Journalism

let's get a debate going

Pull a concept out of the air and lay it down on newsprint. Cities make restrictions on tables and objects in the street. A newspaper knows how to whip up a discussion. Do let us take a look now, at this standard journalistic tradit-con. [tradition]

Conservatives have tradit-cons they’ve been using for thousands of years. It is enormously satisfying being a member of a culture that excels in perfectly sensible ways of always reasoning a matter out. Certainly we are sensible if nothing else.

But the liberal tradit-con is a method — something like the process of developing photos that occurs in the photo laboratory. It is something you have to know how to do. In fact, it may take some time before you can become skilled in it. Kilgore said of the proposed city ordinance that maybe it was stopping the Tenant’s Union from being able to organize. It is “going to affect our organizing abilities and things like that” is what the man said.

The basic problem was that the police chief didn’t like the tents. The police chief did not respect the rights of the protestors to camp out. This increased tension and that increases the possibility of violence and the ensuing repression. Is that what St. Petersburg police want? Mostly you do not see people out on the street here. Except, that is to say on lovely Central Avenue, which is where there is a concentration of taverns or bars, sometimes 5 on one block! Excellent “destinations” here.

But we are talkin’ about journalism and their ways of getting a discussion going. There is the need to have an issue or something to write about. So the newspaper creates the debate. You are going to need two sides so they can create that if they need to. It is a basic need for a journal to have stories. If you have may pages you have to have stories. You are going to need the “activists” for this story. Here is one, a fellow who (I cannot specifically discern which) either runs, or is just works within some entity called a “tenant’s union,” & we have a police chief, responding to questions. Now we can get a story. (I saw this in a local free newspaper that has “real journalism” capacity. It is called “CR” and well-known in St. Petersburg. So the journalist needs to whip up a story. He needs to find, or create, an issue.

It’s all about “free speech,” you see. Free speech is an issue. If this did not exist, the left (whom I like, really!) would make it up because these people actually live for these “issues.

“Issue” = something is on the line (original was “in contention”). Radicals protest, and they feel themselves threatened. How one causes the other is a point of contention. Either their free speech is on or they are one very insecure bunch of people.

Conservatives have lost the race. They do not stand a chance. The world’s curators today run a place where ideas have come to be of supreme importance. We do not see any other basis to rule on. So, when a journalist whips up a “debate platform” that comes from his pocket, puts it down on the street and asks us to read about it, that is a standard journalistic device. We have no way of knowing if that is still a real argument or just actors. Playing out a sequence from the long-ago past.