RE: “Real” news, or as I like to call it “un-faqe news”
TL;DR I want to shitpost using the ‘preview’ UI in most platforms, which you can’t do without a website.
In an era dominated by poor media literacy, it has become increasingly clear that it may not be possible to educate those who do not wish to be educated
The central thesis underlying this barebones website is – if you can’t beat’ em, join ’em.
It is not clear to me that the path to a nuanced, considerate media consumption is necessarily a straight line – that somehow rigidly adhering to standards & norms while grifters drop misinformation hot snakes directly into the exhausted working people’s brains (I think that’s called an upper decker?)
A more compassionate take is that you should meet people where they’re at – if the average person does not have the energy to deeply process the vast amount of information we are expected to, because our collective humanity is robbed from us 8+ hours a day and then again from an unending torrent of infinite scrolling then maybe it’s easier to cut the bullshit and produce headlines that say the essence of what is to be communicated.
I very much subscribe to the position of satire expressed by the Onion in their Supreme Court Amicus Brief that:
Creating effective thumbnails in apps requires meta tags and the OpenGraph protocol – so that my free speech isn’t just words – it’s spicy words in a slightly different rectangle when I say them.
I’m not going to declare complete fake news, but at least for certain issues corporate media has demonstrated an unwillingness to depart from the framework of “unbiased” news coverage that only serves to uphold the status quo.
So, as our Queen Girlypop Cheryl Sandberg says – time to lean in.