The Follies of Muckraking Journalism

By Phil Elmore

How many death threats have you received in your life?

How many people follow you around the Internet wishing you ill?

Most normal people can say these numbers are low, if not zero.  I am not most normal people.  I am a writer and, unfortunately for me, I spent a few years very enamored of the concept of muckraking journalism.  I believed I was going to speak truth to power… and truth to stupidity.  I thought truth was the ultimate defense. I thought nothing could stop me.

What I found out was that muckraking journalism is the gift that keeps on giving.  Thanks to writing several articles in the martial arts arena that exposed the false claims of a few different people, I now have a devoted “fan club” of people who hate me and follow me around the Web to tell me so.  They’ve threatened to kill me.  They’ve threatened to sue me.  They’ve defamed, slandered, and libeled me.  They’ve formed entire secret Internet discussion sites devoted to amassing information on me, for the specific purpose of harming me, destroying my reputation, and even killing me.

I’m not complaining, mind you.  As a writer who offers strong opinions in often inflammatory fields of human endeavor, I bring this on myself. I was overjoyed when the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal propaganda group labeled me a hatemonger.  It meant I was entering a new tier of political punditry.  I was getting noticed, and hated, by the right people.  You have to accept that this will occur to a certain degree if you’re going to operate in the battlefield of public opinion.

But I made the problem worse.  I made it worse by making specific enemies. I wrote exposés on individual martial arts personalities who will hate me and threaten me for the rest of my life.  To a certain segment of the “ninjitsu” community, I am the bogeyman.  I am the monster under the bed.  Ninja exponents tell their children to eat their vegetables or Phil Elmore will get them.  Then they call me fat and go online to tell the world what a son of a bitch I am.

Had I to do it all over again, I would have avoided specifically “muckraking” journalism like the plague.  It just isn’t worth the trouble.  I vowed to stop when people who merely commented on articles I wrote received death threats from the subjects of those articles.  Crazy people have a lot of spare time.  They will always have more energy for these online feuds than you.

Learn from my example.  The Internet is, arguably, all about hate.  Everyone hates everyone else.  We hate each other’s opinions and, separated by distance and near-anonymity, we all feel free to tell each other how much we hate them.  There’s no changing that fact.  You will be hated if you express an opinion online… but you can avoid making the problem worse than it has to be.

Think before you write. Consider the repercussions. Count the enemies you will make… and ask yourself if you want to contend with those people for the rest of your life.

This entry was posted
on Wednesday, March 27th, 2013 at 11:00 and is filed under Last Honest Patriot.
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