Study Hall Digest 9/26/2017
Hi
Just a reminder: Come to our event on Oct. 4, where I’ll be chatting with some cool people from Mask Magazine, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and The New Republic about media in the age of Trump.
Picking up from a discussion thread earlier this week: Google and a few other private companies are funding “Report for America” to bring 1,000 journalists into small and mid-sized newsrooms within the next five years. Sounds good on paper, but the people behind the project explicitly compare it to Teach for America, which has become controversial for essentially using the cheap labor of out-of-towners to replace unionized teachers. I could imagine the same happening here. And, as Aaron Cantú points out, many journalists have a white savior complex. Is this a form of colonization? (BTW the BBC Radio started as a service to give British colonizers updates from the homeland as they invaded other countries—someone should write about this). Would be cool if the program had some local hiring requirements at least.
BuzzFeed, the quirky (but sometimes serious), fun-loving, teen-targeting, CIA-obsessed cool fun super great media outlet :))))).
CNN is also bad, which I think I’ve said before.
Milo Yiannopoulos tried to host a “Free Speech Week” at U.C. Berkeley. It was a disaster. Un the process he targeted Jack Smith of Mic, telling his followers he was a Nazi that they should look out for him near Berkeley’s campus. Moral of the story: Journalists, stay safe out there!
Mark Zuckerberg released a statement saying the company will more closely monitor fake news and propaganda, and be more transparent about political advertising. That’s good, but it’s obvious what Zuck is trying to do: increase Facebook’s good will, and show the public that it can be trusted as a news platform. Without doing that, they risk being regulated by the U.S. government (which is probably not gonna happen under Trump, but could potentially be a big issue in subsequent elections).
More evidence pivoting to video is just a nice way of saying “going out of business soon.”
Final Thoughts
This is how we all work right?
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