Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App

2020 in a headline

>The call shows how Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled by the press and lauded as innovators and disruptors, fundamentally misunderstand the role of journalism the moment it turns a critical eye to their industry.

No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires objectivity, and that the whole industry is broken because it has been completely dominated by ideologues, top to bottom, who are blatantly pushing politics onto the masses.

Don't support BLM? Have legitimate criticism? Be prepared to be called out by "journalists" until you fall in line, if you don't get cancelled first. And let's be real, this has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for at least a decade.

Edit: would you all be downvoting if the same journalists were adding pro Trump spin to a sizable proportion (or majority, depending on the outlet) of non-editorial (but editorialized) media? I'm not going to support blatantly partisan writing by ostensibly neutral platforms simply because they represent my politics. We need objective news and the fact that it is impossible to be purely objective is not an excuse to deliberately pollute news articles and headlines with consistent agenda.

> On Wednesday night, the topic of conversation was Lorenz herself, who had been listening earlier in the conversation but left partway through. After she left, the participants began discussing whether Lorenz was playing "the woman card" when speaking out about her harassment following a Twitter altercation with Srinivasan.

> "You can't fucking hit somebody, attack them and just say, 'Hey, I have ovaries and therefore, you can't fight back,'" Felicia Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Family Foundation and wife of Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz, said.

[...]

> "Is Taylor afraid of a brown man on the street? Then she shouldn't be afraid of a brown man in Clubhouse," Srinivasan said. "I have literally done nothing other than one previous tweet. Number one, right? So the whole, you know, talking about tweeting as you know, harassment—completely illegitimate, completely wrong, completely fabricated and just false."

[...]

> "When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that exists right now," Nait Jones, an Andreessen Horowitz VC, said on the call while speaking about recent reports about abuse in the tech industry. "Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around protecting vulnerable people."

1. The lack of self awareness is incredible.

2. What happened to us? Were people always this nasty and identitarian?

It's required because a democratic society relies on a healthy press. These are supposed to be scholars, with a code of ethics, dedicated to documentation. Journalists are not supposed to actually interfere in the system they are observing (e.g. by calling for de-platforming) because then they go from being journalists to being activists.

Edit: To be clear, I have no problem with newspapers including opinion articles about de-platforming, but there must be an acknowledgement that there's a difference between journalists and activists/thought leaders. We cannot go on mixing both.

Ethics are rarely required but that does not lessen their importance. Are you argueing against having ethics in journalism simply because they were not required when the printing press was invented?