Does anyone still understand irony at the New Yorker?

A puff piece on Unicorn Riot – an activist organization that covers/streams protests across the country.

The Tiny Media Collective That Is Delivering Some of the Most Vital Reporting from Minneapolis

You could refer to what Unicorn Riot does as “activist reporting,” just as you might call a bystander capturing footage of N.Y.P.D. officers tossing people to the asphalt or plowing cruisers through crowds “citizen journalism.” But you also could decide that these distinctions reflect a certain snobbery and have lost a certain salience. There is no use in quibbling about objective journalism amid this emergency, when the power of people’s voices is our only defense. To be a good citizen is to be an activist. To report is to speak up. To have your eyes open is to witness democracy in action, and its failures in abundance.

The writer, Troy Patterson, is probably blind to the totalitarian cast of mind that declares “to be a good citizen is to be an activist”.

The surprising part, to me, is his casual dismissal of conventional journalistic standards as obsolete and snobbish.

The New Yorker's entire business model depends on snobbery. That is the appeal to the subscribers and the luxury brands who advertise in its pages. Snobbery is the force that puts money in Troy Patterson's pocket.

Usually we don't talk about that when we talk about the New Yorker and Journalism. (Tom Wolfe did which is what made him Tom Wolfe).

No, we are required to blather on about the New Yorker's rigorous fact-checking process and the layers of editors who make certain that only the very best stories with the most verified facts and the most thoughtful reporting appear in its pages.

After decades of this ritualistic praise we now have a New Yorker writer dismissing it as obsolete and unimportant,

Related:

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