WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES’ HIT PIECE ON SLATE STAR CODEX SAYS ABOUT MEDIA GATEKEEPING:
One starts to get the feeling that the Times simply wants to tarnish every view that exists outside its own narrow purview, perhaps because the Times has appointed itself the gatekeeper of the unsayable and resents having to relinquish this role to newer media ventures.
“Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche,” writes Metz. “There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions. And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.”
The idea that a clinical psychiatrist’s blog is the embodiment of Silicon Valley’s psyche is very odd, probably wrong, and at the very least unproven throughout the article. But notice the grander concern: A community of iconoclasts is struggling to decide what’s off-limits for all of us. What the Times actually means is that not enough speech is being rendered off-limits: The new gatekeepers are not nearly as interested in policing strict boundaries.
Many members of the media, including and especially those who report on tech, fret constantly about the potential for inaccurate speech to appear on social media. Their complaints frequently expose their own biases: Times tech reporter Kevin Roose once tweeted that “Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing disinformation right now,” and linked to four news stories that had attracted significant web traffic on the platform. But the headlines of all four were accurate, as Roose later conceded—a particularly powerful example of an emerging phenomenon in which journalists label something as disinformation or misinformation, not because it is false, but because they don’t want the American public to hear or read it.
Newspapers changed for the worse when millions of people went to see All the President’s Men, and many of them decided to adopt Woodward and Bernstein as their journalistic role models. These days though, apparently The Lives of Others is a de rigueur a how-to guide for ambitious J-school students.