Social media is great for sharing links but the quality of material being produced in recent years is not encouraging. BuzzFeed for a start, with its quizzes and text-poor stories and endless sequences of quoted tweets, is a bad sign.
Then you have the newspapers that pimp their stories to get subscribers. The quality doesn't matter to people as long as the bias conforms with their own. Some, like the Guardian, ask for donations and run campaigns to fund stories on specific topics. But with the groupthink evident on social media begging for ideologically-bent material in preference to objective stories written by ethical journalists, it's hard to see how we can be well served by such organisations.
You also have "indie" media which is run on a shoestring and which runs complete nonsense that people applaud and retweet endlessly, as though the vomit they are promoting were some rare souffle offered up by the kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef.
The kinds of extremism that thrives in social media, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, is precisely the wrong kind of influence you want to have operating on journalism. In the old days, university graduates used to complain about the hysterical headlines produced by the major urban tabloids. Words with the same kind of rhetorical audacity as statements that are made by politicians intent on demolishing the arguments of their opponents. But with social media this same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous.
In fact, it even infiltrates the public personas of leading mainstream journalists. For example: "The amount of methane released from the pile of bullshit to be uttered by the govt on climate change policy over the next 5 weeks is going to severely increase our total emissions..." Now this comment, made just before the 2019 Budget was released, might be true, but the person who said it is a prominent columnist for a mainstream media outlet. This is a man who has built a reputation on the back of carefully considered articles that use a lot of graphs and that rely on numbers for impact. But here he is raving like any louche pleb from the boonies with an internet connection and too much time on his hands.
It's precisely this kind of thing that makes Channel Nine's new social media guidelines so necessary. The company recently introduced guidelines (that apply equally to employees and to contributors) that limit the amount of personal opinion can be included in social media posts.
It makes sense, objectively speaking. If you won't listen to what both sides of politics are saying, how can you be trusted to provide an unbiased assessment of the policies of any political party? And being perceived to be objective is as important as actually being objective. If you are a journalist who wants to be taken seriously, why would you things in public – where people are watching all the time – that are unworthy of attention and that even contain base slurs?
But the tribal dynamic of social media – where people back political parties like they barrack for football teams – makes editors and journalists pander to the lowest common denominator, to the plug-ugly dimwit who publishes drivel and who cannot spell, doesn’t know how to use punctuation, and who struggles even with basic grammar let alone with things such as expression. More and more, newspapers are giving people what they want regardless of the truth, and even outlets that claim to belong to the mainstream are sucked into the vortex because that’s where the money is to be made. If you flatter people they will reward you with dosh.
Then you have the newspapers that pimp their stories to get subscribers. The quality doesn't matter to people as long as the bias conforms with their own. Some, like the Guardian, ask for donations and run campaigns to fund stories on specific topics. But with the groupthink evident on social media begging for ideologically-bent material in preference to objective stories written by ethical journalists, it's hard to see how we can be well served by such organisations.
You also have "indie" media which is run on a shoestring and which runs complete nonsense that people applaud and retweet endlessly, as though the vomit they are promoting were some rare souffle offered up by the kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef.
The kinds of extremism that thrives in social media, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, is precisely the wrong kind of influence you want to have operating on journalism. In the old days, university graduates used to complain about the hysterical headlines produced by the major urban tabloids. Words with the same kind of rhetorical audacity as statements that are made by politicians intent on demolishing the arguments of their opponents. But with social media this same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous.
In fact, it even infiltrates the public personas of leading mainstream journalists. For example: "The amount of methane released from the pile of bullshit to be uttered by the govt on climate change policy over the next 5 weeks is going to severely increase our total emissions..." Now this comment, made just before the 2019 Budget was released, might be true, but the person who said it is a prominent columnist for a mainstream media outlet. This is a man who has built a reputation on the back of carefully considered articles that use a lot of graphs and that rely on numbers for impact. But here he is raving like any louche pleb from the boonies with an internet connection and too much time on his hands.
It's precisely this kind of thing that makes Channel Nine's new social media guidelines so necessary. The company recently introduced guidelines (that apply equally to employees and to contributors) that limit the amount of personal opinion can be included in social media posts.
It makes sense, objectively speaking. If you won't listen to what both sides of politics are saying, how can you be trusted to provide an unbiased assessment of the policies of any political party? And being perceived to be objective is as important as actually being objective. If you are a journalist who wants to be taken seriously, why would you things in public – where people are watching all the time – that are unworthy of attention and that even contain base slurs?
But the tribal dynamic of social media – where people back political parties like they barrack for football teams – makes editors and journalists pander to the lowest common denominator, to the plug-ugly dimwit who publishes drivel and who cannot spell, doesn’t know how to use punctuation, and who struggles even with basic grammar let alone with things such as expression. More and more, newspapers are giving people what they want regardless of the truth, and even outlets that claim to belong to the mainstream are sucked into the vortex because that’s where the money is to be made. If you flatter people they will reward you with dosh.
No comments:
Post a Comment