Today, at Al Jazeera, Sarah Kendzior wrote one of the most sensible media analysis I’ve read in a good while: When mainstream media is the lunatic fringe. I don’t have anything to add to this so, rather than comment, here are a few choice quotes but I highly recommend clicking through and reading the whole thing.
But is the mainstream media any different in its biases and cruelty? It does not appear to be. Mainstream media cruelty is actually more dangerous, for it sanctions behaviour that, were it blogged by an unknown, would likely be written off as the irrelevant ramblings of a sociopath.[…]
It is not surprising that people lack empathy. What is surprising is that unbridled antipathy toward innocent people continues to be sanctioned in an era where fatuous arguments – and terrible ethics – are called out en masse. For critics of mainstream media cruelty, social media is a means to prevent lunacy from being accepted as logic. To the mainstream, it is mere “snark”.
Mainstream media cruelty targets those who lack power. Their crime is daring to exist. Along with cancer patients and transgender individuals, racial minorities are a frequent focus.[…]
In the American media [ED: word by word this applies exactly to Dutch media and I’d venture, European in general], white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems have no alternative but to matter – for they structure the limitations of their lives – are locked out of the discussion.
Really, click through and read the whole thing.
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