#journalism #history #fascists #propaganda #clickbait #CultureWar
Flashback (Feb. 7, 2020):
"Big Swinging Brains and fashy trolls: how the world fell into a clickbait death spiral
In the years leading up to Trump’s election, traditional media gatekeepers found themselves shoved aside by trolls and tech companies who told us they were only giving us what we wanted.
(. . .)
Mainstream journalists, or at least the ones who were paying attention, were daunted by the fiscal precarity of their industry, the plummeting cultural authority of their institutions, and the unpredictable dynamics of social media outrage. The more these threats loomed, the more journalists clung to one of the few professional axioms that still seemed beyond dispute: in all matters of political opinion, a reporter should strive to remain neutral. This is true enough, for certain kinds of journalists, when applied to certain prosaic debates about tariffs and treaties. When it comes to core matters of principle, though, it’s not always possible to be both even-handed and honest. The plain fact was that the alt-right was a racist movement full of creeps and liars. If a newspaper’s house style didn’t allow its reporters to say so, at least by implication, then the house style was preventing its reporters from telling the truth.
Neutrality has never been a universal good, even in the simplest of times. In unusual times – say, when the press has been drafted, without its consent or comprehension, into a dirty culture war – neutrality might not always be possible. Some questions aren’t really questions at all. Should Muslim Americans be treated as real Americans? Should women be welcome in the workplace? To treat these as legitimate topics of debate is to be not neutral, but complicit. Sometimes, even for a journalist, there is no such thing as not picking a side."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/07/big-swinging-brains-fashy-trolls-clickbait-death-spiral-internet-media