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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

He's right. When I started writing in the 90's, there was an idea of journalism as telling stories in the principled defence of minority interests and as a public check on institutional power, but it has mutated into the unhinged and corrupt prosecution of deviance from official narrative lines. Social media is just a way for neighbours to denounce one another in a new snitch culture that rivals any 20th century system. I'm usually a couple of years ahead of the curve on trends, and I even dropped Slack last year because it's not a place for real discourse.

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That's funny, because what I remember about journalism in the 80s was a common sense of confusion and dismay that the job of a journalist had mutated from "reporting facts" to "telling stories" -- specifically I remember polls of graduating journalism majors; for the first time the claimed motivation for choosing the field was "changing the world."

I don't know your age, but I suspect it's more likely you're finally reaching the point of realizing how shit everyone and everything is.

My experience was stupidly believing the idealistic crap I was taught when young only to eventually be forced to realize we're not much better than the ones we villify.

I guess my point is that you should consider whether journalism has really gone to shit or if you're less idealistic than you used to be. There is hope in the thought that you're less idealistic. It means the world has always been kind of shit, yet has survived, so perhaps you're just a bit more alarmist than you should be.

Or atleast that's what I tell myself.

The longer I live the more comfortable I am with my inevitable death. At the very least it will mean that my disappointment in sapiens will someday have an end.

>there was an idea of journalism as telling stories in the principled defence of minority interests and as a public check on institutional power

To “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”, as it were.

> ...from official narrative lines

I always laugh at this. Which "official narrative lines?"

During the Trump administration, many people complained that all journalism was too anti-Trump, and anti-Trump voters (who voted in the majority in 2016). So was this "prosecution" of the views of the party in power by journalists enforcing the "official narrative," or against it? Was it defending the minority's interests or the majority's?

Somehow, everyone has it in their minds that "PC culture" is the real official line, no matter who is in power. This is how, when all the social media apps were censoring Trump, everyone just accepted the perception that it was big-government censoring the little people, even though it was literally censoring the people in power.

> has mutated into the unhinged and corrupt prosecution of deviance

You realize all those criticisms apply very well to this very piece, right? Just read it again. The hook from the lede paragraph invokes, literally, an:

"[...] unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power."

I mean, the point is well taken, but the call is coming from inside the house.

And, FWIW: the whole thing is about how Taylor Lorenz dinged Andreessen for using the word "retarded" on a call. And it turns out, I guess, that someone said it, but not Andreessen. Is that really worth this screed?

> And, FWIW: the whole thing is about how Taylor Lorenz dinged Andreessen for using the word "retarded" on a call. And it turns out, I guess, that someone said it, but not Andreessen. Is that really worth this screed?

I think this is a good microcosm of a broader trend. Is it itself indicative that the sky is falling? No, of course not. No single black man getting shot by the cops in murky circumstances is itself indicative of systemic racism. Rather, those cases, and the Lorenz case serve as useful foci for talking about what I think are real problems with society.

I do think that journalists aligning themselves against privacy and free speech in the name of fighting "misinformation" and "hate speech" is a real problem. This case is not what makes it a problem, but it is a good vignette demonstrating it.

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