Newsrooms Need To Treat Coordinated Online Attacks On Reporters Like Propaganda - And Act Like They're At War

The latest in the near-endless flow of bad faith attacks on the media erupted last week in a coordinated attack on New York Times reporter Mara Gay. Gay made comments on MSNBC around the growth of white nationalism, specifically mentioning the American flag:

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing … Essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this,” Gay said.

As usual, the right wing media (Fox, New York Post, et. al) turned this into a miniature crisis around Mara Gay “being disturbed by the American flag,” after which they decided to ignore every word she said, and also forget every word before them, and basically operate in the shittiest, worst bad faith way possible. As expected, the Times stood up and referred to the comments as “out of context”:

The problem here is that, as usual with these comments, they are defensive and passive, and fail to address the core problems of what happened. Mara Gay’s full comments were very clear - that we as a country must wake up to white supremacy, but also the vast amount of white voters that believe that we are not in a functioning democracy, and that this problem is not simply going away. To say that things were “taken out of context” is still humoring the bad faith actors by acting as if they regularly take context into account, rather than simply choosing one statement and hammering on that, with the full intention of organizing a targeted harassment campaign against people in the free press.

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