The YouTube debacle

Have you ever looked at a media’s narrative and gone ‘who in the hell actually believes this?’ I’m guessing you have. I’m guessing you have because there have always been things in the media that some people agree with, and some people don’t. Such is the way of opinion and politics. But have you ever read something and simply not understood the line of thought? Been unable to even understand what could motivate a person to think that way?

I can understand terrorism. It is an evolved form of defence. Just like we get defensive when someone attacks our sensibilities, this is how these people feel, and it is how they lash out in revenge, or in a disdain for the people perpetually attacking their values (in their eyes).

Some people look at the media as if it has an agenda. It does, in my opinion. I now, also have an agenda, and a bias, but the difference here is I am admitting it to you. You, reading this, now know that no matter what I say, it is simply how I think and feel, and you can agree or disagree. This will unlikely sway your thought processes, and if you do change your mind because of it, it will be because your own mind took more or different factors into account, and through the very same thought process changed its opinion. It’s a disclosed bias and therefore a non-factor, something current media and journalism has seemingly forgotten.

This is all leading to a point, I promise. The point was in the title, and it was likely the reason you started reading this article in the first place, yet I’ve taken you through some outwardly unrelated items. YouTube, is taking a big hit. Advertisers are pulling out big time and in the space of a week the Google funded platform has lost tens of billions of American dollars. Perhaps people would be okay with this if it wasn’t entirely underserved; YouTube as a platform simply hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. Sure, there have been minor updates and tweaks, a few policy changes which caused some ruckus that quickly died out, but nothing major enough to cause this reaction. What has changed, are the media’s tactics, and I am currently using the wall street journal as my example, as an attempt to make these claims a little less vague, but rest assured they are not the only one (Buzzfeed and the guardian are two other examples).

There’s a common trend as times move forward, old media attacks the new up and coming media because it feels threatened. Socrates hated books and writing, as it couldn’t capture the essence of what he was saying. Gaming was heavily criticised for what it could do to the youth, despite a higher level of violence present in books such as the clockwork orange, Tv was similar for how it made people lazy. It’s an example of history repeating itself, and I think it is happening again now. With the advent of fake news, the absenteeism of journalistic ethics and a disdain for positive news, people are beginning to distrust the information media that had gained their trust through the newspapers, then Tv news, then online articles. Now it all has an agenda, and instead of clarifying when a bias is there, it is instead injected into every word. The BBC, a bastion of unbiased and fair reporting, has some of the most loaded questions and editing to sway the public one particular way. I can explain this bias with the example of two words. ‘Despite’ and ‘Brexit’. Suddenly, any positive story is a negative one, one that is spun around the agenda of the BBC that are so pro-EU that they cannot comprehend the idea that the whole economy isn’t collapsing and we aren’t all burning in eternal hellfire. Every positive story is a miracle, yet every negative story is an expected flaw in the Brexit plan:

‘London will remain Europe’s financial capital despite Brexit.’ (Pratley, 2017) Change the word to Post-Brexit, now it’s just a report, swinging neither way.

‘Despite Brexit, the status quo will remain in Britain.’ (The Globe and Mail, 2017) Same here.

Vloggers. Reporters. Personalities. We’re now looking into news both for the information and its entertainment value, these people I’m about to mention are no less biased than the current news, but they don’t try to convince you. They let you know that they do have bias, and use the news story to express their opinions on the subject. Some, in a calm and measured way such as Philip DeFranco. He definitely has bias, but he clearly expresses that it is an opinion, and presents all the facts at hand for you, the viewer, to make a decision based on the evidence and if you want more, some links to do deeper research. He still gives his opinion without swaying you one way or the other. You can disagree with him and not feeling the slightest bit of discontent at injustice in his reporting, or a lack of journalistic ethics. Others take a more dynamic approach, getting angry, or allowing their passion to run free in their scripts. Sargon of Akkad, and the Amazing atheist, are great examples of this. They are both loud mouthed, vulgar people, but they still present all the facts before shouting their opinion for your entertainment. These people are more entertainers than journalists, but they are presenting all the facts of a news story, with their bias clearly stated. These ‘vloggers’ are using journalistic ethics when in all honesty, it’d be okay if they didn’t. They’re just entertainers, yet nowadays they’re a more useful source of information than any of the mainstream media.

Podcasts such as the Drunken Peasants are brilliant. They mix their comedy in with news stories, real news stories, and using the facts they have present an opinion. If they don’t have all the facts, that is clear as day. Always. And they never use language designed to manipulate your opinion. They are big marijuana smokers, but if you hated the drug with a passion you could still watch them and enjoy everything else, because the disagreements are just that, disagreements, and they have a personality behind them that you keep coming back to. You don’t click for the news, you click because of who is telling the news.

Of course, these YouTubers are beginning to gain a a lot of traction and are actually surpassing the old media in some cases. This is no good of course, big news corporations can’t have some fat guy in his bedroom making ‘smoke weed everyday’ jokes be more popular than a global news network such as the independent. So, the first thing they tried was a smear campaign. The Wall Street Journal started it, with PewDiePie. PieDiePie switched up his content not too long ago, to long episodic let’s plays to more random sketches, funny little videos and the odd gaming video here and there. It is a very well rounded channel. One joke he used a lot though, and whether you found it funny or not is up to you, is one to do with Nazism. In which he would pretend to be a Nazi, implicate that something was Nazi-esque or just randomly use Hitler as a transition. The reason these jokes work, or supposedly work if you’re not into that humour, is because we all know the Nazis are shockingly horrible. We know it’s ridiculous to compare YouTube heroes to Nazi youth, they’re nothing alike, but he is making a good point in that video as to how awful the YouTube hero program is, so it makes sense in context. That’s going to be a motif in the next paragraph: ‘in context it works’.

The same goes for his other jokes, the Hitler transition is completely random in a completely random video. It’s ridiculous to use his likeness to transition to another clip, which is why it’s a good joke. In context, it works. In one video, he is talking about how the media takes things out of context and calls him racist and all sorts of horrific accusations, and then pretends to be a Nazi by dressing up in a uniform (not a Nazi one by the way, just a military one) and proceeding to watch Hitler speeches. In context, the joke is perfect, and ironically, it does the exact thing he was joking it might do. His worst joke, and the one that caused him the most trouble, was one in which he was trying to show what people would do for 5 dollars. He paid two Indian kids $5 to hold up a sign saying ‘death to all Jews’ and to say subscribe to Keemstar – Implying that Keemstar is a terrible person through proxy. Whilst again, this is a joke that works in context, and that people shouldn’t get offended at something so clearly free of malicious intent, it is the only joke I can actually see a case for, not that I agree there is one.

The wall street journal cut these clips of him out and used them in video and an article to paint him as an anti-sematic ‘comedian’, and then the rest of the media jumped on the bandwagon, calling him a racist, a Nazi, an anti-Semite. None of it is true, sure he made some distasteful jokes that some may be offended by, but he was not sincerely suggesting that Nazi views were acceptable, in fact he was saying the opposite.

Advertisers pulled out, he lost his up and coming show ‘scare PewDiePie’ and his partnership with maker studios. The media, seemingly, had won. The entire internet; however, was on PewDiePie’s side, with every personality from Chris Ray Gun to JonTron defending him and his right to comedy. PewDiePie is fine, he can keep making money through YouTube and his many different branches of business.

It is now happening again, but this time for everyone. This is no longer a smear campaign from the media, but a defence for their place in relevance, and they’re going to win this ‘war’ by stripping YouTubers of their source of money. By claiming the site is full of racism and bigotry, with hate speech flowing from the mouths of all these bloggers, the media has gone to YouTube’s advertisers and scared them into pulling their adverts from the website, and Google as a whole, even though no evidence was provided, no factual evidence anyway. This is what this type of media does best, incite fear. They’re now pressuring the advertisers who are still there with incredibly loaded questions such as ‘Why are you still funding such a hateful site as YouTube?’ Immediately painting the advertiser and the website as the villain before the facts are even played out.

Perhaps it is a good thing. YouTube is by no means fair to its creators, so this could create an entirely new platform for people to migrate to, and make an honest living in a more stable environment, we shall have to see. It still doesn’t change the disgusting tactics currently being used by the media, and people need to be aware.

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/30/london-will-remain-europes-financial-capital-despite-

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