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by littletimmy
3980 days ago
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This is shitty journalism at its worst. The study presented a very conservative finding, which is that men who lose in online games are more likely to be hostile, particularly towards those they don't think are in the in-group. That is understandable. The journalist in question extrapolated it to Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, and god knows what else. All the while making huge conjectures about how this means all harassers are low-status losers (a word used pejoratively, not descriptively). Pathetic. |
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News pieces report relatively factual material. That's the first part of what you identify. But then there are other kinds of writing that also appear in newspapers. [1] This in particular is from their blog The Intersect [2], which is cultural commentary focused on the Internet. It is written by their "digital culture critic". [3]
So cultural commentary is exactly this person's job. And I don't think it's a giant stretch extrapolating research about men harassing women online to... men harassing women online. Of course, you could be right: some online harassers may also be high-status winners sending out semi-literate email screeds from their mansions and yachts and whatnot.
So no, this isn't shitty journalism. It would be a shitty news piece if it were a news piece. But since it's not, I'd call it a decent commentary piece.
[1] Hopefully this isn't too big a surprise; this is literally what they tell fifth graders about journalism. E.g.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english/creativewr... or http://www.dispatchnie.com/content/pages/types-of-articles/t...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/
[3] I learned all this by a) clicking on the big title at the topic of the column, and b) clicking on the writer info at the bottom. Next time if you're wondering what sort of article you're reading, those are good places to start.