John McDermott had no idea who Jay Shetty was when he was assigned to write a profile of the monk-turned-influencer for Esquire. After meeting Shetty and conducting cursory research, McDermott knew there was a bigger story—one that wouldn’t flatter Shetty. Yet the magazine balked when McDermott informed his editors that he wanted to investigate further. Thankfully, the Guardian picked up the story.
As John tells us on tomorrow’s Conspirituality Brief, Shetty’s PR team has tried to spin this ordeal by claiming McDermott is a fanatic out to “get” the uber-popular plagiarist. Ironically, this same team pitched Esquire to cover Shetty, citing McDermott by name.
This story gets to the heart of one of journalism’s main problems: as Max Tani writes for Semafor, a lot of American media has “lost its nerve.” Tani even cites the McDermott near the top.
Last year, freelance reporter John McDermott discovered that Jay Shetty, a massively popular lifestyle podcaster who recently interviewed President Joe Biden, had fudged biographical details about his life. But months after he began his reporting for Esquire, he wondered: Would any outlet publish it?
Esquire lost interest as the piece took on a critical tone. He then approached The Hollywood Reporter — as did Shetty’s publicists, who delivered a litany of complaints about the journalist, arguing that he had a conflict of interest. More than a year after its conception, McDermott’s story was eventually published by The Guardian, prompting British education officials to demand Shetty remove false references to them from his website.
Accountability matters. Yet as Tani writes, more outlets are turning to pay-to-play agreements to publish content, even allowing celebrities creative control over seemingly-journalistic documentaries and profiles.
Case in point: my wife and I saw a preview for the four-part Netflix docuseries on Martha Stewart. The trailer, which was extremely flattering for Stewart, even justifying her jail time within those two minutes, raised my suspicions. Looking through the celebrity press around the series, the most I learn is that “Stewart is cooperating with the filmmakers.” Then I discover, as the last line of one of fluff pieces, that “CAA Media Finance and Submarine Entertainment brokered the deal.”
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that CAA represents Martha Stewart.
The line between marketing and journalism has never been so thin.
But it’s always existed. Twenty years ago, I had to kill a number of stories as a music journalist. At one magazine, I couldn’t be critical of any album whose label advertised in the pages. When I was, the review wouldn’t run.
At another publication, I interviewed a popular local rapper who I thought was anything but (a rapper) and expressed my opinion strongly. My editor told me to turn it down a few notches because “they want to get free stuff from the label.” I refused.
Getting promo CDs is a world away from claiming that your life coaching course has academic affiliations with major universities, which Shetty claimed and which his school did not have. Aspiring coaches paid $7,400 under false pretenses—one of the new insights in McDermott’s piece.
Sure, this is minor compared to true investigative reporting, but what McDermott experienced—and what Tani expresses—is that something more systemic and problematic is at play: if the powerful can’t be held accountable, they can get away with anything.
So when the powerful are confronted by actual journalists—looking at you, Elon—they’re caught flatfooted, unable to wiggle their way out of their misinformation and propaganda.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to media. As it turns out, MLMs continue to exploit economic vulnerabilities as the wealth gap increases in America, which turns everything into a marketing scheme.
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