The Media-Activist Complex

A new year, fresh displays of media irresponsibility. Some unlucky members of the public found themselves framed as oppressors victimising a marginalized person and the target of the usual woke barrage. The Covington boys were fortunate that just enough hard video evidence existed to force the press (well, some of it) to grudgingly admit fault. The public reaction to this latest media debacle was more one of exasperation than surprise. Few expect better from our commentariat, and indeed scarcely a month later they returned to form by widely publicising what turned out to be Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax. A question hung in the air — “why are they like this?” How do the same mistakes get made, again and again?

Continually the media employs the same script, assigning preconceived signifiers of oppressor and oppressed groups to those involved in disputes and uncritically repeating the story of the latter. The “oppressed” is normally an activist consciously playing this part, who is only too happy to help the journalist tell this story. The two enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. This media-activist complex owes its current prominence to the pressures of the internet age. It lends itself beautifully to clickbait headlines designed to maximize ad revenue. However, more than this it provides a reassuring narrative in which the commentariat has cloaked itself amid encroachment from alternative media. Service to self-professed victims is supposedly what distinguishes them as real journalists. Those outside the relationship suffer, as decent people are tarred as bigots whilst vulnerable groups’ concerns are reduced to a dramatization of oppression.

*

Objectivity in journalism has always been controversial. Well before poststructuralist insights into the dubious nature of truth claims, the unavoidable selectivity of reporting and the influence of money and power was said to make a mockery of the idea. A variety of solutions emerged to this perennial problem, one being advocacy journalism. Academic staff in journalism who support this method practice critical pedagogy influenced by the Frankfurt School, which considered objectivity a mask for existing power relations – thus advocacy journalism is more attentive to power imbalances which shape supposed “objectivity,”. If objectivity is impossible and bias inevitable, the only lodestar reporting has is the moral obligation to lend bias toward the powerless and marginalized Other, reason enough for “cultivating the media activist.” As well as moral weight this purportedly ensures accuracy, as the standpoint theory cited by such educators holds that the nearest to truth is furthest from power. Though such valorisation of the marginal as a source of moral and epistemological authority has its problems, cold objectivity plainly has been weathered more painfully by some groups than others, and advocacy journalism can be vital. However, when seen not as a tool for particular cases, but as standard practice, problems result.

“Marginalized” perspectives and instances of oppression are suddenly in constant demand. Who supplies? Enter the activist, who publically performs the role of marginalized person and provides its moral and epistemic weight for journalists’ use. In turn journalists publically validate these often highly politicized and particular activists as legitimate representatives of their victim group. The two have a mutually beneficial relationship, each reinforcing the other’s credibility. Hence Covington. Rather than ask both parties and bystanders, the press went immediately and only to the activist, Nathan Philips – whom they knew would tell them what they want to print – and uncritically regurgitated his dubious story. In advocacy journalism such hasty, biased reporting is permissible when covering a “marginalized person” suffering under oppressors – but is necessary to establish them as such in the first place, justifying itself retroactively.

Appeal to the Other is no solution to the problem of objectivity, since one’s idea of the marginal is itself product of one’s own biases. Reporters don’t somehow absorb and broadcast the unified perspective of whole underprivileged social groups, but select for activists who share their politics. More serious than this unresolved problem for journalism academics, however, are the consequences of advocacy journalism for the people sucked into the news-cycle. Often-ignoble activists get a free pass, whilst those they dislike get railroaded. The media-activist procedure crunches every event or dispute involving an activist into the same story of the marginalized resisting the oppressor.

This mode has proved particularly attractive in the tricky age of digital media. To reiterate the familiar story, as physical circulation has plummeted, outlets have struggled to make online readership financially viable. Subscription-models were mostly rejected in favour of maximising hits and thus ad revenue. Younger ventures like Buzzfeed, Vice and Gawker are (or were) infamous for their clickbait content, but even ostensibly serious institutions fell to this temptation. Social justice marries well with clickbait, making highly-politicized conflagrations of practically any event which garners outraged hate-views from all political persuasions. Further, where once professional standards prevented the tendentious reporting that clickbait requires, denial of objectivity and sacralisation of the marginalized provides moral pretext for such forthright bias.

However, greater than financial insecurity is journalists’ status anxiety. If anyone can blog, vlog, podcast etc. the stature (even purpose) of the fourth estate appears dubious. For those covering substantive topics like high politics, geopolitics, the economy and such that require expertise and connections in high places, this is less of a concern. But many among those with less precise remits who write as "commentators" or "opinion-makers" have only a legacy masthead separating them from any Joe and Jane Bloggs with a blog. Young writers (a growing number of media employees owing to their cheaper labour), who have aspired to and bitterly competed to join mainstream outlets, find the evaporation of the status this once conferred particularly troubling.

Old critiques of objective journalism claimed objectivity was a ritual intended to obscure the limitations of the reporting process and confer reliability on the product, “the sacred knowledge, the secret ability of the newsman which differentiates him from other people.” If so, advocacy journalism is the new attempt. It serves as a shot of adrenaline to the old "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" shtick. What distinguishes the modern journalist is knowing that objectivity is impossible, and employing bias consciously in defence of marginalized groups.

Hence efforts to tar alternative digital media as inherently spurious and reactionary. Last year the Data and Society activist group put out a report smearing swathes of Youtube channels as a engines of far-right radicalisation. Despite obvious flaws, multiple outlets duly gave it their seal of approval, keen to condemn spaces away from the enlightened eye of real journalists as shelters for old prejudices. The Vox response to the Intellectual Dark Web idea was similar, predictably painting it as a movement of men hostile to women for no reason in particular. A movement which in part criticizes the press for misrepresenting reasonable disagreements with activists as bigotry against marginalized groups… is misrepresented by the media as bigotry against marginalized groups. The new journalist consciously performs the role of heroic ally to the downtrodden as his symbolic self-justification, a role with built-in defences against criticism.

The viciousness with which the press fell on the Covington boys becomes intelligible in this light. For if there is to be a hero there must also be a villain. They were fortunate that the weight of evidence was too great to ignore. Not all are so lucky.

*

Vilification has become a genre of its own. For intersectional activists resistance to power is the summum bonum, and all axes of oppression ultimately prop up the central pole of hated power – the straight white male. Hapless civilians like the Covington boys are made into signifiers of this category – their supposedly not treating a native American with due deference quickly extrapolated into their being misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc. A similar phenomenon occurs with individuals like Jordan Peterson – opposition to particular activist claims (enforcement of novel gender pronouns, or insistence on gender as purely social construct) are collapsed into a presumed totality of sexism, racism, homophobia etc. by activists – then repeated by the media. Hence too why so many outlets entertained such a palpably ridiculous story as Jussie Smollett’s for so long, and other hate crimes like it. The villain must be everywhere so the heroic ally can always stand against it, and anyone with a bad word to say about activists must be a villain.  This delegitimizes reasonable disagreement with left-wing activists, and understandably hurts and angers those so smeared. Reporters concerned about political polarisation and hostility to their profession need look no further than media conduct for an explanation.

For those who define their professional identity as always standing athwart abuses of power are heedless of their own. Particularly dangerous are those who consider themselves oppressed people, writing from the margins in the Guardian, the New York Times or the Washington Post (I know circulation is low, but still). Bizarrely but earnestly they presume themselves to be “punching up” despite their prominence and power, blithely assigning the “oppressor” signifier to their hapless targets. Writers who perceived the Covington boys as their own oppressors were only too happy to condemn them, such as a senior culture writer at Buzzfeed who likened them to tyrannical male students handing in their homework late.

Often the people who suffer most are the very vulnerable people journalists’ idolize. Manichean oppressor and oppressed coverage elides the more mundane causes of social ills. Consider transgender homicide. The Independent, the New York Times and Guardian repeat claims from activists that direct “transphobia, misogyny and racism” is the motivator, as evidenced by the preponderance of trans women of colour among victims. In the logic of intersectional activism, oppression originates at the apex of cis white male power now embodied in the progressive mind by Trump, and runs all the way to trans women of colour at the very bottom.

The cases seem contrary to this narrative. Of the 28 US trans homicide case in 2017 there were 13 of 28 cases in which the ethnicity of both victim and suspect are publically known. Of these, nine were intra-racial. As for interracial violence, one mixed race victim was killed by a black man, one black woman was killed by a multiracial gang, one black woman was killed by a hispanic woman, and one black woman was killed by a white man. As the intra-racial nature of much trans homicide and diversity of ethnicity among perpetrators suggests, the actual causes are likely more mundane than forces of oppression. These cases involve mutual (often familial) violence, self-defence, justified police force and petty crime. Further, from 2008 to 2018 62% of 2982 trans murders worldwide involved sex workers, a notoriously dangerous profession. Ameliorating the violence affecting trans people requires targeting the poverty in which they and perpetrators alike suffer. Family rejection, police mistreatment and employment discrimination are the bigotries which could be more easily and productively addressed. Instead public attention is focused toward the media’s preferred idea of direct bigotry of Trumpian origin. Such reporting distorts politicians perception of these problems, (US Senator Kennedy now claims such murders are “hate-based, hate-inspired violence”) misdirecting attention from more effective solutions.

Thus journalists exploit those they purport to care for, flattening out the complexity of social problems into a theatrical battle of oppressed and oppressor. Hate crime hoaxes like Smollett’s and false rape cases like that at UVA are uncommon, but the media disproportionately picks these needles from the haystack because they are designed by activists to suit their narrative. When they fall through, public goodwill toward real victims declines. Of course, most in these vulnerable groups are decent, honest people — but in the media-activist complex the scum rises to the top, to the detriment of all.

*

The complexity and plurality of our polities is elided by this media-activist complex, as the boilerplate narrative of victims and tyrants necessary for the journalist to play their preferred role is used in every event. Journalists should think more critically about the categories of oppressed and oppressor which justify such tendentious reporting — or at least be less hostile to those who do. Impartiality isn’t a privilege of the journalist to be eschewed, but a protection for her subjects. Journalists who dispense with it do so to benefit not the marginalized, but themselves.

This may seem unkind to the fourth estate. The media, in particular its more specialized members, have expertise and access vital to communicating current events to the public, and is larger than the opinion and commentary patch I have analysed here. However, this section has influence beyond its size, and has poisoned public discourse far outside its remit. A range of issues, from education to sexual violence, immigration to free speech, are only written of in terms of the oppression of marginalised groups, almost as if journalists can no longer think in any other terms The resulting public discussions are reliably inflammatory, not to mention fruitless.

But I can end on an optimistic note, hopefully demystifying hostility to the press, especially for those baffled by apathy and even celebration at billionaires single-handedly destroying media outlets. Consider that, in light of recent years of misbehaviour, many are reasonably less concerned with the media protecting us from billionaires than with billionaires protecting us from the media. Anger at the press is more easily explained by its own misconduct than Russian bots, and is therefore well within their power to address — if they can bear a bit of introspection. By challenging this ubiquitous narrative our political climate may become more manageable and perhaps even amiable. The time could be just about right — though it proved lucrative for a time, clickbait's strongest purveyors are now feeling the same pinch as older outlets. Perhaps as this model loses financial value the press will prove more amenable to criticisms of it.