Phishing
First, you must understand the motive of them all.
Journalism has many meanings. Here, we refer to the common denominator of it all, a website which produces words like an LLM about current events with an unexplained fervor.
Your attention
With the force of a violent diarrhea, these outlets find placement in social medias, aggregators, podcast scripts and more. They repeat each other but rarely link to one another for fear of offboarding your clicks to a competing shitter.
We especially refer to outlets which treat political events like a hero-driven sport that will proceed into forever like proper quidditch, and thus like a revenue stream as renewable as sunlight.
In writing something (truly anything) about a current event, an outlet plots to swindle you of your attention from the outset. They published it for the purpose. You cannot read two postings at once, so if your eyes are on theirs, they have won the moment. Their prepared trap has already sprung.
Reputability in outlets is not real. You have been tempted to believe it is. However, it is not. Who or what is reputable exactly? The writer or the editor? Is it the CEO? Is the logo? Is it the ethos? Which of these cannot simply be changed in a private board meeting? Reputability may be an accident of converging factors, none of which can any cog force a delivery.
The form is mistaken for function. They all share the same sources, because they are so many birds with their gullets open for more, to be first or to fabricate scoops for karma. The first mover will mathematically get more attention when it matters most. Slow movers can often earn much more, but we will shortly discuss their slop.
Any outlet alchemically converts your attention to income by slipping you ads. Each one has hundreds (literally hundreds) of partners ready to assault you individually with invisible metrics collection software.
They are hunting you. They deploy clickbait for this purpose. Their headlines are meritless, either because they are so starkly factual that anyone else could have told it to you, or because they are fraudulent promises.
With the trap set and A/B-tested bait deployed, writers and editors hunt you like psychopaths with an hourly quota.
Your belief
The outlets which got away for so long with calling themselves Reputable, they are quite demented. These are afraid political incorrectness and so strive to launder what they know through a filter, some agreeable hue that destroys truths in favor of palatability. They may scoop, and these might link to one another like a polite applause held until paragraph four.
These will lowercase a screaming tyrant’s words. These will dutifully disseminate literally anything spoken by a prolific liar. These will leave out dire eccentricities in order to publish in an established canon of other keywords.
These use words like Allegedly when they know full well. These pretend to label Lies without invoking the word. These write sentences so long that the crucial verbs don’t appear until 36 words and four commas deep, and the nouns they discuss are strewn throughout like a constellation; Their sentences would be more readable if they redacted the filler. These refuse to release real photos to maintain an illusion of Decorum. These manipulate every word of their text to farm your belief in the level-headedness of an author whose name you didn’t even read at the byline.
These protect the brand first. These withhold the purpose of their article until the second page break after the ads embedded directly into the text, because their readers have more patience than the average and are ripest for that sort of exploitation.
Your hope
I have attended numerous panels where Journalists claim that it is sufficient to isolate Opinion from Fact with a small label at top, and maybe a special tab where all the Opinions live. Some prefer calling it Editorial, or a Column. This distinction from Fact is a hoax.
Journalists infuse their publication’s opinion via the text filter they compulsively deploy on every piece. They plan every word for how it will look with the filter applied.
Journalism at a mass media scale does not exist, and cannot. However, when polls are conducted about what people think qualifies as Journalism, you get diverse answers on specific outlets, blogs and podcasts. These all revolve around whether respondents think there is Real Work being done.
The astonishing super majority of Journalists are paid predators who hunt your attention for the benefit of a brand.
They write fan fiction about Susanne Collins and Lisa Murkowski bucking the so-called Republican Party whatever that is and call it Analysis. They will even ignore worthwhile discussion elsewhere to do it. They offer a hoax of hope for your preexisting opinions which they know you hold, and they will require you to tune in this week and next to find out if our heroes succeed. They never do, but they planted in you the desire to stay tuned to a wholly fabricated storyline.
It is masochism to compose and then tout these fan fiction pieces. It is snake oil missing its Opinion or Editorial or Column label. It is not Reporting to invent 3600 words of cope that Murkowski of all people will hold back the derailed freight train called The Senate.
They should Get Lost with their unlabeled Opinions. It is Fraud what they write, because they do it to get Paid.
Tranquilizer Journalism
Knowing what they are, you must observe what they all do.
They write headlines and Stories about how renters win when property manager cartels are fined miniscule dollars (the cost of business) for successfully inflating rent for a decade.
They fraudulently soothe you to believe this or that fine marks a victory, when in fact the Company whatever that is arrived at a settlement and admitted no wrongdoing at all.
They lie to you that you’re winning now when you are actively losing and being slaughtered on all sides. They fabricate Reporting on happenings and tell you to smile when you should be screaming. They don’t want you screaming, because then you’re not taking your Journalism meds.
These Democrats whatever those are will whine for a billionth impeachment vote with literally no hope of passing it, and Journalists across This Country will write about it like it has a shot because you might already believe it when they made you click your team’s headline. The Journalists do not care about anything but the click.
Their job is to burden you with a budding belief in the impossible, because with that hook in your cheek you will add them as Your Preferred Source On Google.
They will tell you all about What To Know while failing to tell you the only true information around: The vote won’t work. Even when they know it won’t work, they won’t write that. They season their fraud with words like “unlikely” and “expected to fail”, CYA language that exempts them from the embarrassment of being wrong.
There is no commitment to fact or truth, only the almighty click. If we all stopped clicking their work, they would be fired, regardless of what they write. Their content is worthless, not even a variable.
They write Stories like spammers massacre your inboxes for the off chance that you open it even by accident. They need you on their website so they can harass you with Hundreds Of Partners, their ads which cover your entire mobile phone screen and occlude the supposedly valuable content.
Their content has no value, but if they bait you into trying hard enough to read it anyway on the misguided belief there is something meaningful inside it, they are ready with a hoax to push into your eyeballs, broken up by six in-flow ads for other things to read before this one even got to the supposed point.
Their content expires within minutes, and they know it. They summarize their prior work in every new installment because they know full well you won’t click a link to that work. If you’re stupid enough to click a link, they’ll make sure it sends you somewhere that requires more clicks; They’ll turn whole phrases into topic keyword links that go nowhere at all but a soup of more articles.
They’ll purport to read court documents for you so that they don’t have to link to them, and then fail to quote anything at all from the same. The requirement that you trust them is paramount, because they have no intention of doing more than feeding you lines, any lines. They do it with editorialized photos at top, with garbage sub-titles which announce their intention to ignore all facts but the one their Story is about. They do this while claiming to be an authoritative source about What You Missed.
These outlets republish each other verbatim, pilfering the brand of another for their own paid clicks. The metrics of their success are not related to how much fact you know, or whether you notice which Stories were labeled as an Opinion or not. They need you to believe that if you return tomorrow, you can get more junk from them. 24/7, all year round.
Their authors are faceless for all that they look like AI-generated headshots. There is no personal authenticity in one word of what they produce. They are laying out the bait so that you take it, and keep taking it. News aggregators, from Apple to Ground, will refuse to display bylines on any Story they display, though they will include a pretty picture. Their authorship is irrelevant, because the brand title is all that matters.
The hordes of paid predators calling themselves Journalists could all be replaced overnight and not one word in the tempo of their combined Journalism would change.
What does that tell you?
They know they have burned you out on bad news, so they write with fraud in their hearts to make you believe that doing nothing at all is working.
You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.
