Study Hall Digest 11/27/2017

Hi

I’ve honestly been waiting years for a New York Times reckoning. People on the left and right have called the paper’s coverage of politics unfair for decades, but finally this week seemingly everyone got on board. The paper’s misdeeds went viral, and were even covered negatively by news organizations usually quick to defend the Grey Lady, like MSNBC and the Washington Post. That Nazi profile deserved all the criticism it got for sure, and the Times’ defense of it was weak as hell. Of course you should be able to cover Nazis, but there’s nothing new or noteworthy about Nazis that look like your next door neighbors. There are a lot of white supremacists in America. There always have been. They’ve never really been a fringe movement. The Times claims they’re covering Nazis because they’ve gone mainstream, but really what’s happened is that white supremacists have started to seem more normal and THAT’S IN LARGE PART BECAUSE OF THE SYMPATHIZING, NORMALIZING COVERAGE PROVIDED BY PLACES LIKE THE NEW YORK TIMES. The most recent Times feature went out of its way to normalize the Nazi. It selected facts that made him seem more moderate, it skirted around obvious questions that would make the Nazi look bad, it promoted the dude’s fuckin’ website for godssakes.

The Times’ response—that it should cover Nazis because they are a part of our current political landscape—would make more sense if the paper covered anything else (e.g. socialism and the victims of Nazism (where’s the glowing profile of Heather Heyer?)) with such a forgiving lens.

Buried in the deluge of criticism about the Nazi piece was a truly insane Times piece about Ben Shapiro, who doesn’t think trans people are real and believes Trayvon Martin deserved to be murdered. The Times described him as a prizefighter, a gladiator, and the “cool kid’s philosopher,” whatever the fuck that means. And let’s not forget the other Times humdinger from this week: Tom Friedman’s press release for the Saudi government, which the Saudi government literally turned into a press release.

But this of course is the modus operandi of the paper of record. It wants to sit itself comfortably at the intellectual center of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which means that it needs to constantly pull both ends of the political spectrum into a lens it understands. Nazis are now normal, and leftists either don’t exist or can be ignored as a fringe. This is what the Times has always done, but it seems people are finally getting fed up with it.

It’s truly depressing to think how much media organizations are paying celebrities to post their content, a practice which might not even be legal!

How fast is BuzzFeed declining? Seems like very fast?

Welp, it was nice freelancing. See y’all later. :[

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Final Thoughts

Haha but also :/