[Me1] We need to do a better job of differentiating between dry fact-checking statements and explaining the context of statements. The former is yes/no, for the most part. The latter is inherently subjective.
[Me2] A study looks at the role the media plays in perceptions of crime using a natural experiment in Italy.
[Me3] Nathan Robinson writes about how social justice media is undermining social justice for clicks and money.
[Me4] Breitbart can run from its endorsements, but it can’t hide. If your sole criteria is hates liberals and mainstream conservatives, you do run the risk of promoting Nazis as they do manage to piss off both.
[Me5] The creator of the concept of Fake News has regrets. It’s almost humorous how quickly this turned into an own goal.
[Me6] The good news is that in the overall “fake news” seems to mostly be preaching to the choir who are actually getting most of their news elsewhere. The bigger danger isn’t crap being made up on Facebook, but the sense of validation some of it gets on closer-to-mainstream outfits like Fox and company.
[Me7] It’s not often you hear reporter complaints about reporter pay being too high. But men’s pay is too higher than women’s pay, apparently.
[Me8] This is not a headline you expect in 2018. So are they going to start hiring reporters again?
[Me9] Eric Garland is on the warpath.
M3: Stuff like this is going to continue as long as Google and Facebook eat up most online revenue from ads. That being said i am a cranky older person who hates click bait writing conventions but lots of people go for it. The thing about news is that doing it well is hard, expensive, and often boring for most people. Celeb X tweeted Y is cheap and easy. CNN seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on the reporting about tweets so I find it hard to blame .mic.
Me4: I am just surprised they haven’t gone full Nazi yet.
Me7: The BBC is more closely governmental and funded via taxes than PBS. It is cherished in a way that most Americans would find incomprehensible. This is good old fashioned British socialism!!Report
Adding to what Saul said, there seems to be an inherent problem in treating news as a business as M3 noted. Businesses exist to make a profit while news is supposed to give relatively accurate information on the state of the word to the readers and viewers, although what is relatively accurate information is an ideological question. Relatively accurate information doesn’t make money though.Report
Me7: Is the BBC that cherished? Its definitely part of the cultural landscape of the United Kingdom but it isn’t without its critics, generally on the right but really across the spectrum. I think most British people treat the BBC and the oldest commercial channel ITV as the way Americans treat the networks, something that just is. More information is needed to know if the BBC is really as loved in the UK as American liberals want it to be.
Its also not necessarily a socialist institution even though its public. There were several commissions to determine the relationship between the BBC and the British state. Its more like a NPO that happens to work in the area of media than providing services for the less well off.Report
I was distressed to see that even the small local news channels in my parents’ town have gone clickbait style for headlines to “tease” their upcoming stories
One was:
“Facebook to shut down” and under it, in smaller type, “its ‘M” Personal Assistant”
C’mon, guys, you’re better than that….Report
That’s been going on for decades.
“Are pedophiles driving your kid’s school bus? Tune in to a Channel 8 exclusive at 5:00PM!”
“Are serial rapists wandering your neighborhood? Tune in at 7:00!”
“Are you going to be devoured by fire ants tonight, while local mechanics overcharge you for labor they never performed? TUNE IN AT 9:00!”
“If you don’t watch our 6:30 PM special, you will literally drop dead where you stand.”Report
@morat20 LOLOLOL This is such a perfect depiction of how I felt hearing the local news headlines when I moved here, vs how they worked where I grew up. (Canadian newscasters in small towns really don’t get that agitated about things, even when they are actually big serious things they SHOULD throw some drama into. It would be undignified.)
Maybe @fillyjonk’s small town used to be more like CBCPEI and is now more like LocalColoradoAffiliate?Report
Me8: They use the M&A code word “synergies”. This means that they will fire staff, not hire. Since they say “geographic synergies”, I assume they mean eliminating things like redundant state capital reporters.Report
Me3 – iow, I liked social justice before it sold out and went all commercial.
More charitably, what is interesting (to me) is that the same focus by the right wing media sphere on clickbait triviality and pseudoscandal did not undermine their main effort – just the opposite, it got Donald Trump elected President.Report
Depends on which part of the right wing you are talking about.Report
“I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
The left-leaning clickbait sites are not connected to the goal of electing Democrats like the right-leaning clickbait/tabloid sites seem connected to the goal of electing Republicans. They still only managed to get DJT a freak victory.
Plus left-leaning clickbait sites generally don’t have people like the Mercers to bankroll them.Report
If “Social Justice” signaling is a good way to gain status in a sub-culture, we’re going to see a number of people signaling “Social Justice”. The thing to wait for is when the next big way to gain status in the sub-culture shows up and see who flips over to that and who sits still and continues talking about the importance of listening to the voices that are queering fat embodiment among POC.Report
What is “Social Justice signaling” versus “advocating for Social Justice”?Report
You know how Jesus talked about Pharisees?
Similar to that. Only moved up to 2018.Report
That is, how the New Testament, written by enemies of the Pharisees, has Jesus talk about Pharisees, One of Jesus’s most famous lines is a direct quote from Hillel.Report
Oh, I’m sure that Jesus was totally unfair to some of the Pharisees.
That said, his criticisms of Not All Pharisees resonate across millennia.Report
You know who else made generalizations about Jews?Report
You’ve lost me.Report
Are you familiar with the Woes of the Pharisees? Wikipedia has a good breakdown of the rants of Jesus here.
He spends a lot of time on stuff like hypocrisy.
Here, I’ll copy and paste the three biggest ones from the woes (I prefer the RSV to the NRSV, but what can you do?):
The Pharisees were not worshiping G-d, they were merely signaling that they were worshiping G-d.
Do you see how this translates to the difference between “Social Justice signaling” versus “advocating for Social Justice” or do I need to go into further detail?Report
Oh no, that clears it up.
“Signaling” is an accusatory term.
And if I assume this is related to Me3, then it probably fits.
What is odd is that “signaling” from what I can tell, is usually reserved for leftist causes.
For instance, the monetarization of outrage referenced by Me3 is a direct ripoff of rightwing outrage scams, where the latest Obama-coming -for-your-guns outrage is peddled next to ads for gold or such.
In fact, “Conservative Signaling” can be said to be the entire Fox News business model.
P.S. I am from a Catholic background. We don’t read the Bible. We pay people to do that.Report
What is odd is that “signaling” from what I can tell, is usually reserved for leftist causes.
Yeah, that seems accurate. When righties do it, the go to is usually “hypocrisy” or, if especially religiously-based, “pharisee” (which, as Schilling will point out, is unfair to the pharisees).
But now that I think about it, we haven’t really needed a term for non-religiously based (but very much moral outraged-based) hypocrisy until the last few decades.
Not surprising that a new term surfaced.Report
I think that’s right. The left often signals in silly, easily mockable ways. Signals from the right, on the other hand, are so presumptively pro-American they not only can’t be easily mocked, they usually go unnoticed and so pass under the “signaling” radar.Report
They can be easily mocked, I think, but those who think the signals are good, pure, sensible, non-partisan things – they may not perceive the mockery.
Like, Obama’s outrageously unamerican tastes in sandwich condiments.Report
Here’s a Patton Oswalt tweet that does a good job of making a joke in this vein:
Report
*cough*
postvaticaniiallusyoungunsstartedreadingthebibleyo
*cough*Report
[Me3] It’s a little dismaying that Robinson misses the most damning indictment of what he asserts is Mic‘s strategy for manufacturing outrage: it didn’t even work as a money-making scheme! Forget about cargo cult social justice activism, they had a cargo cult business model.
On the other hand, the link to Current Affairs‘ pivot to video was great, as was this quote:
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@michael-cain Pot Update: It’s happening!
Vermont poised to enact legal pot through LegislatureReport
Forcing the issue has upsides.Report