This week, journalists have been providing coverage of the Tory Lanez trial in which he faces three federal assault charges for allegedly shooting Megan Thee Stallion. If you want to follow some exceptional reporting on the matter, I’d recommend James Queally from the Los Angeles Times, Gabriella Bulgarelli from NPR’s Louder Than a Riot, and Nancy Dillon from Rolling Stone, among others from real news organizations. Yet even with a handful of capable reporters doing a fantastic job informing the public of what is going on in the courtroom, people are looking to folks like DJ Akademiks and platforms like No Jumper (headed by Adam22) as credible sources. Under no circumstance do these people have the faintest idea of what’s going on. They’re idiots parading as journalists, exploiting poor media literacy.
In general, the way these two platforms cover news is little more than exploitative, shameless gossip. As they’ve amassed such large followings, they hold an outsized degree of influence over how communities within and adjacent to hip-hop perceive current events but are far too incompetent to be good stewards of this power.
No Jumper has spent the week posting threads on Twitter so riddled with grammatical errors they look like prompts for a middle school English exam. No Jumper has also gotten basic law terms confused, notably stating a juror got "accused," from the “trail.” We all make mistakes and are hunted by the typo monster, but the biggest tell that these jokers don’t know what they’re doing and have no place acting as a journalist in even a community theater play is that such a grave error was not met with a correction more than 24 hours after it was published. Meanwhile, DJ Akademiks is most concerned with whether Tory Lanez and Megan Thee Stallion had sex.
The main agenda these vultures have is to publish salacious content and to feed their viewership’s appetite for misogyny. They have no desire to truly serve the public nor do any understanding of legal terms like “recused.” No Jumper, Akademiks, and similar hacks are extremely out of their depth. They want to obfuscate facts and paint Megan Thee Stallion as a liar so their fanbases can feel vindicated. The target audience will eat it up because they have poor media literacy, which is a grave threat to our democracy.
It’s about time we leave bozos like this in the rearview. When it comes to serious reporting matters, it’d serve everyone right if they’d go ahead and “accuse” themselves for good.
H. Drew Blackburn