Sterling, Sulzberger & Associates.

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

We keep whining about Donald Sterling and his recently surfaced racist comments.
Question is, why do we want him to apologize?
Will a staged act of phony public contrition be enough for us to forgive him, move on and resume business as usual?
He was right when he scolded Anderson Cooper for having a “plantation mentality”.
We all have it.
Sterling’s point is quite insightful: we love our white slave owners.
We are happy to keep the status quo and butt our heads against the hurricane-proof glass ceiling.
We are accomplices.
Our only condition: we just want our masters to be nice to us.
In essence, what we are telling them is: you are a racist, we all know that.
We know you hold the deck and we know it’s stacked against us.
We know the game is rigged.
However, if you are smart enough to hide your prejudiced nature -or convincing enough to apologize for it- we will be more than happy to keep working for you and funneling billions into your back account.
Let’s be honest: the right solution for the Sterling snafu would be for the entire Clippers team to quit and for basketball fans to stop attending and/or watching Clippers’s games.
Otherwise, it will mean that our commitment to fight bigotry is as tepid as Donald Sterling’s apologies.
The real billion dollar question is: how many NBA franchises are owned and operated by African Americans?
Are you Hispanic, black, Jewish, female, LGBT, all of the above?
STOP FOOLING YOURSELVES.
You need to build your own companies, your own sports teams, your own brands, your own political organizations, even your own cities.
From scratch.
It’s totally ok to work with the white man.
His money is just as green as anybody else’s.
But don’t expect anything to change if you keep working FOR the white man.
Men don’t change when they see the light.
Men change when they feel the heat.
Let me give you another example: the New York Times/Jill Abramson snafu.
It just so happens that, as the Gray Lady’s executive editor, she expected equal pay as Bill Keller, the dude who occupied the position before her.
A big miscalculation.
Her mistakes were manifold:
-She got a tattoo with the Times’ logo on her back (!?)
-The NYT is a struggling dinosaur. They fired Bill Keller and appointed her, among other reasons, to save money in the first place.
-The NYT is a family business, the heirloom of the Sulzbergers. A string of boys with daddy issues. What made Abramson think she was going to be admitted into the family?
-The NYT is not going to change.  Those who expect it to change are setting themselves up for a big disappointment. It just cannot change simply because it would stop being the NYTimes if did.
A dinosaur is a dinosaur is a dinosaur.
For better or worse, there’s a new model out there.
Buzzfeed, Politico, the Drudge Report, the HuffPo.
Some people dislike this new model.
Some people even have the gall to mock it.
A group of people we can call “the media establishment” or “the violinists on the Titanic.”
These people are stupid enough to dismiss Arianna Huffington.
They mock her accent, they question her journalistic creds.
They call her a parvenu, an airhead, a bottom feeder.
Well, deal with it.
She is the new game in town.
Arianna might be the most successful editor working today in the brave new digital world.
As opposed to, say, Rupert Murdoch of Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
Whether we like it or not, the Huffington Post has revolutionized the way news are harvested, packaged and delivered.
She sold her concoction of a blog aggregator for 300+ million to AOL without relinquishing an inch of control.
Moreover, on top of said payday, the deal also includes her assuming full control of pretty much all of AOL’s editorial, media & news operations.
Of course, the violinists on the Titanic still diss her at every turn.
They are scared shirtless of her.
Shirtless. Wink wink nudge nudge.
In short: content creation and distribution is changing at breakneck speed.
Brace yourselves.
You can run but you can’t hide.
All sacred cows out there will be duly tipped, skinned and butchered.
By the way, did you know NPR just hired the founder of E! Entertainment Television as its new CEO?
Now that’s an about face.
LOL.