Social media drains life out of journalism
This is not a good time to be a writer. Which is odd, because everyone writes these days, for free, on Twitter and Facebook, in self-published novels on Amazon, for Medium, newsletters, basement podcasts — and of course informally in irate notes left on my car windshield.
Clearly, many self-proclaimed disrupters yearn to write in what they see as formal golden places of the mainstream: magazines, newspapers and actual hardback books backed by agents and editors. Judging by Twitter (don’t), their resentment of newsrooms with structures, staff and in-house lawyers eats away at their souls.
This puzzles me. The informal online unpaid world is a more interesting place. If you filter it correctly — which means narrowly, selectively, ardently — it offers ideas, nuggets of insight, terrific humour and news like lightning. It also hands out fear, so much so that established publications are being drained of interest.
I very much dislike seeing writers lose their job or platform over badly phrased tweets or tweeted allegations of BadThink and WrongSay. It’s fine to disagree with people, but it is not fine to create a hashtag and gang up on them so that polite mainstream editors, blissfully unaware of hyperactive hate on social media, are made to see disagreement as an important event.
Disagreement is a cloud, a fume. It passes. It carbonates journalism and keeps it lively. The effect of Twitter call-outs is to dullify journalism. When was the last time a news website made you laugh? Open a window into a part of the world you knew nothing about? Offer a startling opinion freshly considered?
Social media is to blame. Columnists are afraid to joke or be sarcastic. Reporters fear providing context in a news story lest it be considered bias. Much of the fun has drained out of the media kitchen sink to be dispersed in a million social-media droplets, as they say of coronavirus. Twitter is interesting (in a life-ruining sort of way) and as a result, journalism favours boring readers into submission. It’s safer.
As this continues, newspapers and especially the CBC (with an ombudsman who must send frantically hardworking reporters into despair) become homogenous spaces, like every Airbnb condo you see online: white walls, boho rug, grey couch, faux fernery. A column becomes an airport lounge, a generic area that people pass through but don’t remember.
I thought of this when the editor of Guardian US, fearing backlash, took exception to a writer’s tweet making a mild joke about American government funding of Israel. The writer, Nathan Robinson, a socialist magazine editor, deleted the tweet and apologized, as requested. He was quietly dropped anyway.
It was unfair, and when I saw Robinson speak, I understood why. He’s an interesting young journalist with an actual personality. He dresses like a dandy, is charming and self-deprecating, and unafraid to reveal his distress — in other words, a loose cannon.
Never drop an interesting writer out of fear. That would leave you with plodders.
Fear is a damp blanket; it muffles innovation, ideas, jokes. A daily newspaper should emerge as a fresh loaf each morning, not a bag of stale crumbs for pigeons.
Headlines are increasingly dull: verbless, non-specific, “one-year-old child” instead of “baby,” “lactating individuals” instead of “breastfeeding women,” stories clogged with jargon (policing, education and health care sectors are so thick with the stuff they could insulate your attic) and filler quotes that add little.
Why say “person who is experiencing homelessness” rather than “homeless?” Because social justice advocates demand it. But I’m guessing a homeless person worries more about being frozen to that wet subway grate right now rather than in 2022. For them, it’s life that day, not theory.
It’s more than that. I care deeply about autism, but if I write about the topic, self-identifying “autistic people” and their parents who prefer the term “people with autism” are at war, and someone will take offence. I want to write about women’s issues without being called a “TERF” (a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which I certainly am not). I want to write about whether atheists can seek asylum in Canada, and how women can deal with sexual harassment, winning without destroying their careers.
But so many people are permanently offended now. They write to kill writing.