By swarming all over NBC’s Dasha Burns for questioning John Fetterman’s health, her fellow journalists hid the truth from the public but exposed how they manufacture consent. Quote:
Today, a politically unpopular article or personality can leave a publisher besieged from the outside while facing a revolt from within. We’ve seen this play out again and again, especially at The New York Times. There was The Nazi Next Door scandal, the Donald McNeil fiasco, the Tom Cotton op-ed outrage, the Andy Mills brouhaha, the Alison Roman inanity and everything that Bari Weiss ever wrote or tweeted. Some of these tempests may have started with readers, others with journalists, but mostly it was hard to say, because they emerged from the swamp where the media industry’s most indignant consumers and its loudest employees coalesce: Twitter.
As these changes took place across the digital media industry, Twitter became a disciplinary tool for the journalistic profession. It became the means by which the partisan and ideological vanguardists huddled inside the media’s fortress walls could find their ragtag armies on the outside and wage war together against disfavored colleagues like Weiss and McNeil.
That’s what happened to Dasha Burns. I don’t know Burns and she didn’t respond to my request for comment. But I do know that she’s a human being. As such, I suspect that, if not for being so publicly vindicated by Fetterman’s debate performance, she may have begun to think twice before again giving voice to an obvious but unpopular truth that could draw the collective wrath of her colleagues. She may have learned, in other words, how to lie.
