That we live in an era of outrage-fuelled clicks has been clear for some time. In 2014, online mastheads were already declaring “This ‘Let’s Anger Our Readers For Clicks’ Thing Needs To Stop”. (Worth noting that very same outlet just ran “Bad News, Leunig Has Made Another Cursed Boomer Cartoon, And People Are Angry”.)
But a few recent examples from the US demonstrate just how far removed from reality stories of absurd wokeness or anti-PC culture can be.
One of the better known fables in the World Gone Mad genre is that of the college cafe accused by “offended” students of “cultural appropriation” after serving less-than-authentic versions of Asian cuisine. First reported in 2015 in Oberlin College’s student newspaper, the story was later picked up by several major outlets, with headlines like “These College Students Claim Their Cafeteria Food Is Racist”. Four years later, it turns out the episode was significantly less insane than it seemed.
Meanwhile, a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review tells the behind-the-scenes story of a reporter who “exposed racist tweets” of a local hero and was then fired for his own “offensive tweets”. (Spoiler: it may not have been his comeuppance after all.)
And remember Nick Sandmann? The MAGA-hat-wearing teen who “smugly grinned” at — and blocked the path of — a Native American protester at the Lincoln Memorial. That, too, turned out to be a little more complicated than early reports suggested.
Closer to home, we’ve had reports that Victorian libraries were considering “banning” gendered books like Thomas the Tank Engine (they weren’t), and that Woolworths had caved to the “PC brigade” and renamed Christmas cake “celebration cake” (they hadn’t).
The moral of the story? Don’t get mad online — that’s just what they want you to do.
One of the best things one can do for their sanity is to either click expecting to roll your eyes, or banish clickbait to the No Click Zone. This has sadly become the case with leftish sites too. Anti-PC folks manage to be the worst, though, as the article demonstrates
And for everyone’s sake, if marketers piss you off, move on. They are basically profiteering off the culture war. Don’t do their work for them for free.
Outrage can be a profitable industry. Never mind that people get hurt as long as the dollars roll in. In the Indonesian island of Ambon, years ago, after a long history of peaceful neighbourliness, some drunken Christian youths attacks Muslims in prayer during Ramadan. This set the two previously close communities at each others’ throats. As the violence escalated two local newspapers, one on the Christian side and one on the Muslim side, egged their respective supporters on. The two papers were owned by the same company.
It’s not cultural Marxism that we have to worry about but the cultural imperialism that uncritically repeats and amplifies through the internet the clickbait of the mainstream USA media . This is then further amplified in the Australian media and internet sites, as I am doing through this comment
On a brighter note you can usually go to the original source to check out what, if anything, happened to start the whole thing off. As a bonus it usually takes less than four years.
The internet can’t be blamed for everything as some old faithfuls predate the internet. The ‘War on Christmas’ has been around every err um Christmas since my parents refused to share the credit with Santa Claus. The joke in Taree High circa 1966 was that the Enid Blyton Noddy books were banned because it wasn’t only Big Ears’ that was big. Pizzagate was beyond our imagination as we didn’t know what a pizza was.
… Big Ears’ ears that was big.
I heard that some libraries removed Enid Blyton from their shelves was because of the sentence ” Noddy felt a little queer”.