The Death of the Rude Press
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Yes. Especially including Gawker network writers, like the author himself. What he sees as "rudeness in the name of speaking truth to power", millions of others see as low-rate tabloid-esque journalists injecting biased, poorly-formed, condescending and contemptuous opinions into articles with the direct intent of maliciously stirring outrage in an unwarranted and sensationalistic manner.
The death of the Gawker / "rude" press was a long time coming.
Are you saying that we can't trust his motives and competence, because he was fired?
In general, though, I'm very skeptical of the idea that journalistic rudeness, snark, condescension, and contempt is a good way to address issues, even if the issues may be real and deserving of exposure.
The trash rude press are the tabloids and muckrakers who I think most would agree we'd be better off without.
Fortunately, most non partisans recognize the complexity of the world reaches far beyond the limits of what one political viewpoint is able to encapsulate.
> Communism is viewed favorably by more than one-in-three Millennials (36%), up 8 points from 2018.
> About one-in-five Millennials (22%) believe that “society would be better if all private property was abolished,” compared to 1% of the Silent Generation.
Also, far left is a relative term.
LGBT rights are orthogonal to communism, you can have a state that murders anyone who is gay and one that enforces universal gender reassignment and both could be equally communist. Nationalizing the electricity grid and ISPs isn't orthogonal, but the 'far leftists' in the US either don't mention it at all, or mention it so far in their list of demands there will be no political capital left for it even if world revolution happened tomorrow.
What supporting communism means is when a communist shows up on the ballot box, you are likely to vote for them. That in itself is a huge shift from the older generations.
And I question whether your premise is true. About 22% of millennials surveyed stated that “it would be better if all private property was abolished.” https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/2019-annual-poll
> Sawant has advocated the nationalization of large Washington State corporations such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon[62] and expressed a desire to see privately owned housing in "Millionaire's Row" in the Capitol Hill neighborhood turned into publicly owned shared housing complex saying, "When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned."[63] During an election victory rally for her City Council campaign, Sawant criticized Boeing for saying it would move jobs out of state if it could not get wage concessions and tax breaks. She called this "economic terrorism" and said in several speeches that if Boeing moved jobs out of state, the workers should take over Boeing facilities and bring them into public ownership. She has said they could be converted into multiple uses, such as production for mass transit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant#Economic_policie...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/seattle-councilwoman-urge...
In particular, look at two aspects of the animation for "Political Polarization of the American Public, 1994-2014": First, notice that the line for Median Democrat moves only to the left. Second, put your pointer or your finger over where the line for Median Democrat is in 1994 and compare that to where it ends up in 2014. Then do the same for Median Republican.
edit: Here's the version of it that goes to 1994-2017 -- you can clearly see what happens from 2015 to 2017 as well:
https://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polariza...
Becoming more "consistently liberal" and less "mixed" is essentially the definition of moving to the left.
> Hell, even moving more to the left isn't necessarily, depending on where one starts from, and the early 90s are not exactly known to be a left-wing era in the US
As opposed to what preceded that, i.e. Bush/Reagan?
Arguing that Democrats aren't far to the left of where they were 25 years ago because at that time they were much closer to the center than where they are now is just conceding the point by rephrasing it.
"Far-left", at least everywhere I've seen the term used, is not relative to a previous position the same population held, but relative to the overall political spectrum. It's essentially "in the subset farthest to the left one can possibly be".
Who exactly fits into the far-left is arguable, but generally abolition of large-scale private property tends to be a requisite.
The extremes also expose the flaws of that spectrum to begin with, because your average anarcho-capitalist would no sooner want to live under Hitler than Stalin. But we've somehow managed to categorize as "far right" both the proposition that no one, including the government, should ever use force to coerce anyone to do anything, and simultaneously the proposition that the government should use lethal force to stamp out homosexuality and racial impurity and wrongthink. And on the other side, that far-left at the same time means both granting equal access to power and resources to everyone and granting total economic authority to an all-powerful central government. And that the government should use lethal force to stamp out wrongthink. In that sense far-anything is just a useless general-purpose pejorative, so if it's going to mean anything then it isn't very useful for it to mean that.
So I tend to think a more useful meaning is something like the category exemplified by AOC as compared to the category exemplified by Bill Clinton.
And that's fine, because if we're discussing US politics, then Europe's definition of far left is rather irrelevant.
It doesn't mean anything to talk about positions or shifts over time without some kind of a baseline.
The world is saturated with hot takes, and I don't need your particular ad-laden website to enjoy them, even if you have serious but rude journalists. Ask every other journalist in every part of the world how the industry is doing and you'll understand this isn't specific to the "rude press".
It’s weird to me that people are so unskeptical about assertions that things are somehow completely dysfunctional in one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world.
Our institutions are not only the product of a vigorous democratic process, but we can compare the results to the institutions of other vigorous democracies. If we look to our friendly neighbor to the north, we can see that in broad strokes, and even a lot of detailed strokes, they’ve organized their society very similarly to ours. We can look across the pond to the U.K. or Australia and see the same thing. To me, what warrants skepticism isn’t our institutions, it’s those impugning the “competence and motives” of those leading them.
As someone who hails from Asia like you and has seen proper dysfunctional systems, I agree completely.
But don't events of the past 3-4 years give you any pause? I've recently developed a habit of reading foxnews front page, and there's a clear trend of painting Mexicans and brown people in general as troublemakers. You and I will agree that the system isn't really corrupt, but I think you and I will also agree insofar as it's all ruled by money, news will be given out in the manner in which it gets them the most money: and unfortunately that is going to be by producing more outrage and by appealing to our laziness and our worst instincts. Doesn't that give you any worry?
It should be no surprise, then, that many of those who are skeptical about American institutions are also skeptical about the states being one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world.
And I know you aren't saying it directly, but this really shouldn't be about The Left and The Right. The problem is about punching up versus punching down.
Yes, it's said to be part of the "anti-PC press": The anti-P.C. press certainly delights in titillating its audience, but it always, unfailingly, endorses a completely servile relationship to authority.
As you say, the actual point of the article isn't even about rudeness, it's about standing up to power, or not.
"Punching up" in general is a concept unique to modern progressive philosophy, as well. I don't believe that's a concept for the right. I understand the thought behind it, but I think it's a very dangerous and slippery slope.
The fuzzy "up" concept for the modern left is kind of the equivalent of the fuzzy "degenerate" concept for the modern right. They're just labels you use to tar people you disagree with or dislike, and then you use the label as shorthand to merit any kind of judgmental or malicious behavior towards that group.
Also, even when one does agree with their "upness" assessment, it doesn't necessarily have any relation to the nature or deservedness of the criticism. I agree billionaires are powerful, but you can still write hit pieces against billionaires which misrepresent their words and positions, or imply hidden intentions behind their words or actions with no credible evidence.
Almost everyone can justify to themselves and people like them why someone else deserves to be treated rudely. It's a lot harder to avoid being rude, even to people you disagree with. It's also better for society to disagree in other ways.
A lot of 'normal' media sources rushed left to be the anti-Fox. It's become so crowded that the field has started to thin.
If gawker were profitable enough, no one would have ever interfered with the editorial process.
Being rude to people that deserve it is the same sort of justification used for punching Nazis. It’s easy (and a good idea)when they are wearing a Swastika, but it’s actually not so easy to discern most of the time. And when you are a media outlet, you peddle in most of the time scenarios resulting in nonstop clickbait.
Good riddance.
The rude media has died because the rude media is boring. You can only blame déclassé white men for the worlds problems so many times before everyone tunes out. What was new in the 1960s is not new, interesting or even right 50 years later.
OP should probably read some of that anti-pc media, like Mencius Moldbug or RMS. A few people who have something interesting to say and have been crucified for it by OP and OP's friends. To quote Moldbug (2013) [0]:
> The logic of the witch hunter is simple. [...] The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters. [...] Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake! Priorities! No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.
[0] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-...