PicoBlog

For all those wondering, this is neither “big project” I’m working on. One of those is soon to be published, I hope.

Scoop: Nashville is a website and Facebook and Instagram page owned by Jason Steen. Jason has gone through a lot: most notably, he has had a heart transplant. In this regard, he was incredibly lucky—about 20 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant in the United States. Fortunately, Jason was lucky enough to receive a heart transplant and he is healthy now.

What has Jason done in his renewed time alive? Mainly, run Scoop: Nashville—which has amassed over 100,000 followers on Instagram. This level of success for a localized community is quite impressive.

But what is Scoop: Nashville? Is Jason a prolific writer with an unmatched ability to detail the Nashville news? Well, Jason’s Scoop: Nashville page is hardly “journalism,” although Jason calls himself an “editor.” Scoop: Nashville instead posts mugshots of people who have committed crimes published in the Nashville crimes database. These come with short snippets about what the person did, and these blurbs are often poorly written or grammatically flawed.

Ostensibly, his career may seem innocent. After all, these are public criminals: anyone could have accessed this information and they violated the law. The court of public opinion ought to try them. Jason is, in effect, just commuting to the public who the criminals are.

That interpretation of Scoop is far from the truth, though. In reality, Scoop is a cancerous “service” that offers vigilante circle-jerkers a moral superiority over petty criminals. Jason goes to every level to make your life as miserable as possible: just to force you to pay him an exorbitant fee.

Jason will tell you that he is an “audacious reporter” analogous to someone covering up political scandals or in some violent war in the Middle East. Perhaps he has genuinely convinced himself that he is doing Nashville a service by posting these crimes. He, of course, is not a journalist. His blurbs are generally poorly written. And there’s little “audacity” in what he does—he stays in his house all day and vampirically feeds off of people’s worst moments for the masses to consume.

This practice itself seems predatory. Publicizing a person’s mugshot for people to criticize (generally about their physical appearance) seems analogous to a public humiliation. Having the criminal record stored away somewhere on a shitty bureaucratic Nashville administrative website is one thing, but posting it for the masses seems incredibly predatory. But an Instagram page like that wouldn’t warrant a blog post. The way Jason runs his page is incredibly bad-faith and immoral.

What has convinced me of this? Well, the most obvious example of bad-faith reporting is his removal contract. If you are posted on Scoop and don’t want your mugshot to be seen by thousands of people or your employer, you can ask Scoop for removal. This would be a nice service if it didn’t cost multiple thousands of dollars. Yes, Jason’s primary way of monetizing his service is to ask for removal. This is obvious exploitation. If you doubt this Reddit post, there is ton of evidence that he does this from numerous people. The reason I’m not using specific names is because I think that feeds the vampiric cycle. Most people do not know this is Scoop’s main profit source.

More evidence suggesting Scoop is tumorous are the tagging practices. Scoop both tags the person in the mugshot and often their employer—if they work at a prestigious school, they’ll be sure to post the name of that school in the tagline as well as tag them too. Just so that the employer knows the person was locked up.

Steen himself is a bad guy. Here’s some evidence.

And, uh… his mugshot, too.

His moral degeneracy seems obvious and yet Scoop remains one of the most popular Nashville pages on social media. Which leads us to the fans…

Every person who is a fan of Scoop is a bad person. That statement is obviously hyperbole but I think it’s closer to reality than you’d think. Here’s an example of a comment section on one of the Scoop posts in the recent weeks.

This was on a post for someone who bit his teacher. The problem? The guy went to a school for special needs children. Which means, yes: Scoop Nashville posted a disabled person for his degenerate fans to call a “mouth breather.”

Here’s another comment section:

These bundles of joy are commenting on a post of someone who was taken into a mental hospital after the crime. So funny!

But the real example I’d like to talk about is this guy, who commented on a teenager’s DUI charge (no one was harmed in this incident).

Alecsander is followed by Scoop, because Alecsander is one of the many people that vehemently defend him. In a way, Scoop tacitly supports telling children they have no family that love them. This is unimaginably stupid and degenerate. I told Alecsander, who informed me that drunk driving was, indeed, bad. My response was that telling the person “hehe… NO ONE LOVES YOU!” is not a valid thing to say regardless, and he then DMed me and said: you guessed it, drunk driving is, indeed, bad.

These people have brains the size of peanuts, and they form a degenerate mass that makes fun of the disabled, mentally ill, or adolescents because they derive a moral superiority from it.

In a quick intellectual exercise, I will answer the most popular arguments made in favor of Scoop’s depravity.

Almost none of these make sense even proposing because they assume that this whole shabang is a good faith exercise, which it so obviously isn’t it’s not even worth pointing out.

A) These are criminals, and criminals are bad and we should make fun of them!

Why should we make fun of criminals? …

A1) We should make fun of criminals because we have a moral right to do so.

Absurd on face! Making fun of people is fun, but almost always self-serving. Meanness is bad because it makes people feel bad. There is no distinct moral right to make fun of the physical appearance of a random drunk guy who was disobedient downtown.

Perhaps you could say that it makes sense to make fun of exceptionally violent criminals. This makes little sense in this context—hardly anyone on the Scoop page is a particularly dangerous or violent person, and almost all of the posts are alcohol related. Here’s a survey of the previous 23 posts, for reference.

The “green” colors represent true violent criminals: rape, assault, etc. One of them just slapped a guy who refused her drunk friend a seat, and another one was the disabled man who was discussed above. That leaves just 17.4% of recent posts related to actual violent criminals who threatened others. And none of the comments above were from posts like these.

A2) We should make fun of these people for deterrence!

Most of these people aren’t violent criminals, and deterring DUIs or “being too drunk for downtown Nashville” is hardly preventable due to some social pressure. There is, of course, no evidence making fun of criminals makes future criminals less likely to offend. There is evidence that fostering antisocial behaviors through social pressure actually causes criminality , albeit in children.

B) Be Informed of the Bad People

No one follows Scoop to be informed of potentially violent people in their neighborhoods. Plenty of the people from these posts are simply visiting Nashville and booked for toxic intoxication. And this argument doesn’t justify Steen’s ridiculous behavior.

C) Free Speech

You obviously have a right to be Scoop Nashville, but that doesn’t make it desirable. And thusly, I have a right to own a Substack blog where I call you a cancer on society. I hope this doesn’t feed your pathetic victim complex, where you feed off the commentary, Jason. Your work makes people’s lives miserable at your profit. Any “social gain” is completely ridiculous and it’s readily apparent. Your swarms of fans defending Scoop for being a “badass journalistic page” are also cancerous and reminiscent of the people who attended pillories for fun. And don’t hide behind the vaneer of your “progressive” stance on Freddie O’Connell or whatever. Nothing you do is progressive. It’s social punitivism at its worse: perhaps one day Nashville will recognize it.

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