Journalism is dead, journalists murdered it…
The Increasingly Narrow, Parochial Prism of Journalism
- What is strangest — and most defamatory — is to call people “far-right”, or insinuate that they are linked to the far-right because they are saddened by the fire at Notre Dame.
- For those who know the journalism business… the degradation exemplified by Tharoor, Taylor and Noack is no surprise. It is the consequence of a shrinking industry with shrinking budgets which cannot afford foreign reporters and finds itself instead paying low-grade hacks to sit in America and write about people in Europe who are tweeting about a massacre in Sri Lanka.
- Apart from demonstrating quite a remarkable freedom with facts and ignorance of libel laws, these “journalists” also do something else. They see the world, and the terrible actions of some terrible people in it, only through their own narrow and deeply parochial vision.
 What is strangest — and most defamatory — is to call people “far-right”, or insinuate that they are linked to the far-right because they are saddened by the fire at Notre Dame. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) |
Last month, immediately after fire had almost destroyed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Washington Post ran a piece with the headline, “The Notre Dame fire ignites the West’s far-right.” The author, Ishaan Tharoor, used his piece to expand on that untimely and inaccurate claim. He wrote:
“A strange — though not altogether surprising — thing happened in the shadow of Monday’s tragedy. As many around the world watched an iconic cathedral in Paris go up in flames, others immediately set about trying to spark new fires. On both sides of the Atlantic, denizens of the far right took to social media to grind their culture-warring axes, locating in the calamity a parable for the political moment — or, at least, their understanding of it.”
Tharoor then went on to list the various people he wanted to grab at to make this prefabricated argument.
He attacked Fox News host Tucker Carlson for having commented, regarding the Notre Dame fire, that it was in “some ways a metaphor for the decline of Christianity in Europe.” You might agree with that or you might not, but it is not at all clear why Carlson saying this should be included in a piece claiming that the “far-right” have been ignited by the fire at Notre Dame. Unless you are willing to pretend that Carlson is “far-right”. Sure enough, this is what Tharoor does, or (perhaps distantly aware of the law) tries to do. He writes:
“Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a popular anchor accused by critics of openly embracing white nationalism in his broadcasts, said the Notre Dame fire was in ‘some ways a metaphor for the decline of Christianity in Europe.'”
