Journalism is dead. The privileged, cosseted ranks of this once proud and revered profession have overseen its ruination, content with churning out mindless drivel interspersed with nakedly communist screeds from the safety of their social and intellectual bubble, while demonizing dissenters and further alienating themselves and the clutch of coastal elites to whom they preach from the Common Man.
One man who has spoken about these trends is the ever fearless Jason Whitlock, co-host of All Takes Matter on Fox Sports 1. Today, he has further exposed yet another weapon used in the media’s war on common sense with a helpful explanation of native advertising, a bastardized form of journalism that he definitely and without question knows lots and lots about.
All of this started with this post from the site Awful Announcing, in which they took Whitlock to task for what they perceived as Whitlock trying to lecture former NFL offensive lineman Damien Woody about the finer points of line play. After seeing the blog, Whitlock came out swinging:
For those of you with modern journalism’s wool still pulled over your eyes, these tweets might not make much sense. Maybe you don’t know what native advertising is, or maybe you sort of thought you understood the term but you don’t get how the process of an outlet disguising advertisements at the behest of sponsors looking to sell products has anything to do with one website’s choice to write a blog critical of a talking, behatted head. You might, if you were feeling particularly unforgiving, conclude that Whitlock himself doesn’t have a clue what native advertising actually entails and was using it as nothing more than a general insult to make himself sound smart.
Luckily, Whitlock cleared this all up by demonstrating his mastery of the topic at hand:
As was soon pointed out—an obvious attempt at a “gotcha” moment from the media elites looking for any avenue to discredit this profound and controversial truth-teller—the content of Whitlock’s explainer tweet is simply the first sentence of Wikipedia’s entry on native advertising. Embarrassing, right? Did the implication that he didn’t know what native advertising meant before using the term send Whitlock scrambling to cover his tracks? Maybe for a lesser mind, but not our Whitlock:
Start taking notes, young journalists. With Whitlock’s lead, we can save this industry yet.