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Seth Abramson’s viral meta-journalism unreality

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C C Offline
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/seth-...witter.php

EXCERPT: America has been ruled by the tyranny of tweets, and the news media has been tangled in threads. Twitter threads are a way for journalists to gather information and to promote their work [...] One of the most prominent Twitter-thread stars is Seth Abramson, who came to the fore around 2017, as the American press was choking on news about Russian interference in the presidential election. Every story was cloaked in subterfuge ... He was the man uniquely capable of pulling the loose threads together.

[...] How you see Abramson is a kind of Rorschach test. He is either a rogue pundit or a media darling. ... On his podcast, Abramson has assured listeners that everything he says “comes from major media.”

[...] To understand Abramsom ... you have to understand what he calls his “poetics.” Or what most people would call his personality. From a distance, he can seem assertive, defensive, and self-aggrandizing. He blocks Twitter followers who have been mildly critical of him; he is relentlessly controlling of his image; he sends late-night emails that are overbearing, obsessive, and self-referential. He buries you in text. In person, though, he’s quieter...

[...] Abramson wanted to become a lawyer and was interested in public defense. After college, he earned a JD from Harvard and got a job as a public defender. The work was draining and a little demoralizing ... At night, to unwind, he wrote poetry.

[...] As a poet and writer, Abramson fashions himself a metamodernist ... Metamodernism can be described, very simply, as a cultural philosophy that mediates between modernism and postmodernism (of which, it is assumed, meta-journalism is part). ... All of this jargony obsession with metamodernism is what Abramson says led him to the Twitter thread. In his view, the form fit him naturally: “Short bursts of language carefully constructed on Twitter,” he told me. “That was inspired by being a poet.”

[...] Since Trump left office, and America has begun to recover from a media cycle that revolved, endlessly, around a cruel and vindictive White House, it’s important to remember how easily we let conspiracy leak into our lives, into our TV shows and our punditry and our thinking. How quickly we smashed the retweet button, how little we thought about it. And how dangerous it is to live in a world built entirely of your own words, with no vetting, no editing, blocking critics, until everything is a mirror shining you back at you.

Nevertheless, Abramson continues to tweet out thread upon thread: About China and the virus and trade. About Saudi money. About an NBC executive who had allegedly been informed by former Secret Service sources about a contingency plan in case Trump refused to leave the White House. (Upon further investigation, the executive was actually retired and used to run a “tour experience” for Universal Studios.) Abramson also tweeted extensively about the violent mob that stormed the Capitol, leading to the deaths of five people...

[...] Abramson has also held on to his pet theories. On his podcast, and in his first Proof book, he makes arguments based on the Steele dossier. (Remember the Steele dossier? You know, the pee tape thing.) The reliability of the Steele dossier is, to put it mildly, in question; a report by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found that the dossier was dubious, unvetted, and shady as hell.

Of course, people still believe it and defend it—Abramson continues to cling to it uncritically—but the point is: it falls short of proof. Journalism, of the meta or curatorial sort, isn’t worth much if it can’t meet that standard. And that’s the trouble with Abramson’s interpretive threads. Pull on any one of them, and the whole tapestry unravels... (MORE - details)
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