The Scrapbook remembers the days before social media and the Internet, and they weren’t marked by civility and well-informed dialogue. Even so, when someone in the pre-Internet era responded in print to an article or essay, he or she had usually read the article. Nowadays you just read the headline, if that, and sound off.
A few weeks ago, for instance, an item appeared on the Bloomberg news site headlined “Finland’s Basic Income Test Wasn’t Ambitious Enough.” Bloomberg’s Twitter account tweeted a link to the article with the teaser, “A lack of ambition is ending Finland’s experiment with a universal basic income.” The article suggested that Finland’s universal basic income, or UBI, wasn’t large enough to live on. But hundreds of thousands of Twitter users assumed the article was about UBI making people lazy or unambitious. Next came a million wiseacre comments based entirely on a misreading of a tweet.
Why actually read the article? It’s so much more fun to ridicule a non-existent claim.
All this came to mind this week when we read about a four-minute monologue by Colion Noir that ran on NRA-TV, the National Rifle Association’s online streaming service. Noir argued that the news media’s neurotic obsession over school shootings tends to inspire other troubled young men to seek glory and fame by perpetrating more school shootings. The observation strikes us as plainly true, and indeed our colleagues have said as much in these pages.
But Noir went on: “It’s time to put an end to this glorification of carnage in pursuit of ratings, because it’s killing our kids. It’s time for Congress to step up and pass legislation putting common-sense limitations on our mainstream media’s ability to report on these school shootings. . . . Pass a law preventing the media from reporting the killer’s name or showing his face.”
Noir, as you may have guessed, was using heavy-handed irony—suggesting facetious regulations on the First Amendment in order to question the constitutionality of real ones on the Second. He went on explicitly to disavow any desire to limit what the media can say and to suggest that gun-control proponents ought to be equally hesitant about limiting the constitutional right to bear arms.
But you had to listen for three minutes to get his point, and that was far too long for Twitter. Aaron Rupar, a tweeter with the left-liberal organization ThinkProgress, summarized Noir’s video to his 18,000 followers in this way: “NRA death cult now openly calling for 1st Amendment to be curtailed so people won’t be able to learn full extent of the gun violence problem they perpetuate.”
Left-wing Twitter, which often suffers from irony deficiency, went berserk with the news that the NRA was now “openly calling” for a rollback of the First Amendment. At this writing, a full week after Noir’s video went live, a million progressives must think freedom of the press is in danger simply because some nitwit only watched half of a video. Oh, but it must have felt good to sound off.
