I remember being blown away by cod 2 on a 360 demo station, how the smoke seemed like it was thick and had real volume in a way I'd never seen before.

It was an Issue on which serious people were expected to have opinions.

Over and over again we’ve seen the media refuse to create Issues out of anything related to right-wing radicalization. If they get any mention, they’re in stories about ‘polarization,’ a misstatement of the actual problem.

This is a huge part of the media’s role in a democracy, not simply reporting the facts but collecting them into Major Political Issues to which the citizenry and politicians pay attention.

In 2021 when homicide rates spiked, for example, we got a wave of stories about causes, fixes, fallout, etc.

It’s true that these incidents appear in the news section, but they’re rarely collected into trend pieces or framed by the media as part of a single, urgent story.

Compare this to ‘campus free speech,’ which had magazine covers, entire verticals and dedicated beat reporters.