At the beginning of 2017, like most people, I made New Year's resolutions. This year I made two of them. The first resolution I made was to not start my own podcast in 2017. The second resolution I made was to pay attention to as much petty-ass Twitter drama as I could. Now, these resolutions may not be the most noble resolutions ever made. They may not require a lot of sacrifice or make the world a better place or say good things about my mental and emotional health. But they are goals, and it's important to have goals.
I'm happy to say that through March, I'm coming through on my first resolution. I've made it almost three months without starting a podcast! The second one has been more of a struggle. There's been sadly little Twitter drama in 2017. But last week, the Oklahoma City media came through for me.
In the wake of the Ralph Shortey scandal, Phil Cross of Channel 25 was reporting from the Oklahoma capitol, and seeing Senator Stephanie Bice introduce her daughter made him decide, for some reason, to publicly compare her to a victim of sex trafficking:
The important thing to know here that Phil Cross is a good reporter who has broken a lot of important stories and done a lot to hold public officials accountable, but also that he's something of a showboat and the worst-kept secret in the OKC media is how much other journalists can't stand him. Journalists are a tribal group inclined to defend their own, but Phil Cross has an almost singular ability to piss them off. I hear and see more potshots, publicly and privately, from other members of the media about Phil Cross than every other local journalist combined.
It's with that background that the Tulsa World's excellent capitol reporter Barbara Hoberock came in, ready to jump on Cross for his tweet about Bice's daughter:
FREAK SHOW! Oh yeah, that's the good stuff. Let's go ahead and see who liked Hoberock's tweet:
Yes, that's the Tulsa World's Corey Jones, Frontier's Dylan Goforth, Channel 4's Abby Broyles, and Channel 9's Aaron Brilbeck among the many who were amused by the freak show sentiment.
But Hoberock wasn't done. A little while later, she piled on, questioning how Phil Cross even has a job:
Phil Cross, for his part (and much to my disappointment), never responded, but eventually slinked back and deleted his original tweet. Hoberock would delete her second one, and everyone will now go back to passive-aggressively subtweeting each other over and over. But the honest hostility was a lot more fun -- hopefully 2017 will bring me lots more Twitter drama to follow. Please, guys, make it happen! I have so little!
