The Tool That Is Twitter

In my Media Comment columns at the Jerusalem Post, wrttten conjointly with Eli Pollak, we have highlighted an aspect of Twitter that we see as harmful to objective and fair journalism which is the way it leads journalists to become personal and then strident and nasty in their conversation which spills over back into their reporting.

In this June 8 NYTimes article, there is revealed another aspect, one in which the reporter feels obliged, because of the mass feedback that Twitter generates in an intoxicating fashion, to respond to what his/her audience wants to hear:

The central vein for reporters, producers, activists and a vast national audience was Twitter, which had already begun subtly shifting the power dynamic innews. It steered coverage. When John Eligon of The Times published a largely sympathetic profile of Mr. Brown that described him as “no angel,” it setoff outrage on Twitter as a symbol of a style of journalism that seemed too ready to explain away police violence. “They had a point” about the phrase, Mr. Eligon recalled last week. Twitter “did make it feel like you’re more accountable to a broader audience and a more diverse audience.”The platform also gave the younger reporters “freedom to establish their own stilts in ways we didn’t have without someone handing us the keys,” said Trymaine Lee, then 35 and reporting for MSNBC. “Before you’re at the whim of the newsroom,’’ said Mr. Lee. Buton Twitter, the young journalists received “positive reinforcement,they’re getting thousands and thousands of people saying, ‘Yes, we do like that.’”

To borrow radical progressive political terminology, this is media weaponizing in support not of social or economic or political change and improvement but in support of revolution while jettisoning any normative ethical professionalism.

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