Context of Modern Media and Clickbait News

Context, Does It Matter? It Should.

In today's world of always-online connectivity, news travels at the speed of twitter. In 140 Characters, people can spread and consume headlines and stories faster than you could say peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. So it can be assumed that people take in stories every day read the headlines and go “Yes that's true.” I don't have to look further into it and I can make up my opinion on the subject at this very moment. You as a media consumer be it the generation the “millennials” or the next generation “Gen Z” should be more attentive when it comes to media and what kind of content they push to your smartphones and monitors. Media today comes in many forms from the classic nightly news broadcast to the newer online sites we use every day with places like Facebook and Twitter allowing for constant instant updates. And knowing how media works sensational headlines get more views or online clicks, way more than a story that isn't sensationalized or controversial, and the more people that watch or read their work the more money these companies make. You should be skeptical of both the headlines and the content these mainstream media people claim as fact because you might not know their agenda for making these articles and what bias they have in making it. Short edited videos above a long article that are then edited for quick consumption that keeps our attention just long enough to get the big idea and move on. Never mind the original purpose of the content they are using, just put in a catchy headline and use some editing to make it fit into our agenda so we can make money. Both the media and the general public make the big faux pas of taking content written or made under a specific context and twist it so it matches their personal agenda. So while people all across the world can enjoy the speed at which content is shown to them you as an individual should make sure that big flashy headlines and controversial topics don't instantly sway your opinion.

In February of this year, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) released a piece on Pewdiepie aka Felix Kjellberg a Swedish comedian and arguably the most famous person on the YouTube platform with a subscriber count of over 54 million users to date. In their article, they portrayed Felix as being a racist and an anti-Semitic. In their four and a half minute, long video they go over a few of his videos edited for maximum effect. The first clip they use starts with him in a make America great again hat watching a Hitler speech while also wearing a Nazi like uniform. The next was a clip of him watching two South Asian men, that he paid on a website called fivver, dancing and laughing while carrying a sign that said "DEATH TO ALL JEWS" and lastly a clip where he shows a man acting as Jesus saying Hitler did nothing wrong. But this supercut of his videos are highly misrepresentative of what Felix is as a comedian and a content creator.

As a comedian trying to make jokes about our crazy world and he was often misrepresented in any of his inclusions of anything Nazi related. The part with him watching the Hitler video was a satirical look at the new program YouTube is looking to implement called the YouTube Heroes Program. The program as it was described allowed people to opt in to contribute to flagging inappropriate videos while also being rewarded for doing so. Felix is comparing the ability to censor content just because it offended you to Nazi youth and given the context, that Nazi’s are bad so is censorship. The part with him and the dancing men in context was of him showing that you can get people to do the craziest things for some money, same thing for about the Jesus video. The WSJ article would like to have you believe that Felix, the most popular person on YouTube, is a racist and anti-Semitic. Though in a Forbes article defending Felix written by Dani Di Placido, “The Wall Street Journal’s video contains several scenes deliberately taken out of context, and is edited to appear far darker than the patently ridiculous source material. A penchant for vulgar humor does not automatically make one a neo-Nazi, and while Kjellberg is controversial, he has never seriously advocated a racist agenda”. The specific content that the WSJ focused on had bigger meanings and ideas that Felix wanted to get across in his satirical comedy. Yet they cut out that part of the story because the out of context view of "Pewdiepie is a racist anti-Semite" guaranteed them to get lots of coverage and with coverage comes money.

The story from the WSJ gained so much traction, so much so that as a reaction: YouTube canceled the second season of his YouTube red series scare Pewdiepie, removed from the Google Preferred ad program of YouTube and was dropped like a hot rock by his MCN (Multi-Channel Network) Maker Studio owned by Disney. The WSJ, Wired, The Washington Post and many other "mainstream media outlets" are just running with the story publishing the same thing and misrepresenting and putting things out of context when talking about Pewdiepie and that's because Pewdiepie is an easy target. Philp Defranco, prominent YouTube news content creator said, “You look to all these other sites that are talking about Pewdiepie right now and you can see their intent. Their Intent here was to take down and ruin Felix; the biggest Youtuber on the platform, through