This happened twice just this week, once with the (constructive, rather softball) comments made by a union leader about Corbyn himself (to which the reaction was something along the lines of "oh no, he's losing the support of his base!"), to the rather mild back-and-forth about John McDonnell's sarcastic crack about Mao in Parliament (which the media basically manufactured into a fake story, all the while implying that McDonnell is a crypto-communist, while he is nothing of the sort).
Anyway, rather than it being about a specific subject, I guess my point is that I am pretty down on journalists in general these days, because chasing the story and filling the news cycle (in any medium) seems to have taken priority over actually substantive reporting of things that matter.
Is anyone saying he's a crypto-communist? All I've seen is that it's yet another example of Corbyn's shadow cabinet being fantastically terrible at politics. It's not feeding the "Labour are outright marxists" narrative, it's feeding the "Corbyn is incompetent and sooner or later the house of cards will fall" narrative.
There is an infection of using superlative language at every turn, and it is especially bad (but not limited to) how conversation happens in the US, and countries like Britain that increasingly model their politics and culture on the US[0].
The current culture makes nuance and explanation hard, because those don't fit into sound bytes. When we live in a world where Jeff Bezos can declare, with a straight face, that 3000 words is a "long read", we're kinda screwed when it comes to politicians being able to make any point that isn't a slogan painted on the backdrop they are speaking in front of, or a startup to declare "we are just building a service that is one iteration better than the existing ones on the market, and people will pay us good money to use it".
I mean you can do that, and you can probably even make good money at it, but you won't get the fawning press or the billion-dollar hyperinflated valuations.
[0]: A strong statement, especially to make in passing, I know. But happy to lay out my reasoning on that point for anyone who wants it, and I promise it's not just the usual bellyaching about "creeping Americanisation" that gets thrown around a lot.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/11/the-guardian...
So for any writers without anything meaningful to say... well, just find the most obnoxious, audience baiting thing possible, back it up with a bunch of thinly sourced 'support' posts and watch your article trend on Reddit within an hour or two. Or maybe on Twitter.
It's also why comment sections were virually unmoderated until recently... a civil debate brings less comments than a heated flame war between lunatics.
I've heard second-hand information about my national media platforms that they're (the media companies) actually seeding flame wars in comments on purpose - angry people coming back to respond to other angry people = much more eyeballs = more ad dollars flowing in.
Watch the news on TV or read a newspaper; how many times do they tell you that people are outraged, or asking questions, or something is up for debate, without showing so much as a tweet?