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Objectivity in journalism is not only a pipe dream but a psyop, designed to mislead you about what media really is and how it really functions. Intrigued? Let’s dig in. . . .
The post No, the Dinosaur Journos Have …
At Balliol, Boris Johnson’s old Oxford college, there was a society, now dormant, called the Hysteron Proteron Club. Members were required to live an entire day backwards at least once a term, and discharged the duty conscientiously. The 12-hour ordeal …
If there is anything more dull than listening to acquaintances relating their dreams, it can only be reading journalists complaining about Twitter. Yet since Elon Musk spent $44 billion on becoming its main character, the topic has become inescapable. As …
There is something horribly seductive about the spectacle of extreme violence: it’s disgusting, gut-wrenching, appalling. It’s also impossibly compelling in its extremity and strangeness: just look at it.
Anyone who builds a career out of watching such material, whether it’s …
It was the kind of correction you love to see. The story that originally broke in the final days of August, about a young black athlete being racially heckled in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah’s Brigham Young …
For the past two years, the Western media has taken that pernicious little term, “Zero Covid”, at face value. While the rest of the world saw rocketing caseloads and death rates, during a key 18-month period China reported two (yes, …
Exploitation, in the debate about strip clubs, is treated as a given and an open question simultaneously. Someone is being used, and someone else is doing the using: we’re certain of this, even if we haven’t yet figured out the …
With most of the world’s information only a click away, one would have assumed that ours would be the most enlightened generation in human history. We may have lost the rote-learning skills and depth of knowledge of our grandparents, but …
The media misremembers the Watergate scandal of 50 years ago in two significant respects: the first for an understandable reason, although one that ultimately is unflattering to the media. But the second misrepresentation defies explanation. Let’s take the puzzling one …
The Star Wars franchise has always been a cultural mirror, with each manifestation reflecting the fears, hopes, and political themes of the moment it was created. The original 1977 film was steeped in the anxieties of a postwar landscape; the …
It’s an unmasking worthy of a demented superhero story: the exposure, after months of intrigue, of the elusive political operative known as Libs of TikTok. You may have missed this story — part secret identity drama, part media gatekeeping controversy, …
Pride of place in my breakfast room in my home is a large sculpture that I commissioned to celebrate The Sun’s controversial Gotcha headline which followed the news that we had sunk the Argentine navy’s cruiser the General Belgrano.…
Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine consumed the media, New York Times columnist Jay Caspian Kang and Substacker Matthew Yglesias published near-simultaneous critiques of the notions of “disinformation” and “misinformation”. This convergence among prominent liberals was significant. These and …
The absurdly long table Vladimir Putin sits at, whether with Emmanuel Macron last month, or his terrified subordinates now, was the giveaway. There is stately furniture, then there is 20 feet of thuddingly symbolic paranoia. Isolated during the pandemic, padlocked …
