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Friday, August 17, 2018

“Conservative Journalists” are an Oxymoron

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - If you're a journalist, and I know your political leanings, you're doing something wrong.

I have to speak out about this, again. Proper journalism is critical to KoopaTV. I've long been at the point where if I suspect a story to be FAKE NEWS, I won't commentate on it. I won't betray the trust that you have in KoopaTV by using untrustworthy, bad sources. That list is a lot longer than the good sources list. This makes it increasingly harder to do my job as an editorialist. I don't even believe most of what I read. I'm very skeptical.

Anyway, here is what is a non-starter for me: Biased, ideological people claiming to be journalists. Since the mainstream media is clearly unreliable and primarily made up of FAKE NEWS left-wingers, a whole new crop of new media figures claiming to be journalists have popped out of the Internet, trying to add balance by... being just as biased and ideological, just in the right-wing direction.

No. That's not how it's supposed to work. Journalists are supposed to give objective facts in their reporting, and leave the spin to folks like me. Journalists aren't supposed to care about the outcome of elections, or be rooting for anyone. If that seeps into your reporting, it's tainted, and as a consumer, I need to work all that much harder to try to filter what the actual truth is. (That makes you an enemy of the people, by the way.) If you're reporting with an agenda, then you're not a journalist. You're an activist. Journalism might be boring and no-thrills sometimes, but wanting to have fun doesn't give you an excuse to change what journalism means.

Which brings me to “conservative journalists.” I mentioned how they popped out of the Internet — mostly social media. Now social media platforms are exerting their biases, and “shadow-banning” conservative voices, including “conservative journalists.” Social media companies want to shape the public dialogue, since most people stupidly use social media and get their news and whatever from it. Of course, these companies are anti-conservative, so they hide conservatives from your timelines, suspend them, or “de-verify” them, raising doubt that they're even the person running the account.

This all goes against my personal experience with Facebook, where they banned me for being a Koopa, not for being a right-wing provocateur. (In fact, they refused to delete the non-administrated KoopaTV Facebook page for hate speech.)

I can tell you that KoopaTV gets a majority of our views from organic search. We haven't ever relied on social channels to get us traffic, since it's always been a rigged pay-to-play system. If we get shadow-banned off search results, then, yeah, THAT will be a big problem for us.

This article was written as a response to what I've seen on Twitter (a bad social media platform that somehow keeps winning KoopaTV's best social media awards every year) about “conservative journalists” (like whomever “Laura Loomer” is) being “de-verified” by Twitter, along with a bunch of other “conservative journalists.” The whole designation makes me sick. Obviously, social media companies insidiously having this kind of influence is bad, but it gets down to a battle of two monstrous trends that are bad for society. I don't want any part in either.


KoopaTV relies on quality journalism to base this site's editorials on. KoopaTV's core values of truth and levity mean that the world, based on actual truthful events, is funny enough to exist in. No need to make up FAKE NEWS for humour. Activists on all sides of the political spectrum can pretend to be presenting the truth but they're really not, which is dangerous. Please support KoopaTV through these dangerous times by sharing with your friends, and give KoopaTV your feedback in KoopaTV's feedback forms!


Ludwig has already written before (several times) about the fall of journalism.
The one social media platform that KoopaTV is on that actually cares about freedom of speech and doesn't shadow-ban anyone is GAB.

4 comments :

  1. Can one ever be truely free of bias?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the past, I've argued no, when it came to developing games.
      https://www.koopatv.org/2016/02/eiji-aonuma-versus-developer-ideologies.html

      In fact, I said in that article...

      "You cannot take ideology out of game design, because games are designed by people who naturally let their biases and thoughts influence their art. Rather than try to self-censor your art and consciously look for and systematically remove these biases, you should just let the freedom flow. Your product will probably be better to your intended audience."

      Now, there's a difference in how I feel regarding works in the creative industries (like games) versus journalism, which is not supposed to be a creative industry.


      There are journalists out there that keep things to just-the-facts, like Jamie Dupree. It might require some editing of yourself and self-awareness and perspective, but you can minimise or almost entirely eliminate your bias when journalism-ing.

      Of course, it all starts in why one is entering the journalism industry to begin with. The "conservative journalists" are in it just to be activists. They're entering it specifically to serve as a counter-weight to the mainstream media. That's a bad starting place in the quest to be free of bias, of course.

      Delete
  2. If a news outlet tells you that they are fair and balanced or free from any bias, chances are they are not telling the truth. Walter Cronkite must be rolling over in his grave because of how less objective reporting the news has become. If you have not already read it, I suggest checking out "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" by Neil Postman. It details how television has ruined the way we obtain information. It was written before the Internet was a huge thing, but it is still relevant to this day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reminder that KoopaTV's own site-wide text below our banner, on every page, is...

      "KoopaTV embraces entertainment as both a hobby and a way to present information, and has published over a thousand articles on the videogame industry."

      So, of course, I'm not gonna say don't be entertaining, but... someone out there has to be giving the straight news without an agenda.
      It's sort of like how science has lost credibility, since a lot of so-called scientists are also just activists, and they're subverting the scientific method by having a conclusion before gathering data.

      What "journalism" has turned into is much the same way now.

      Delete

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