Mediaboss Marketing

You'd think that when Donald Trump won the White House, in large part by bullying the press, journalists would have woken up to the fact that the culture war was already at their door, but, apparently, Charlie Warzel at the New York Times only just realized this week that the culture war, whatever that means, is already here for the media.

"The culture war will come for us all," Warzel writes in an opinion piece reflecting on the fracas surrounding reporter Felicia Sonmez. The Washington Post suspended Sonmez for sharing an old story about a rape allegation against Kobe Byrant just hours after his death, and, although the rest of the internet excoriated the reporter for insensitive timing, the Washington Post newsroom rallied around Sonmez, leading the paper to reverse its decision. Warzel astutely notes that newsrooms often hire writers specifically for their public profiles but then leave them out to dry when they err on social media, but it's his commentary on the internet mob, not media bosses, that's all the more telling.

"While the internets culture war dynamics are fraught, theyre not all that hard to understand," Warzel writes. "They come in the form of intimidation and threats toward journalists and angry campaigns toward advertisers and executives. Some of the responses are posturing and some are real, but all are engineered for maximum virality and outrage. Everyones exposed. But theres an asymmetry to that exposure."

Yes, there absolutely is an asymmetry to the exposure of social media, that fertile ground for bad-faith rage to fulminate, but it's not biased against journalists. It's biased for them.

To understand the nature of this exposure requires understanding that, unlike culture clashes of the past, our contemporary "culture war" is more tribal or mob-driven than a sparring of values. There's a reason why the same mob that rails against Ben Shapiro, a conservative Orthodox Jew, also has knives out for Joe Rogan. It's also why alt-right and a specific, vitriolic wing of the Left so often join forces to try and take down figures such as Meghan McCain and Kyle Kashuv. Central to this culture war is not winning votes or hearts or minds. It's cancellation, or using social, economic, and litigatory forces to scare and shame people from any sort of civil discourse.

Consider, for example, when CNN bravely investigated the identity of an anonymous Reddit user whose GIF Trump later retweeted. The organization wrote that it wouldn't publish his identity because the Redditor seemed genuinely remorseful, but "CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change."

At least they never actually followed through on the threat. When the Daily Beast found the Bronx forklift operator who posted a "doctored" video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Facebook, it doxxed him.

But cancellation often has nothing to do with Trump or even with conservatism. When Carson King of Iowa, who had unexpectedly earned a million dollars from strangers for beer money donated it all to a children's hospital, Aaron Calvin of the Des Moines Register decided to dig up old racist jokes he had tweeted as a high school sophomore. Anheuser-Busch dumped its partnership with King as a result.

At least Calvin faced a reckoning when there was a widespread backlash to his hit job. After journalists botched the case of the innocent Covington Catholic High School students, many in the media continued. Further video showed that the students were victims of harassment, not perpetrators, but that didn't stop writers at Slate and Deadspin from vilifying them as "privileged" and "smug."

A free society requires a free press to serve as a check on the powerful, but for a free press to survive the passions of the people, it must remain fair. That doesn't include using massive public platforms to bully and harass anyone, especially private citizens and nobodies, who commit wrongthink.

And Warzel is absolutely correct that "angry campaigns toward advertisers and executives" damage democracy. Then why are the same activists screaming that Sonmez's life is at risk also rallying behind Media Matters's calls to shut down Fox News programming?

The media may not have started the culture war, but they made it metastasize. Maybe now that they're getting a taste of their own medicine, they'll reconsider if it's worth it.

Continued here:
The culture war has come back to bite the media that made it - Washington Examiner