I really don't think what he did was "honest" i.e. not meant to be provocative. As many sibling comments have pointed out, if you're making a living as a public personality, you kinda have to accept a higher level of scrutiny simply in order to avoid media hit jobs.
The hit job was some of the other items they'd cut together to make the "anti-semetic" charge stick. One item where he was comparing youtube policies to those of the Nazi's (i.e. casting both in a negative light) the WSJ used as "proof" he was pro-Nazi. that's what prompted my thought of the quote.
And their fans then defend them with "If you've seen their other stuff, you'd know that isn't unusual," which is a pretty thin defense---a bit like defending an arsonist with "Oh sure, nobody cared when they burned down all those grocery stores, but now that the WSJ is reporting on that orphanage..."
> There really is a joke there somewhere at Fiverr’s expense, and I think that’s what he was going for.
> The parts are there, loosely, if you cock your head and squint a bit. There’s an air of exploitation (on Fiverr’s part, but also often claimed to be on PewDiePie’s part) but it was a rush job. Seinfeld, in contrast, maps out goofy jokes about Pop Tarts down to the syllable.
I read and understood what slowbeef wrote. Delivery is the unmentioned point of discussion -- landing the delivery. It's the difference in whether a joke is funny or not. But changing delivery keeps the raw essence of the joke the same.
And I don't think it's fair to call it "holding someone accountable", if the same raw essence of a joke told with better delivery is suddenly OK. It's the same accountable action. If you're really interested in "holding someone accountable", shouldn't the same raw essence of a joke be wrong no matter how it's delivered?
I don't disagree that delivery is extremely important to landing a joke and it being funny. I do disagree that holding people accountable for bad delivery of a joke is somehow a moral impetus. That good joke was just as morally bad as the bad joke.
In other words, you could have taken a lot of George Carlin's material and run it through the ultra-politically-correct filter and come out deaf from the blaring alarms. But he's somehow above moral reproach because he's good at it? I don't buy it.
I think all this really goes back to the idea: Only the fool can criticize the king. Anyone else, and it was grounds for treason. I would have hoped we moved beyond that model.
I think that's why you see a lot of people saying that none of this was surprising for people who knew his material before hand. And I think the comparison elsewhere to shock-jocks is very apt. Such material is often suddenly found lacking when it gains an audience wider than it was targeted for.
And this also plays into the wider idea of, how responsible should a speaker be for "triggering" [0] a listener? That's a very heavy burden when your audience suddenly -- and not necessarily intentionally -- becomes "everyone".
[0] Yes, this is a somewhat lax usage of that term. However, it is also a common usage, so I use it as such.
It was predicated on the fact that WSJ took statements completely out of context to have the exact opposite of the in-context meaning.
("The hit job was some of the other items they'd cut together to make the "anti-semetic" charge stick. One item where he was comparing youtube policies to those of the Nazi's (i.e. casting both in a negative light) the WSJ used as "proof" he was pro-Nazi. that's what prompted my thought of the quote.")
My point was the the part where they conflated PewdiePies comparison of Youtube and the Nazi's as being him supporting the Nazi's, this was entirely take out of context. I wasn't referring to the sign there at all.
One of the best points I've seen was that Youtubers have a lot in common with talk radio hosts. When Howard Stern said something offensive, it was a bit rich to act surprised. He was paid to be shocking, he did better the harder he pushed on the edge of acceptable, and so of course he eventually went too far. Everyone from PewDiePie to Penny Arcade have run into the same issue.
(Under this framework, JonTron is a fundamentally different issue - he doesn't seem to have been looking for views, just melting down.)
PDP, unless he's stupid, should have known what DISNEY wanted. And it's not anti-semitic jokes, particularly following repeated use of Nazi iconography in his videos.
You're right that it exactly mirrors PDP's situation: off-the-cuff, inflammatory content creator partners with advertisers, does something extra-inflammatory, gets dropped by same.
What you're witnessing is mainstream (pretty much) America rejecting something they're now aware of that's too outside the norm. PDP can keep making content, but there's not really a likely scenario where he gets paid by Disney to do it.