I have at various times been employed at Bloomberg, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Business Insider. But one question is whether that vibe shift will make its way into the newsrooms, with a resurgent expectation for reporters to keep their opinions to themselves.Īs you likely know, I used to work in mainstream media. Of course, there was that recent employee groundswell at Disney that led to the company wading into a prominent social issue dispute in Florida - and look what happened there, a result that gives Bob Chapek and every other major company CEO something to point to when they explain why they’re staying out of the next thing.Īs I’ve written before, I’m not sorry to see corporate social activism go - I don’t think the liberal politicization of the corporate sector has been healthy for either corporations or the Democratic Party. There is increasingly open pushback against ESG initiatives on Wall Street. In 2019, following the James Damore saga and other messy distractions, Google sent an official memo telling employees to stop fighting about politics and stick to coding. You don’t see nearly so many news stories about employee social activism out of Silicon Valley as you were seeing four years ago. I’m less sure about this next part, but: I also think the ferocious demands from employees for their employers to speak out on the issues they care about have peaked and are in decline. Conservative consumers and lawmakers get outraged by them, any apparent benefit with liberal customers isn’t appealing enough to be worth the trouble. You’re going to see a lot fewer going forward. These corporate statements, I believe, are casualties of the vibe shift. “Conspicuously quiet” - why would we expect video game companies to have something to say about a controversial political issue, one on which the country is divided… not evenly, but with, depending on how you measure it, perhaps a bit more than 2 out of 5 Americans on the opposite side of the issue from how the Post would expect the companies to weigh in? (Or I don’t know, maybe the idea was some companies would issue anti-abortion statements.) Well, as the Post says, the expectation was because in recent years, these companies had been making more political statements at the urging of left-leaning staff members. Wade’s days are numbered, most of the video game industry’s biggest companies have remained conspicuously quiet - though not all.

In the wake of a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion essentially confirmed that Roe v.

The Washington Post has a sort of bizarre story this week about video game companies and abortion rights.

Its the vibe