Geek News Radio

Fabian A. Scherschel
Bowmore Mike Mullan-Jensen
Sharps Wolf Rock

You can discuss the episode via this GitLab issue or by joining our Discord community. You can also listen to it on YouTube.

Mike and Fab sit down for three hours to discuss current politics and how journalism is tied up in it. There’s also some Elite Dangerous talk.

We start the show with Fab talking about the Distant Worlds 2 expedition he’s part of in Elite Dangerous.

Someone beat us to it, @fabsh and @MegaSlippers!
'Why I bought a Brexit survival box' https://t.co/KBXJgxauqn via @BBCNews

— Mike Mullan-Jensen (@MstevnsMJ) January 14, 2019

In the main part of the episode, Mike and Fab discuss current affairs and how the changing journalism landscape is influencing all of our lives. Things we mentioned:

• Niklas Luhmann
• The Fresno Bee
• HyperNormalisation
• Register of Journalists’ Interests
• Seth Abramson
• Carole Cadwalladr

Seth Abramson’s definition of metajournalism:

My Twitter feed is what’s called “metajournalism” — a metamodern form of post-internet digital journalism that acknowledges that we all have too much information to process daily. Instead of despairing, however, metajournalism tries to find a way to see and use all available information to make better journalism. How does metajournalism do this? By seeing and using the entire field of information on a given subject — say the Trump-Russia investigation — whether the information comes from the United States or elsewhere, from print media outlets or digital outlets, from a verified Twitter account or a New York Times article from a decade ago. The idea is that, as long as all of the information that is seen by the metajournalist is accurate, it can be used to reconstruct false narratives into accurate ones. We’ve already found this to be true time and time again in the Trump-Russia investigation: conventional journalists, pressed for time and faced with a tsunami of digital news sources, are unable to see the entire field of information on the topics they’re writing on before they write about them. The result is that they miss information or connections that many of their readers — having seen a different part of the field — don’t. Unfortunately, when this happens many readers presume bad faith on the part of the journalist. “How could you have gotten that fact wrong!” they cry. “Either you’re biased, or you’re a liar!” By comparison, the metajournalist presumes good faith on the conventional journalist’s part, while acknowledging that conventional journalism makes it inevitable that any given reporter will miss a substantial sector of the field of information they’re working within.

After all of this, you probably have a lot to digest. We do end the show quickly, but do address some of your feedback from the past few weeks.

Matt sent us a picture of the Ultramarines he’s painted because the show got him into Warhammer 40K.

Hmmm, alright then, good sir. I did let others have a chance, but since nobody has asked for it so far, I shall say: pic.twitter.com/cx0SW1auVk

— Niklas Meinzer (@NiklasMM) December 19, 2018

If you also have some comments on the show, you can talk to us via Twitter, on GitLab or by joining the Sixgun Discord and talking to us directly.

Thanks to Bytemark for graciously providing bandwith for this podcast.