Garbage In, Garbage Out: Tech Journalism, Fake News and the Russia Threat Narrative
“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question … Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”
George Orwell, 1945, ‘The Freedom of the Press’
When leading media platforms in new technology and innovation, that proclaim to be the cutting-edge in tech and digital culture commentary, earnestly promote establishment narratives in deference to the US intelligence community, embrace a pattern of dumbing down which is increasingly conspicuous, and now, given the ominous proliferation of technological trajectories which all of us will be required to adapt to while approaching the third decade of the twenty-first century: does a hyper-liberal bias pose as much of a problem in tech journalism as it does in the larger sphere of corporate mainstream press?
And when it is verging on the kind of mainstream media malpractice seen in recent months, when major outlets would rush to judgment over anti-Russian stories, why might this become a more harmful problem in tech reporting than you might think?
At a time when mainstream media has become an extension of the military-industrial complex, when those who espouse freedom, civil liberties, and human rights have given in to mass surveillance, censorship, and perpetual war — by hyper-liberal tech journalism I refer to the abundance of popular media publications online (and in print) that collectively share a focus on a less-formal alternative to traditional journals in how they cover emerging technologies, innovation, multimedia, and science.
My focus will be on a number of the popular (large audience) platforms such as Wired, The Verge, Motherboard, Ars Technica, and MIT Technology Review.
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