RE: “Men’s group sponsors ‘manspreading’ petition,” Jan. 8-14.
I’m sure you’ve seen a number of major publications pushing certain stories, not based on the validity of the issues raised, but rather on how much buzz it will generate being a hot button topic. It’s a problem journalism has been facing since its inception.
Manspreading, to me, is a perfect example.
It’s the capitalization of a total non-issue into a half-page worthy story in the Charlatan because it ticks the right boxes. The boxes being gender politics, which is very much the “in” social movement.
Why the Charlatan is, I’d argue, more at fault in this instance of producing buzzworthy news is because they don’t have have a profit motive. Or at least, not nearly as heavily influential as most other papers.
They’re free in a lot of respects to take chances and be idealistic, when in a more corporate newsroom you simply don’t have that flexibility. That this freedom is wasted on doing the same old nonsense you see everywhere else is sad.
By publishing something of such baseless inanity, it only lowers the bar that much more as to what merits/promotes intelligent and informed discussion. As journalists, it’s their job to decide for the readership what’s worthy of being printed each week.
That manspreading was voted, not only as a worthy story, but as the most important issue of that week (intentional or not, that’s the message you send with your front page story) is laughable. Not to mention that most people’s interaction with the Charlatan starts and ends with the front page. Basically, the Charlatan said that in that specific week, if they could only choose one piece of information to spread, it was manspreading. Manspreading was apparently what most students needed to know about.
From a personal perspective, issues like manspreading encourage people to see oppression/social issues in every shadow, and then to dismiss anyone who doesn’t see it the same way. I believe this dismissal usually comes based on their skin colour/gender, and not their actual arguments.
In fact, this is a losing venture for me by even speaking out. I’d be shocked if the fact that I am a white man isn’t brought up several times in response to this piece. I’m sexist by default in the eyes of many for merely voicing my opinions to the contrary while also in possession of a penis.
I’m not delusional; the fate of journalism isn’t at stake here. What the Charlatan does and doesn’t publish will have very little overall effect (I mean, they even let an idiot like me write in). But it is another small brick in the foundations that are harming the discourse that takes place in our society.
What’s especially tiresome about manspreading is it’s actually asking to be taken seriously. It’s bullshit masquerading as a social issue, and instead of covering the trillion other newsworthy events in our school, community, city, country, world, etc. we devoted time and effort to publish and read about people sitting on buses with their legs out wide.
Any news medium on the planet could find something more worthy than manspreading. It just would have taken some, you know, journalism.
