Journalists and Twitter redux

Ain’t no fun when the bunny gets a gun

Farhad Manjoo of the NY Times is having second thoughts about Twitter.

How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

It’s an interesting read, but much of its interest lies in what it ignores and excuses, not in what it analyzes or indicts.

For instance, Manjoo wants to blame Twitter for elevating the stupid over the serious:

It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.

What he never mentions is that “serious” news organizations like CNN happily covered the “covfefe” crisis on their news programs. Manjoo really cannot explain why it is Twitter’s fault that CNN wasted time on “a brouhaha over a typo.”

A large part of this article is a sly attempt to excuse and coverup the moral and intellectual failings of professional journalists and established news organizations.

“When journalists see a story getting big on Twitter, they consider it a kind of responsibility to cover it, even if the story may be an alternate frame or a conspiracy theory,” said Alice Marwick, who was co-author of a recent report on the mechanics of media manipulation for the Data & Society Research Institute. “That’s because if they don’t, they may get accused of bias.”

Note how neatly this absolves the legacy media. They are forced to cover these stupid Twitter-generated stories because they bend over backwards to avoid even the appearance of bias.

Here’s an alternative explanation that Manjoo conveniently ignores.:

Covering a Twitter-centric story is cheap and easy. The journalist never has to get out of his chair. As such, this content is catnip for penny-pinching editors as well as lazy, ill-informed reporters.

“I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all.”--G. K. Chesterton

"A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day."--Scott Shane (New York Times reporter)

[Related: Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze]

In previous posts I’ve argued that journalists were early adopters of Twitter because it strengthened their control of “explanation space”.

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Why twitter?

The huge BOTS! RUSSIANS!! CONSPIRACY THEORIES!!! freak-out now underway is simply another battle in that war to control the Narrative.

A few years ago Twitter was praised for the way it empowered and energized the Black Lives Matter movement. The MSM was singularly uninterested in the role conspiracy theories played in that movement and the fake facts promulgated to support the favored Narrative (“Hands up. Don’t shoot”)

DeRay McKesson: Leader, Activist, and Unrepentant Conspiracy-Monger

Other curious omissions

Manjoo and his editors cast this piece as an even-handed look at how a technology can be exploited to disseminate lies and misinformation. Oddly enough, he chooses his examples from Trump supporters and the populist Right. Sean Hannnity and Seth Rich get a lot of attention. Louise Mensch, extravagant and misleading claims that “Russians hacked the election“, and flat charges that “Trump committed treason” are largely ignored.

Outside of Twitter in message boards or Facebook groups a group will decide on a particular message to push. Then the deluge begins. Bots flood the network, tweeting and retweeting thousands or hundreds of thousands of messages in support of the story, often accompanied by a branding hashtag #pizzagate, or, a few weeks ago, #sethrich.

If it is mostly bots retweeting bots, just how many people are reading the tweets let alone the underlying stories?

The passage quoted reminded me of something else-- an earlier conspiracy to frame the narrative and shift debate during a presidential election.

Journolist.

In that case, though, journalists and activists were not creating trending hashtags for a small audience on Twitter. Instead, they were injecting them right into the MSM.

And the defenders of truth and honest journalism did not care.

Because, in the end, facts and truth are not a major concern for them. It is simply Narrative Uber Alles.

Thought for the day

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Carl Sagan