirety: “The restaurant Pure Food and Wine has been running a long con for years. So of course you’d be upset if you ate dinner there.”
Go here if you want to raise awareness on this & influence Sarah Weinman to engage me in an earnest discussion regarding her tweet.
I feel similarly as when ~1.5yrs ago I posted this in response to one of the dozens, it seemed, of journalists posting false information on Tumblr and elsewhere that served to discredit and disempower their comparatively, already disempowered targets (much like children cruelly and remorselessly targeting the weaker among them).
One effect, I think, of this top-down libel is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—which bafflingly seems, to me, based on what I’ve read, like what Sarah Weinman (and others who routinely or sometimes state unsupported facts while in a mode of journalism and not, say, comedy or theatre) would be strongly against.
