The Mainstream Media Writes For People In Cubicles

If the “postponement” of the ABC 20/20 manosphere “exposé” has taught us anything it’s that the writers seeking to cast light on the manosphere are looking for crazy. They need crazy because it’s the only thing they know how, or have the patience, to confront in as minimal an effort as it takes to type a few paragraphs dismissing it as misogyny.

Writers (vichy male writers) like R. Tod Kelly are also lazy. They see an opportunity for outrage that sells advertising. They wanted Stormfront and what they got was a global consortium of rational, well reasoned men with jobs, families and intelligence, men from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds expressing ideas that don’t fit into an acculturation of feminine primacy.

If you read Matt Forney’s 20/20 interview post you’ll see the desperation for crazy in their producer’s attempts to provoke him to become what they think he should be – a frothing, angry, hate-fueled misogynist. That would make it easy for them, they know how to sell crazy. The copy gets approved, the crazies get marginalized and we move on to the next Mabeline commercial.

But they didn’t get crazy from Matt, or Roosh (okay Paul Elam looks a bit like Charles Manson in a certain light)—they got well reasoned, sensibility that was hard to argue against, so they attempted to prompt the crazy by barraging Roosh with questions about rape in the hopes that he’d blow up. He wouldn’t. They wanted it to be easy. They wanted to know all they needed to know about the manosphere by sourcing Manboobz, interviewing three manosphere bloggers and then trot out the crazy, show off the carnival freak, demonize and marginalize him and frog march the crazy off the stage. They wanted fringe, the easy kind of fringe that their journalism, communications and women’s studies classes taught them the easy answers to confront it with.

But the manosphere isn’t fringe. For as much as R. Tod Kelly, or the producers at ABC would like it to be, the manosphere is too broad, too comprehensive, too diverse for anyone unfamiliar with it to really understand it, much less deliver an unbiased objective opinion of it. So Kelly follows formula and makes the same lame attempts at simple aspersion and misogynistic dismissal 20/20 had already failed in doing (as evidenced by their segment’s postponement). The Daily Beast wanted its formulaic red meat, but Kelly is just dishing out ABC’s cold left-overs.

The Cube

Details of Elizabeth Vargas’ alcohol rehab not withstanding, the entire debacle of the cancelled (?) ABC 20/20 manosphere hit piece serves as an illustration of how out of touch the MSM is, not just with their distorted portrayal of the manosphere, but who their audience really is. Judgy Bitch has done an admirable detective job in shinning some light on the backgrounds of the girls responsible for generating their written piece, and also detailing the process they used to emphasize their distortions. However the entire affair, and all of the internet fallout that led up to ABC shutting down their comment thread after tiring of playing whack-a-mole with their comment deletions, exaggerated the impression for me that a “news” organization the caliber of what 20/20 used to be has absolutely no idea of how their audience’s media consumption landscape has changed.

As I walk through the various sales and marketing departments of the offices of the liquor brands and casinos I develop for, what do I see in every cubicle I pass? I see men and (primarily) women glued to their monitors, checking Facebook, or a blog, or a forum, or a news site. In all likelihood, you are reading ROK or Chateau Heartiste or Rational Male from a computer at work that miraculously isn’t censored by your company’s web filters.

The cube-lings’ only consistent connection to anything happening in the outside world invariably comes to them via their company’s internet when they’ve got “down time” which is usually a lot more than the actual work time they’re probably tasked with. Right or wrong it makes much more sense to the average cube dweller to consume media of their own choosing at their convenience, which is usually on their bosses’ dime, when things get boring. This is the new media consumption paradigm that at least ABC’s 20/20 freshmen crew of producers interns seem genuinely surprised by. People consume media that they want to take an active part in. It’s not enough to be spoon-fed something to consider; people want and are now used to being actively engaged in the media and information of their own choosing. Whether that’s Mommy blogs, custom car forums, political blogs, or the manosphere, people now expect that degree of engagement.

I literally don’t watch TV anymore. If I could subscribe just to the NFL channel when the season’s on without a basic HD cable package I would drop cable entirely and stick to my AppleTV with subscriptions to Netlfix, Hulu or whatever else I think might be worth it. I’m far to busy a person to be on any media outlets’ schedule for my information or entertainment. Maybe I’m an outlier at this stage, but I think my lifestyle is becoming increasingly more common with regards to how I consume, as well as produce, media (products, promos, branding , etc.) A lot gets made these days about dual screen media consumption; where a viewer is watching something on the monitor and simultaneously “participating” in that consumption on Twitter or a live blog or even on a forum. Whether they believe their online input will actually direct the overall perception of what’s being broadcast is debatable, but what isn’t is the desire of media consumers to influence perception one way or another.

This is what the little girls responsible for the now failed 20/20 manosphere exposé didn’t anticipate – they sourced the same online communities that would hold them accountable before and after the piece would air. They weren’t writing for the cube, but they were happy to petition the cube and writers for the cube while naively believing that neither would actively engage them in the overall narrative of their misrepresentations. They weren’t writing for the cube, they were writing for a dying media form; they used new media to create a product to be delivered in an anachronistic format and it came back to bite them on the ass.

Need another example of this? Look no further than MTV’s Helena Kincaid’s petitioning the manosphere for exactly the same purpose, using exactly the same process as the interns at 20/20 did. Don’t ask the cube for anything you don’t expect to be held accountable for.

When you consider that media consumers will spend more hours with their eyes on their employer’s monitors than they will their own TVs, as a media producer, blogger, forum proprietor, etc. you must now write for the cube. Why does ROK or A Voice for Men outrank mainstream blogs in the Alexa ratings? Because it’s a topic and media that more people want to be engaged in. This entire affair puts ABC and anachronistic media delivery on notice, ignore the cube at your peril. Otherwise you might want to invest in hiring more digital media managers to delete blog comments about your story’s distortions or dissenting opinions; and even that wont stop the global perception.

Read Next: 8 Ways The Manosphere Changed My Views

51 thoughts on “The Mainstream Media Writes For People In Cubicles”

  1. Red pill is great! One year in… Crazy gf is gone. Work promotion. New passions… And the gym (28 years to get me to one)! Rollo for objective injection, CH for girl reality check, sunshine marry for balance and ROK for just about everything! You guys have pulled me out from a bad place
    The 20/20 shambles will no doubt lead more guys like me to find and read what the ‘sphere is all about…. So thank those poor abc cubicle workers for spitting out junk!! I hope others can find, swallow and accept the pill…
    Great work rollo!!

    1. “sunshine marry for balance”
      Why not throw in some Aunt Giggles “for game advice,” Hanna Rosin “for empathy and impartiality,” or Lindy West “for health advice?”
      ‘Sphere whores are virtual post-feminist war brides. While “alpha” hubby works, she’s at home attention whoring with you on the interwebz. Is being her beta orbiter red pill?
      (Keep up the good work, Rollo.)

      1. funny that you’d use war brides where rollo would probably disagree w/ the SSM stance but interesting take nonetheless

      2. I didn’t even know about sunshine mary til now. I googled it and saw her site with the little hamster animation. Cute.

    2. Make sure to read the entire works of Barb Rossa and Stardusk on YouTube also. These are the movements bibles.

  2. It’s sad these days how so many people only consume media that reinforces their existing opinions. Whether it be in this “manosphere”, feminist blogs or the mainstream media.
    We have too many people choosing to live in echo chambers that reinforce existing opinions until they become extreme parodies of the opinions once held.
    It’s the exact same situation that led to furries and the “die cis scum” crowd.

  3. This just reminds me of then George over at 3rd Millenium Men was interviewed. I just know that there was a substantial uptick in manosphere readers. And just the preview of Elam’s interview should have been enough to bring in a substantial number of men looking for answers. Slowly but surely, the paradigm is shifting. I can imagine how different things will be in as little as 2-3 years.

  4. A summary of the 20/20 breakdown is incomplete without noting that the feature’s protagonist* was the feminist “social justice activist” Anita Sarkeesian, who wants to censor video games. This creature got $160k (and more to deliver speeches to game companies) to make shit videos about video games….and it was only game fans and fan sites which exposed her as a fraud. The mainstream gaming sites covered up the fact that Anita Sarkeesian is a total fraud. They still do. This 20-minute video is an epic expose`, and also exposes her white knight sycophants.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqJCCnued6c
    *Anita Sarkeesian was the “protagonist”, in that the media was portraying her as the “victim” of hurtful words by the manosphere. To feminists, “victim” and “protagonist” are synonyms.

  5. Welcome to ROK Rollo. Your reputation proceeds you.
    Vargas, what a joke. The look on her face as Elam was explaining the bias against men in family courts. “What do you mean bias?” Just watching her trying not to flinch said everything.
    Wow and THEN she checked into rehab as the special got postponed/cancelled. It’s just too perfect.
    The MSM is fucked. They can’t make up bullshit anymore without being called out by internet users. I am so happy to see so many different people with varying opinions able to speak out.
    Any site without a comment section lacks credibility in 2013 and moving forward. This is a good thing. There is nothing like an uncensored comment section to ensure that all opinions are heard and all fallacies/misrepresentations are brought to attention.

    1. Elam and the true concept of the Maonosphere overloaded her hamster, forcing her to drink and checking into rehab.

    2. They can’t understand the manosphere because of one simple reason: unlike most of the ‘isms’ they are so used to, the manosphere isn’t a ‘movement’. It’s not a bunch of people being herded like sheep into a nice conformist template. It’s really just men questioning the lies they have been fed since birth. It’s men actually improving themselves in body and mind and doing what they were biologically ordained to do – be Men. It’s rediscovering what was taken from us by a couple of generations of clueless idiots.
      Women may like being herded; men don’t. If someone in the feminist crowd fucks up, all the other feminists rush to defend her. Not in the manosphere. Someone here fucks up, they’re told that they fucked up. This is how real men operate. The media is incapable of understanding this.

  6. Rollo,
    With regard to the cable and NFL issue, you can dump cable. There may be other devices out that that have the NFL app to subscribe to during the season, but for sure the PS3 does. It is more then just a video game box. i have music loaded up on it, use it for netflix, recently added in TunIn and listen to music, podcasts of all kinds and sports programs. Amazon movies stream to it and there is a bunch of sports stuff, NFL, pro baseball and hockey and college sports. It is a great little box that allows you to pick and choose from a wide variety of news and entertainment. The PS4 is on the way so I would think after the New Year you could pick up a used PS3 for a pretty good price.

  7. “Maybe I’m an outlier at this stage, but I think my lifestyle is becoming
    increasingly more common with regards to how I consume, as well as
    produce, media (products, promos, branding , etc.)”
    Same here. I stream what I want and watch football live. Whenever I’ve randomly flipped on commercial television (usually some syndicated sitcom rerun), I become annoyed with the commercials, news promos, and general noise. And I majored in Advertising for God’s sake.

  8. 8 years ago I had my own blog going covering many of these issues. At the time, I was mostly focused on the false information in the MSM fed by feminists, bias against fathers, and that sort of thing. I had not quite made the leap to just saying, “fuck it and fuck them,” and skipping right past them.
    After about 3 years of obsessively researching and writing, I started to feel pretty lonely in my quest. I got busy with work and other things and gradually stopped posting. I figured it was a lost cause.
    I ran into the manosphere about 3 months ago. I cannot tell you how over-joyed I was when I found it. This entire community of red pill truth seekers had developed after I gave up. Bull shit is being called on feminist hate and cultural conditioning daily, hourly, even minute by minute. And a lot of writers are young men. “There is hope for the future!” was my immediate reaction.
    I want to thank all of you for the good work. I want to especially thank you for seeing through the past 3 decades of extreme effort to turn you into culturally conditioned pussies. There are no pussies here.

  9. Great write up. The only thing I watch nowadays is Turner Classic Movies. This is where men act like men and women act like women. Everything else from MSM, to daytime, and primetime programming sucks the big anaconda. This is because they are run by feminists and their deballed, manboobed, fag-fruit supporters. I view MSM only as a source of cheap entertainment. That’s all. 90% of what they air or print has very little impact on my life. They think they are informing the masses, but those or us in the Roissysphere / Rooshsphere know differently. In addition to Vargas taking to the bottle, I bet she fudged her Huggies when her Manosphere piece didn’t air.

  10. Don’t forget…Hats off to Roosh. He said it earlier this year. The manosphere is going to hit the mainstream.

  11. Compelling analysis, Rollo! A nice topical shift as well. Actually learning something new in the ‘sphere gets rarer and rarer for me. Insightful. The drones ingest at work. There’s the efficiency of slavery. lolllollzzlolllzzzzzzzzz

  12. “If I could subscribe just to the NFL channel when the season’s on . . .”
    The advantages of being more into Kenneth Clark and James Burke than I am into football.

  13. Liberalism’s biggest problem is that it has won. There is no more raison d’être for the liberal project of destroying all traditions, so it’s constantly hunting down threats to give the Alinsky treatment to. The exploitive nature of liberalism always means that it is defeated by its own success, and we are seeing the latter days of that victory as they set up straw men, but the population is becoming weary. They can’t prop this charade up much longer….

    1. that’s why it ultimately leads into national socialism or communism…. and rather interestingly the dept. of homeland security recently bought 1.6 Billion rounds of ammo, mainly hollow point military (killer) rounds, not full metal jacket for target practice…. civil war II anyone ?

      1. This is an argument I’ve had with a friend. He thinks we are going to break out into a Utopian Libertarian society. I think we are headed for tyranny, since that’s what has happened in the past when republics fail. And the actions of government only confirm this.

        1. To your friend: More democracy, not less. A Libertarian society means a Conglomerate economy (unless you have a strong government that can apply anti-monopoly laws every day). Read more economics, don´t fall prey of easy ideas that make you feel smart.
          Your friend obviously believe all that simpleton stuff from the deranged mind of Ayn Rand or their followers.

        2. Oh dear God, Pablo you are so deluded. Marxism/Socialism/Communism etc. can be very easily discredited by using a simple thought process, because at the core of Marxist Socialism is the notion that PROFIT is evil.
          “Oh the evil Capitalist”, they say “PROFITING off the misery of the workers!” crocodile tears streaming down their cheeks. But this is nonsense. To the communist, the existence of profit can only mean that someone is being exploited, either the workers or the people buying the good/service/whatever.
          But I can very easily show how this is not true. Because you see MONEY isn’t even REAL! Its just a symbol, just a currency, it is mutable and ephemeral. It doesn’t actually have any VALUE intrinsic to it at all. It just REPRESENTS value, that’s all.
          And what is real value? Human ingenuity, that’s what real value is. And human ingenuity is potentially limitless. Its certainly not finite.
          And so what happens when you make a PROFIT? Well, when you make a profit, you are “making money”. Making money out of no where! You are conjuring up true value into the world which didn’t exist before.
          Because under a capitalist system, when 2 parties conduct an economic exchange, BOTH benefit, BOTH gain value, or else they wouldn’t do it (because they have the freedom to choose whether to conduct exchanges or not, and they certainly wouldn’t choose to do so if either of them felt it would leave them worse off).
          So you can see that when PROFIT is made, everyone benefits, in fact the whole of society benefits, and everyone’s living standard rises, and the inevitable march of humanity continues on ever upwards.
          Yet when you introduce despicable socialism and marxism, this benevolent process is stopped, and you see it everywhere its ever been tried: declining living standards, poverty, corruption. The richest countries in the world are the most capitalist: Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, etc. The poorest countries in the world are socialist: Venezuela, Cuba, et al.

    2. You are to closed into the USA debate. What you call “liberalism” is not exactly progressive. Take me, I am a socialist that reads Marx, and I am against the consequences of third wave feminism. In fact, there is nothing on economic Marxism (the classic Marx) that is against Men (it would be ludicrous since Marx himself was kind of an Alpha man / Intellectual Frat Boy living in the 19th Century, the fucker had a rich wife maintaining him, a lover, and was president of the beer or wine club when in “college”).

  14. “In all likelihood, you are reading ROK or Chateau Heartiste or Rational Male from a computer at work that miraculously isn’t censored by your company’s web filters.”
    I work for a company that deals in porn. Nuff said 😉

  15. Unless you are running for high office, any publicity is good publicity and since many a popstar has built their reputation on scandal and by winding up the “moral majority”… you will find that the ABC article is just fantastic… I’ve written for a few mainstream publications and seen their stats… a page like this can get hundred sof thousands of clicks… and you know what… you’re average beaten down guy is putting manophere straight into google after reading the first paragraph….. thanks ABC…

    1. “CD anyone ? …. Can’t even give that shit away…..”
      Send ’em to me. I prefer to own property over licensing abstracts.

        1. Thanks, but I’m all stocked up on coasters.
          How do you handle your CDs anyway to get them scratched so badly that they won’t play, when you only play them once?
          Then you stick them away for their value as backup or in trade.

  16. “Writers (vichy male writers) like R. Tod Kelly are also lazy.
    They see an opportunity for outrage that sells advertising. They wanted
    Stormfront and what they got was a global consortium of rational, well
    reasoned men with jobs, families and intelligence, men from all walks of
    life, all ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds expressing ideas
    that don’t fit into an acculturation of feminine primacy.”
    hahahahaha, you guys now many people see right through this right? It’s really obvious this site is a bunch of insecure losers whining anonymously and making up bogus stories of financial success and sexual dominance..
    I highly doubt any of you are successful in reality.

  17. ROK and Heartsie blocked at work. Rollo and Elam are not. I wonder what the trigger points are that create a block.

  18. “In all likelihood, you are reading ROK or Chateau Heartiste or Rational Male from a computer at work that miraculously isn’t censored by your company’s web filters.”
    No, actually I was reading ROK on my Blackberry to bypass my company’s network activity logging.
    Then I came home to write this comment because I’m too lazy to hack Disqus to work w/ my Blackberry.

  19. Paul Elam, to ABC, is the face of a movement. At least he smiled. He tweeted about this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij69NeNgdB8 (which refers to him as “Satan” – or “Santa” for my fellow gifted dyslexics). That evening, he tweeted about an online radio show, so I decided I would return the favor by investing some time into listening to it.
    I was one of 28 listeners. Elam was appalled that I sent messages recommending Rollo Tomassi’s book to big 28 and his guest Sage. They all sounded ready to fight an uphill battle (but they need to learn some basics first).”The Rational Male” by Rollo Tomassi would fix the issues they were trying to resolve.
    Dear Paul Elam his followers: Just read “The Rational Male” by Rollo Tomassi. I spent five figures learning the stuff that’s now in “The Rational Male” for less than $10. (Yes, I’m a bit bothered Rollo didn’t do this a long time ago). “The Rational Male” (book) is high-speed learning.
    Or, forget it… Save $10 U S and keep complaining about stuff millions of men before you have worked to figure out (so you don’t have to). Grab some fast food, avoid the gym and grow a beard. ABC needs you. http://wp.me/p3P5mL-65

    1. I saw Paul’s comments about me on the YouTube thread. He just doesn’t know enough about me (and why would he?) to have any opinion, so it’s easier to dismiss me as a PUA. In a sense he’s just doing what ABC did to him to preserve his brand.
      Thanks for all your RM evangelism Sam, however, I’d have to disagree with your comments regarding how the ABC cancellation of this piece was some engineered scam to get more manosphere input to do a better one. They really are THAT stupid, too inexperienced, and apparently too alcoholic to have that kind of chess-like foresight. Sarkesian’s flimsy stories and reputation alone should be enough to see that.

  20. “I literally don’t watch TV anymore …”
    No television, no television licence — it’s easy to do if you’re living with other people who are television addicts, although some of them have trouble understanding why my laptop is my preferred media device and why I shield my eyes from their televisions.
    They call it “programming” for a reason.
    I spent a night in an American hotel this past week with Very Comfy Pillows and a huge flat-screen television, having not watched American television for nearly three years. I was mildly shocked at the least, not by the programming, but by the adverts.
    I saw adverts treating men like boys, complete with poses that resonate with thumb-sucking and sleeping under the Christmas tree in pyjamas, along with the rest of the kids (or is it kidults now?). I saw adverts for pricey Evil Diamond Cartel merch that implied that some Successful Married Beta wasn’t going to be getting any until he pimped out for A Piece of the Rock from the likes of Kay Jewelers. I saw adverts treating idiot children demanding toys with utmost respect, adverts treating idiot single mothers and other non-role-models with utmost respect … all while they slagged on decent men and emphasised their Wallet with Scrotum (Possibly Detached) status.
    The bits of Drunken Whore Pop and Freak Show Drama that came on seemed relatively straightforward and awful by comparison.
    How the hell can you stand this mindless garbage parading through your living rooms?

  21. Really?!?!?! Really?!?!? This article is what all the hub-bub is about?!?!? Just gotta say one thing ….1st amendment mo’fos!! Love ROK!!! And if anyone should be outraged is because some Mexican lady got her fuckin’ head cutt off for the whole world to see….but…that would be racist. ..jesus…im gonna go have a beer with my girlfriend (who ironically turned me on to ROK) god bless

  22. The MSM is acknowledging (and trying to exploit) the manosphere for their own corporate gain – ratings (profit). They know that drama (any drama) sells so they’ll always try to stir the pot (on any issue) and then sell it to the public (whether is a partial truth or one big lie). The goal of MSM is ratings (money) – truth has nothing to do with it.
    They (MSM) are worried and they will soon be a thing of the past. Their days are numbered.

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