An interesting observation from Hunter Stuart, a former Huffington Post reporter and editor, at the tail end of an extensive and interesting piece on anti-Israel bias in the media.
Stuart's observations of the entanglement between NGOs and foreign reporters, the pitfalls of trying to report on Hamas and the agenda behind anti-Israel reporting is interesting, but it's the ending that caught my eye.
"Working as a reporter in Israel for a year-and-a-half didn’t shatter my faith in journalism. But it increased my skepticism that it can do good in the world. Eight years of working for the news media has made me more and more alarmed by how partisan it’s becoming. News publishers these days target millennials on social media who’d rather see their own opinions validated than see an article that’s balanced and objective."
Obviously this is one of the gags behind Clickhole. And it's an interesting phenomenon as a trend when it's overlaid on the campus situation.
The death of objectivity might be the biggest story of the age. And the phenomenon is to some extent generational. But the social media environment also enables it. If the goal is to get likes, it's much easier to do that by incentivizing sharing from motivated users than by trying to tell a larger story. Add in the #Resistance, the insistence that there is an urgent battle and that you're either with us or against us, and there's no room for objectivity or nuance. Just hit Republicans harder. Intersectionality creates a list of enemies and friends. Journalism becomes moral only through advocacy.
You're either an "ally" or oppressor.
CNN tried to ride the wave, the way that the Washington Post has been doing, but it crashed and burned by playing by the old rules. An the Huffington Post was one of the first to innovate this model. It's a real life clickhole, a content farm whose only purpose is to produce viral content at the lowest common denominator made to be shared by likeminded people. The Daily Show's tirades had much the same effect. And CNN Investigates, the unit at the center of the current Fake News scandal, had rolled in BuzzFeed's people. They weren't the source of the problem, but the phenomenon is revealing.
Viral content is profitable, but it diminishes reach outside a niche. And that's how the media is dying. It's losing its ability to function as a national institution. It has the left, but hardly anyone else.