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There's a meaningful difference between misleading presentation/highlighting of facts (eg, fox's coverage of hilary's various scandals) and literal fake news (pizzagate, qanon, etc). Ytlaya has good points about the invisibility of propaganda for the status quo , but I'm gonna draw a line in the sand and say that reporting based in fact is better than reporting not based in fact.
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Dec 18, 2018 21:38
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Helsing posted:I also find it remarkable how so many of the anxieties I heard expressed in the early 2000s about Fox News and its then unprecedented levels of open partisanship have seemingly all turned into to anxieties about the internet, facebook, fake news and the decline of trust in "mainstream" sources. So far as I can tell nobody really disputes that Fox counts as "mainstream" news now so I'm not really sure how people sustain the idea that the internet has made some uniquely malign contribution to our media culture. It feels like there's been a willful forgetting of how bad stuff was already getting before social media came along as a convenient scapegoat. Granting that there is definitely a normalizing effect in play, I feel like its within the realm of reason to say there has been a degenerative trend when the reality TV stars of those very early 2000s--themselves notoriously favoring of fox news in particular--are the presidents of 2020. It was that bad before, its worse now, and seems fit to degrade further into the future.
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Dec 18, 2018 21:42
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awesmoe posted:There's a meaningful difference between misleading presentation/highlighting of facts (eg, fox's coverage of hilary's various scandals) and literal fake news (pizzagate, qanon, etc). Ytlaya has good points about the invisibility of propaganda for the status quo , but I'm gonna draw a line in the sand and say that reporting based in fact is better than reporting not based in fact. On the other hand, the fake news was always there too; it just used to take the form of chain emails and fringe newsletters rather than social media posts. Perhaps there's more of it now and a wider audience that buys into it, though. Edit: See this piece from 2011 complaining about chain emails, for example: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/conservatives-control-political-e-mail-rumor-mill/335294/ Edit 2: And this one from 2008: https://newrepublic.com/article/62545/the-critical-browser-anti-obama-chain-e-mails Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Dec 18, 2018 |
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Dec 18, 2018 21:46
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awesmoe posted:There's a meaningful difference between misleading presentation/highlighting of facts (eg, fox's coverage of hilary's various scandals) and literal fake news (pizzagate, qanon, etc). Ytlaya has good points about the invisibility of propaganda for the status quo , but I'm gonna draw a line in the sand and say that reporting based in fact is better than reporting not based in fact. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you here but I think for a reasonable discussion to actually proceed we need to talk about how we're defining what it means to be "reporting based in fact" vs "reporting not based in fact". I also think we need to try and recognize that there's a difference between what gets the most attention and what is actually driving the narrative. You hear a lot about the role of "fake news" and pizzagate but most analysts would agree that television news from mainstream sources was vastly more important to the election. Journalists have generally focused more on stories about outright fake news stories like "The Pope endorses Donald Trump" getting play on facebook, but I think that objectively speaking what mattered a lot more was that because he was a ratings bonanza the mainstream stations gave Trump a level of coverage that no other candidate could dream of receiving, and this made Trump's unique style of giving long inflammatory speeches much more effective. When I read reports on or discussions of the 2016 election that focus heavily on the social media and fake news side of things I can't help but think they are deeply misreprenting the much more significant role of television coverage in creating Trump. And I think the same thing can be said about most of Trump's ideological positions: Trumpism went mainstream in the Republican party thanks to Fox, not thanks to facebook. That doesn't mean the internet isn't significant or that facebook, youtube and twitter aren't playing a role in radicalizing the population and pushing people into epistemic bubbles. But most of the actual reporting on fake news seems to really misrepresent the actual problem as well as the events of the 2016 election. Willie Tomg posted:Granting that there is definitely a normalizing effect in play, I feel like its within the realm of reason to say there has been a degenerative trend when the reality TV stars of those very early 2000s--themselves notoriously favoring of fox news in particular--are the presidents of 2020. It was that bad before, its worse now, and seems fit to degrade further into the future. That's fair but I my concern here would be that because we're talking about this online and are all extremely online people we probably see a disproportionate amount of evidence for fake news and the youtube-extremeism-pipeline in action but wouldn't necessarily have seen equally bad or worse media trends in the past. If we were having this discussion in the 70s we might be talking about the rise of direct mail under figures like Richard Viguerie - as unrepentant a peddler of fake news as you'll ever find - and if this were happening in the early 1990s we'd probably be talking about right-wing talk radio. But given the age and interests of this forum most of us didn't really witness those phenomena in the same way and can't remember the political era before those things emerged. If we had been alive and able to watch those trends as closely as we're watching the explosion of fake news on youtube then I wonder how that might change our perspective. My pointing being that while each new form of technology or media is going to have game-changing effects I think we need to be cautious that we don't just assume that something we saw for the first time in 2016 is actually unprecedented. Often a lot of stuff that seems scary and new turns out to have some precedence we didn't know about. I wonder if that could be happening with 'fake news', because like I said, it seems like a lot of anxieties people used to have about partisan mainstream news were unconsciously transferred to internet news starting around 2015. This is why it's important to try and define the terms we use so we don't slip into overly broad or vague language.
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Dec 18, 2018 21:54
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Also just wanted to quote this because it raises a very important point:Willie Tomg posted:I do not understand how you can be Online enough to be on these forums, basic enough in the brain to be scandalized by highly advanced Russian Active Measures (aka. interferentsiya) across *gasp* EVERY social media network like
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Dec 18, 2018 21:55
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awesmoe posted:There's a meaningful difference between misleading presentation/highlighting of facts (eg, fox's coverage of hilary's various scandals) and literal fake news (pizzagate, qanon, etc). Ytlaya has good points about the invisibility of propaganda for the status quo , but I'm gonna draw a line in the sand and say that reporting based in fact is better than reporting not based in fact. Because it was uncritical parroting of obvious lies, but also a man in a suit did say those lies so it wasn't "fake news."
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Dec 18, 2018 22:15
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Helsing posted:This is why it's important to try and define the terms we use so we don't slip into overly broad or vague language. * your initial point of 'mainstream media is bad because the mainstream is bad' (jokingly paraphrased) * the ideological slants of mainstream news and how that affects coverage within the mainstream (eg biases of fox, nyt, politico, and how that plays out in hiring, coverage) * the politicization and commercialization of fake news - the way chain-forwards have been weaponized and the effect (if any!) that has on the populous * media literacy - the differences between op-eds and news, continued incredulity that the mainstream papers won't say use the word 'lie' in headlines, etc. * a bunch of other longass posts that I skim over cos i'm not super interested and that's not even getting into the other media news about journalistic violence etc. It's a great thread and I'm glad you've made it. Rent-A-Cop posted:Where does the entire leadup to the Iraq War fall on this spectrum for you?  e: like if you really believe they were obviously lies to everyone at the paper then yeah everyone at the nyt is a cackling ghoul sending young men off to die while grabbing bags of money if you accept that the lies were believable to a scoop-hungry zealot, then it's a massive journalistic failure for miller to trust those particular sources, and a massive editorial failure in giving her the trust to write the story without more vetting. But in this case, they printed it because they thought it was news, even if they were disastrously wrong. Either way it was an institutional fuckup that the paper's credibility will never recover from (and rightly so). awesmoe fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Dec 18, 2018 |
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Dec 18, 2018 22:21
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Silver2195 posted:On the other hand, the fake news was always there too; it just used to take the form of chain emails and fringe newsletters rather than social media posts. Perhaps there's more of it now and a wider audience that buys into it, though. I don't think you can make a case that fake news never existed before now, but the real shift is the fall of traditional media. Where for a while no matter what other media you consumed you were also probably watching the 6 o'clock news (or whatever) at least sometimes. Like even if you also got news from a weird newsletter you probably also consumed enough shared media that you probably had a list of events that happened any given day that more or less matched up and agreed with what other people thought the events were (and then likely wildly disagreed on the meanings and spin and interpretations of those events). Now it's easier to get 100% of your news from the weird newsletters and never check in with anything shared. If the 5 facebook groups you follow for news are all telling you wrong stuff that is a lot easier to get really incorrect sets of facts than if you were following 5 newspapers from your local newsstand years ago. Multiple networks reporting inaccurate information about Iraq WMDs is like, major news that gets mentioned frequently almost two decades later. A facebook group can post absolutely nonsense and it's just 'of course, it's just a facebook group" but then more and more people have that as their primary news source. Like it's not a new problem, it's a thing that got easier as people stopped watching tv and buying newspapers and kinda drifted into haphazard news sources for now.
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Dec 18, 2018 23:08
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awesmoe posted:if you accept that the lies were believable to a scoop-hungry zealot, then it's a massive journalistic failure for miller to trust those particular sources, and a massive editorial failure in giving her the trust to write the story without more vetting. But in this case, they printed it because they thought it was news, even if they were disastrously wrong. This is an important point to grasp because mainstream sources like TV are often the way people try to check what they see online and if all the ducks are in a row like they were pre-Iraq then it is difficult for anyone to have an unbiased picture of events. It wasn't as if the lies weren't being challenged at the time, but a narrative of "lets do it anyway" led from the top and was largely accepted by mainstream media, who merely reported the challenges and did not investigate them. It was particularly obvious in Australia where despite massive citizen protests the executive and mainstream media were in lockstep. Generally, mass media as a subject is sufficiently complex that having a context to understand its drives is impossible without assistance. I'm sure for many Jay Rosen's site has been a valuable tool. Election coverage is always a great opportunity to watch how the media deals with narrative. In this sense, narrative is a pre-election strategy to lay down the groundwork for messages to be reinforced in the proper campaign. These days, if not actively supporting the narrative, mainstream media rarely challenge it. Recently we saw a narrative failure in a law and order campaign in the Victorian state election, which Murdoch media had been practically selling for two years previous and completely failed because it was regularly undermined by controversy around the party and irrelevance of the narrative to what concerned the target audience most. Rosen's eternal present is useful here, as mainstream media moves on to stories of party dysfunction and only columnists continue to rant about African gangs.
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Dec 19, 2018 01:09
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not the one who has issues with understanding. I'm arguing that it's a bad thing that NYT and similar op-ed consists of right-wing viewpoints coated in a veneer of urbane sophistication. It's intellectually bankrupt and reinforces the vanities of an increasingly deluded petit-bourgeois audience. Helsing posted:The issue is that the Never Trump Republicans are by and large a bunch of prominent architects of neoconservative foreign policy who have been revealed to speak for a constituency of approximately twelve rich people in a country club somewhere. Their ideas did incredible damage and many of them are actual war criminals who in a just world should be serving life long prison sentences for their actions. They used their power and influence to advocate for some of the worst things the US government has done in the last few decades and never paid a price for it - in fact they were generously rewarded. If the issue isn't the "Never Trump Republicans" but they've been essentially a booster seat in "media" but they don't really deserve it? That's a fair argument. I just don't see the alternatives of bringing folks like Jordan Peterson or otherwise a good thing. They could just decline to interview such folks but I that's terrible journalism. On the flip side, neo-conservatives are as you said useful for a handful of wealthly folks in a Country Club yet they've had an enormous impact on the world. Halloween Jack posted:I already did. NYT op-ed would be more intellectually vivacious if it was written by the people who call in to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter radio show. 
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Dec 19, 2018 03:10
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Well that's it, then. We can either give a columnist position to someone like David Frum or someone like Alex Jones; there are no other conceivable alternatives on this plane of existence.
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Dec 19, 2018 04:35
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't even know where to begin with this. You think there's a high level of support for Assad among leftists? "Assad is bae" tankies are a social media laughingstock. My definition of "finding common ground" includes more than having some similar criticisms of the establishment that get voiced in social media. Are leftists and fascists having meaningful dialogue? Are they cooperating and organizing together? Assad is bae tankies like Rania Khalek, who took a reporting trip to Syria supported by the Syrian regime, and has written countless pieces attempting to absolve the regime of responsibility for its war crimes? Who's work was recommended in the OP of this thread? Where was the mocking, I must have missed it. Khalek's work slandering first responders in Syria to make them unsympathetic to western audiences so closely resembles actual fascist Vanessa Beeley's work, that Vanessa claimed it was coordinated, and gently caress if anyone could tell the difference either way.  We're not talking about "similar criticisms of the establishment" here. We are talking about two groups of people that both have a clear interest in promoting authoritarian populism abroad. Fascists because they're fascists, and the left because these authoritarian populists tend to be anti-American, and thus, are preferable to  liberals in the US. Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald have both appeared multiple times on Tucker Carlson's show to express their hatred for liberals with each other. Of course, there's no need to address Tucker's "views" in such segments, because there's bigger fish to fry than Tuckers brand of right wing populism surging into popularity worldwide. Helsing posted:Can you define what you mean by "mainstream" and "alternative" in this context and maybe clarify how your statement that: "[alternative media pundit] have 0 obligation to get anything factually right, as they are generally pedaling ideology rather than news". Because first of all that statement is obviously factually inaccurate in many specific cases where experts have blogs or do interviews in the alternative press, and because two you seem to be suggesting that none of the things you described are problems for mainstream punditry. Experts tend to be anyone who can provide a veneer of legitimacy to whatever point is trying to be made. The saga over Ted Postol and Seymour Hersh's reports, Assad propagandist turned chemistry whiz Partisan Girl, and their pathetic attempts to absolve the Syrian regime of guilt for its chemical weapons attacks are a testament to that. Or the UN (see: Eva Bartlett) addressing crisis actors in Syria, and Eva the impartial expert who totally isn't wearing a loving I <3 Bashar bracelet in her Facebook pic, speaking the truth. The people they are selling this poo poo to want to believe it, so it doesn't need to be bulletproof at all. It's similar to FOX's relationship with its audience. CNN for example, gets held to a far different standard, albeit a deserved standard, and one they fail to meet time and time again. But at least Amanpour and CNNI still have a solid reputation. Alternative media on the other hand gets a pass on egregious gently caress ups that border on despicable simply because their audience thinks their heart is in the right place, so they don't get caught up in the little details. quote:I honestly find it fascinating that your entire post is written as though the only things that matter are changes in the media structure. This is all written as though hatred for CNN spontaneously bubbled up out of the ether and irrationally turned everyone against CNN and other major news sources for no particular reason. There are reasons, but most of them are simply weaponized by people on the fringes who have gone on to do the exact same poo poo. The definitions for making a source not credible are selectively applied. For instance, the Iraq War is one of the most common critiques. "These people promoted the Iraq War, how can we trust them now?" Of course, such logic has been applied to Glenn Greenwald, who supported the Iraq War, all of about 0 times by these same people. He says what lefties want to hear, so he's exempted. And as to the root issues in the reporting of the Iraq War, what are the key ones? Promoted false information about WMD's as truth? Didn't question the official narrative from state sources that had skin in the game? Didn't dig deeply enough into war crimes committed by an imperialist force? Attempted to slander victims as terrorists who hate us for our freedom to legitimize imperialist violence against them? Every one of these loving crimes has been done on behalf of Russia and Assad in a war they are conducting that has very nearly, or already, surpassed the death toll in Iraq, by a handful of supposed experts, and then cited all across the landscape of alternative media. Sometimes even months after chemical weapons attacks on civilians, crossing over into outright war crimes denial. But we're supposed to laud their journalistic integrity simply because they have the courage to criticize the Iraq War in the year of our lord 2018? Please. It's easy to see what's going on with the right and their attacks on journalism since we see it from the outside looking it. But that same level of dishonesty is present all over the place, and has been growing for the last several years. There's nothing more mainstream than the idea that you can't trust the mainstream media these days, regardless of your political background. I get just as pissed as anybody when I see Friedman getting yet another loving column to spread dangerous nonsense, or some other shill for Likud reciting their platform and ranting about the self-hating Jews. But what's going on here goes far beyond that into a sort of blind hatred, and that is pretty dangerous when it's directed at journalism. And it's so prevalent now that it's being weaponized to criticize outlets on topics where they actually did journalism, or to hold up the rare good piece from a mainstream source that contained a bunch of nonsense and never should've made it to print, but supported the cause. Ultimately, corporate media's responsibility is to make money for itself. It's hosed up and wrong, but I don't think any of us disagree that it's the truth. And they make money by getting people engaged and paying attention to them. The success of the FOX model and the rise of alternative sources with similar tactics is defining how you make that money in a really negative way, and I don't think this story ends with "and then the mainstream media became good." Quite the opposite. quote:This really just sounds like your bad faith conflation of 'the left' with a handful of people you argue with on these forums and twitter. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the American left exists solely on these forums and twitter, OP. And with such unimpeachable values, it's no wonder why. quote:You mean the report that they full out retracted because it was so indefensible? Not even a correction like "oops we went overboard in a few places" but a full on "this was such a bad hit piece we're completely pulling it from our site and posting an apology". Reading it again, it's hilarious how Blumenthal and his lawyers portrayed it, and that SPLC caved to them. He's only mentioned in the article when they are posting his direct quotes, where they were said, and who else was saying the same things. Where he was, when, and with who. All sourced. His own words tell a story he wasn't trying to have heard. https://web.archive.org/web/2018030...wing-resentment Volkerball fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Dec 19, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 09:03
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Volkerball posted:Where was the mocking, I must have missed it. quote:the American left exists solely on these forums and twitter 
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Dec 19, 2018 15:48
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awesmoe posted:can't really have a productive discussion if you won't shift on your view that the lies were obvious It absolutely was obvious that USA was lying during the lead-up to the Iraq war. At least from my point of view outside USA. Did your media not report on the weapons inspectors' results, or how the things your government told in the UN about Iraq were blatant lies?
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Dec 19, 2018 17:15
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Halloween Jack posted:Well that's it, then. We can either give a columnist position to someone like David Frum or someone like Alex Jones; there are no other conceivable alternatives on this plane of existence. Or I don't know Republicans that don't spew blatant conspiracies, outright lies or at least try to participate in discussions? Oh wait, we tried that.
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Dec 19, 2018 17:25
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Tab8715 posted:Or I don't know Republicans that don't spew blatant conspiracies, outright lies or at least try to participate in discussions? Oh wait, we tried that. What if they exercised some modicum of editorial oversight rather than letting Brett Stephens write op eds that are clearly factually contradicted by the NYTs own reporting? It would be a method that would either require fact checking his columns before publication (which would salvage his and their reputation) or running same day fact checks next to it (which would savage his and maybe help their reputation). Let the people try and lie then. But that they are unwilling to do either indicates that it’s more important to them for their pundits to be able to lie and promote ideology than to have meaningful interpretations of reality and narrative explanations or insights into current events. It’s just top to bottom indefensible and they should either put honest representations of actual constituencies on the page with vigorous oversight or just shitcan the whole thing. Worrying that the “wrong” people might get a platform is just the cowed victim response that refuses to place the majority of the blame where it belongs, in the leadership’s lap.
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Dec 19, 2018 17:34
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awesmoe posted:There's a meaningful difference between misleading presentation/highlighting of facts (eg, fox's coverage of hilary's various scandals) and literal fake news (pizzagate, qanon, etc). Ytlaya has good points about the invisibility of propaganda for the status quo , but I'm gonna draw a line in the sand and say that reporting based in fact is better than reporting not based in fact. It may be better, but not to the extent that it makes sense to focus the vast majority of your negative attention on just the fake news (particularly when most US media fits the "propaganda through ignoring inconvenient information and highlighting convenient information" description more; heck, even FOX news doesn't directly lie that often in its non-editorial content). I also feel like there's a grey area that is at least as bad as the sort of explicit "fake news" you describe, where someone draws a false conclusion from information. Most Republican talking points fall under this category (for example, the idea that people are deserving of wealth and the poor deserve their situation isn't what most liberals would call "fake news," but it's definitely a false idea that is far more harmful than any sort of "fake news" in practice). I'm not at all willing to say that "fake news" is worse in practice than this sort of thing. awesmoe posted:e: like if you really believe they were obviously lies to everyone at the paper then yeah everyone at the nyt is a cackling ghoul sending young men off to die while grabbing bags of money But pretty much the entire mainstream media was helping peddle these lies, and they obviously haven't suffered in reputation for it. The issue (and you often see this with regard to the Russia investigation) is that most people just assume it's common sense to believe information they hear from mainstream authority figures, whether it's the government or large media (that is generally getting their information directly from the government). Like, in the case of the Russia stuff, there was no direct evidence to speak of for the DNC hacking being Russia until the thing with Dutch intelligence observing the hacking or whatever (though that also isn't direct evidence so much as "extremely strong circumstantial evidence"). But people still treated others like they were insane for expressing skepticism, despite it being entirely reasonable to be skeptical of claims with nothing but the statements of the government (or aligned organizations) supporting them. The claims likely being true doesn't change the fact that most people immediately unconditionally believed them even before sufficient evidence remotely existed, and the thing that stood out the most was the extreme attempts to mock and discredit anyone who expressed skepticism (which was entirely warranted prior to the Dutch info, and is honestly still not entirely crazy, even if claims in question are almost certainly true). Basically, the whole situation makes me 100% sure that most Americans, liberals included, would absolutely still swallow propaganda like that leading up to the Iraq War. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Dec 19, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 17:56
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Ytlaya posted:The claims likely being true doesn't change the fact that most people immediately unconditionally believed them even before sufficient evidence remotely existed, and the thing that stood out the most was the extreme attempts to mock and discredit anyone who expressed skepticism (which was entirely warranted prior to the Dutch info, and is honestly still not entirely crazy, even if claims in question are almost certainly true). What is special about the dutch info that everything before that might be a fabrication from the lying lamestream media but the lying lamestream media couldn't just make up the one last thing that convinced you? You are kinda in a brain in a jar paradox here.
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Dec 19, 2018 18:20
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Volkerball posted:Assad is bae tankies like Rania Khalek, who took a reporting trip to Syria supported by the Syrian regime, and has written countless pieces attempting to absolve the regime of responsibility for its war crimes? Who's work was recommended in the OP of this thread? Where was the mocking, I must have missed it. Khalek's work slandering first responders in Syria to make them unsympathetic to western audiences so closely resembles actual fascist Vanessa Beeley's work, that Vanessa claimed it was coordinated, and gently caress if anyone could tell the difference either way. I'm going to ask you again to actually define the terms you're using. What counts as "mainstream" and what counts as "alternative" and is alternative the same or different from "fringe", what is "the FOX model" and what are the "similar tactics" being used by "alternative sources"? I'm confused because so much of your post is actually an attack on what would be considered mainstream sources, i.e. Fox News, Seymour Hersh, Tucker Carlson, etc. You seem just as unhappy with these figures as you are with the alternative media. And in some cases you actually side with the amateur (Brown Moses) against the expert (Postal) so I don't see how any of this is at all compatible with your previously stated position that the mainstream media is distinct from the alternative media specifically because it is held to a higher standard and is much more factually accurate.
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Dec 19, 2018 20:35
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Helsing it is difficult to underscore how bad a way it is to start off the thread by defending this particular set of sources, on these particular issues.
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Dec 19, 2018 22:08
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Discendo Vox posted:Helsing it is difficult to underscore how bad a way it is to start off the thread by defending this particular set of sources, on these particular issues. I cannot imagine that any discussion is helped along by pleas for less nuance.
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Dec 19, 2018 22:10
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Tab8715 posted:Or I don't know Republicans that don't spew blatant conspiracies, outright lies or at least try to participate in discussions? I have no idea what you want or why you're so angry.
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Dec 19, 2018 22:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What is special about the dutch info that everything before that might be a fabrication from the lying lamestream media but the lying lamestream media couldn't just make up the one last thing that convinced you? Prior to the Dutch thing there appears to have been no actual direct evidence (and as mentioned even the Dutch thing isn't actually direct evidence so much as "very persuasive circumstantial evidence"). Just the statements of the government and other affiliated organizations. Prior to that point it was still reasonable to think it's extremely likely that it was Russia (largely because they had the most likely motive), but it was never unreasonable to retain some level of skepticism or demand direct evidence. Just in case there's confusion, skepticism does not mean "believing something to be false." It can be hard to tell if you guys understand this distinction, so I figured I should clarify. You might want to step back for a moment and realize that literally everything you're saying could have been said against skeptics of Iraqi WMD claims. It is important that people always demand evidence of things like this from governments, and it should set off major warning signs in your mind when people start trying to act like others are crazy for doing so. Like, can you tell me right now what the direct evidence is? And if this question is sending you off to Google, maybe you should do some introspection about why your default reflex is to join in the ridicule of skepticism aimed at evidence-less government claims. Every time this comes up it feels like being gaslighted, because people always say "you're ignoring the direct evidence!" and then I go and look around for the tenth time because I don't want to make a fool out of myself, but nope, there's still no direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence that makes you think "yeah it was almost certainly the Russian government," sure, but nothing that makes it equivalent to global warming denialism or whatever*. Like, prior to the Dutch thing I'm pretty sure the only evidence was "the government and that organization hired by the DNC say it's Russia" and "the hacking appears to have come from somewhere in Russia." I'm always more than open to people explaining what I'm missing here, but the response is always just this reflexive ridicule (and at the very least it is extremely obvious that most of the people doing this ridicule aren't even aware of the evidence themselves!). * I would say that someone explicitly saying "I don't think it was Russia" is being ridiculous, but that's a very distinct opinion from "I want the government to provide direct evidence of the claim before acting on the basis that it's true." Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 23:58
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Halloween Jack posted:You've lost the plot, mate. Never Trump Republicans are vastly overrepresented in mainstream media precisely because those outlets want civil, "honorable" Republicans. Turns out there's remarkably little daylight between "intellectual" conservatism and the Ku Klux Klan, and what passes for Mainstream Respectable Intellectual Conservatism is a pack of propagandists for forever war. I’d like your solution that it asked for more than once.
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Dec 20, 2018 02:58
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No, you didn't ask me for anything. You're too preoccupied with being appropriately self-righteous and smug to actually ask a direct question. What's the problem you want solved?
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Dec 20, 2018 05:07
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https://twitter.com/Nitzky89/status/1041448813775478785 Jimmy Dore is bad lol. (this is a Twitter thread)
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Dec 20, 2018 05:36
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Ytlaya posted:Prior to the Dutch thing there appears to have been no actual direct evidence (and as mentioned even the Dutch thing isn't actually direct evidence so much as "very persuasive circumstantial evidence"). Just the statements of the government and other affiliated organizations. Prior to that point it was still reasonable to think it's extremely likely that it was Russia (largely because they had the most likely motive), but it was never unreasonable to retain some level of skepticism or demand direct evidence. Just in case there's confusion, skepticism does not mean "believing something to be false." It can be hard to tell if you guys understand this distinction, so I figured I should clarify. You said "most people just assume it's common sense to believe information they hear from mainstream authority figures, whether it's the government or large media " but unless you are flying around doing your own investigations at some point you are doing the same. Like it's good to be skeptical, but at some level if everyone is lying they can just as easily lie about the followup evidence then lie about the validity of the second lie out to infinity. and you can never really get out of "but what if everyone lied?" If the FBI can lie about it being the russians why can't the dutch lie about it being russians? As you said, many sources spoke in lockstep about the WMD. At some point the only way to function as a human is draw some line of "well, this level could still be a lie, but I'll treat it as tentatively reality"
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Dec 20, 2018 05:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You said "most people just assume it's common sense to believe information they hear from mainstream authority figures, whether it's the government or large media " but unless you are flying around doing your own investigations at some point you are doing the same. Like it's good to be skeptical, but at some level if everyone is lying they can just as easily lie about the followup evidence then lie about the validity of the second lie out to infinity. and you can never really get out of "but what if everyone lied?" If the FBI can lie about it being the russians why can't the dutch lie about it being russians? As you said, many sources spoke in lockstep about the WMD. At some point the only way to function as a human is draw some line of "well, this level could still be a lie, but I'll treat it as tentatively reality" this is a terrible arguement. the arguments that saddam was building nuclear weapons in 2002-3 were patently absurd, even at the time. instead of actual evidence of WMD development, there were pictures of trailers in the desert, vials of powder of uncertain origins, and aluminum tubes. even more damning at the time was the way that most of the media implied that saddam was behind 9/11, something that contradicted everything they said in 2001. if they had had honest evidence, there would have been no need for any of this charade. living through those times, i didn't grasp that all of the us evidence was completely fabricated from reading us media, but it was very obvious that the government was pushing a completely false narrative, mostly because of the way that they tried to link al-quaeda and saddam. you claim that it is impossible to know the truth if everyone lies to you, but that wasn't the case then, at least for me or the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest the war.
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Dec 20, 2018 07:49
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GoluboiOgon posted:living through those times, i didn't grasp that all of the us evidence was completely fabricated from reading us media, but it was very obvious that the government was pushing a completely false narrative, mostly because of the way that they tried to link al-quaeda and saddam. you claim that it is impossible to know the truth if everyone lies to you, but that wasn't the case then, at least for me or the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest the war. The point is that everyone needs to draw lines somewhere where they eventually trust SOME of the things the media and government say, otherwise you spiral deeper and deeper into solophism. Like, you need to believe some things and disbelieve other things and the right place to draw that line is the point where you get it all right, but there isn't easy answers on how to do that.
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Dec 20, 2018 14:10
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GoluboiOgon posted:this is a terrible arguement. the arguments that saddam was building nuclear weapons in 2002-3 were patently absurd, even at the time. instead of actual evidence of WMD development, there were pictures of trailers in the desert, vials of powder of uncertain origins, and aluminum tubes. even more damning at the time was the way that most of the media implied that saddam was behind 9/11, something that contradicted everything they said in 2001. if they had had honest evidence, there would have been no need for any of this charade.
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Dec 20, 2018 14:57
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Halloween Jack posted:No, you didn't ask me for anything. You're too preoccupied with being appropriately self-righteous and smug to actually ask a direct question. What's the problem you want solved? Halloween Jack posted:The goal for a sane media should be to push these people out of the Overton Window, preferably onto a pile of dung. Essentially mob rule with pitchforks and torches? Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 20, 2018 16:04
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Halloween Jack posted:You're too preoccupied with being appropriately self-righteous and smug to actually ask a direct question. What's the problem you want solved? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 20, 2018 16:19
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selec posted:What if they exercised some modicum of editorial oversight rather than letting Brett Stephens write op eds that are clearly factually contradicted by the NYTs own reporting? That makes much more sense and I wonder why they won't or haven't done such a thing. I could see how it's somewhat difficult to put "Fact-Check Article" next to "Fallacious Op-Ed" but I'd imagine you'd be able to get close the overwhelming majority of the time.
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Dec 20, 2018 16:25
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Tab8715 posted:Essentially mob rule with pitchforks and torches? heaven forbid that the people whose lies killed half a million people lose their jobs. these people defended and even advocated for the extra-legal torture of the prisoners of an illegal war, and basically created the modern form of islamophobia in the us, but somehow calling for their firing is mob rule. why should anyone have confidence in the us media when the same people who lied so blatantly in 2003 are still around? if there is 0 accountability for such obvious mistakes, what's to stop them from doing it again?
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Dec 20, 2018 16:33
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GoluboiOgon posted:heaven forbid that the people whose lies killed half a million people lose their jobs. these people defended and even advocated for the extra-legal torture of the prisoners of an illegal war, and basically created the modern form of islamophobia in the us, but somehow calling for their firing is mob rule. Don't get me wrong. I agree. I'm not religious but I sure as hope there's hell because there's a few folks who should visit eternally. That said, I don't agree with any sort of vigilante justice because it isn't. Selec's earlier solution is much more rational although I am incredibly curious why it hasn't been done.
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Dec 20, 2018 16:40
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Tab8715 posted:Don't get me wrong. I agree. I'm not religious but I sure as hope there's hell because there's a few folks who should visit eternally. because they do not make money by telling you they hosed up. if you sit around waiting for people to administer justice to themselves, you are still going to be waiting on judgement day
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Dec 20, 2018 16:51
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Tab8715 posted:Don't get me wrong. I agree. I'm not religious but I sure as hope there's hell because there's a few folks who should visit eternally. selec is assuming that the editors are somehow in opposition to the opeds that are being printed. these op-ed writers were hired for their political beliefs, and they are doing their job when they publish those dreadful opeds. this also ignores the way that advertising works. to the nytimes, every click is a bit more advertising revenue. writing colossally awful takes in the oped section doesn't hurt them financially, it helps them, as they get more money from something that gets millions of hate views compared to a decently-written essay that doesn't get shared around. i'm not sure that having your opeds held up as examples of everything wrong with journalism is the best long term strategy, but it makes sense financially in the short term.
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Dec 20, 2018 17:00
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GoluboiOgon posted:selec is assuming that the editors are somehow in opposition to the opeds that are being printed. these op-ed writers were hired for their political beliefs, and they are doing their job when they publish those dreadful opeds. Oh no, I wouldn't assume that the editors oppose those op-eds. I was just pointing out what a solution could look like. I have no confidence whatsoever they will even come within spitting distance of that. Those Op Eds are there to convince the people in power that the status quo is just. It's just bedtime stories for monsters.
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Dec 20, 2018 17:02
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The problem is not just that they don't conduct editorial oversight over Bret Stephens, it's that their idea of "truth" and exposing their readership to "diverse opinions" is hiring Bret loving Stephens. Providing "alternatives" and "solutions" for the NYT to better fulfill its mission statement feels like explaining that successful doctors don't douse their patients in gasoline and set them on fire.
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Dec 20, 2018 17:29
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 17:55 |
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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. Der Spiegel is well known in germany for its in depth invastigative pieces, comparable perhaps, to the US New Yorker. This scandal is already being used by Germanys right wing political parties in their spreading of fake news accusations against Germanys main stream media. You can read the (English version) article here: http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-relotius-reporter-forgery-scandal-a-1244755.html Its well worth the read: Der Spiegel posted:It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL's best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: "It wasn't about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure." And: "The pressure not to fail grew as I became more successful." demonicon fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 20, 2018 17:36
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