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It’s just too bad that Stewart couldn’t get Jim Cramer’s show cancelled as well.
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Dec 21, 2018 05:49
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Solkanar512 posted:It’s just too bad that Stewart couldn’t get Jim Cramer’s show cancelled as well. CNBC doesn't even have the modicum of shame that CNN does.
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Dec 21, 2018 05:52
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Solkanar512 posted:It’s just too bad that Stewart couldn’t get Jim Cramer’s show cancelled as well. Would we still be in the red if we followed Cramer's investing advice? EDIT : Greenwald's reporting has been going downhill ever since Bush left in '08. His constantly cries of Russiaphobia are complete nonsense. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 16:51
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Tab8715 posted:Would we still be in the red if we followed Cramer's investing advice? I don't think buying up Bear Sterns a few weeks before they collapsed would be all that useful.
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Dec 21, 2018 16:59
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Tab8715 posted:Greenwald's reporting has been going downhill ever since Bush left in '08. His constantly cries of Russiaphobia are complete nonsense. I feel like this isn’t really fair to his entire body of work. Even if you grant that he’s 100% wrong on Russia for example, his reporting on animal abuse and factory farming has been exemplary and he does a good job on Brazil too as far as I can tell as a relatively uninformed outsider.
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Dec 21, 2018 17:37
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Lightning Knight posted:I feel like this isn’t really fair to his entire body of work. Even if you grant that he’s 100% wrong on Russia for example, his reporting on animal abuse and factory farming has been exemplary and he does a good job on Brazil too as far as I can tell as a relatively uninformed outsider. Maybe he should stick to that.
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Dec 21, 2018 17:59
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Spun Dog posted:Maybe he should stick to that. I mean tbh Greenwald would be one of the unambiguously greatest journalists of our generation if he only wrote about animal abuse and factory farming.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:01
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Lightning Knight posted:I feel like this isn’t really fair to his entire body of work. Even if you grant that he’s 100% wrong on Russia for example, his reporting on animal abuse and factory farming has been exemplary and he does a good job on Brazil too as far as I can tell as a relatively uninformed outsider. My current thoughts on him are entirely from his twitter, maybe that's a poor example?
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Dec 21, 2018 18:03
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Lightning Knight posted:I mean tbh Greenwald would be one of the unambiguously greatest journalists of our generation if he only wrote about animal abuse and factory farming. And didn't narc out whistleblowers.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:04
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Tab8715 posted:My current thoughts on him are entirely from his twitter, maybe that's a poor example? Yeah his Twitter is kinda bad tbh. Sometimes it’s good but it’s mostly silly. Spun Dog posted:And didn't narc out whistleblowers. I assume you mean Reality Winner here.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:06
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Spun Dog posted:And didn't narc out whistleblowers. did he narc out a whistleblower at some point, or is this another bit of that wonderful snarl-word game where because a bad thing happened the guy you already hate must have been responsible
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Dec 21, 2018 18:08
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Lightning Knight posted:Yeah his Twitter is kinda bad tbh. Sometimes it’s good but it’s mostly silly. Yah
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Dec 21, 2018 18:08
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Spun Dog posted:Yah lol please lay out how you believe Glenn Greenwald narced on Reality Winner, this should be good
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Dec 21, 2018 18:09
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Lightning Knight posted:Glenn Greenwald is going to bat for Tucker Carlson's "free speech" because people are trying to boycott companies that place ads on Carlson's show. Carlson is a white nationalist. Greenwald just constantly memes himself on issues related to freedom of speech and it's hilarious but also sad because he should know better. Yeah, free speech fundamentalism is stupid and probably the biggest issue with Greenwald's personal ideology. Lightning Knight posted:Glenn Greenwald is simultaneously an incredibly talented journalist and writer, and a great philanthropist who hooks up homeless people with puppies, and yet also a big old fuckin' idiot, and I know why he is both of these things and yet it is also baffling to me. I dunno if I'd go as far as to say "incredibly talented." It's more that, in the context of US media, he isn't a particularly offensive figure and the ire aimed at him is obviously deranged and unreasonable. I can't help but doubt the judgement of someone who feels the need to express their strong distaste towards a person like Greenwald but has almost nothing negative to say about more mainstream non-Republican media figures. Like, take this post: Tab8715 posted:EDIT : Greenwald's reporting has been going downhill ever since Bush left in '08. His constantly cries of Russiaphobia are complete nonsense. I can virtually guarantee that this person knows almost nothing about Greenwald or Greenwald's opinions beyond maybe seeing a few selected dumb tweets*. This sort of thing annoys me not because I care about Greenwald specifically, but because it's indicative of a larger trend of mocking and belittling non/less-mainstream voices while largely ignoring more mainstream/prominent ones who say and do things far more harmful. And it's also highly debatable about whether they're even dumb with regard to the Russia stuff, since Greenwald has never denied or claimed that he thinks Russia didn't hack the DNC or whatever; he's just demanded direct evidence and encouraged skepticism towards the claims of the government and aligned organizations, which is a completely reasonable thing to do even if it's almost certain that (in this case) Russia is responsible. There is nothing harmful about having (in this case) a small minority of media figures who always default to strong skepticism in situations like this, and I can't help but wonder why some people get so irritated about this. I think that in most cases, people have just absorbed this attitude and opinion through a sort of cultural osmosis after being exposed to it a bunch in liberal/Democratic-aligned media and discourse. The Russiaphobia stuff is also a completely legitimate concern, since there has been an actual effort to discredit people and ideas that have appeared on Russian television or in Russian social media propaganda. Again - I can't help but wonder why some people get so irritated and defensive about this. What are they worried about? That this will somehow cause us to be "too soft" on Russia which will, uh, lead to something bad, somehow? It makes no sense. Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:did he narc out a whistleblower at some point, or is this another bit of that wonderful snarl-word game where because a bad thing happened the guy you already hate must have been responsible Yep, this is another one of the things that has somehow been absorbed into the liberal psyche through osmosis. It's funny how liberals talk about conservatives blindly believing things, when they're completely willing to do the same when it aligns with their preconceived beliefs. Silver2195 posted:Edit: After looking through Johnson's Twitter timeline, his ratio of good to bad takes is better than I'd expected. I guess the awful takes I'd seen getting retweeted were somewhat unrepresentative. Yeah Johnson (and the podcast he does, Citations Needed) is actually good; Hamprince's opinion isn't exactly rational and is just based out of a reflexive disdain towards anyone vaguely associated with the left. Dunno why; my personal hypothesis is that people like him may have had some nasty break-up with a leftist in the past or something. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 18:17
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Ytlaya posted:I dunno if I'd go as far as to say "incredibly talented." It's more that, in the context of US media, he isn't a particularly offensive figure and the ire aimed at him is obviously deranged and unreasonable. I can't help but doubt the judgement of someone who feels the need to express their strong distaste towards a person like Greenwald but has almost nothing negative to say about more mainstream non-Republican media figures. That's an interesting argument to make in defense of a guy who goes on white nationalists shows to bitch about the dems.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:20
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Spun Dog posted:Yah congrats on being a literal conspiracy theorist
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Dec 21, 2018 18:27
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, free speech fundamentalism is stupid and probably the biggest issue with Greenwald's personal ideology. Nah I think Greenwald is unironically a good journalist and his reporting on factory farming actually deserves awards. We can sit all day and argue about the merits of his Russia reporting but his problem is that he memes himself on his takes as a pundit not that he’s objectively bad at his job, because his investigative reporting is good.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:52
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Volkerball posted:That's an interesting argument to make in defense of a guy who goes on white nationalists shows to bitch about the dems. If you make a big post and somebody responds to that post and asks you follow up questions then I sincerely ask that you either reply in good faith or you stop posting in the thread. Just ignoring posts you don't want to address and then coming back a few pages later to drop off more of the same hot takes you were being challenged on is one of the reason arguments in D&D have an endless and circular quality that makes them incredibly boring. If you find the idea of a long form debate like that unappealing then feel free to take your argument to the middle east thread, Russiagate thread, right-wing media thread, USpol thread, the current events thread, or any of the numerous other threads that cover the same set of topics.
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Dec 21, 2018 19:52
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To add something besides whatever this thread is so far, Der Spiegel posted an expose about how one of their own reporters made poo poo up constantly, for years. Here is one US journalist's perspective as it pertains to fact checking (fact checking here referring to confirming everything in a story, not the Bottomless Pinocchio!!! style trash from WaPo): https://twitter.com/spoke32/status/1076219412485677056 Here is a European journalist's response: https://twitter.com/youngvulgarian/status/1076526885729902593 There's also a bunch of other Europeans (mostly British people I think) in the replies who are astounded at what gets confirmed in US journalism.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:07
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Badger of Basra posted:To add something besides whatever this thread is so far, Der Spiegel posted an expose about how one of their own reporters made poo poo up constantly, for years. Here is one US journalist's perspective as it pertains to fact checking (fact checking here referring to confirming everything in a story, not the Bottomless Pinocchio!!! style trash from WaPo): it seems silly to laud the way that the us press nitpicks the stories that reporters write over the tiniest details, and yet pay so little attention to the quality of information that they get from sources. the us media routinely takes the words of government sources and reports them as fact, which is how so many objectively false stories got amplified during the buildup to the iraq war. back in 2017 there was a huge rash of reporting on events that went on in the white house that never happened; reince preibus was leaking contradictory information deliberately to the press in order to discredit them. the newspaper's don't really care, as long as you are accurately quoting a source you can print completely false things without fear of a libel suit. having your editors spending days verifying the number of lightbulbs on a sign in india is a waste when you are also not checking the veracity of what your sources are telling you.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:55
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GoluboiOgon posted:it seems silly to laud the way that the us press nitpicks the stories that reporters write over the tiniest details, and yet pay so little attention to the quality of information that they get from sources. the us media routinely takes the words of government sources and reports them as fact, which is how so many objectively false stories got amplified during the buildup to the iraq war. back in 2017 there was a huge rash of reporting on events that went on in the white house that never happened; reince preibus was leaking contradictory information deliberately to the press in order to discredit them. the newspaper's don't really care, as long as you are accurately quoting a source you can print completely false things without fear of a libel suit. having your editors spending days verifying the number of lightbulbs on a sign in india is a waste when you are also not checking the veracity of what your sources are telling you. Later on in the first thread (or maybe in the replies, idk) he points out that this isn't done for most dailies. The kind of stuff he's talking about is for longform stuff.
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Dec 22, 2018 20:04
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GoluboiOgon posted:it seems silly to laud the way that the us press nitpicks the stories that reporters write over the tiniest details, and yet pay so little attention to the quality of information that they get from sources. the us media routinely takes the words of government sources and reports them as fact, which is how so many objectively false stories got amplified during the buildup to the iraq war. back in 2017 there was a huge rash of reporting on events that went on in the white house that never happened; reince preibus was leaking contradictory information deliberately to the press in order to discredit them. the newspaper's don't really care, as long as you are accurately quoting a source you can print completely false things without fear of a libel suit. having your editors spending days verifying the number of lightbulbs on a sign in india is a waste when you are also not checking the veracity of what your sources are telling you. On the one hand I agree with your sentiment that getting minor details accurate isn't that impressive when the press is so easy for powerful people to game. A particularly egregious example would be when Dick Cheney leaked information to friendly journalists to publish then went on the talk news circuit and cited those government leaks (that actually came from him) as justification for the war. He was effectively laundering his talking points, passing them through additional anonymous hands in order to create the perception of a widespread government consensus regarding WMDs. That having been said, I have some experience with fact checking and I'm reading through the Der Spiegel piece now and reached this rather baffling part: quote:Last Thursday, Relotius said that "At Home in Hell," the story of a terrible reform school in which children were tortured for many years, was a reported story, a clean work of journalism based on interviews with the victims and contemporaneous witnesses and visits to the site. Relotius said the same of his article "God's servant," which DER SPIEGEL published in February 2015. The article is a political profile of gynecologist Willie Parker, the last doctor to perform abortions in the U.S. state of Mississippi. But how can we know if that is true in light of the new knowledge we have about Relotius' relationship to reality? How can we be sure that there is only one abortion doctor left in the state of Mississippi? Or that the doctor had previously been anti-abortion and had completely reversed course? Speaking from personal experience, if you want to know whether somebody performing abortions in Mississippi was formerly pro-choice then you can always... call them and ask. You find the number (typically the journalist gives you contact information for all their named sources) and you summarize the statements they're quoted as making and get confirmation from the person in question that they did say what is attributed to them. Often you'll also get them to verify other information they provided, in this case while I was checking that abortion doctors quotes I would have also asked them if they thought it was accurate to say they were the last abortion doctor in the state. Now in fairness fact checking used to be a paid position whereas its now its often either been eliminated altogether or is done by unpaid interns. Still, I have to roll my eyes at this internationally famous magazine throwing up their hands and saying "How could we possibly have known what this abortion doctor said? What were we supposed to do, have a fact checker call them and ask or something?!" Some of the stories involving Syrian refugees are easier to forgive but if you don't even bother to do follow up interviews with easily reachable people like doctors then you really shouldn't be claiming to have a rigorous fact checking process.
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Dec 22, 2018 20:10
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Helsing posted:You find the number (typically the journalist gives you contact information for all their named sources) and you summarize the statements they're quoted as making and get confirmation from the person in question that they did say what is attributed to them. Often you'll also get them to verify other information they provided, in this case while I was checking that abortion doctors quotes I would have also asked them if they thought it was accurate to say they were the last abortion doctor in the state. From reading the comments in the twitter thread, a lot of (presumably European) journalists are reacting like it's crazy to give contact information for sources to staffers in this manner. Is there any reason for this belief? Is it about privacy or something? I honestly have no clue if there's a legitimate concern behind this reaction or which way makes more sense. My gut feeling is that as long as you tell sources that you're going to give their contact info to the paper (or whatever) that it should be fine and good to contact them to verify their statements.
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Dec 23, 2018 00:47
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i guess it's less of an issue in yankeeland what with the authorities knowing everything anyway, but i understand that source protection through compartmentalisation is Good practice, and also of the paper has your sources they don't really need you
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Dec 23, 2018 04:07
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V. Illych L. posted:i guess it's less of an issue in yankeeland what with the authorities knowing everything anyway, but i understand that source protection through compartmentalisation is Good practice, and also of the paper has your sources they don't really need you That’s not really something that applies when the sources aren’t anonymous
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Dec 23, 2018 04:19
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For the relotius story you can read the link from my post (page 3). It's quite an interesting albeit very long read. Der Spiegel also tries to explain in the article why fact checking didn't always work because of the style relotius used in his writing. His style of reporting was that of a "grand story" where he would mix hard facts with personal observations and characterizations. This lead to large parts of his texts being un checkable as he would make sure he was the only one who had met his (completely invented) characters. A quote from the article: Spiegel posted:As such, there is no simple remedy. Already, every text printed in DER SPIEGEL goes through a thorough fact-checking and vetting process to review the accuracy of every fact stated in an article. When Claas Relotius wrote in his first major feature for DER SPIEGEL, "At Home in Hell," that the city of Marianna is located "an hour by car west of Tallahassee" in northern Florida, a DER SPIEGEL fact checker reviewed whether that detail was accurate. This is a huge scandal in Germany, being used by right wing parties to discredit the main stream media further, but has also sparked some (I believe) healthy discussions whether the style of reporting itself is to blame for this. As for the gynaecologists case I agree, this could have been checked. However, keep in mind that relotius was well aware of this and tried to get around that by various means. He would not release the actual names of his protagonists (claiming they wanted to stay anonymous) or ask for articles not to be released in English or even digitally. Even going so far as falsifying emails or creating fake Facebook profiles. demonicon posted:Here is a German scandal to be mad about : A german reporter who completely falsified most of his stories and was employed by one of germany most renown magazines, der Spiegel. demonicon fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 16:08
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One might suggest it illustrates a fundamental flaw in the concept of having people go out and write stories which are then read by hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people.
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Dec 23, 2018 16:15
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In relotius case he would try to actually limit his audience. (see above added paragraph) It seems his target audience were actually other journalists and the media industry itself which would reliably reward him with prizes for his articles.
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Dec 23, 2018 16:20
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The problem still applies regardless in the sense that you can't "fact check" your way to empirical reporting because reporting is a: not based on empirical truths and b: to the extent it uses them they can easily be unverifiable. You are, fundamentally, trusting small numbers of people with control of the information supply and using their brains as the filter through which the world is presented. Even if you ignore the tendency for this to result in malicious actors (which I would suggest is itself a feature of the structure, it is much easier to buy off or have perverse incentives for a small group of people, and any given individual will have a very large scope to do damage in this way) you have fundamntally a very similar problem where you cannot report on many things without the bias of the author or editor affecting it massively. This and the inherent level of trust required a news outlet to pay people to do a job are things that you cannot fact check your way out of, as illustrated. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 16:23
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I completely agree. However, I think this is a fundemantal problem for humans not only limited to the media world. Everyone lives in his own world, filtered, as you said, by his brain. Sometimes I am surprised that we can even talk to each other because even words have totally different meanings for different people. Take climate change for example, for one person it means severe ecological danger for the human species, for the other it means bullshit thing invented by China costing me money. I do not think this is an issue we can solve and therefore we have to accept that everyone filters the world his own way, even reporters. The only thing we could do, in the reporting world, is to only ever simply report facts and not write a "story" about the facts. But I am afraid that people wouldn't want to read that. Look, for example, at the story I linked. The german version is obviously written a lot better as the translation is not that good, but even in the english version it is an interesting, sometimes even thrilling Story. Its opening paragraphs could be taken out of a novel: Spiegel posted:Shortly before the end of his journalistic career, misery and glamor crossed paths in the life of Claas Relotius. Even when reporting about the relotius case Spiegel couldn't help themselves but write in the very same style. And were actually heavily critized for it. The reason they did this, is that their audience wants this kind of writing. And It is entertaining to read.
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Dec 23, 2018 16:52
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Well I would personally question whether or not the existence of the press as a form of entertainment which you correctly identify it as, and also correctly deduce that it is driven to be so as a result of a desire to sell papers, is not itself actively harmful when it also attempts to hold the position of information provider. I don't think, essentially, that you can have a press which does that and which also is supposed to be trusted to provide important information or serve as a check on power, ignoring of course the obvious inability of the press to do that anyway even if it were inclined to try. And as you can't really stop the existence of the press, or at least the existence of "a thing which publishes stories about the world on the basis that people like reading them" which would de-facto be one. I don't think people are remotely unjustified in just generally discrediting the notion of a trustworthy press. I obviously don't like the far right but I think the fact that "fake news" finds such fertile ground across society is a good thing, because fundamentally yes, it's all fake to some degree or other, and it's good that people recognize this in some way even if they don't react to it productively. The right might be shits but they're correct when they say the news is bullshit. The left should be doing it as well, because "actually they aren't they're honest and true and trustworthy" isn't a credible position. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 16:57
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I mostly agree. Another interesting aspect: In Germany we have state funded media who do not have to earn any money by sales and actually have the mission to be independent and neutral. They still however have a similar style of reporting because, I believe, if you simple state facts no one would even read it. If no one reads what you publish there is no sense in publishing, even if you take money out of the equation.
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Dec 23, 2018 17:06
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We also have state funded media and it turns out they mostly do what the state tells them to do and it's not actually a very good idea  Collectively owned media might be an interesting idea though I'm skepitcal because it still has the problem of being produced by a few people, however democratically appointed they might be. Just don't really think the entire idea of a professional informer class works at all honestly, at least not well enough that you want to encourage faith in it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 17:07
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demonicon posted:For the relotius story you can read the link from my post (page 3). It's quite an interesting albeit very long read. I'm glad German media is finally confronting some of the fundamental issues with New Journalism. I wonder whether the (former?) intense fact-checking regime in American magazines was a reaction to that.
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Dec 23, 2018 17:09
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In Germany there is a proverb: The freedom of the press is the freedom of 100 rich people to publish their opinion.
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Dec 23, 2018 17:15
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OwlFancier posted:We also have state funded media and it turns out they mostly do what the state tells them to do and it's not actually a very good idea I don't see much of an alternative to a professional informer class, though. Most people don't have the time, expertise, or even inclination do find out what's going on in the world for themselves. Obviously newspapers get things wrong all the time, but the informal grapevine seen, e.g., on Twitter gets things wrong a lot more often.
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Dec 23, 2018 18:23
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I would suggest that that lack of time, expertise, and inclination does not occur in a vacuum however. It is perhaps heavily encouraged by the presence of the press as a "viable" alternative. Yes you can't just believe whatever you hear on twitter either, you can't just believe whatever you hear from anyone. But believing things because you like the person writing it is precisely the attitude that is encouraged by the press as an institution. They all trade on perceived credibility, and in so doing, encourage the notion of credibility as an intrinsic quality, rather than a thing informed by circumstance. A paper does not tell you "trust us because material circumstances promote accuracy and honest from us in this instance" they just say "trust us because we're trustworthy" and this is expected to apply universally. And if the end result of trashing the press is just that people don't trust generally that's still preferable to a situation where people trust whoever has the biggest budget or whoever aligns with their political views. Though frankly at this point I would probably also feel a lot more secure in a world where people entirely abandon the notion of facts if it also resulted in breaking the control of media outlet owners over all discourse. Is total ignorance more dangerous than a carefully curated sense of knowledge? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 18:26
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OwlFancier posted:I would suggest that that lack of time, expertise, and inclination does not occur in a vacuum however. It is perhaps heavily encouraged by the presence of the press as a "viable" alternative. We know exactly what it looks like when people "don't trust generally": they end up joining anti-vaxxer websites and we get measles outbreaks in 2018. No thank you.
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Dec 23, 2018 18:35
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I don't think antivaccination is particularly a good example of skepticism given that they all believe the same dumb theory about the gubmint trying to poison people with fema or whatever and do so wholeheartedly with very little critical thought. That also ignoring the idea that it's primarily an expression of people not being able to let go of their just world ideas in the face of reality. Antivaccination is, if anything, a far better illustration of the danger of telling people that they can get a comprehensive worldview from some idiot on the TV. Because it is looking for exactly that, except it's in response to not liking the leading brand of truth. It's also a bit funny in that the initial promotion of antivaccination as a concept was very much helped along by certain sections of the media reporting on it because it was very sensational despite being entirely incorrect So whatever it is, it's definitely not a good example of why we need the press. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 18:38
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So are you proposing that we should spend all day interviewing government officials or just not believe anything we see or hear?
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Dec 23, 2018 19:00
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