The woke revolution in American journalism has begun

Is repeatedly criticizing the president usually a bad thing that inherently lacks nuance? Yes. Key word usually. Sardonically call me "woke" or whatever you want, I don't care. This president and his administration are extraordinarily bad. Your usual middle-brow heuristics don't apply.

False. It is no coincidence that as we enter an unprecedented period of economic depression, all the liberal media wants to discuss is racial disparities.

The ruling class is winning the class war, and as long as they can keep the working class fighting the race ware instead, nothing will change.

These protests are being milked for every last drop by the liberal media, in cooperation with liberal activist NGOs on behalf of the Democratic party.

It used to be that dissemination of information was expensive.

Thousands of years ago you had to travel to town squares or churches to get updates on things. Then you had newspapers, radio, and television. These often were pillars of a community.

So it was logical that the same devices that would report on news ("free-press" activity) would be used for "free-speech" expressive activity like commentary, editoral, op-ed, letters to the community, etc., because it was media that a high percentage of the community was guaranteed to consume regularly.

This is no longer true and also no longer needed. Free-press and free-speech activity doesn't have to share the same platform anymore and can be separated.

Free-speech expressive activity can be done on websites, social media, etc. We don't need journalism outlets to do anything but post reports on things happening.

With the two separated there is less ethical quandary.

The idea of scheduled consumption of media is also breaking down. So we don't need journalism outlets collecting stories and deciding what to put into papers, because there shouldn't be a paper. There should be a website with reports with easily searchable keywords.

Hypocrites. All of them. Everyone has an agenda. If something doesn’t go their way, then, even the most outspoken, all of a sudden, just lost their voice. There’s no need for them to put their necks out on the line.

These events are better analyzed in terms of the Red Team, which let itself be taken over by some egregiously moronic positions. Being for the rule of law and against the plague should be common sense American values. The idea of airing "both sides" doesn't work when one "side" has gone off the deep end and is penning op eds about using the military to help rioting police attack constitutionally-protected protests. There's nothing inherently "woke" about ignoring anti-American tripe - if the Red Team wants to be taken seriously again, it needs to develop some adult opinions to embody actual Conservative values.

"A serious news organization cannot exclude views championed by one of the country's two major political parties and held by more than 40 percent of the country's voters."

I don't wear a "red tie" but this resonates with me, as someone who speaks daily with friends from both extremes of the spectrum. In truth, I most seek out people who think issue-by-issue, because as an adult, and not a 20 year-old revolutionary, I don't believe that reality is to be explained with glued-together social theory with axiomatic truths that the believers don't recognize are even there and can be qustioned; as an adult, I find it hard to fathom the downward spiral of the idea of truth into a weaponized all-or-nothing nihilistic battle.

In the past few weeks, the Washington Post and the NY Times, both of which I have subscriptions and I read daily, declared war. They've made that pretty clear and they've also admitted it. Gone are the days where we want unbiased reporting.

Sunday and Monday of the week prior, Manhattan had hundreds of stores looted and the streets became fully lawless as cars could drive up to broken storefronts, send organized groups in and retrieve thousands of dollars of goods. Those two days, the NYT, the home town paper, ran front page stories about Trump's (reprehensible, do I need to say it) actions. And around the front page they had commentary about the Trump actions. In short, focus on the Enemy. No focus on the rioting, and the story is even worse with Chicago, which has experienced the most murders in 60 years. Surely a story worth a visible lede.

This reminds me of the Two Minutes Hate in 1984 when the Party watches films of Goldstein, mortal enemy of the party (a Trotsky-like fellow) speaking, and everyone must scream and shout and curse and stand out of their chairs in demonstrations of fury.

"But, but, we're on the side of good" a.k.a. The End Justifies the Means has never lead to any great outcome.

I'm legitimately nervous about the state of journalism in this country. But I'm about ten times more nervous when I read comments below that say, "Well, of course the press does this. Did you see what the Red Ties did this time?"

The Cotton op-ed was essentially advocating fascism. He was positively tumescent about the thought of using the army to kill American civilians. Regardless that it was published in bad faith (see: Cotton laughing on Twitter about it), the NYT op-ed was published without context, for an audience where over half are incapable of telling the difference between news and opinion (source: https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/confusio...). It was irresponsible and dangerous to publish it in the way it was published. The NYT admits it was a mistake to publish it and there were editorial failings in the process.

The old detached civil-libertarian 1000ft view, where "all opinions, however vile, deserve a platform from which they can be debated" is for an older time when these arguments were held in good faith.

Far from "a woke revolution suppressing speech", if we wish to keep free speech intact we each must work to deny a platform to fascist ideas (and the right in America is hurtling towards fascism if it is not there already) or there will not be free platforms for much longer.

Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. We are at that point with the American far right.