What about the recent editorial condemning Taylor Swift: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/the-gu...
Their hatefulness must have become so deep seeded that they are unable to tolerate anyone out there who does not wanted to get instrumentalized by their 'either you are with us or you are our enemy' crusade.
But they are clearly labelled "Opinion" and then I don't have a problem ignoring and being very critical when I do happen to read such an article.
Why would a British newspaper think that?
No, they are assuming that everyone must have an opinion. It seems outside of their reality to accept that people don't care about the things they care about.
Just because I don't voice my opinion on which days I prefer the garbage collection truck to arrive doesn't mean I am a big fan of them arriving on Monday. I just have other things in life going on.
Sure, you may not be a fan of it, but you don't find it a big enough problem to complain to the city.
For the editorial in question, the subject is Trump and their opinion is that finding Trump not big enough a problem to complain about is not an acceptable position for someone of such wide social reach. You may not agree with that assesment, but I think it's a fairly normal position for an editorial board to take.
Why is an artist is not allowed to be an artist anymore but needs to be an political activist?
Even worse, because TS doesn't follow the Guardian's absurd logic, they are trying to shame her with their imaginative interpretation.
That's not journalism, that is a 6-year old's fantasy world, who dreams up stories about celebrities and why they are their imaginary friends/enemies.
This is nothing but grade-school peer pressure coming from adults and supposedly legitimate news organizations.
"They're burning all the witches even if you aren't one..."
I think in fact The Guardian and most other "journalistic" outlets are a tad bit jealous of Taylor Swift, as she is one of the very few public people/entities these days who seems to be able to garner attention, and importantly rake it shit tons of money, without resorting to daily Trump outrage spam and culture war nonsense.
I guarantee you rags like The Guardian are shaking in their boots at the eventual prospect of Trump being out of office. They might want to take a lesson from Ms. Swift and learn to create actual quality content to prepare for that coming day of reckoning.
Nobody complains about my stance of not talking about unicorns as being pro unicorn. Complaining about Taylor Swift not taking a stance on trump as being pro trump is a failure in logic at the most basic level.
How about we stop caring so much what celebrities think instead?
Why again does this failing rag deserve support, and why is this obvious propaganda upvoted to the top of HN?
This isn't something specific to this editorial; it is the general rule the website works by.
(As an aside, I'd much rather Comment is Free just died, because so much of what the Guardian gets lambasted over is content posted there—and its explicit point is less editorial control over the contents. If people don't want what gets posted with less direct editorial control over content, just don't give it to them.)
I mean, at least the old "newspaper" platform v. "blog" platform distinction made sense—there were many more differences (editorial control being a major one) than just commenting.
That's not to say the readership wasn't with them - that's a lot harder to quantify - but thencommenters largely weren't.
Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.
I believe they largely shut down comments for a couple of reasons:
- Like a lot of newspapers, they feel very strongly that they have to moderate comments very aggressively. They didn't use automated systems to do that, because often the comments they wanted to delete were highly scored, so they ended up paying an army of moderators. That's not affordable for an organisation that loses tens of millions of pounds a year.
- As their columnists got crazier the comments got more vitriolic. It became commonplace for me to read a loopy story and go down to the comments to find people pointing out factual errors by the writers, or flaming them for their extreme opinions. I think the staff got tired of commenters trying to bring them back down to earth.
Nowadays they only rarely seem to enable comments. Presumably to keep mod costs down.