Welcome one & all to News on News! Before we get into it, we have an ✨exciting announcement✨ from our social media intern: they have just made us an Instagram account!
Follow @drosselmeyerrrr for new post alerts, for yet another platform thru which to dm us yr juicy info, & for long-awaited Drelfies (Drosselmeyer selfies):
…also for this pic of real-life bingo in a bar called [Redacted] Cult. We are not joking 😂😂
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…We will, for today’s segment, continue to not be joking 😑 We woke up this morning from a nightmare, covered in sweat: we’d dreamed that we were in Somni’s irl, unembellished situation. We woke up again to our gf playing acoustic Alice in Chains, & to frantic texts from our News on News crew: “Where are you? I thought we were going to cover the press’s reaction to Jamie’s letter today!” 😮
Indeed indeed indeed! The AP has been handing out copies left & right— apparently, if you’re sharing from journalist to journalist, rather than from journalist to plebe, “unverified allegations” are fine to distribute 🤷🏻♀️ It could be worse. Maybe a curious journalist will transform these into ✨verified✨ allegations! Anyway, we are surprised the AP is sharing this letter at all, due to what it says abt the press’s shenanigans! It says:
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You, the public, are being lied to.
You've been told a number of spooky, fabricated stories that make no sense & leave you with more questions than answers.
the truth about my friends and I will make a lot more sense than what you've been reading about in the papers.
[The Unnamed Site]… is one of the primary sources newspapers have been using... It is the story our various stalkers & abusers have coordinated on in order to discredit us, so that no one will believe us… the big lie… is the story being repeated by the news, the FBI, & local police.
I have been unable to read the news while in jail. The little news I've gotten was enough to determine that my friends & I are being described as like Satan's lapdogs, the devil, & the manson family all rolled into one… papers are publishing speculation as fact…. I'm viscerally reminded of witch hunts, of the Satanic Panic…. These papers are flagrantly lying.
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…THAT is Jamie's opinion on the press. Oh, & just as a shoutout to our Citizen, they have this to say as well:
Jessica Taylor, who is one of the more commonly cited “sources” being interviewed by the press, wrote a blog post in defense of adults sexually grooming children.
…So, we wonder, what will the press have to say abt them? 👀
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The press is being weird abt it! They are picking lots of good quotes: they are giving a good overview of what Jamie talks abt, minus their allegations against Rationalist figures.
They are reacting to some of Jamie’s statements w/ surprise— for ex., VTDigger is amazed to hear, “My friends and I certainly don’t call ourselves ‘Zizians’”! Do we believe their surprise? 😑 It is v. hard to say.
In the case of VTDigger— sure; they’re a small local paper. They prob. haven’t done an extensive deep dive into this subject— over the 4 months they’ve covered it.
But other outlets, like the Independent, are using this opportunity to reveal news they have been sitting on— news which indicates they have been aware of a counter-narrative for some time, & have just decided not to cover it. We threw up our hands as the Independent rubbed its chin & said, of Jamie’s account:
[This] partly echoes the account of [the courageous entity who published the Mea Culpa. It] told The Independent that [it] helped edit [The Unnamed Site (TUS)], and that it was a misleading "smear site" borne out of an obsessive grudge.
Whose obsessive grudge? 🤫 The Independent isn’t saying! We are guessing they have never aired the entity's info before— since they link from it to no other articles… tho they do link to TUS for curious readers!
We like that the Independent agrees, however reluctantly, that TUS “appears to have coined the term ‘Zizians’ and described them as a ‘cult’ led by Ziz LaSota”. This would normally knock our socks off— so why are our socks still firmly on?
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We have repeatedly said that we will stop giving the press so much grief as soon as the press stops giving this story the runaround. Have we been fibbing?
Are we constitutionally incapable of burying the hatchet? Are we ourself a bad-faith reader— if the press corrects one foible, will we inevitably point to another that justifies our being so grumpy?
To the extent that we are, we will work to improve our grumpy, obsessively-grudgeful character ☺️ To the extent that we aren’t, we may be reacting to a few tricks which the press has been playing w/ Jamie’s revelations.
Tonight, we will be exploring these tricks thru just 2 sources: thru just VTDigger & the Independent. We’ve chosen them as paragons bc one, as noted, is small & US-local. The other is big & UK-based, w/ an international audience. Both are described as center-left, & both have been excitedly cashing in on our “Zizians’” saga.
We’re climbing aboard VTDigger first— since it played the trick which made us roll our eyes the hardest.
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We greet, from VT, reporter Peter D’Auria— a fellow Italian! 🤌
We are indeed a versatile ppl: Peter, just like us, typically has nothing to do w/ cults. His beats are government accountability & health care: yet he has not only written 8 whole “Zizian” articles; he has rocketed our cabal to the top of VTDigger’s suggested topics—
What can we say? 🥲 We Italians bring un fascino indefinibile. We bring the passion & heat to even your harshest, blandest climes. For better or worse, we like our news big: we like to be shocked, to be scandalized, & to be told many sensational stories. We cannot help but tip our hat towards this shared aesthetic heritage, even as we would like to tip Peter’s framing of Jamie’s letter right into the trash.
Peter, w/ a tricky smirk, has twisted Jamie’s defense of Mz. Ziz into confirmation that Mz. Ziz iz Jamie’s cult leader. What makes this particularly noxious is that here is Jamie’s defense:
• Ziz “saved [their] life”
• “Ziz is not my leader, & I am not her’s. What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express.”
& here is Peter’s smirking:
What’s more, [Jamie] wrote, “My friends and I certainly don’t call ourselves ‘Zizians.’” […] But several paragraphs of the letter are taken up by effusive praise for LaSota.
Can we not claim that our friends save our lives? Can we not declare love for our friends, w/out being accused of representing cults named after them? 🤷🏻♀️
V. strange. Anyway, here is Peter w/ 4 more pranks we do not dig.
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#1: In his first line, Peter introduces Jamie as being “linked to a cult-like group that *others* have nicknamed the ‘Zizians’” (emphasis ours)— then he jumps into Jamie’s disputation of this nickname.
Peter, w/ his 8 chart-topping Zizian articles, clearly belongs in this group of "others". Why will he not stand proudly behind his decision?
Why will he not use this moment to self-brand? To say: “a cult-like group that we at VTDigger— w/ oh so many others— have loved to call the ‘Zizians’”?
None of these journalists like taking credit for their achievements, & that makes us sad.
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#2: Peter describes Jamie’s letter as:
a hybrid of a manifesto, a list of grievances and a shaggy-dog story about a large group of acquaintances — except that it levels allegations of abuse against multiple people.
“Manifesto” is his own opinion. Does he back up his opinion by, say, citing which bold goals Jamie lays forth? Does he cite revolutionary or excitingly visionary (EV) language from Jamie? He does not, bc Jamie’s only explicit goal comes at the end of the letter, when they ask for help. He would have had even greater trouble finding EV language to cite— in the midst of so much language which describes real & devastatingly down-to-earth suffering.
We see why he might call this long & twisted story a “shaggy dog (SD)”— but ultimately, we object to his framing.
SDs are characterized by a lot of rambling details which build towards nothing: which build towards a silly, trivial, or anticlimactic punchline. We do not view Jamie’s plea as either silly or trivial.
Implicitly, neither does Peter when he says that Jamie’s tale is un-SD in that it “levels allegations of abuse against multiple people.”
Abuse allegations, we thought— we’d hoped— are inherently a serious & climactic “punchline” (SACP). What is a SD w/ a SACP? It is, perhaps, simply a detailed & urgent story.
Peter could have avoided repeating himself & contradicting himself— had he called Jamie’s letter “a long, detailed, & urgent story which levels allegations of abuse against multiple people.” He instead published a bad line— a redundant line— while minimizing the serious message of his subject.
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#3: We read Peter as, in a subtle kind of way, besmattering Jamie’s letter w/ mud bc, in it, Jamie doesn’t give a theory of *who*— if not they— killed their parents.
In a world where Jamie is not the killer (TK), this omission is unremarkable: how would Jamie know TK?
In Peter’s world, where Jamie is guilty despite having no murder-related charges, this omission is a suspicious sidestep, which Jamie’s shaggy-dog abuse allegations may be working overtime to distract from.
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#4: Peter touches on Jamie’s heartrending descriptions of life inside Allegany County Detention Center (ACDC)— but then calls up Kati, the ACDC spokesperson, who deftly denies everything that Jamie alleges.
On the one hand, this is good “both sides” journalistic scrutiny. On the other hand, Peter knows that, for most of his readers, Kati’s rapid-fire denials will carry more weight than all of Jamie’s allegations put together.
This is a genuine q.: how can we give “both sides” when one side is a state institution, & the other is a prisoner whom we have spent 4 months calling a cultist?
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Well, one thing that comes to mind: Peter could have amplified Jamie’s lonely little voice by checking their ACDC descriptions against the descriptions of other former/current prisoners.
If he had, he might have found that ACDC has been described v. negatively by former prisoners and their families, esp. around medical care. He might have found a major lawsuit which the family of James Stevens brought against the Board of County Commissioners, after ACDC “showed 'deliberate indifference'" to Stevens’s “serious medical needs” while he was jailed.
Upon arriving at ACDC, Stevens, who had heart failure, diabetes, & asthma, reportedly had his oxygen tank & insulin needles confiscated. Over the next several days, despite clear signs that he was in severe medical distress (vomiting; dangerously high blood pressure; symptoms suggesting a heart attack or sepsis), medical staff failed to transfer him to a hospital or seek appropriate emergency care. He finally died in their custody.
His family’s lawsuit claims that what happened to him is part of a broader pattern: where ACDC minimizes or mishandles serious inmate health concerns, leading to catastrophic outcomes. And his story is, tragically, mirrored by Jamie’s stories of what they & esp. others are enduring in ACDC right now.
But we learn none of this from Peter. We learn only that, as per Kati:
Allegany County Detention Center takes all medical concerns seriously and has established procedures for timely evaluation and treatment by qualified healthcare personnel.
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We were, at this point, shocked to remember that Peter— when not moonlighting as a zreporter (Zizian reporter)— covers government accountability & health care.
Does the q. of medical neglect at ACDC not fall perfectly in his wheelhouse? Is this not a place where accountability is needed from the state? How big is this jail’s budget? How much could it dedicate to humane health care?
If Peter wrote his next article on these q.s, we don’t think it would make VTDigger’s top 5 topics— but boy would it make our summer! We assure him: he has no competition. Maryland’s local papers aren’t scooping this— yet!
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W/ that joyful possibility in our minds, it’s time for a commercial break. We’ll sail across the pond when we return, & see what the Independent has to say abt all this. For now, we are sailing to the green room to take a nap 😴
Do whatever you want in the meantime. Steal our lobby candy, jump around on stage. We could not care less ☺️
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