Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
“Savvy political reporters took it for granted that all candidates would be risk-averse. They didn’t even have a category for the political candidate who was risk-friendly. And that’s what Trump is. He risks everything every time he opens his mouth.”
So many of the routines of political journalism were based on behaviorist assumptions about how candidates would behave that simply do not apply. And that’s one of the epistemological crises in journalism right now.[…]
I think we’re completely losing this battle, on every level. And fighting about truth itself — there’s something inherently polarizing about that. We’re just at the beginning of understanding some of his methods for profiting in an environment where truth is exploded.
An example would be his use of verification in reverse. Verification is trying to nail down a claim with facts, evidence, data. Verification in reverse is taking something that has been nailed down and introducing doubt about it. When you do that, it releases a lot of energy, controversy, furor, reaction. And then you can power your political movement with that energy.
The truth-telling system and political journalism rested on certain assumptions about how public actors would behave. Trump shatters all those assumptions.
Rosen continues,
One of the things that slips in there, of course…is that entertainment logic can actually be the logic that a news company is operating under, and it doesn’t have to explain that to its users, or even to itself.
An example I would use is the way that CNN has purchased these pro-Trump talking heads. That doesn’t have any editorial logic to it. It makes sense to have conservative voices. It makes sense to have people from the middle of the country. It makes sense to have people who have certain priorities.
It doesn’t make editorial sense to have a pundit who is defending Trump, right or wrong. But it does make entertainment sense to have people like that on the air, if you are following entertainment logic.
“I’m not upset about the audience getting more power. But I’m worried about the very weird way in which we can hear them, and the way it’s mediated by social platforms that have their own very messed-up incentives.”
Your face is the -- is the puppeteer. And the only thing is…is that [Vladimir Putin] is the puppet.
That's real time. This isn't like you have to render some software on your computer. It's literally you download a clip or you take a clip from cable news and you turn on your webcam, and however long it takes you to do it you're done. It's the same as just shooting a video on your phone.
“Basics of journalism in an authoritarian regime. Do not repeat propaganda. Do not give lies a platform. Do not give “both” sides as a legitimate argument that is then used against real journalism. We are better than this, my fellow journalists.”
Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.
Why do journalists and news organizations insist on doing this? I think the answer is pretty clear.
It’s because they want to appear fair without taking any chances.
“None of this is fucking real. It’s an entirely made up thing. It’s Piers Morgan, four people with 9 followers and a Russian bot.”
Oh hi. Let’s look at this bullshit article on the BBC website, shall we?
First of all it’s on the BBC so you’re like oh wow it must be a big deal.
You read that there have been calls, calls for Gillette to post an apology video! Damn.
Oh there’s a link to the source. Let’s click on that.
A dude is presenting demands to end the boycott. The demands are the apology video and also that all male employees have to read some mra bullshit, like it’s mao’s little red pill.
So you click on the dude’s profile, wondering who he is and why he can make demands.
This is he. 18 followers. The BBC Just used this person as a source.
And the person who wrote this piece knows the tweet is bullshit, from a bullshit source, because they sure as hell didn’t put the mandatory book reading up on the BBC, they know how stupid that would be.
And yet.
You can construct any fucking narrative by scouring the internet for people claiming something. It doesn't make it relevant. It doesn't make it true.
This is another tweet cited in the article. Eight digits in the handle, fewer followers than I have toes. Gets to represent a "side" in a "controversy".
Have we learned nothing from the past few years? Is this really the best we can do?
We could go on of course. When Piers Morgan dusts off his laptop to plug the week's trending topics into his trusted word document DailyMailPCCultureRantTemplate.docx for his weekly Daily Mail diatribe, the DM uses two tweets to illustrate the article.
13 followers. 4 followers.
And here is Time Magazine. That boycott link? Some dude with 71 followers.
None of this is fucking real. It’s an entirely made up thing. It’s Piers Morgan, four people with 9 followers and a Russian bot.
This isn’t to say it can’t *become* real. These things can snowball. But journalists pushing this duality as a reality are hurting us.
Just a few final points before we let the thread die a well-deserved and long-overdue death.
This is one of those websites that push dubious content. This article has been shared thousands of times on Facebook, into the feeds of thousands more.
It links to the BBC “report”.
So my focus on follower-count was less “high-follower essentialism” as someone put it so beautifully, but rather an attempt to show that we have no way of knowing if these accounts are real much less in good faith.
And serious news organisations should not rely on this shit.
Because an ignored tweet from an account with 18 followers (that has now vanished) should not be a journalist’s core argument on the BBC website, and certainly not be proof of a “major backlash and a wide boycott”.
Note I have no opinion on the ad, its message, the number of dislikes on youtube or whatever.
Just that we rely on journalists to make things clear, to separate truth from lie. This twitter-searching to prop up predefined notions and narratives just adds to the noise.
OK, fin.
(And she was commenting on a time before social media.)
“A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. … It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.”
“If you believe, as I do, that many of those [newspaper publishing] institutions are so mismatched to the task at hand that most of them face a choice, at best, between radical restructure and outright collapse, well, in that case, you’d probably find the smartest 25 year olds you know, and try to convince them that now would be a pretty good time to start working on Plan B… No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.”
“Twentieth-century beliefs about who could produce and consume public messages, about who could coordinate group action and how, and about the inherent and fundamental link between intrinsic motivations and privation actions, all turned out to be nothing more than long-term accidents. Those accidents are now being undone by new opportunities, created by us, for one another, using abilities afforded to us by new tools. The driving force…is the ability of loosely coordinated groups with a shared culture to perform tasks more effectively than individuals, more effectively than markets using price signals, and more effectively than governments using managerial direction.”
