The furry fandom cannot catch a break. Ever, really. It’s hard to find any articles which are merely NOT negative; much less ones that are positive. Therefore, the community tends to rally around their hatred for negative media attention.
Case in Point: This article.
It has all the baits of a bad article on the furry fandom. If you read the article, and you don’t have any preconceived bias of the furry fandom from sources like the “infamous CSI episode,” you can see it is quite ridiculous in its portrayal of the members of the fandom.
But after the article was released online, furries are not a group that takes bad reporting like that lying down. Various members of the community wrote in stating the inaccuracies of the article, such as the fact the author wildly misinterpreted the size of the furry community, in addition to the fact that no one in the New Zealand furry community had seen fursuits like the one she described in her article. They were also able to find that they lifted her “interview” from various other online sources on the furry fandom. Not only that, but she used a copyrighted picture from an Australian furry convention.
Because the furry community is largely online, and they are used to being portrayed poorly in public media, they are very aware of their self-image. This encourages furs to share their unique information to bring down news articles like this which have many different kinds of errors, but you need people from various specialties to point out all of them.
Not only that, but now that Flayrah has put up an article about the issue:
Look in the comments section and you can see how the group is collaborating further. Some community members from around the globe are showing their support, while other people are writing in to contribute resources that they can use to help their cause.
The furry fandom was once an easy target for news media, simply because not much was known about it, so it was easy to sway the public’s opinion one way or the other. In today’s world, where the fandom is far more tightly knit and can better support each other, and the community is better able to share different pieces of information, these reporting methods will no longer fly.
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