Nebraska Dave News and Reviews

https://archive.ph/TV59i washingtonpost / Alyssa Rosenberg / Dec. 26, 2019 / A cliffhanger end to a decade that married politics and culture

Trump was hardly the only person using culture to transform politics. Aggrieved video game fans launched harassment campaigns against a number of female and LGBT game critics and artists, inspired by a conspiratorial memo that dressed up vengeful sentiments about the author’s former partner as concerns about journalistic ethics. Figures such as provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and former Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon saw the controversy as an opportunity to recruit disaffected young men to the alt-right. This so-called GamerGate became a sewer pipeline, dumping the vicious tactics of online argumentation into the political mainstream.

How did Gamergate, which started from 2014, go back in time to 2008 to convince Spencer Ackerman of the Journolist listserv, to "call them racist" and "let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear."?

• Journolist 2007 (February 2007 to June 25, 2010); Spencer Ackerman's strategy for "a state of constant fear"; Wired's defense of him; fellow journolists disagreeing only on strategic grounds; open letter

https://archive.md/Xy7jW daily caller / Jonathan Strong / 1:15 AM 07/20/2010 / Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright

The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones rejected an early draft, saying, “I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of [Gibson’s] and [Stephanopoulos’s] questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input.”

https://archive.md/Riacr wsj / James Taranto / 20 jul 2010: 'Call Them Racists' How "journolists" tried to suppress the news.

But Ackerman was not engaging in a public debate; he was privately strategizing about how to suppress the news. And his fellow journolists, while disagreeing with him, did so "only on strategic grounds":

Most damning is a long quote from a Spencer Ackerman, who worked for something called the Washington Independent:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It's not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them–Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares–and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes them sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

How did Gamergate (2014) influence gamejournopros (2010) to be shills? Oh god someone stole the time machine again!

• gamejournopros (31 August 2010 to late September 2014) was inspired by Journolist

https://archive.md/3MMvt thisisvideogames:

GameJournoPros is a now-defunct private Google Group consisting of 150 writers, bloggers, and editors from various game news sites and media outlets. The mailing list, group members, and various leaked email conversations have sparked online discussion in the video game community's ongoing Gamergate controversy.[1][2]

The group was directly inspired by JournoList, according to its creator, Ars Technica Senior Editor Kyle Orland.[3] The existence of GameJournoPros and its leaked email conversations play a major part in the case made by #GamerGate that the game media industry is guilty of collusion, corruption and attempted censorship.

From the same nytimes article WaPo references, Gamergate started in 2014.

Gamergate must've travelled back in time to introduce journaloids and media activsts to Gamergate's "vicious tactics of online argumentation into the political mainstream."

https://archive.ph/xkyQZ nytimes / CHARLIE WARZEL / AUG. 15, 2019: How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War

On August 15, 2014, an angry 20-something ex-boyfriend published a 9,425-word screed and set in motion a series of vile events that changed the way we fight online. … And it did. The ex-boyfriend’s claims were picked up by users on Reddit and 4chan and the abuse began.

I suppose Gamergate caused the Journolist 2.0 and Cabalist as well!

• The "jezebel Google listserv", aka Journolist 2.0 (2010 to ~2018+), accidentally revealed by Jezebel

https://archive.md/w9RaO jezebel / Harron Walker / 27 Jun 2018: Private Messages Reveal the Cis Journalist Groupthink Behind Trans Media Narratives

Singal posted these messages in the discussion forum of a closed listserv he belongs to, hosted on Google Groups. The listserv, per its “About” page, aims to provide an “off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics and wonks.” It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing). These members include New York Times best-selling authors, Ivy League academics, magazine editors, and other public intellectuals—in short, a lot of important people who influence public discourse through their written work. They use the listserv’s forum to discuss current events, news from their respective fields, articles they’ve read, articles they’ve written, and other topics of public importance. There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties: whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women’s prison; Janet Mock’s contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan and the “Twitter mob” she inspired; Elinor Burkett’s New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood; comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal; erasure of the word “vagina”; saying “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women”; and a number of Jesse Singal’s articles over the past few years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiE6gI0fYuA Tim Pool / Published on Jul 9, 2018: How Journalists Conspire to Push Political Agendas

Somehow, journaloidism's greatest failures are the fault of the journaloid's targets, not the hacks themselves.

Let's see what they say:

https://archive.md/aYyzG

Well, you are giving me free publicity. So yeah, I am pretty good. I pissed you off enough

But please. Keep engaging. Keep giving me what I want. Or don't.

Way I see it, every engagement gives me free publicity. Which gets me more clicks. ….which means I get to write more of these, so please. Continue.

Or I literally make money from your attention and clicks. There's that too.

https://archive.md/C1GFu

I don't know, but I am grinning at how all the hate-quote-retweets that tweet is getting sure are good for my engagement analytics. Not that they matter, but it is funny.

If hacks write stupid shit for clicks, surely it's Gamergate's fault!

It's not like journaloids STILL exploited Gamergate for clicks 5 years after it began:

https://archive.md/JWc55 KotakuInAction / 15 Aug 2019: [SocJus] So the New York Times just dropped 4 articles about Gamergate at the same time…

https://archive.ph/IyDQs techcrunch / 18 Aug 2019 13:54:45 UTC: The mainstream media have still not learned the lessons of Gamergate

https://archive.ph/fTIfx theguardian / 20 Aug 2019: The Guardian view on Gamergate: when hatred escaped

https://archive.fo/EJa8I theverge / Aug 21, 2019: Gamergate comes to the classroom Students used to be blank slates — now they arrive with agendas

https://archive.fo/m0chj slate / Aug 23, 2019: Gamergate Never Died The harassment campaign foreshadowed our toxic, meme-strewn politics—but it has also persisted in its original form.

https://archive.fo/jPrgf KotakuInAction / 24 Aug 2019: [SocJus] Cesar Gaglioni / Nexo – "Gamergate 5 years later. And your role to the far right" (translated from Portuguese)

https://archive.md/YLBMh wehuntedthemammoth / August 24, 2019: Hate, lies and video games: Six ways #Gamergate poisoned gaming and ruined the online world for the rest of us

https://archive.md/h7vMq KotakuInAction / 26 Aug 2019: [SocJus] Ophélie Surcouf / Korii – "The "Gamergate" showed that the Internet was a weapon of mass destruction" (translated from French)

As for mainstream clickbait, perhaps these classics from the Washington Post?

https://archive.md/HUfQb washingtonpost / Joby Warrick / October 27, 2019: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48

https://archive.md/8smER washingtonexaminer / John Gage / October 28, 2019: Washington Post columnist issues correction after claiming Baghdadi not a coward

Of course, a certain writer has a dissenting opinion:

I don't expect you to have in-depth knowledge about the inner workings of journalism, but you need to understand that "clicks" do not equate to revenue. I get a salary and benefits from a company with a business department that sells ads, posts deals, and puts together other revenue generators (that are thankfully kept very far away from the editorial team) in order to ensure that we get paid on time.

This thread really sucks and despite your sudden pivot to sucking up to me, I have no patience for your generic disparagement of my colleagues' hard work. You want to criticize an article or offer specific feedback, be my guest. You want to try to get a bunch of people to dogpile on Kotaku, GamerGate-style, based on absolutely nothing but gut feelings, vague nonsense about "clickbait," and a threat to put us on your ad blocker? Piss off.

Maybe he needs to tell all the journaloid hacks from NYT to WaPo to Slate to stop writing piss.

But what do I know, I'm just the cash cow for journaloids.

https://archive.ph/vj3lS Colombia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram / November 12, 2019: Everyone is admitting what they get paid to work in journalism

Imagine people getting paid $50,000 a year to write bullshit about you. Amazing!

Like journaloids say, capitalism owns! https://archive.md/hVf8X

Back to the WaPo article:

Maybe the next decade in politics and culture will bring a return to relative normalcy in which we all agree that politicians should be boring and effective and that culture should be escapist and disengaged. Maybe the movements of this decade will continue rather than fizzle out, producing an entertainment industry that’s more diverse in human and intellectual terms, and public figures who establish new ways of communicating with the public. And so maybe it is fitting that this franchise-dominated decade is ending with a cliffhanger.

Yes, let's get back to normalcy. I can't wait for every journaloid to go the way of Deadspin.

https://archive.ph/MmzJu Jack Crosbie / GEN / Nov 12 2019: The Progressive Press is Facing Mass Extinction Deadspin, Splinter, and ThinkProgress are gone. The mainstream media is hopelessly neutral. Who’s left to check capitalism?

https://archive.md/4tu3t businessinsider / 23 Oct 2019 00:12:20 UTC: Employees at digital media companies like Vice and BuzzFeed are griping over dashed stock dreams

More crab raves, get excite!