The suffering of others brought out the worst in people who express opinions, and supposedly report the news, on social media and in the press.
The suffering of others brought out the worst in people who express opinions, and supposedly report the news, on social media and in the press.
O f all the recent trends in modern news media, few are as loathsome as the press taking its editorial cues from Twitter.
This trend can be seen in major media’s rush to cover entirely niche topics that appear to be of great import on social media but are of interest to only a small fraction of a small fraction. The Trump years were particularly bad in this regard, as esoteric, in-the-weeds topics were regularly given the “breaking news!” treatment merely because a dedicated clique of “resistance” tweeters obsessed over the story. (This specific phenomena served as the basis for the funniest satirical headline published in the entire Trump era.)
We saw this trend in 2021, when members of the press bizarrely shamed audiences for being interested in the then-mysterious disappearance of social-media influencer Gabby Petito, claiming that audience interest in such stories smacked of racism. The New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, etc. complained of “missing white woman syndrome,” alleging that Americans simply don’t care when a woman of color disappears. These newsrooms, by the way, dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy to covering Petito’s disappearance. Ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted a missing-person alert featuring a woman of color, challenging his followers to care as much about her disappearance as they cared about the story CNN itself covered wall-to-wall. Unsurprisingly, until his firing in December 2021, Cuomo’s nationally televised evening program failed to include regular amber alerts for missing persons of color. His moralizing was an entirely in-the-moment thing, prompted by social-media focus on the supposed “syndrome.” As that conversation came and went on Twitter, so, too, did that style of commentary come and go at CNN and elsewhere. Until the next white woman disappears!
If people are talking about this on Twitter, it must be a major story of national importance: That’s the delusion under which several major newsrooms operate. Time and again, we see that this is not the case, yet Twitter-trawling is still a popular method for deciding which stories and commentary deserve the above-the-fold treatment. It’s likewise a popular method for deciding how stories should be covered, and what the going narrative should be. The obvious problem with this is that it means members of the press are taking their cues from inside an echo chamber, as social media is designed to seal off like-minded users from other groups. It also means unhinged race- and class-obsessed sociopaths directly influence coverage and commentary, as unhinged race- and class-obsessed sociopaths are generally the loudest and most active on social media.
We saw the Twitter-to-newsroom pipeline operate in real time following the disappearance last weekend of a submersible craft, the Titan, designed to reach the wreckage of the Titanic. As particularly obnoxious and loud Twitter users responded to the tragedy by jeering the suffering of the Titan’s wealthy passengers, identical media commentary and coverage were not far behind.
On board the 22-foot Titan, owned and operated by OceanGate, were the pilot and company CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman, British businessman Hamish Harding, and retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet. An international rescue effort tragically ended with the announcement by OceanGate on Thursday that all five passengers had been lost. Prior to that announcement, the story had captured international attention. Understandably so. It was a race against time to search a vast area of the Atlantic to find a tiny, deep-ocean craft with a finite amount of oxygen shared by five people. How and why communication was lost with the craft is still unknown. The story involved billionaires, self-styled tech tycoons and “adventurers,” danger, death, mystery, and, of course, the Titanic itself, the disaster that has entranced the world for more than a century.
As a legitimately fascinating human-interest news event, the Titan story in pre-social-media times would’ve been covered like any other crisis. Straightforward and to the point. However, this is the post-social-media era. Hence, some of the coverage and commentary were influenced by the most deranged humans to walk this planet, including politics- and class-obsessed malcontents who believe the Titan’s crew deserved to suffer and die.
“OceanGate CEO Missing in Titanic Sub Had History of Donating to GOP Candidates,” reads the headline to a news report authored by New Republic senior political correspondent Daniel Strauss.
As if the article’s framing and headline weren’t bad enough, the story itself is an outright insult to the craft of journalism.
“[Stockton Rush] was not a Republican megadonor, but his donations over the years leaned heavily toward Republican candidates,” it reads. “The FEC also lists donations from Stockton R. Rush III, Stockton R. Rush Jr., and Stockton R. Rush. While the home address for these donations are all the same it’s not clear if these are close relatives or the same Stockton Rush.”
They haven’t confirmed whether the donations all came from the same person, but they published anyway? What sort of journalism is this?
“All together,” the article adds, “those donations are consistently Republican and include George Bush for President in 1979, the Illinois Republican State Central Committee in 1980, Citizens to Elect Rick Larsen in 2022, and friends of Mike McGavick in both 2000 and 2005.”
What does any of this have to do with anything? What does a donation to George Bush in 1979 have to do with the tragic disappearance of five human beings? What is the implication here? (The implication seems obvious, but I want the staff at the New Republic, none of whom thought this report was a bad idea, to say it out loud.) To cap it all off, the story concludes with an “Editor’s Pick” postscript, promoting an article titled, “The Media Cares More About the Titanic Sub Than Drowned Migrants.”
This report is a work of art. It’s a perfect how-to for how not to do journalism. Hang it in the Louvre.
Elsewhere, the Associated Press dusted off 2021’s “missing white woman syndrome” discourse and adapted it to the present moment, scolding readers for not being equally interested in the recent sinking of a boat carrying migrants off the coast of Greece, a disaster in which many drowned. An AP news blurb declared that world attention to the Titan search “contrasts sharply with another recent tragedy in which the victims were migrants motivated by desperation.”
The story itself reads (emphasis my own), “The search for a submersible that disappeared while taking wealthy tourists to see the wreck of the Titanic has gripped many with its grim cinematic elements. . . . But the outpouring fell far short of the shock and grief over a boat carrying hundreds of migrants that sank recently off the coast of Greece.”
The AP makes a great point. If only there were a major newsroom — a newswire even! — that could dedicate its considerable resources to highlighting tragedies such as the one near Greece. Alas, where would we find such a newsroom?
Then, of course, there are those who saw Titan’s disappearance as an opportunity to further promote their own personal bugaboos, including newsrooms eager to lay the blame at the feet of . . . Elon Musk?
“The company behind the missing submersible thanked Elon Musk’s company Starlink prior to the disastrous expedition. He hasn’t said a word about the mission on Twitter,” reads a Yahoo! headline.
The Daily Beast: “Missing Sub Firm Thanked Musk’s Starlink for Making Dive Missions ‘a Success.’”
Starlink and Musk have exactly nothing to do with the Titan or how it communicated with the surface. So, that’s a fun non sequitur.
Speaking of personal bugaboos, there are even worse examples of this type of deranged, Twitter-hive-mind commentary, including from MSNBC contributor Elie Mystal, who positively, absolutely hates the conservative Supreme Court justices.
“Next time some rich white person wants to take Sam Alito on an expensive trip, please take him to see the Titanic,” Mystal cracked this week on Twitter.
Yes, it’s a joke. But perhaps we were still better off in the “before times,” before social media brought out the worst in the worst people — those who feel compelled to put the worst thoughts in our heads, and all for negative attention from strangers on the internet.
And this is what makes the Twitter-to-media pipeline so uniquely poisonous — worse than mere media malfeasance, when compared to other modern media trends.
It’s bad enough when social-media users belch forth their most toxic thoughts and opinions, rendering platforms such as Twitter and Facebook all but unusable. But it’s so much worse when the cretins have their most disturbed positions repackaged and repurposed by the largest and most powerful newsrooms in the world. It’s not enough to walk away from social media. Even if you delete your account, chances are the nonsense you sought to escape will wind up in the mouth of a news anchor or talking head and reach you anyway. Twitter’s influence on media’s editorial judgment is not just bad for media. It’s bad for you.