It's not them writing
about Channers and Redditors doing the ops. It's them
FALLING for the ops, hook, line, and sinker, and writing about them.
Take the American Sign Language sign for OK, as an example:
According to most mainstream media outlets, this is now a symbol for "white power". Why? Because the idiots who write the news completely fell for a /pol/ op to try and get the "journalists" (and I use that term lightly, since the most investigating most of them do is looking at Twitter for 5 seconds) to declare it a white supremacist symbol. Dozens, if not over a hundred articles were written about this or people seen using the sign (which is universally used in the US as OK), especially people these "journalists" disagreed with politically.
There's a huge groupthink mentality in mainstream left leaning journalism. It's not about the truth in what they report, it's about how "woke" they can make themselves seem. If one of them writes something that sounds super woke, then you'll see a whole bunch of them copy the same talking point to make sure they stay as woke as possible in the eyes of the very few in the entire world who actually give a shit if someone is "woke" or not.
This is why the NPC meme pissed off so many of the social justice social media people, and so many "journalists". It hit so close to home that very few of them had any original thoughts and just parroted the words that sounded woke, almost as if they were programmed to do it. There were articles talking about how it was "dehumanizing" to call them NPCs-- never mind that they're all about dehumanizing anyone they deem to be an ideological opponent (Nazi, Russian Bot, Alt-Right), which just so happens to be anyone that slightly disagrees with them. But it follows the "It's OK when we do it!" playbook they use, so that's OK.
The Channers and Redditors don't want credit for creating an op, or to have stories written about
themselves... they want the "woke" left leaning journalists to buy their ops as an absolute truth that is worthy of being written about in so many news/op ed pieces that you'd think someone eviscerated the first born of all of the journalists' (right in front of them) writing so passionately about the subject. And the "journalists" will never admit they fell for a hoax from "the hacker known as 4Chan".