I'm no fan of Trump, but leave it to the NYT to frame its industry as a victim. As though decades of increasingly partisan coverage had nothing to do with the industry's problems.
"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."
I don't necessarily disagree with you (or agree with Thompson), but I always liked that quote.
I do think "Objective Journalism" is a hard line to toe, and I don't think the NY Times does the worst job with it. Sure, the paper is clearly anti-Trump. My perspective is that this is only really a problem if they fabricate evidence. As long as they're presenting the world as they see it, it's hard to complain.
I'd apply that equally to right wing publications.
I mostly agree with that, but it does rub me the wrong way that the New York Times tends to smuggle its views into its reporting, all the while maintaining the false pretense that it is being entirely Objective outside of its opinion pages.
In contrast, The Economist is absolutely anti-Trump, but it makes no pretense to the contrary. It owns the fact that the paper as a whole has a free-market, classically liberal point of view, and as a result it's much easier for me to read The Economist's criticisms of Trump with a straight face. (Not that I have any trouble generating my own criticisms of Trump, mind you.)
I tend to agree with you on some level. I don't necessarily think it's possible to be completely unbiased, but I'd still like it to be the goal.
Reuters is pretty good for that sort of thing (for instance they don't use the term terrorism because they see it as a value judgement).
I would hope that even journalistic objectivity has some limit, to the point that one could call the slaughter of innocent people wrong. That's a value judgment that should be made. If not, then it would seem that they could not complain if their offices were attacked by evil people, because that would be making a "value judgment" on their actions. It seems like some kind of hypocritical cop-out.
Besides that, Reuters is no longer a bastion of objectivity. Their coverage is definitely left-leaning. And since they are a wire agency and their stories are reprinted around the world, it makes their bias even worse, because it seeps into other publications.
My perspective is that it's unclear to me what you gain by describing something as a "terrorist attack" as opposed to just an "attack." I'll make up my own mind whether it's a terrorist attack or not.
I find Reuters fairly unbiased, although at the end of the day individual editors and reporters all have individual biases. If you have a recommendation for a less biased news source than Reuters please share.
So by the same token, what is gained by describing it as "an attack" instead of "a terrorist attack"? I'm not sure it matters so much either way.
What I think may be more interesting is what the choice of description may imply about underlying bias.
I feel Reuters is biased toward the left, but that's just my interpretation. I wish I could recommend a less biased source, but it seems that they're either one way or the other. Maybe we (as a people) should just recognize that and read accordingly. The real danger is that we don't recognize bias and think that certain sources are impartial when they are not, because that leaves us vulnerable to manipulation.
That implies they'd have to start calling US drone strikes "terrorism" when they kill people who've not been identified as combatants in countries with which the US is not at war.
Then you'd probably call them even more left-leaning.
Why? What value does it add? As long as they provide the information that innocents were slaughtered, what's stopping you from adding the condemning language in your own head?
My impression is that objective journalism is effectively dead, and that the choice of words used to describe things like this likely gives insight into journalists' political bias.
Besides that, what is objectivity? Is it pretending to be a hypothetical, non-human, universally objective observer that views the loss of human life no more important than a meteor smashing into a random asteroid? Is it required that one not condemn the slaughter of innocents to be considered objective? From that perspective, is murder even wrong?
Interesting questions to think about.
Guess you missed that?
www.newsbusters.org Help yourself.
You are conflating the entire media landscape with the New York Times. NYT has its bias, but you are effectively saying that NY Times is just as a responsible for the destruction of journalism as the likes of Fox News and Breitbart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness...
I am fully aware NYT screwed up stories, they generally back a globalist tilt, they screwed up the Iraq/WMD story, etc. But I also know they are, overall, committed to the truth. And Fox News and Breitbart are committed to propaganda. To compare the two is an absolute joke.
Your defense of it.
Their entire organization is biased, just like Fox or Breitbart. Why are they "committed to the truth" when conservative outlets are "propaganda"? Do you think conservatives view NYT/CNN bias as "truth telling" or "propaganda"?
Then actually define it, and provide examples of them being literal propaganda. Otherwise the discussion is just a political version of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
You might be a special exception but I assure you that I, like most people, wouldn't be adding additional insight at all. I'm more than happy to let other people do it, I just don't see the point in participating. I just wanted to let you know that thinking it's just some liberal bias against conservatives that makes people think Fox and Brietbart are propaganda is pigeonholing these folks into a very convenient "idiot" bucket. If it was that simple they'd think that about every conservative media/news organization.
I'm willing to put forward a simple test: does the source publish retractions and corrections?
I would guess that the NYT does and Breitbart does not.
And that's why it's really stupid to dismiss outlets you don't like as propaganda.
I would presume that a lot of people in the media may or may not believe what they are spewing... as for the management/administration of Fox News, I would say it's likely more about money than political views.
Where has it been said that they're both equally biased?
I don't know anything about American news, this is all from an Australian perspective, but if a right-wing paper runs fairly standard stories and occasionally has an opinion piece on stricter border controls; and a left-wing paper runs page after page after page of manipulative appeals to emotion full of terrible anecdotal "evidence", nobody would suggest that they were equally biased. The same works in reverse. You don't get to declare a Facist state and openly call for the execution of all Muslims because your rival paper ran an investigative story into refugee camp abuse and then go on to claim an equal bias.
There are no such studies for the NYT, editorial page bias notwithstanding.
There are just as many angled stories in the mainstream media and they are actually worse because they claim to be objective.
Trump, unprompted: I like to grab women by the pussy!
Women: So yeah, Trump grabbed me by the pussy.
Trump & conservatives: Bitches be lyin'
Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Bush: Whatever you want.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Furthermore if you are going to call what he describes sexual assault then all men who lean in on a women and start kissing them are committing sexual assault. Any guy who tries to get his hand up under a womans shirt is committing sexual assault.
You forgot the part of "they let you do it". Thats not sexual assault.
If I sucker punch you does it mean you let me do it?
The logic you seem to have bought into is completely out of bounds with reality. These things happens everyday and aren't sexual assault, but because Trump does it suddenly it is. What an amazing logic.
I would love to see you prosecute someone for saying those things with nothing more than that tape recording.
And keep your ad hominem to reddit. This is not a discussion about me but about something he said or whether it constitutes sexual assault which it obviously do not.
Overall the media gave Clinton a bit more (by percentage) positive coverage in the general, while Trump got more if you include the primaries. However, Trump got much more coverage overall. The negative coverage of Clinton spiked during the last two weeks of the campaign.
The NYT could be saints and that wouldn't change the fact that the industry they're in is what it is now. And if they can't identify that and instead just say that industry's the victim, weberc is 100% correct.
If NY Times is the vanguard of journalism, would you not find it atrocious the precedent they set in partisanship and misrepresentation of the people they are supposedly reporting to?
Newspapers have been having (some self inflicted) trouble for a long time, but what Trump is doing is something new and very dangerous.
That's quite a high bar.
But now that they've become more blatantly partisan (maybe as they infer here because it clearly sells more to be hyper partisan) it leaves me with an odd feeling that they are pushing back hard towards the Clinton-esque center left war-friendly surveillance-state Russian-boogiemen establishment politics that so many people (not just on the right) seem to be trying evolve beyond. At least the younger generations. And they say Trump is harking back to the old days...
After reading NYT daily for nearly a decade I'v moved to WSJ. It is much more expensive but I've been much happier reading it - as someone who doesn't care for either US party. I don't have to sift through vague connections to Russia or questionable accusations of secret white nationalism every time I read a political story about someone related to the current administration.
For example, I was just reading a profile of Donald Trump Jr. in NYT. Half way through the article they say he's been accused of making 'white nationalist' statements. Upon further reading it turns out to be because he made an off hand reference to 'gas chamber' in a random speech. So instead of making the obvious assumption he was referring to the form of capital punishment used in the US until the 1990s (and still used as a back up to lethal injection in some states), which is exactly what he claims to have been referring to, they decide to infer he was making some anti-semitic reference to the holocaust.
I am far from a Trump supporter but this type of weak partisan character assassination doesn't belong in a reputable paper like NYT.
So I'm not surprised to see a random swipe at Trump within the first few paragraphs of a non-political story... it's their shtick now.
If there is no media around to complain when he starts wars, then yes that is more dangerous.
It's not like any of this started with Trump, and isn't like any of it would really be stopped by a president for the other party, that served in the last administration over the department most directly covering spying and warfare.
Estimates appear to vary widely, with most in the hundreds of thousands range, but there's one estimate as high as a million deaths in the Iraq War (from the linked page):
"Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll conducted August 12–19, 2007, estimated 1,033,000 violent deaths due to the Iraq War. The range given was 946,000 to 1,120,000 deaths. A nationally representative sample of approximately 2,000 Iraqi adults answered whether any members of their household (living under their roof) were killed due to the Iraq War. 22% of the respondents had lost one or more household members. ORB reported that "48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance."
(full Wikipedia page on this survey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_Iraq_War_casualt...)
I don't know how much you want to attribute to it overall, but the war was based on fake evidence.
Estimates range from ~100,000 to 700,000.
The Iraq War was a mistake that sixty years from now we will be mocked and judged for, but be careful with words like "millions."
I wonder if you think the NYT had a hand in pushing for the first Iraq war? How about in Yugoslavia? Panama? Libya? Syria? Or were all of those moral and noble humanitarian wars where the death and destruction was worth it?
Although the Iraq war is the best and most blatant example of the NYT's warmongering, it is far from the only one. All of these wars combined easily resulted in millions of deaths.
Nobody has claimed one million were killed. Stop trying to spread wrong information, it is the same thing as lying.
>I wonder if you think the NYT had a hand in pushing for the first Iraq war? How about in Yugoslavia? Panama? Libya? Syria? Or were all of those moral and noble humanitarian wars where the death and destruction was worth it?
Holy fucking non sequitur, batman. What does a media agenda have to do with a moral position on war? How is "NYT had a hand in pushing for" related to the question of whether your examples were "moral and noble humanitarian wars?" You can't just say a thing that's absurd, and then immediately assume they're true, so that you can jump to making a moral attack. Here's a great resource for you: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/eng207-td/Logic%20and%20Analy...
>best and most blatant example of NYT's warmongering
Somehow we started at outright lies about the number of deaths in the Iraq war, and concluded that the NYT is a warmongering institution with the power to mobilize the most powerful military on the planet at it's whim, and thus is responsible for every death caused by the US military throughout history.
Hey let's take it up a notch, did you know humans never landed on the moon and that Mark Zuckerberg's evil twin, Matt Zuckerberg, is running a robotic pizza factory that snoops through people's emails? Benghazi.
I'm simply pointing out that the NYT functions as a critical cog in the overall propaganda machine that provides cover for the establishment warmongering agenda. That cover, almost without exception, revolves around framing these wars as humanitarian wars that supposedly help the people and bring them freedom and democracy (by bombing the crap out of them). I'm sorry I didn't spell that out explicitly. NYT absolutely had a hand in pushing for all the aforementioned wars.
Finally, I'm not saying the NYT is controlling the military, it is obviously the other way around - NYT is the mouthpiece of the established powers. But this discussion is in the context of comparing what is more dangerous; an establishment mouthpiece propaganda outlet that provides cover for killing millions, or Trump saying some questionable things from time to time. As of right this moment, NYT's track record looks much worse to me. But hey, maybe you're on the side of people like Madeleine Albright who think that killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions was totally worth it.
According to the Wikipedia article 2 people have linked to you, only Opinion Research Business survey claims it was one million. And only one million, not "maybe 2 million or more!". If you have evidence or other sources, could you please contribute to our collective knowledge by updating the Wikipedia page? You don't even need an account to do it and we're all guaranteed relative quality by editor review that way.
>And you can easily make an argument for the fact that the war never really ended
When you say "Iraq War" people are going to think you mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War which took place from 2003-2011. There's an article on the Iraqi Civil War if you want to talk about that, but it's a different thing. If you want to talk about Middle East action in general, ok, but as we go on you're going to be lumping more and more extremely complicated conflicts into your "This is the NYT's fault" argument, which is already tenuous.
>simply pointing out that NYT functions as a critical cog in the overall propaganda machine
Dude, this is an extraordinary claim. You can't just toss that tidbit over the wall and be like "FACTS!" You gotta support that. You haven't yet, that I can see.
>agenda
Extraordinary claim. Burden of proof (or at least argument) is on you.
>NYT is the mouthpiece of the established powers
How can that be true when NYT is critical of the current government? Are you suggesting there's a shadow-government that is opposed to Trump, and in control of the NYT as well as the US military?
>maybe you're on the side of people... who think that killing hundreds of thousands
Stop trying to do that. It's so fucking transparent when you try to derail the argument through personal attack via non sequitur like that. You want to talk about propaganda techniques? You're (attempting) to employ them as mechanically as if you've got the "Guide to Misinformation via Trolling on the Internet" textbook sat next to you.
The truth is important. Getting facts wrong about wars can only help people who are pro-war by making pacifists look uninformed.
Mainstream media reports from a big business point of view and it almost never reports on itself or its parents critically.
People get this. Trust is low and Trump is exploiting that reality to great effect.
Today, we have people growing lost, confused, seeking more and maybe better information. What they are finding from indie efforts ranges all over the map.
It's reasonable to say that isn't a good thing either. Though I will also say it is at least a mild check on an ugly press machine in play today.
I am very rapidly becoming a fan of people funded news and Media.
In the USA there is almost no reporting and commentary from the economic left point of view, for example. I lean strong left, but I also don't see that as a blanket answer.
I do see it as the basis for a more complete discussion, and we really need that right now. I know I need to understand others better and they me so the conversation can get somewhere good.
This isn't happening.
Not all of our problems are going to be resolved with boardroom and or bumper sticker politics.
For perspective, our conservative peers could say the same thing about social issue reporting, and they would be right.
The product of this is a very dangerous polarization. Ideologies are being championed as means to ends, when the better role for them is as a basis for policy ideas we can use, combine and apply toward common goals. There are a few big needs, like health care, where we have solid majority support for doing good things, necessary things, yet no real ability to accomplish them.
Our press does not address this at all too. It's all process and horse race type drama, not a meaningful look at both the state of things and clear desire to make progress on them.
A more inclusive discussion, sans so damn many triggers and set pieces would bring those goals to front and center. All political sides need this.
We need it as ordinary people too. Badly.
Some 20 percent of us have few worries about money. Another slice, maybe a third tops, must be super careful, but are OK. The rest are in big and growing trouble! Super expensive, long term trouble. Decline of a great nation type trouble.
As a nation of people, that growing unrest is not good. We will pay really hard for allowing so much to get stalled, bogged down, ignored. Even those of us who are economically secure will share in that cost. It won't hurt in dollar terms like it will most Americans. It will hurt in terms of our future, environment, social laws, many norms.
These kinds of things take lifetimes to come back from, if we even can
It began somewhere late 70s maybe 80s too. A look at government and politics prior to that time saw the process working. Governance happened and it was net progress. Our history is littered with ugly politics. The better times seem to be associated with a more functional press.
Those better periods were not the best possible, but were livable.
Today?
Cluster fuck. And the press has a lot to do with that as does the Internet and social media presenting different views to everyone based on some ideas of what we think people want to see. It's hard to get a sense of where people are really at outside our circles and rough class and demographic.
This should be front and center journalism. Yet, it isn't.
Remember earlier, simpler Internet? For a while we all saw most of the same things. People exploiting that and the need or value in curated content brought us a better information view in some ways, but a worse one in others.
This idea of a weekly paper, if done in a reasonable, equitable way may just hold the potential for establishing that "we are all people and just want better for us and ours" conversation. It could unify people and foster cross class, cross gender, etc... type conversations.
It could also do a lot to help understand one another better and punch through so damn much vilification going on too. When we have an opportunity to talk to one another, sans all the bullshit, we invariably find the others have good intent. Nobody wants so many others to hurt and struggle out of hand.
So many of us do not have those conversations. Lack of venue, opportunity, fear, judgement all play a role here.
I'll be watching efforts like this. We need to keep trying. The growing mess us quickly approaching the unrecoverable and regrettable.
Almost none of us really want that, but it's gonna happen, unless we can somehow have a common conversation that can get us back to the idea of just governance.
Nobody should get all they want, but all of us should be getting the things we really need. There is more than enough for it to happen too.
[1] CNN http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intellig...
[2] BuzzFeed with source of "dossier" https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-t...
[3] 4chan talking about Rick Wilson + dossier back in november https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/95568919/#95571329
Now, NYT themselves did not run this story. But the vast majority of "main stream media" runs stories with a narrative - or as Trump himself put it - a "tone". They insist that Trump must be wrapped in controversy, and every article I come across from NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo all insist on including a negative tone; or at the very least, emphasizing facts that make Trump seem negligent, stupid, arrogant or malevolent. In my opinion, it's them who have forfeited ethics. Tell me, how exactly is Trump doing something "new and very dangerous"? How should he respond to constant negativity? Even he himself is not asking for positive propaganda - he just wants neutral, honest media reporting. He has told CNN in a press conference that he'd be their greatest fan if they would report honestly.
How do you suggest the NYT, CNN, WaPo react to actions that seem to come from a place of incompetence or malevolence? When Trump rolls out an unconstitutional EO that seemed barely vetted by the Attorney General's office, how should the NYT paint that in such a way that Trump is depicted as competent?
When Trump and Spicer repeat falsehoods that anyone with a pair of eyes can refute (inauguration crowd size) or that has zero evidence behind it whatsoever (3-5 million illegal votes, Obama wiretapping Trump), how should the WaPo react to these lies?
When the president's campaign is under investigation by the FBI for potential collusion with a foreign government, and Rep. Schiff says there is 'more than circumstantial evidence', how should CNN report this?
It's laughable and a little bit sad that people think that Trump is more honest than the MSM.
Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.
Maybe ask what Trump stories NYT should be covering.
2. The dossier existed. It was floating around for months. Reputable organizations refused to publish the actual document, because it could not be verified sufficiently to warrant full coverage. CNN approached the potential story by talking around the document. NY Times just didn't publish it.
3. The Press is supposed to be relentlessly aggressive towards the administration, and towards power in general. Every administration has to deal with this, from one section of the media or another. Any time the press has abdicated that balance, bad things happen (see Iraq war).
4. An anonymous comment on 4chan doesn't "debunk" anything.
I'm not sure how it's relevant then, unless you're suggesting there's a conspiracy between CNN and NYT to destabilize Trump. Oh, you are. Carry on then.
>Every article... include a negative tone.
He is a bad president. Of course the media is negative about him.
>a dossier... which has since been debunked as a 4chan prank
Nope, wrong.
I'm not saying he isn't a bad choice for President... He's only been President for a couple of months. In the course of 4 years, that's a bit premature of a statement.
What seems to be happening with education, and the pitiful healthcare bill... not fond of a lot of what's happening. Not to mention, there is zero need to expand military spending. I'm all for cutting spending, but expanding one of the biggest areas of the budget when we already outspend the rest of the world combined is asinine.
When the sum total of your bad decisions are as great as Bush JR or Trump, there's little you can do to negate that in the next 3 years.
Furthermore, my statement is that he is a bad president, which he is. Personal attacks on Twitter, regular vacations at taxpayer expense, deregulating climate change, pushing to remove healthcare from Americans, bad appointments. These actions are happening now and have not been rectified. Present tense, he is a bad president.
If he undoes all these things and does a couple good things, I will say "he was a bad president, then he became a good president." Currently, though, bad president.
Trump has repeatedly claimed facts as true without evidence or just based on a claim by a singular news source sans evidence. It is worrying that Trump has repeatedly done this and then sought to discredit critical news sources by labeling them "fake". I'd wish the president to be above hypocrisy in the realm of "fake news". You shouldn't spew falsehoods and then criticize others for doing the same. Both sides are guilty of this, but I believe the president has a higher burden of responsibility than a newspaper or TV program.
I also believe that Trump has been guilty of generating BS moreso than the "legitimate liberal-leaning" news, but that's just me editorializing, so please leave it out of my argument :)
An absolutely perfect role of journalism, because he is.
Then he could sell his story for a big fat advance.
Personally, I hope Trump chooses to fight. Pass the popcorn.
When someone gains an advantage for their point of view by consistently associating it with professional, reliable journalism, I consider it an advantage well-earned. A point of view that isn't compatible with that advantage doesn't deserve it.
Much worse than having a point of view is trying to avoid the perception of having a point of view, which leads to vapid, passive, easily exploitable schlock journalism.
Look, you can be biased and have an opinion and still treat dissenting opinions, and the people who hold them, with fairness and understanding.
It doesn't happen, but it CAN. It's the 3rd option between "has no point of view" and "crafts a narrative around their point of view".
I'd rather get the Times point of view from the Times stories and the WSJ point of view from the WSJ stories than ask them to converge on exactly the same dry list of uninterpreted facts (if that were even possible.) They can try to do justice to other points of view, and it certainly helps their credibility when they're able to, but I wouldn't depend on it. Not even if they had the purest motivations. It's better to have a diversity of voices than to have one dominant voice doing a ventriloquist act.
Also, I think people ask for "fairness and understanding" but want a great deal more; they want to feel that their ideas are held in equal esteem, when in reality ideas can't all have an equal share of social approval. If I went to a singles bar with Ryan Gosling, I could justifiably ask to be treated with equal civility, but not with equal enthusiasm. No amount of civility or journalistic detachment can enable us to forget that different ideas prevail among different groups of people with different levels of wealth, power, social prestige, and cultural cachet.
What makes me worry about humanity is the fact that you said that with a straight face as if we, as a society, can't (or shouldn't) demand that they tell the story with the same set of facts.
Treating the other side with fairness and understanding MEANS acknowledging all the facts.
> ... than ask them to converge on exactly the same dry list of uninterpreted facts
This is a false dichotomy.
> Also, I think people ask for "fairness and understanding" but want a great deal more;
And you just twisted my words, which doesn't need to happen in order for us to have a conversation. But you chose to do it anyway because you're not interested in a conversation, you're not interested in fairness, you're interested in pushing a narrative.
And it sucks that people like you exist.
AKA merely reporting the facts and events without introducing someone's uncalled for opinion, which shows respect for the audience by trusting them to draw their own conclusions.
Funny how "easily exploitable" journalism is somehow worse than "directly and blatantly exploited" journalism.
Our ability to see this deception admittedly means that finding the truth will be a bit more messy than the "truths" we've been presented with in the past. But far from this diminishing our ability to discern truth, it is helping us by forcing us to return to critical thinking.
If this means democracy is in crisis, then democracy requires deception to operate.
Our world is officially too complex for anyone to understand, and you expect the average voter to to engage critical thinking to positive effect? We just failed at that catastrophically. It's completely unrealistic, there's no evidence for it.
I think most newspapers do a pretty good job.
Noting that it appears to be SOP to always make everyone aware that someone doesn't support Trump if the statement that they are making seems to make it appear that they might support Trump or are not part of 'the resistance' to Trump.