I don’t really understand what the legitimate purpose of NBC News’ Think opinion section is supposed to be. It looks mostly exist for click bait purposes and as a form of welfare for Brooklyn based journalists. As an example of it providing content at the level of say, a blog like this one, instead of NBC News, take a piece that ran yesterday, titled “I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on Monday and took a selfie. Things got weird after that.“. The sub-headline which makes a more specific claim, is this:
The pause on Tuesday had strangers hyping my supposedly inevitable demise. But victim-blaming is just a response to those people’s perceived vulnerability.
By “strangers hyping my supposedly inevitable demise” that refers to a few quote tweets, that is, a tweet that includes another tweet below it. The author of the piece, Andi Zeisler, describes what happened this way:
I woke up Tuesday morning without any discernible side effects — but to a phone screen crowded with notifications.
…
The ones from Twitter indicated that what I’d thought was an unassuming vaccine selfie was being retweeted with snarky comments from total strangers like, “One and done all right,” and, “Oh honey, I’ve got bad news.”
Those sound more snarky than hyping her demise. But more importantly, the word “like” seems to be used in a misleading way.
As of the time I am writing this post, there are a total of 21 quote tweets of her tweet:
[insert image]
Six of those came after the NBC News Think piece. 15 quotes seems pretty low number to justify a story, but only three seems to fit this at all. Besides the ones already quoted, there was this one:
Maybe use better phrase emoji 😬 #JohnsonAndJohnsonVaccine
Those three seemingly jokey and harmless lines receive a huge discourse that starts with the following and then goes on and on:
Those retweets of my vaxxie, meanwhile, were unsettling but not surprising: On Twitter (the most proudly miserable of the big social media platforms), total strangers gleefully anticipating my untimely demise isn’t a new experience. But that there are people searching for the phrase “Johnson & Johnson” to gloat about tweets like mine — which, to be clear, was about getting a vaccine to hopefully prevent severe illness and hospitalization from a Covid-19 infection, if not a Covid-19 infection itself — is a powerful reminder of the human instinct to apply moral and intellectual judgment to others in an effort to shield ourselves from the breathtaking cruelty of happenstance.
It is worth noting that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that those people did a search for “Johnson & Johnson”. They could have come across it in other ways, considering that this woman has 84,700 followers according to Twitter and the tweet has been retweeted by others. It also is worth noting that those tweets don’t read like total strangers gleefully anticipating her untimely demise. It seems like this woman could use some professional help, not a major news outlet publishing this garbage.
If you are wondering who she is, her Twitter profile states:
Writer, editor, @BitchMedia cofounder, speaker, author, WE WERE FEMINISTS ONCE. I look like your cousin’s friend or your friend’s cousin. I love your dog.
Why does someone with their own media outlet need NBC News to provide them an outlet as well? Especially with the distinct lack of quality of this content?
I should note that at least she isn’t from Brooklyn, but where she really lives is unclear because on Twitter it says Portland, but piece says she “got vaccinated in Washington state”, so maybe she really is based in some place like Vancouver, Washington, but claims to be based in Portland.