No, @TiffanyDCross, please don't apologize for being on Twitter. I am grateful you are there.
The "big social" your guest demonizes also made #BLM and #metoo possible because big, white, old, mass media did not.
Note both are built on the same, attention-based business model.
Note also that moral panic about social media is unhelpful as it finds an easy villain -- "big social" -- when big media are also culpable (see below). It also distracts us from society's true problem: underlying racism. ft.com/content/b47b27…
In it, @lionelbarber laments the loss of trust in Walter Cronkite; "newspaper of record." That was trust imagined by the institution & limited to white privilege & power. Now, on the net, we hear people never included in the institution, who never trusted it. See: #BLM, #metoo
Barber quotes @WesleyLowery, which is good, but misses his point: that these institutional notions of objectivity, impartiality, trust were fictions those in power told themselves because they had the power to do so. It was journalism's fatal tautology. 3/
Yow. @Malinowski came to the Capitol to thank police there. One said he is also in the Army National Guard and that men in his unit this week said they thought Jan. 6 was "a fake."
.@Malinsowski said the mistake is too common in history: not believing people will do what they say they will do.
Well, here's a story for J-school ethics classes: how Sheehan lied to and broke agreements with his source, Daniel Ellsberg. (This story needs comment from Ellsberg.)
Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/…
The ethical question to be explored is the obligation journalists have to sources and their control of material, especially when that material could put them in prison. This story should be viewed in the context of Snowden, Wikileaks, Reality Winner.
The other uncomfortable thing revealed in this story is that another @nytimes reporter had an excerpt of the Pentagon Papers from Ellsberg but "had chosen not to mention the bombshell to anyone at the newspaper, preferring to keep it for a book he was writing about the war."
As ever, a wise thread from @jayrosen_nyu. But I'll argue a few more factors: 1. The role of media in amplifying bad groups & bad people (Trump was no Twitter genius, as Jay's said; he was good at using Twitter to manipulate media; Q appeared in media bigger than it was)...
2. Social media still allows so many good groups to assemble and act--#BLM first on a long list--and that was necessary because media had not given these communities voice & because media still give them less attention than the bad groups, because that's how media define "news."
3. I'm not seeking false balance. But I am seeking balance in media's flip-flop to its dystopic moral panic techlash. Media choose to amplify bad actors over good and dismiss the public's ability to discern the difference: mass 3rd-person effect.
Rereading Arendt is so instructive right now. SS men "were not interested in 'everyday problems' but only 'in ideological questions.'" Nevermind that grandma is dying of COVID and my kids can't get jobs, they're gonna fight for guns and abortions!
Arendt on followers' "radical loss of self-interest, cynical or bored indifference in the face of death [COVID] or other personal catastrophes [unemployment], the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life [guns über alles]..."
"...and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense." Sounds familiar, eh? She called this the mass. We call this the base.
Ad executive I used to respect just blocked me after I criticized him for wanting to block the voices on social media. These are the people who decide what media and what voices in social media get their support and do not. Looking for people who are too powefful? Start there.
I sat in a room with other ad execs who, with enough wine, admitted they don't want to be anywhere near news and don't care about supporting it. The only reason they care about news is their stock prices, they said. This is how they use their financial power.
What ruined the internet? The attention-based, advertiser-paid business model imported from mass media. Looking for whom to blame for a worsened net? Follow the fucking money. It will lead you back to advertisers.