steve shearer wrote:Come on Nick, this faux-preciousness is a bit much.
You've already alluded to the massive conflict of interest which lay at the heart of your journalism career. You had interests to protect, chiefly those of your brother, and by extension those of the industry which supported him.
Rather than a frank and fearless reporting of events; events which surfers knew were happening anyway, you maintained an illusion via a position of false neutrality. You were one of the chief gatekeepers of this illusion. That illusion served the interests of certain people and sectors. It certainly didn't serve the interests of all, mostly the general public who were sold a pup for all those years.
I say that without rancour. Most would have done the same under similar circumstances. But for christ sakes lets stop this whole objectivity pretense.
Still haven't read that book eh shearer.
Why don't ya read it and then get back to me about positions of false neutrality and the objectivity pretense. And about all the illusion serving and maintaining and the interests served therein. All the poxy fcuken humanity of it.
I'll reply to you on this because you're not hiding behind a pseudonym, I'm not gonna address nasty little comments thrown up from the coward's hole of Trollville.
I'm pretty much sick of this bullshit actually. Yeah I've written some shitty boring articles as well as good ones over the years, yeah my reporting has been incomplete, yeah I protected my brother from public exposure over his drug use, well, tough shit. Like I have tried to explain to you before, there's a time for those personal stories to be told and for me and Tom that time has come, so we've told it in all its painful fcuken detail, as it needed to be told. The cost of a decision to "out" him before that time would not have been borne by the readership, nor by the surf industry by the way, it would have been borne by him and his kids. I've got questions about how much I enabled Tom's drug use and about the family dynamics involved which I dig into in the book, but about the judgement call to put his and his kids' private lives ahead of the public's need to know, fcuk, I am not ashamed of that at all, it could well have saved lives.
Other surfers are doing the same thing - telling their stories - to differing extents and good on 'em. Again their personal stories are theirs to tell. This feels to me like necessary revision and it'll go on for as long as people are interested in surfing.
As for this Chief Gatekeeper thing, holy shit, well here is how it looked from my side of that rather weird fence, I was mostly just a stoked surfer trying to convey my feeling and understanding of the sport to others. I was as sucked in by the romance of surfing as much as anyone could be, and thus tended to brush aside a lot of other stuff in the process, it felt to me like surfing was the main thing, not what seemed to me to be the crap on the sidelines. That was my strength – my involvement and passion – and I played to it. I'm a bit older now and the romance is eroded by experience, and I'm pretty aware of my weaknesses as a writer and in other things. I also feel a bit sorta used by the surf industry in some ways, like the passion I tried to inject into all those mags ended up partly just being fuel to their marketing fire, though I know heaps of people who worked (or I should say used to work) for those companies shared exactly the same passion. Maybe the revisionism mentioned above will end up condemning me for numerous historical surfing crimes, though that all seems a bit overwrought to me. But I still feel like overall I've done a good job as a surf writer over the years and I've got nothing to regret in any of it.
I also feel like you want me to be someone else, well I'm not.