I do kinda appreciate Freddie deBoer and the twitter irony left going in on journalists for dropping Game of Thrones references all the time, but I should point out that even in the golden age of journalistic seriousness before the internet there would be tons of facile pop culture comparisons on the editorial page, just they would be in the cartoons.

Like, my hometown paper would run syndicated essays from Molly Ivins and Cal Thomas and Nat Hentoff and Mike Royko (Mike Royko!) and Phyllis Schlafly, and right in the middle of that the biggest thing on the page would be a doofy cartoon with like, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky doing the Titanic “king of the world” scene with an iceberg in the background labeled “grand jury investigation”.

I do think they’re on to something though in that the young journalists working at these online shops have Game of Thrones as a go-to reference for “political strife” because they don’t have any other experience to draw on - none of them have done a turn in the Istanbul bureau, none of them have reported from or even contemporaneous to previous coups in Turkey, or Greece, or South America, or even the Balkan wars of the ‘90s. At best one of them might by luck have taken a seminar on the topic in their Ivy League college, past that they’ve got wikipedia and the more farsighted might call up a professor who’s basically just a better trained distant observer and ask.

That’s an issue, yeah. Also rereading that last paragraph I realized I’m describing myself, so. One distinction is I don’t feel obligated to have a post about everything, my sole input to the Turkey thing was waving vaguely at the concept of a young officers coup. And the Economist tends to do a decent job with bright young things.

One distinction there is that the Economist runs unsigned articles, while at places like Vox, brand-building Twitter bragging seems to be at least 2/3 the point, and it really rankles to see the ignorant proudly parading their insufficiency as a career-building credential to be rewarded, and I can see how that would be a particular sore spot for the Weird Left, who tend to be strikingly better and more knowledgable writers tbh.

One thing to consider is the same lean budgets that gave us rookie reporters mean there’s not much room for internal advancement - if there are only a handful of slots above you and they’re full of the 30s/40s first-gen blogger founders, career advancement will require you to switch outfits and thus build up a public reputation as a “catch” - this is what I’m getting at with my concern that journalists through Twitter are shifting their schmoozing energy from sources (which at least generates new public facts as a side effect) to each other (which generates new takes, mostly).

I hear there’s a similar dynamic going on in the nonprofit world, which might pressure existing operatives to favor interventions that prompt the creation of new activist movements, organizations, and titles.

(Also I suppose Weird Left Twitter is kind of resurrecting that serious text/silly cartoon thing by alternating medium articles about, like, the potential for socialism with absurdist Harambe memes)