This is the ninth post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August 2019 but there was an earlier post on 18 February of that year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.
This survey started on 5 October 2019 and continued until 14 December of the same year, so it’s not exhaustive. Times shown are Australian Eastern Daylight Time except before 6 October, the day daylight saving kicked in.
The survey starts with a case of official harassment of a journalist, something which, along with public opprobrium of the same category of professional, is everywhere on the rise. In some countries, as we all know (or, at least, as we should know) journalists are jailed or, even, killed. The following case is less extreme but it is still worrying and is indicative of a trend that is readily evident.
On 5 October at 6.14am Jillian York, who works at the EFF (“The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.”) tweeted, “This, vaccines, prevalence of guns are just a few of the hundreds of reasons I dread every visit to the US.” The tweet came with two images (see below) relaying a conversation a journalist had had with an immigration official upon arriving in the US. The images had been put up in a tweet from Joseph Cox, a journalist with US media outlet Motherboard. He had said, “Definitely a very normal conversation for a democracy.” “CBP” stands for Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
This survey started on 5 October 2019 and continued until 14 December of the same year, so it’s not exhaustive. Times shown are Australian Eastern Daylight Time except before 6 October, the day daylight saving kicked in.
The survey starts with a case of official harassment of a journalist, something which, along with public opprobrium of the same category of professional, is everywhere on the rise. In some countries, as we all know (or, at least, as we should know) journalists are jailed or, even, killed. The following case is less extreme but it is still worrying and is indicative of a trend that is readily evident.
On 5 October at 6.14am Jillian York, who works at the EFF (“The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.”) tweeted, “This, vaccines, prevalence of guns are just a few of the hundreds of reasons I dread every visit to the US.” The tweet came with two images (see below) relaying a conversation a journalist had had with an immigration official upon arriving in the US. The images had been put up in a tweet from Joseph Cox, a journalist with US media outlet Motherboard. He had said, “Definitely a very normal conversation for a democracy.” “CBP” stands for Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The case was soon picked up by other media outlets. For example, on 7 October at 10.16am MSNBC, the US media company, tweeted, “A Customs and Border Protection agent reportedly refused to return journalist Ben Watson's passport at Dulles International Airport until Watson ‘admitted’ to writing propaganda. Watson joins @kendisgibson to describe what happened.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the organisation’s website that included a video. The webpage has this on it:
Ben Watson, News Editor for Defense One, says that a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to return his passport at Dulles International Airport after Watson told him he was a journalist. The agent refused to return the passport until Watson admitted that he wrote 'propaganda.' The CBP has issued a statement saying they are investigating the incident.
Kendis Gibson is the MSNBC Live weekend anchorman and had 25,820 followers when I checked his profile.
Then on 12 October at 2.27am Jessica Sidman, the food editor at the Washingtonian, tweeted, “My brother is on a @united flight from LA to Boston and saw this guy boarding with a shirt that reads Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.’” The tweet turned into a thread.
He told the flight attendant and she asked what he wanted her to do.
He told her he didn’t want one passenger threatening to kill other passengers.
He told her @united should do the right thing. She went to talk to the captain.
Then security pulled my brother off the plane. He talked to a security official.
The security guy said they couldn’t do anything just because it was offensive.
My brother said it wasn’t offensive, it was THREATENING.
They offered to put my brother on another flight. They didnt say anything to the guy with the shirt.
This is a photo her brother took on the day.
On 14 October at around 11.50am Australian Jason Wilson, who freelances for the Guardian and lives in Oregon, tweeted a link to a story on the New York Times website titled, “Macabre Video of Fake Trump Shooting Media and Critics Is Shown at His Resort.” He commented, “Someone will act on one of these media kill lists one day and there will be no consequences for the people who have done the most to whip up hatred for journalists.” I replied, “They already did in Maryland last year ..” and included the link to my story.
Then things started getting bizarre as the administration or, at least, its supporters, began to enter into the spirit of things. On 14 October at 6.25pm Cindy McCain, the widow of Congressman John McCain, tweeted, “Reports describing a violent video played at a Trump Campaign event in which images of reporters & @JohnMcCain are being slain by Pres Trump violate every norm our society expects from its leaders & the institutions that bare [sic] their names. I stand w/ @whca in registering my outrage.” “WHCA” is the White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents that institution’s press corps. I saw this tweet in my timeline on 15 October.
The next day, on 15 October, at 7.57am an account with the Twitter handle @JDLukenback and 7373 followers tweeted, “This violent video is privately endorsed by Trump and his sycophants around him, you can be assured of that. They may publicly condemn this kind of bullshit, but they know it plays well with his mentally sick supporters.” It came with an image.
Then John Moffitt, whom I follow and who is a US astrophysicist, palaeontologist and geologist, tweeted in response, “You and I both know that people will die as a result of the #TrumpVideo but Trump supporters cheering this Snuff Film will shrug their collective shoulders at the body count.”
On the same day, 15 October, at 8.21am NBC News reporter Ben Collins tweeted, “The timeline behind the account that created the now-infamous violent Trump video paints a familiar picture. An amateur meme maker makes a viral video. Reddit's r/the_donald welcomes him in, offers money and community, and asks for more.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the US TV network’s website. The story tells about an account named TheGeekzTeam on the social media site Reddit that was encouraged to make videos critical of Trump.
The next day, 16 October, there was another case. At 7.49am on that day, Nick Gillespie, an editor at US media outlet Reason, tweeted, “This story that Trump advisor Peter Navarro made up a fake source in multiple books is shocking and should lead to his firing.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the website of US media outlets Raw Story titled, “Trump trade adviser busted for making up ‘whimsical pen name’ to quote himself in his books for years.” The story was dated 15 October and contained this:
A senior economic and trade advisor to President Donald Trump has been busted for making up a person he can quote in his books and to justify his policies.
A shocking expose in The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Peter Navarro invented the name “Ron Vara,” an anagram for Navarro, to justify his own opinions in his books. https://adage.com/article/news/mark-zuckerberg-touts-broad-power-expression-fifth-estate/2208301
A response from social media sites, facing the deployment of false information by politicians, was expected. On 24 October at 6.34am the Nieman Journalism Lab, at Harvard University, tweeted, “Facebook is just gonna come out and start calling fake news fake (well, ‘false’).” The tweet came with a link to a story on its website that had this information in it. The story went on, after the first paragraph:
One thing that will still not be labeled [sic] “False Information,” though, are false Facebook ads placed by politicians, which the company announced recently would be allowed to run without restriction. (As CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in his Georgetown speech last week: “We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. And if content is newsworthy, we also won’t take it down even if it would otherwise conflict with many of our standards.”)
This appeared to me to be sensible. The following image shows what will appear on mobile phones where the company’s apps are being used.
Then, of course, there was a backlash against the social media company. On 23 October at 11.26pm Rob Rogers, a cartoonist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, tweeted, “Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook can't be the arbiter of truth. He has decided that he will allow false political ads and propaganda to run on the site. Money talks, truth walks.”
The next day, October 24, at 6.41am Oliver Willis, a person who calls himself a senior writer at media outlet Shareblue, tweeted, “@AOC asks Mark Zuckerberg if he would allow her to run Facebook ads saying Republicans supported the Green New Deal. He says he doesn't know. Zuckerberg: ‘I think lying is bad’ but then he claims that it's not Facebook's role to take down lies in political ads.” “AOC” refers to Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat. Shareblue describes itself as, “the No. 1 digital platform for progressive news, reaching millions of people each month.” The tweet came with a video showing the congresswoman asking Zuckerberg some questions in a hearing.
On 30 October at 7.16am Kenneth Roth, the CEO of Human Rights Watch, tweeted, “Facebook employees rebel against Zuckerburg's decision to allow politicians to post any falsehood they want—'a threat to what FB stands for.’” The tweet came with a link to a story on the New York Times’ website but I don’t have a subscription and I had already viewed my monthly allowance of articles, so I couldn’t read the story.
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, announced on 31 October, starting a thread at 7.51am, “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…” He went on to list his reasons, which include the use of microtargeting and deep fakes. He also said that he wanted individuals in the community to be the ones pushing messages out about candidates in elections, not well-funded parties.
At 7.55am on the same morning, a Bloomberg journalist specialising in social media tweeted, “Twitter stock took a little dive when @jack announced the company would stop selling political ads. Which is weird because Twitter makes virtually no money from political ads, so either people were unaware or there's something I don't know.”
The Guardian was fairly quick to enter the debate, now with a policy. On 2 November at 6.20am I saw a tweet from the Guardian which said, “The Guardian view on political advertising: time to regulate it, Mr Zuckerberg | Editorial.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the company’s website.
Then “deep fakes” began to enter the discussion about fake news. On 25 October at 9.11am journalist Miriam Cosic tweeted, “If seeing is no longer believing the question is, Could ‘deep fakes’ weaken democracy?” The tweet came with a link to a YouTube video. California had just, a few weeks earlier, made it illegal to use “deep fake” videos. The kicker on this story runs, “AB 730 makes it illegal to circulate doctored videos, images or audio of politicians within 60 days of an election.”
As for journalists, they were being forgotten. They are collateral damage amid all this hatred, all this fear and loathing. At 12.35pm on 14 December Nieman Journalism Lab tweeted, “At least 30 journalists worldwide are imprisoned for spreading ‘fake news’. That’s a huge increase since 2012.” The tweet came with a link to a story.
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