What Will Happen When Woke Culture Destroys The Corporate Media?

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Paint and protest graffiti covers the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond, Va., Sunday, June 7, 2020, following a week of unrest in the U.S. against police brutality and racism in policing. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
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We have all seen the impact of woke cancel culture on the world of entertainment and political punditry. But according to journalist Matt Taibbi, this destructive societal paradigm has metastasized in the soon-to-be corpse of journalism. It has become a cancer that is eating away at the Fourth Estate.

Last week, Taibbi participated in an interview on Hill.TV, where he discussed a piece he wrote titled “The American Press Is Destroying Itself.” He described how cancel culture has now began impacting the media, making it nearly impossible for journalists to report certain types of stories and for commentators to express opinions that progressives have made verboten.

Taibbi noted that there had been a “dramatic escalation” of situations in which journalists have been targeted by the woke left for not adhering to the precepts of progressive wokeism. Reporters have been subject to criticism, and even career consequences for stepping out of line. “Essentially the problem is if you say a certain thing, and an employee accuses you of racism, either your career is over, or your reputation is ruined.”

But that wasn’t all. Taibbi continued, explaining that, “what ends up happening is people just sort of shrink back from wherever they perceive the boundaries are and don’t say anything. And that’s not a healthy climate for journalism.”

The journalist revealed that many other reporters were hesitant to publish negative reports about Hillary Clinton’s campaign “because they were afraid of being perceived as … pro-Trump or as helping Trump.”

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In his blog post, Taibbi provided several examples of cases in which journalists were targeted for falling out of line with the precepts of wokeism. He highlighted the case of The Intercept’s Lee Fang, who found himself in the crosshairs of the Kancel Kulture Klan after interviewing a black man who expressed an all-too-familiar fact about the media’s coverage of police brutality.

During the interview, the black man lamented the fact that the media pays no attention to African Americans who die in street violence. He said:

“I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”

Fang’s co-workers, along with the rest of the woke social media mob, excoriated him for daring to publish the details of his interview and told him to “stop being racist.” The journalist was mobbed to the point that he was compelled to issue an apology. Put simply, Fang had the unmitigated gall to include a point of view that didn’t exactly line up with woke theology, so he had to be punished.

But this was not the only incident. Taibbi also recounted other similar cases:

“There were other incidents. The editors of Bon Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer ‘bitter’ in a Twitter exchange about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology (‘I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH’) was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a headline, ‘Buildings matter, too.’”

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These stories are but a small sampling of instances in which woke culture threatened the reputations and livelihoods of reporters who might lean left, but have not been baptized into the Church of Wokeness. Unfortunately, as Taibbi points out, this societal phenomenon has infiltrated the Fourth Estate and is rapidly metastasizing.

It won’t take long for the woke crowd to finish destroying the corporate press. There does not appear to be any real resistance to their brazen campaign to enforce its will on the media. It is more than likely that the majority of the heretics will be pushed out of the major media outlets and either be forced into obscurity, or they could go independent.

But this means that the corporate media will be entirely under the control of the radical left. If you think media bias is an issue now, you ain’t seen nothing yet, dear reader.

However, there is a silver lining here. Multiple polls conducted since 2016 have revealed that the American public’s trust in the media has plummeted to devastating levels. The corporate media still exerts a tremendous level of influence in American society, but it is not seen as the bastion of truth as it once was, and for good reason.

Since Trump took office, the corporate press has beclowned itself on numerous occasions in their efforts to damage his presidency. It will only get worse when the woke warriors are entirely in control. But the reality is that they will likely do more damage to themselves than to the president. They rarely miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot.

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However, it’s worth pointing out that the decline of the press does not mean that it won’t still be able to mislead the public. We saw their efforts to divide the nation most recently with the Bubba Wallace story. For this reason, it will be critical that conservative media continues to push back on the left’s attempts to minimize right-leaning voices on alternative media and social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

 

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Follow me on Twitter: @JeffOnTheRight

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