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Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
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19 Jan, 7 tweets, 3 min read
This canceling of Trumpists is all well & good. But we in journalism must grapple with our devil & clean our house.
What is to be done about Fox & its claim to journalism?
Should we not shun & shame Murdoch's forces for the damage they have done to news & the nation? 1/ Image
What would it mean to shun Murdoch's Fox from journalism? First, we need to draw up an indictment for its crimes & their damage; media must report on media. Then shouldn't we refuse them a seat in every respectable news group, starting with the @RTDNA (née RTNDA) & @ONA? 2/
Respectable news organizations and their journalists should refuse to appear on Fox. (I turned them down not long ago.) J-schools should teach lapses of journalistic ethics & quality and start with receipts from Fox as case studies. 3/
It's good that journalists counted Trump's lies. (Thank you, @ddale8, @washingtonpost.) We should count Fox's. I've long argued that mainstream media should report what Fox does & does not tell its audience. It is an actor in our political story & should be covered as such. 4/
Fox is on my screen today, once again trying to gin up fear around caravans of brown people at the border, continue its racist attack on the 1619 project, attack tech and media over Trump. We've seen this racist script again & again & again. When will we act? 5/
Can we at least admit the irony -- nay, hypocrisy -- that we in journalism insist Facebook and Twitter clean their houses but we cower from cleaning ours? What are our standards? Where is our line if not at Fox? 5/
I repeat what I told @BBCRosAtkins on the BBC: Rupert Murdoch is the single most malign force in democracy in the English-speaking world. We know that. Yet we do nothing about it. It is time to report. It is time to shun the devil. 6/

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More from @jeffjarvis

Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
18 Jan
Oh, my. Former FT Editor @lionelbarber defends bothsideism, impartiality, objectivity and other recent journalistic tradition.
persuasion.community/p/lionel-barbe…
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/
Read 21 tweets
Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
16 Jan
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…
To which I add:
Read 4 tweets
Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
10 Jan
Watching right now. My Rep, @Malinowski, begins by recounting Jan. 6.
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.
Read 17 tweets
Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
8 Jan
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."
Read 4 tweets
Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
1 Jan
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.
Read 5 tweets
Jeff Jarvis Profile picture
26 Oct 20
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.
Read 13 tweets

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