Shocking. It turns out that Milo Yiannopoulos is ghost-written. Everywhere. He’s got interns writing his articles, his talks…I wonder if he’s so lazy that he’s got them writing his tweets.
Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has
about 44interns —a mix of paid and unpaid— writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.
Two people write Breitbart stuff for me,he told BuzzFeed News, butghostwriting is too great a word.[Nope. Ghostwriting is exactly the word. –pzm] He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him.I have two books coming out this year,he said.It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.
A career like his…what career? He is, supposedly, a writer. What he does for a career is write stuff. He doesn’t have any other job. His wikipedia page identifies him as a journalist. He’s employed at Breitbart as their tech journalist — he doesn’t know much about “tech”, but I guess he’s as qualified to be labeled that as “journalist”.
You know, if he were calling himself an astronaut, and it turned out that the only people to step into a rocket were his paid staff and volunteers, It would be fair to call him out on that phoniness. If he said he was a movie star, but had a team of proxies who were doing all his acting for him, I’d wonder why anyone needed him at all. He’s got about as much of a career as a Kardashian, apparently, famous for being famous rather than talented, and mainly his job is posting selfies and preening.
And 44 interns? That’s ludicrous. What is there left for him to do after 44 people have written his text, edited his words, done all the labor of writing?
Worst of all, he’s outsourcing his writing to…goons from 4chan. That explains a lot, actually.
A brand he is.
I wish I could get paid for doing nothing.
Managing 44 interns would be a heck of a lot of work, I wouldn’t have any time to write!
Not sure if I hope this is a hoax or is not a hoax.
I hope its not a hoax. Nothing wrong with that. Shrug. But really, its April Fools day in 30 minutes.
I’m sure if the 4channers got wind that you called them Goons they’d have a fit since Goon is a term often used for Something Awful, a rival forum.
He’s like the Donald Trump of… whatever it is he’s of.
OMG it’s like that scene where the trenchcoat-wearing antagonist turns out to be three kids standing on each other’s shoulders.
PZ:
From the article:
(bolding mine)
That would (in at least one instance) be a yes.
I am totally enjoying this post.
“ghostwriting is too great a word.”
vs.
“It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.”
:-)
Onamission5 @8
from the article
You know that would seem creepy if it was written by pretty much anyone but knowing it was Milo Yiannopoulos, just ugh. Nope, nope, nope, nope…
And all of them unpaid internships, no doubt, believing the lie that it will help them in their writing careers. Hey, it’s not slave labour – they’re free to leave because they already have and come from money.
Cripes, even singers and athletes put “written with” on their autobiographies.
He’s just trolling (business as usual), because it works.
Just watch as the ‘ethics in games journalism’ crowd swing into action…
This makes it extra-ironic that he threw such a tizzy-fit over losing his Twitter checkmark for being the “Real” Milo Yianopoulos. How many of those tweets were really from him?
@9
Different ghostwriters for those two parts of the interview.
He is right about one thing. It’ pretty standard for a prominent media writer to have assistants, interns, editors…whatever you want to call them…who do the writing. My writing team was criticized once by a marketing person for having so many people working on the project, and we still struggled to make our deadlines, while David Pogue wrote his first “Missing Manual” tomes all by his lonesome. So I bought a copy and looked. Nope, not even close to the truth. In the introduction, Pogue named 12 “editors,” another writer who wrote one chapter, and “others.” Of course, Pogue’s name was the only one on the cover because he’s the star.
if he really has 44 interns he most certainly has some staff whose job it is to manage them a task that is surely beyond him.
uncle frogy
Heh, so he’s the Milli Vanilli of the sexist douchebags.
lotharloo #17
omg
you are correct
that is so very very sad for milo
I bet one of the interns did the interview for him!
I hereby grant lothaloo one Internet.
Loads of interns and do nothing for a living?
Sounds close to my job, I’m only there for emergencies. Now, if only they didn’t screw up the reports, I’d have nothing to do whatsoever.
Then, I awakened from that nightmare and realized, that is precisely what job is one that I’d never want. While we do have a trainload of interns, I have plenty to do, both in giving guidance to my team of interns, creating training and having them generate my reports and correcting minor errors and giving feedback.
I’ve always trained in both train the trainer and train the replacement, even if the interns aren’t slated to replace me. They’ll move into management.
Where reporting is more important than managing and the least competent get promoted to the maximum level of their incompetence.
And my team generates reports on the management reporting downward, preparing a near reciprocal of the initial report complaining about inefficiency, to make that management appear more efficient.
That said, this is the first of April and that may or may not be what I actually do for a living. While we do actually have interns, only a few are assigned to sister teams of my core team. Reporting is more important than production and my team excels in reporting the analysis of raw data, then the correlation on the reporting on the raw data and reporting upon the reports, which are then submitted to middle management, then sent back by senior management to re-report upon.
Which is a lie, senior management generates their own reports, based upon data not available to us, on the same thing that we’re reporting upon and as we have the raw metrics and they don’t, have the same relation to reality that ours do not.
All then hold meetings, based upon the analytic reporting upon raw pseudodata, producing end products of more meetings about the previous meetings, directives are then sent down from senior management to senior management, then to our management, where the directives generate meetings to discuss the analytic consensus of the directives and those generate reports on those directives in the analytic chain.
Anonymous has attacked our working group several times, referred to 4chan, who were utterly defeated by the analytic chain, which, being regenerative, generated more reporting upon the reports of their failure and a report on the report upon the report of their failure, which generated metrics that were used to support previous metrics of success.
On one successful penetration, PRC hackers managed to pierce the veil of our reporting, largely due to a superior number of analysts. This resulted in much mutual laughter and a large investment from PRC leadership.
Which was duly reported upon in our working group metrics and will eventually be found in a footnote in corporate SEC filings, buried in the reporting of the reporting of the metrics of the metric analysis of competing data points.
This data will then be used to leverage the buyout of competing report generating metrics organization in order to create a superior product and a greater return on investment for stockholders and hence, greater buy-out power of competing organizations in order to diversify the marketplace.*
*While this isn’t remotely like what I actually do for a living, it comes close to the ideals of management of most Fortune 200 and higher corporations.
I merely report upon the least significant correlations of the least important events, which are then analyzed for trending information, while the more important events are handled by myself and my team, whose reports are never completed and as there is no reporting chain, don’t matter anyway.
What matters is that there is an incident response, not that it is effective.
~Signed:
Yet another fine product from the nonsense factory
PS; Happy New Year!
Journalism seems to be the only profession without any professional standards when it comes to conservative “journalists.” Case in point: Ben Domenech, a serial plagiarist and a pundit who was paid by the government of Malaysia to write nice things about them, is now on NPR regularly as a trusted commentator and on MSNBC’s Chris Hayes program offering his invaluable insights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Domenech). NPR and MSNBC are considered mainstream liberal and respected and yet they have no standards when it comes to giving conservatives a platform.
I think what’s worse than Milo Yiannopoulos being a fraud is that he is Milo Yiannopoulos.
Unpaid interns doing writing? Has anyone informed him that what he’s doing is illegal? Unpaid interns cannot legally do any commercially valuable work. If they are doing that kind of work, they must be paid.
Artor @ 13—extra ironic, indeed. I wonder if Twitter revoked his checkmark in part because logins & tweets were coming from 45 different locations.
Uh, if his interns are Tweeting for him, that would be why he lost his damn check mark.
johnrockoford @ 22
I don’t know if it’s the ONLY profession without standards. Doesn’t seem like conservative politicians have any professional standards, either
The “Milli Vanilli of sexist douchebags”…I am so stealing that.
Rossignol @27
I’m sure it’s not the only one. But with most professions you have some penalties for violating their ethical standards. Lawyers can be disbarred, doctors can lose their license, etc. At least in most professional environments you will be shunned if you cheat so obviously. But if you’re a conservative pundit, liberal mainstream media will hire you in a sec.
Should we perhaps start talking about him in the plural now – the Milones Yiannopouloi?
+1 Internet for cartomancer too.
So is that Milli Yiannopoulos or Milo Vanilli?
How many CHS’s are there?
*shudders*
Interesting if true (possibly a big “if”).
Anyway, entertaining in several ways.
For one, I’m pretty sure there are twitter bots that could do the “job” just as well.
For two, I’m entertained that the figurehead of a movement of blinkered, hardcore individualists is actually a collective. Inane right-wing bigotry, designed by committee.
For three…..”Milo” has 40 people “researching” and carefully crafting the shit he spews out? That….I can’t. I am flabbergasted beyond words if that is true.
SHOCKING TWIST in the wake of this story breaking.
Milo has taken to Twitter with a slew of stupid jokes and egotistical chest beating.
Milo’s fans join in with the fun fun jokey time, while also flooding the Buzzfeed article with snide mockery, shrieking about SJWs, and a dash of sealioning over unrelated issues.
There is no real answer to whether this is an April Fool’s joke or not. Because they all don’t give a shit anyway.
#24
Not in America. The convenient lie is that an unpaid intern might be unpaid in terms of cash, but is instead being paid in ‘valuable job experience and networking’.
Sounds a lot like a professor farming research out to post-docs and grad students…
Holms wrote:
That lie doesn’t make it not illegal. The U.S. Department of Labor (based upon a decision by the Supreme Court) rules are quite clear:
Damn near all internships fail many or all of these rules and are illegal as a result.
It’s just yet another form of wage theft, and it’s far past time for these laws to be actually enforced rather than ignored.
In other Milo Vanilli news: he’s trying to whitewash overt white supremacy:
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/04/01/breitbarts-milo-yiannopoulos-rejected-by-internet-nazis-who-really-do-hate-gay-jews/
@bargearse #10
Know what’s even creepier? He also calls Donald Trump “Daddy.”
Whether this turns out to be true or not, this article wins for having the best URL:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/31/11341956/milo-yiannopoulous-probably-44-children-in-trenchcoat
Hmmm… not to defend this knob, and I have a feeling he does almost none of the work while his “44 interns” do everything (and I have a hard time believing he has a team that large), BUT!
For example, a lot of comedians, including some of the biggest stand-up comedians, have writing partners or teams. Having a writing partner or team doesn’t really mean the jokes or skits or whatever were ghostwritten.