By Tim Redmond
And the poor boring people there don’t even enjoy it.
Violet Blue weighs in today with some harsh commentary:
It’s just sad when “alternative” papers can’t be more trustworthy or accurate as the New York Times when it comes to the one thing they’re supposed to excel at: accurately representing local culture. And having a clue about San Francisco values.
And now local artist Matthew Williams has come up with an anti-SF Weekly shirt (unfortunately, some people might think NSFW is cool).
It’s been hard to find any substantive response from Matt Smith to all of this; he just complains about “anti-free-speech pornographers (as if protesting a news media column is an attack on free speech).
But in some ways, the thing I find most offensive is his suggestion that it’s appropriate for a newspaper reporter and columnist, who takes shots every week at other people, to duck calls from the press. I make it a policy to call people before I write anything critical about them (Smith apparently didn’t talk to any Kink.com models before saying that they were, in effect, degrading themselves for money out of economic desperation.) Smith says he deleted my phone message without even listening to it.
That’s just really, really lame. You work for anewspaper and you talk shit about other people, you should be willing to defend yourself, in public. When the Weekly calls me — even if I know it’s a hit piece — I always, always talk to them. That’s what you do in this business.
Unless, like Matt Smith, you just want to hit and run and hide.