Qatar, a country without a free press, hosts a D.C. party celebrating…the free press [Washington Post Magazine]
When a sitting president repeatedly calls your industry the ‘enemy of the people’, I think you can be forgiven some dramatics about the importance of and threats to mass media outlets. Newspapers and cable TV news are not ‘the press’. although they constitute a meaningful portion of it, so there’s some abstraction being done here, but again, not inappropriately so. At least in my judgment.
AND I think that a lot of the reason for the newfound religious belief in the importance of the first amendment among some press types has more to do with opposition to a deeply disliked and antagonistic president than it does with any sort of widespread passionate, principled belief in the fundamental value of freedom of expression. To wit, this article sends a journalist into a Washington D.C. party sponsored by notorious journalist-squelcher Qatar. Hilarity ensues.
Utter horseshit, of course. I’m not a media member in any accepted sense of the word, but even I know that Qatar routinely shuts down critical media. You’d have to be living under a rock in the industry not to. But in a world of Narrative, it’s important to drape our preferences in the most politically acceptable and emotionally charged memetic impulses available to us. We’re banking the unbanked! We’re protecting the poor students punitive damages would adversely impact! We are crusaders for free speech!
Y’know, unless there’s a good DJ.
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