The Crisis of American Journalism

is complete emptiness

Actual Business Insider headline:

Here’s the photo that illustrates the claim:

Here’s what they compare it to:

You can see all the laughter in that second photo, right? Segregation is when white people snickered a lot. It was a laugh riot, obviously.

This is shameful garbage, a forced comparison that doesn’t work on the most obvious surface level, unsupported by any form of reporting. Read the story — here’s the link again — and see if the reporter tells you that anyone who was there claims to have heard the remarks from the women sitting on the bench. Why were they laughing? Dunno. Assumed in the headline and framing, but not actually reported. So it must be just like segregation.

American journalism is plummeting through the floor of the shithouse, descending into a level of contemptible uselessness that I wouldn’t have thought possible. Fake, lazy, cheap, empty, dishonest, reflexive, banal, absurd, pathetic. They tell you something while they show you that the thing they’re telling you is false. This picture is like this picture, a headline says, showing pictures that aren’t remotely similar. We’re reaching the point where the narrative-making machine is so clumsy that it can’t fool anyone. What then?