The Tea Makers Are Dead. Tea Makers Forever! Actually, no, whatever.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the death of the Tea Makers, a long-running blog obsessed with the CBC, recently.
If you care, I wrote a post outlining what appears to have happened.
The whole post is after the jump.
In case your not aware of the history, let’s start with a little background.
Background: the Tea Makers was a blog that was started by an anonymous CBC employee during the 2005 lock out (as was this blog incidentally – without the anonymous part). It’s original purpose was an open letter between the guys pounding the pavement and the guys inside in the AC: don’t hate us, don’t blame us, it’s not us it’s him, we don’t like this either.
It was sincere. It had credibility. It was funny. It was popular.
At its best it was well executed Schadenfreude. Since it was anonymous, it also managed to break a few stories about the mood inside what was then labelled ‘Fort Dork.’
Then the whole thing slowly unraveled in the years after the lockout.
The original author ‘Ouimet,’ or another author, under the veil of ‘Alphonse Ouimet’ left, then came ‘Fake Ouimet,’ which led to ‘Anonymous Ouimet’ and ‘Allan’ and ‘PoonGirl’ and Lord knows who else.
And it started to get creepy. It became consumed by Jian Ghomeshi, George Stroumboulopoulos and Tod Maffin. All three were continuously mocked. As was the entire CBC, with the exception of a handful of female executives, whom they seemed to love. Sometimes it was funny. But mostly it was disturbing.
Some quit. Others tried to delete the legacy of their involvement.
It stumbled along, getting more infantile and vicious, until eventually it died.
The Breaking Point
So what killed it?
In the final few months the blog published a story on a Kathryn Borel, a producer at Q, who left to pursue a writing career. This was, according to a previous blogger, Joe Clark, the final straw. “But one thing that can’t be permitted at all, even once and even for a day, is an attack on an innocent noncombatant – in this case, a hapless civilian employee of the CBC whom the Tea Makers chose to mock this week.”
That blog post was relatively harmless (it’s been deleted), but the comments were horrible. The whole thing was labelled as a “random character assassination” by Jesse Brown.
A former contributor Joe Clark said. “This pitiful victim was subjected to 75 hateful, injurious, defamatory, or simply permitted comments issued by Anonymous Cowards,” he wrote on his own blog.
So maybe that’s it. It’s over.
In it’s heyday I would have missed it. Now, well, whatever.
A comment on this blog about what happened is below said “For personal reasons that are nobody’s business but the originator of the blog, it was shut down in favour of lighter, more important life pursuits.”
The entire comment is below.
Fake Insert Candian Name Here says:
Yeah, you COULD write a masters thesis on Teamakers and all the mirth mayhem, skullduggery and controversy that enshrouded it.
Why not just look at it like this …
1. A guy started a blog during the 2005 lockout, not knowing where it was going. He had some inside dope on the Corp ‘cos he worked there. And he loved CBC, and had good ideas and observations that made CBCers and CBC-o-philes alike have a laugh, or think a little deeper about things.
2. That blogger left CBC, but kept the site alive.
3. Various custodians attempted to bring new voices to the site with mixed results. One guy mistook this light-hearted site as a soap box for his oppressive take on things, mistaking satire as Journalism and trying to moralize and ‘clean up’ something that was never intended for such serous matters.
4. Finally, the site became a vanity press / bathroom wall for reportage and spiteful commentary on CBC stars. Much of it was actually pro-CBC in a roundabout way. What happened though, was that many non-regulars to the site could not understand the tones of commenters and the attempts at humour, and became violently or psychotically irate.
This was also responsible for drawing in the crowd I will refer to as ‘CBC Existentialsts’ – those who believe that CBC begins and ends at English terrestrial television, and who generally believe that that narrow sliver of CBC that in their minds should be shut down or privatized.
5. For personal reasons that are nobody’s business but the originator of the blog, it was shut down in favour of lighter, more important life pursuits.
Ironically, all the long winded META discussions about the site, the CBC and its milieu, as well as about all the free speech and moral controversy over its 5 year history have NOTHING to do with its closure.
6. True Teamakers – CBCers and Non CBCers alike including Dwight, Johnny Happypants, Neutron, Kev, A-nony-nony, Patrice Nortel and many, many others will not find the Orwell quote to be cryptic, but completely a propos of the 5 year history of Ouimet’s endaevour.
Good work, Ouimet. Hats off for all your efforts, even when they created unexpected results.
Oh, and, GET WELL SOON, TODD! TEAMAKERS FOREVER!
war is peace.
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| Asides |
I didn’t “pull the plug.” I had nothing to do with the site since October 2009. I deleted my archives from the Tea Makers and then, at considerable effort (some 3,000 alterations to the files), restored them.
I did not at any time “replace” Alphonse Ouimet. I was merely another contributor – for a long time, the main or indeed only one.
Your journalistic inexperience was rather on display here, I think, in several cases, not least of which in failing to name David Séguin while insisting on naming one of his site’s victims. These are among many of the reasons you were a poor choice to write the CBC’s official blog. Then again, it is said nobody else wanted the job.
If you can shake a coherent sentence out of him, Allan Sorensen will probably answer a question, and I’ll answer any reasonable question and many unreasonable ones. To sum up, you fact-checked nothing.
Talking to Joe Clark about why Teamakers closed is like talking to Pete Best about why the Beatles broke up.
Paul, the only Orwell quote you can appropriately use is ‘he who controls the past controls the future’. Because a few tidbits from Joe Clark ganged together with observations by me is just that — An attempt to discredit the entire Teamakers history after being pot-shotted many times by contributors and commenters alike on its pages.
Speculate and fictionalize all you like, guys. The truth is that it is no fun to run a daycare for CBC-o-philes. We’re not talking about WIKILEAKS here!
Anyone who tries to posthumously discredit TM at this point tells only a sliver of the story. Let Ouimet retire, for crying out loud.
it’s been corrected.
Did a twelve year old girl write this crap?
“The whole post is after the jump.” Read TMZ much?
“a long-running blog obsessed with the CBC” Like, totally.
“This was, according to a previous blogger, Joe Clark” – “A former contributor Joe Clark said.” <<<< I'm confused! Are there 2 different Joe Clarks?
"And it started to get creepy." Ewwwwwww.
"Now, well, whatever." You're really "PoonGirl", aren't you?
A “blog obsessed with the CBC” that wasn’t created by Tod Maffin!? Impossible! Even this blog (insidethecbc) was originally one of Tod Maffin’s CBC OCD creations!
Let me set the record straight about the apparent end of Tea Makers.
The end had nothing to do with “in-fighting”. That nonsense went out with the exit of Joe Clark last October.
Ouimet and I were always committed to keeping the blog alive, for our own amusement, but more importantly as a platform for others to be able to speak freely. We were joined by the lovely and irascible PoonGirl.
And we all got along famously.
The blog was created and maintained by Ouimet. Ouimet retained sole ownership, and it was Ouimet’s decision alone to close the blog. It was a choice that came about unexpectedly, and was due to personal circumstances almost unrelated to the blog itself.
I want to be clear that it had nothing to do with any content on the blog, and nothing to do with the personalities who contributed. We could easily have gone another 5 years.
I thought Tea Makers was the greatest blog to ever come out of Canada.
I say that, not because I wrote posts for it, but because of what the blog represented.
It was fearless, and it was smart, and often very funny.
I think that its many readers will miss it, and that you’ll never see another blog like it again, but will wish it was still there.
Allan was a borderline personality with no insight into the CBC and an overinflated sense of his own importance. He was obsessed with minutae. He was joined by a foul mouthed, de-brained young woman in the last months. Every post was about Jian and George. It was stalker bait. Nothing more.
To say the blog had run its course is to understate by a factor of a thousand.
No one will miss Alan.
No legitimate journalist seems interested in actually investigating this story. Perhaps there isn’t a rich vein to be investigated, but there isn’t nothing. All I got from Paul Mcgrath was an E-mail stating, in its entirety,
How the hell am I supposed to answer that nonquestion?
Meanwhile, Guy Dixon of the Globe managed to pack more factual inaccuracies into a couple of Twits than I would have thought possible.
So while you’re all reading what are now the only remnants of the Tea Makers (the rest of it having been wiped off the map by Alphonse Ouimet, a sin everyone seems in a rush to forgive), why don’t we go back to first principles here?
Why don’t we ask why the CBC needs a pseudonymous and anonymous hate blog? Why wass the CBC an environment of such fear that there was a roiling volcano of pent-up opinions to express but nowhere to vent?
Does this have anything to do with the fact that the giant journalistic organization known as the CBC can’t seem to swing something simple like an official blog? (CTV doesn’t have one either, but is that the true standard or comparison?) I know that people who could do a good job of writing the official CBC blog wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Why?
Is CBC still so much of a poisoned work environment that people are still afraid to say what they think under their own names?
Are these not important questions to ask even now?
On the rare occasion that Tea Makers linked back to SDA, the results were uniformly the same: no significant traffic. That’s usually considered a reliable metric of overall readership.
Mocking CBCtards like Jian Ghomeshi, George Stroumboulopoulos and Tod Maffin is like shooting fish in a barrel .. just too easy.
CBC is a target rich environment for mockery . . . the entire organization is a waste of good taxpayer’s money.
The CBC should be euthanized and the money added to the Canadian Forces budget where it do Canda and Canadians some good.
Now that there’s no blog lets get rid of the CBC.
Kill the CBC, end the ministry of Information’s death march to socialism, may Pierre Trudeau rot in hell.
Cut my taxes and end all public funding for the CBC.
Destroy the CBC! Make it self-funding
It is simply impossible for a publicly-funded broadcaster to not advance a socialist driven agenda within its broadcastings.
Candians love the CBC!
That’s why they won’t pay for it unless they are forced to through the tax system.
Turn it into a PBS style station and let it sink of swim according to the wishes of the people.
Let them vote with their wallets.
This whole affair sounds like another episode of Veterinarian’s Hospital, the continuing stooory of a quack who’s gone to the dogs. Only not as entertaining.
I am not at all sure why I should care about the antics of a bunch of self-important lib-tards, (other than schadenfreude, of course, and the fact that I pay their hyper-inflated salaries.)
Look, Joe was out to destroy the site, pure and simple. In fact, that’s what he wrote in his twitter account, that thanks to him, it was “over.”
All it ever was for him was a way to draw attention to himself, like he’s doing here.
The reality was that his time at the Tea Makers was an incredibly low point for the site. He struggled with it mightily. I tried to help him through it, but he wouldn’t listen to me.
And what Guy Dixon wrote was 100% correct. I was his source.
Tea Makers forever
xoxox
More dog-piling by CBC-haters where it’s not needed. Why not brand it spam?
Even taking metonymy into account, I was unaware desks had teeth they could lie through.
Joe, the reason that “No legitimate journalist seems interested in actually investigating this story,” is because there is no story to begin with – there is only Joe Clark, and no one likes Joe Clark.
perhaps, just perhaps, people have a better understanding of the Tea Makers blog when they can now reflect on its parallel with Wikileaks