Stop Treating Tweets As News!
In the increasingly distant past, I would occasionally be introduced as a journalist. It was flattering in that when I think of journalists I think of Woodward and Bernstein or Edward R. Murrow.
At the very least I see journalists as people willing and able to venture out from their laptops to talk to people and engage in a very real way with the issues and concerns of the day.
I do not think of myself as a journalist. I’m not just incapable of following in the footsteps of journalistic legends like Walter Cronkite; I’m also incapable of venturing out from behind my laptop, talking to people and/or engaging with the issues and concerns of the day.
That was the problem with You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me. I convinced myself that I was finally going to push myself out of my comfort zone and be a real journalist, like Hunter S. Thompson.
It turns out that I was incapable of talking to strangers so I figured I would research my book the old fashioned way: by going crazy and doing a fuck ton of drugs.
Somehow risking death and insanity seemed easier and preferable to interacting with people I didn’t already know.
What I did NOT do was visit Twitter and Reddit, see what people were posting about the shows I was attending, summarize those posts and then call it a day.
I seem to be alone in that respect. I don’t hold people who consider themselves journalists to terribly high standards but I do hold them to some standards.
At the very least, if you consider yourself a journalist then you should not use Twitter or Reddit as a primary or even secondary source. In my mind that is cheating. It’s lazy. It’s doing the bare minimum for an audience that half expects to be insulted on a daily basis.
It enrages me to click on an article naively expecting that the writer did some iota of work beyond seeing what’s trending on Twitter, compiling sassy comments about trending topics, throwing in a paragraph or two of context, then passing off what they just did as an article rather than just more meaningless content and perpetually being disappointed.
“Articles” collecting comments from folks on Twitter or Redditors are just a tiny step up from disingenuous clickbait pieces as far as I’m concerned.
They don’t create anything of value, they merely recycle. They’re not news, they’re content. Meaningless, meaningless content.
As with so much that’s wrong and toxic in our society, Donald Trump is partially to blame. Because he was addicted to Twitter and used it so exhaustively and exhaustingly and also was the President of the United States, Trump’s obnoxious Twitter account WAS news, regrettably enough.
Journalists pretty much HAD to treat Trump’s Twitter tantrums as legitimate news and not just the ravings of a madman.
That’s not true of Joe Biden. To cover Biden you actually have to do real journalistic work because his Twitter account is boring as shit. He doesn’t insult ANYONE on it. It gives you NOTHING whereas Trump’s account was an overflowing buffet of newsworthy nonsense.
Let’s stop treating Twitter and Reddit responses to the news of the day as news in and of itself. We may fucking suck as a people but even we are better than that.
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