https://freespeechdebate.com/discuss/an-impregnable-fortress...
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/white-house-press-passes...
The US is a federalized country with quite big cultural differences between states, and at least alternates between two major parties, and frequently shifting administrations. You can at most get canceled by one side. Japan is centralized and monolithic to an extent that really has no parallel in any other democratic country.
Singapore?
The press doesn’t just toe the official line, they actively attack opposite viewpoints.
Bonus points: the TV/radio wing has the delightfully Orwellian name of MediaCorp, and MediaCorp Radio at one point had the amazing slogan "MediaCorp Radio: Your choice!".
in theory there's no problem with this, after all if they represent the plurality ... just as in theory many political systems should work just fine.
and it's certainly possible that this is what the vast majority of people there wants, so it might score 100% on "democracy", even if there are certain very obvious problems (let's say their insane justice system, or the simple fact that their population is both shrinking and ageing)
As an example, John Tan was disqualified for standing as a candidate to the parliament in 2019 because he posted a Facebook post in support of an activist who posted than Malaysian courts were more independent than Singapore ones in trials involving politicians.
They only stop talking to you through official channels. There will always be leakers, disgruntled employees and others willing to talk to you anonymously or unofficially. Not to mention that you can talk to people and ask questions without announcing that you're a reporter. This used to be called investigative journalism.
I would just say it's not as profitable. Many independent journalists seem to do investigative journalism on the cheap. Wikileaks comes to mind. Saying it' too expensive, to me, denotes that they are unable to do it and be a sustainable enterprise, which is probably not accurate.
> They only stop talking to you through official channels. There will always be leakers, disgruntled employees and others willing to talk to you anonymously or unofficially.
You cannot sustain beat reporting by relying on leakers and disgruntled employees. Furthermore, anonymous sources are not credible (ie, the news-consuming public largely does not trust them).
Most of the time, simple facts need to be reported and the only way to do that is by talking to credible sources that have been developed over time. Not all journalism is investigative - what happens when you want to report on a new housing development but you've burned all your sources because you only talk to leakers and disgruntled employees? Or you're reporting on a crime and need to talk to some cops?
> Not to mention that you can talk to people and ask questions without announcing that you're a reporter.
City officials are pretty well trained to know when the person on the other end of the line is a reporter. Not to mention how incredibly unethical this is (won't even start on the legal issues here).
Trump actually had a reporter's white house press credentials revoked and a court reversed it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-reporter/u-s-ap...
The court does recognize the government has a right to prevent unruly behavior. But once it creates a forum with rules on who attends; it simply can not target those who disagree with it's speech.
Yes, American agencies have stonewalled in the past but the 1st and 14th amendments do place restrictions and practices the governments must follow or their acts can be blocked and that American courts do uphold. As far as I know most countries do not have these practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundespressekonferenz#Organisa...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilo_Jung [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv1WDP5EiipMQ__C4Cg6aow
The thing in his early days was that he asked and "demanded" a proper answer. But often times the politicians don't want to answer to the question stated. Now you can waste everybody's time and ask again and again, without getting an answer (which is useful if you stream the event) or accept that there won't be an answer and move to the next topic (which is good if you want to write an article)
But meanwhile Jung doesn't play that game that much anymore, but asks good and precise questions and more often then leaves it there.
It seems that Scottish interviewer Andrew Neil has a reputation for this kind of implacable questioning. Any others?
In that described setting here, you have journalists who want to write an article about current topics. In the article they can write "they avoided answering XYZ" and given limited time it is more worthwhile to switch topics. Repeating a non-answer doesn't make the article longer.
In the 1:1 setting the way they try to weasel out and avoid answering can be educational to the audience and can narrow down the topic a bit.
If they don't want to say something they should just say that. I totally agree with this guy tbh.
It's just a Verein (untranslateable, but let's say 'private association/club') with members.
They can refuse to accept members for any reason, and they can kick out members for the reasons they themselves specify.
Currently this section (§14) reads they can kick out members "that are a danger to the purpose of the association or are harmful to its reputation or interests".
So (read cynically) pretty much any reason.
In any case, such a decision can be review by civil court as well whether it actually met the conditions laid out in their charter.
But also, I'm not saying it's better or whatever or making any sort of judgement? I'm just saying I don't think the media-led organisation has 'all that power' - they'll just go where all the news is, because it's their job, and the government (currently) lets that be where they want?
Twitter doesn't have any more power in that example, it's also just the avenue my hypothetical chancellor self chose to announce a press conference, he could have done it on Facebook, or Volksbook, or whatever, it's up to him, that was my point.
Its the same in the UK.
UK "political editors" working for the larger media outlets are granted lobby passes, which they guard like some precious gem stone.
Lobby passes grant the journalists free access to certain parts of the Parliament buildings, in particular the lobby (hence the name of the pass !). It also grants them access to the Downing Street media briefings, which due to some obscure tradition, are always held behind closed doors.
That's why many UK "political editors" ask such dumb limp questions of UK leaders. Its because they run scared of having their sacred lobby pass taken away from them.
To be fair, politicians still feel the need to get on TV and face Paxman and Andrew Netflix and so on, who are happy to take them to pieces whatever their personal political leanings. That plus PMQs and constituency duties, and I think UK politicians get grilled sufficiently…
Now, we were quite young and didn’t really know that much about British politics to get that much out of it but it was so refreshing to see a interviewer that didn’t just back down like they do back in my home country.
Yes, Paxman was good at pushing politicians.
But he was not a lobby pass holder either, AFAIK. So he had nothing to loose.
Politicians with a grilling fetish came to see him on Newsnight knowing exactly what they would be facing.
But he equally represented a generation of political journalists that seems to have been lost with the newer generation. The new generation of political journalists seems to have lost that "dog with a bone" sprit, even those who are free of the self-imposed restrictions of the lobby pass.
The Johnson partygate, for example, came out of leaks rather than tough questioning of politicians. There are rumours around that some of the more high-profile lobby journalists were at said parties....
What happened to independent investigative reporting?
I think it’s the same pattern in many countries, where there will be two different rythme: almost immediate news with official communication coming in near real-time, and a second wave of news from journalists who took more time to form an opinion/check what they want to publish. Both waves happen in big newspapers, independent ones only bet on the second wave.
- The ACLU faced internal divisions after defending a far-right protest that devolved into a riot of hate-speech that got someone killed.
- The ACLU also argued in court that teachers, when engaging with students in their professional capacity, should respect to gender identity of students.
It seems that a subset of the ACLU has taken the stance that defending free-speech as a cloak for hate would, on balance, reduce rather than increase the rights and liberties of the broader population.
This is the classic paradox of tolerance, it is not a new situation, nor should it be mysterious, controversial, or surprising. It is something that all of us must consider in our daily lives.
Note that the shift has been quite recent (more or less since 2017) and not uniform; the ACLU does still take up free speech cases, while avoiding others, depending on various things.
Related, but not mentioned in the above articles, are tweets from prominent ACLU lawyers calling for banning certain books (see https://reclaimthenet.org/strangio-shrier-free-speech-suppre... for a reference, but this was quite widely reported). On the one hand, said lawyers have a right to their own opinions on their own personal twitter accounts. On the other hand, the ACLU never bothered to say that this opinion does not represent the ACLU organizational position....
In case it is of value to others, one such article is https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/10/26/why-the-aclu-is-rig... - it definitely has a pro-ACLU slant, but I thought it did a reasonable job of explaining the dynamics of the recent discussion/shifts within the ACLU with respect to free speech
I should make a habit of loading things in a private browsing tab as a test.
You should be able to see the whole Times article at https://web.archive.org/web/20220616003939/https://www.nytim... if you are interested in a less-pro-ACLU take.
> modern left-of-center policy in general
The kisha clubs [1], which control media access to government officials and the police, are restricted to reporters from major media organizations. The tabloid press frequently complains about those restrictions and use those restrictions as justification for their less savory reporting methods.
The libel and privacy laws are fairly strict [2, 3] and have been tightened in recent years, making publications more hesitant to report negative or personal information about individuals, including politicians. Some religious groups have used those laws to suppress negative reporting; as soon as I noticed on Friday afternoon that the mainstream media weren’t giving the name of the religious group, I wondered if fear of lawsuits was the reason. (I still don’t know.)
Extremist groups have targeted Japanese media, and have sometimes attacked [4] or killed [5] journalists, for reports that the groups didn’t like about the Imperial family or historical matters. This can make journalists hesitant to raise controversial topics.
The major newspapers are published by large conglomerates that have diverse business interests. The weekly magazines have, over the years, reported many examples of stories that were suppressed by their larger competitors because of conflicts of interest. An amusing one that I remember is when a magazine was not allowed to include the term shōgi daoshi—literally, “falling over like shogi pieces”—in their regular advertisement in a daily newspaper; they wanted to use it to describe an accident where people were crushed in and killed in a crowd, but that newspaper ran a major shogi tournament and wouldn’t allow the term shōgi to be used in a negative context. Some weekly magazines that frequently publish reports of salacious scandals about celebrities and politicians refrain from publishing similar reports about well-known writers, because their parent companies depend on work by those writers for other publications.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisha_club
[2] https://kellywarnerlaw.com/japan-defamation-laws
[3] https://www.omm.com/resources/alerts-and-publications/alerts...
An amusing one on multiple levels. Standard shogi pieces don't fall over! They're not miniature statues like in Western chess, but flat reversible tiles [0]. It's like it was written by a Western journalist who needed to translate his idiom into Japanese.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Sh...
https://www.photo-ac.com/main/search?q=将棋倒し&srt=dlrank&qt=&p...
It doesn't make sense to attribute its origins to Persia in the context of specifically distinguishing it from other shatranj/chaturanga derivatives, like shogi.
TV station: You operate without a license or outside of its bounds, you've committed a criminal act. The government can use their monopoly on force to compel you to give up your resources (fines) or your freedom (jail time).
Youtube: You break the terms of service and are no longer allowed to use their service.
There are other video platforms, there are ways to self host video. No one needs a "license" from Google to get their video content available to the world.
If you want to swim in Google's pool and get the benefits of hanging around the other millions of people in Google's pool, maybe it's a good idea not to take a ** in it.
There are checks and balances on a democracy that do not involve leaving the country. The government can not legally damage you without massive oversight.
There are no such checks and balances on google, and they can destroy your livelihood on a whim without even acknowledging you exist