Mastodawn

Jay Rosen Nov 19, 2022

"What I’m finding most satisfying about Mastodon, and I’m seeing a lot of other journalists feel this, is that it actually forces you to ask and confront some of these questions and to make active choices. Even if Mastodon were to remain Twitter’s very tiny stepbrother, I would still like to be part of a Mastodon journalist community because I think we got lazy as a field, and we let Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and, god help us, Elon Musk decide..."

—@adamdavidson

https://themarkup.org/newsletter/hello-world/mastodons-moment

Mastodon’s Moment – The Markup

A conversation with Adam Davidson

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Tofu Golem Nov 20, 2022

@jayrosen_nyu @adamdavidson
Journalists didn't just get lazy. They failed as watchdogs on the powerful. Profoundly.

The "he said/she said" reporting without fact-checking allowed lies to spread like wildfire.

The constant "but both sides" arguments normalized extremism.

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Levantine Native Nov 20, 2022

@tofugolem @jayrosen_nyu @adamdavidson I didn’t see any “but both sides arguments.” I saw opinion posted as news, I saw an epic pandemic of sloth among journalists, and I saw activism instead of journalism. Journalism isn’t supposed to be activism except for editorial pages. It’s supposed to be about fact-finding and providing those facts to the reader so they can then form their own opinions about those facts.

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Tofu Golem

@levantinenative
They do it constantly. Sometimes subtly, as when they use "everything is so polarized now" to make it sound like both sides made things this way, other times in a far more blatant way, such as when they dig up a random anti-vaccine crackpot to tell the "other side" from an established scientific consensus, and present both sides as having equally valid points.