Here are two more shifts to make in our daily practice to help us kill the ‘spectacle’ in ‘spectacle journalism’.

My first piece published here covered first three mindset and technical shifts, before reporting: pitch the system not the spectacle, report consequence not conflict, center the burden-bearers not the perpetrators. Those shifts are about what story you’re telling and whose experience is at the center of it.

These two are about something that happens before any of that, reading the information environment you’re working inside before you let it assign the story for you.

On beats covering online harm, extremism, and AI abuse, the platform is not a neutral surface. It is an active editorial force. It decides what looks significant. It manufactures the appearance of consensus. It makes fringe content look mainstream and widespread harm look marginal. Journalists who don’t account for that are not reporting reality. They are reporting the platform’s version of reality, which is designed, in specific and documented ways, to serve interests other than public understanding.

These two shifts are about closing that gap before the first word is written, or first raw video is collected, edited, or clipped.

A guide for journalists covering extremism, AI abuse, and harassment — how to pitch the system, not the spectacle, and report consequence instead of conflict.

This covers Part 1 of the full guide, focusing on the first three framing shifts that change how you pitch and conceptualize a story before you report a single word.

By Raja Althaibani (follow on substack @rajaalthaibani)

The Field Dispatch is the working intelligence arm of The Field community of practice. It publishes original reporting, research, analysis, case studies, curated resources and tools for practitioners and institutions across the intersecting fields it covers. media systems, emerging tech and AI, online harm, policy, accountability, public-interest strategy, geopolitical analysis, global narrative, and culture (by Raja Althaibani)

In 2023, I co-authored a piece for OpinioJuris arguing that the existing community of practice in the open-source investigative field wasn't just fractured — it was structurally extractive, skewed toward Global North institutions, and systematically excluding the practitioners with the most situational knowledge and the least institutional power. That argument is the foundation The Field is built on. Read it here → [link]

Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere gets close to the men and misses the machinery. This essay argues that the manosphere is not best understood as a gallery of shocking personalities, but as a networked commercial ecosystem shaped by media incentives, platform dynamics, grievance, and profit. When journalism centers spectacle over structure, it risks reproducing the very logic it claims to expose.

Announcing a New Series: The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere. Raja Althaibani. A new series on the manosphere, media spectacle, misogyny, extremism, platform power, and the urgent need for clearer public literacy and stronger institutional response.