This is the least credible possible evidence, because shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.
Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
Also:
> Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct. Not like, say, Fox News with its usual defwnc ein court that boils down to "who in his right mind would take us for a serious news outlet employing journalists".
There is no law for "wrong reporting". LWTN has not lost a defamation suit, which is very narrow.
"Wrong reporting" is a much broader ethical category of lying by omission to create a narrative or choosing unreliable sources. Think of things like NYTimes and the Iraq War. Or basically any article of the format "x% of some group wants Y evil thing".
> HBO also argued that other statements were opinions and jokes, not factual assertions
> HBO said Murray’s accusations were a matter of “hurt feelings about jokes,” and said jokes are protected speech.
https://www.thewrap.com/coal-magnates-lawsuit-john-oliver-di...
Also, if I remeber correctly, Murray didnnot attack them on the reportes facts, did he?
With jokes like "looks like a geriatric Dr. Evil", "appears to be on the side of black lung", and "[his political activity is] the equivalent of watching My Girl and rooting for the bees" they suggested that Murray was evil without making any actionable claims.
And in their show after the case was dismissed, they embraced the "who in his right mind would take [this] seriously" defense wholeheartedly: accusing Murray of things like being Epstein's prison guard.
Factual (even if obviously untrue), but not defamation because, much as the court wrote in the case against Tucker Carlson (and before that, a similar case against Rachel Maddow): “the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation”
I also found that Genwal Resources, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Murray Energy, agreed they had violated two safety regulations.
They were fined $500,000, but the government said "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse"[1].
LWT didn't include that. Instead they simply said "the government's investigation...found it was caused by unauthorized mining practices." Don't you think "we were unable to prove [that]" should have been included by LWT?
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/09/148319836...
You're defending this particular story when I never claimed it was necessarily false.
> By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct.
That is how "out of context" works. They don't affirmatively lie, they lie through omission. They have lawyers who know how defamation laws work.
You did point out those "interviews", which weren't even interviews to begin with but recording of shop floor banter, without realizing they were done by Al-Jazzeera and not LWTN, not realizing they covered the B787 and were done over a decade ago.
And then you accusse others of discussing out of context? Difficult to have context when you din't even get your basic facts right, isn't it?
Doesn't real line up with this, which is essentially claiming its false:
> ... shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.
No one makes a career about reporting how the free coffee in the break room was changed to a pay your own way plan.
That is "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find something in them to have him hanged."
Generally attributed to Richelieu
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
Rather than fix their airplanes Boeing is trying to discredit the NTSB.
1. Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms
2. Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
3. Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
Even when I agree with the narrative, the mechanisms by which the audience is persuaded feels quite disingenuous to me. Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism. My perspective is based on episodes I watched in 2016. The small bits I've seen from him and other similar formats since then suggest it is still this way.
And, this show in particular, gets the fact right almost all of the time. And it provided more context and details on the whole Boeing saga than any other news source I have seen or read so far since the door plug blew out. Heck, going back to the 737 Max crashes I would be hard pushed to find main stream media reporting that was, factually and regarding context, better.
If not humor, what mechanism would you prefer?
I like it when John Oliver or whoever goes after corruption and incompetence, but it still has to be said that popular comedy news shows are kind of the left’s version of Fox News in terms of shrillness, pandering, and brainwashing. While episodes on many topics are cringey to watch, at least they aren’t completely post-truth yet. When the writers do wade all the way in to culture war nonsense, I think they do this with a certain self awareness and I like to think they feel bad about it.
It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?
NPR (my old favorite) has jumped the shark. Other outlets generally harass me with paywalls when I’m already forced to sift through a total shit show of a website with op Ed’s no one asked for, celebrity gossip, and lengthy gpt-powered regurgitation all fluffing up the same few short blurbs from the AP wire.
Mainstream media for both the left and the right, domestic and foreign, all have websites with ads like “free WiFi for senior citizens” and “Just add this one weird thing to your toothpaste” next to big brain articles about dealing with disinformation in the next round of elections.
None of this is very confidence inspiring, so no, I doubt they’ll sell many subscriptions, and yeah, I expect quality will continue to decline. So I guess comedian-journalism is probably here to stay, regardless of whether I like the format
The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.
Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.
If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.
> Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
> Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism.
It is foremost a comedy show yes, and they present things in a light hearted way. For an American show that means stuff like that. Mind you the jokes about Trumps' hands are more about something that Trump brings up constantly, a weird public insecurity about the size of them.
> Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
I mean. I didn't say it doesn't pick a side. But it does go in depth, and it does present opposing arguments reasonably faithfully (even if it immediately rebuts them) (in my opinion!)
These days I just assume that’s the quality of the average episode and I don’t know enough to know otherwise.
Isnt this how newspapers work? Isnt this also how journalism works in general? If that wasnt the case, you wouldnt have two/three completely different takes on stories given which side of the political spectrum you're on.
How about the U.S. government opening a criminal inquiry that corroborates what they were reporting?
That said, I was greatly amused by this in the article:
> “In an event like this, it’s normal for the D.O.J. to be conducting an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.”
> Boeing had no comment.
> "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse," said David Barlow, the U.S. Attorney for Utah.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/09/148319836...
But let's be honest, Oliver didn't hate Murray because of the mine disaster, he hated Murray for mining coal. The mine disaster (responsibility for which wasn't even proven) was all LWT could dig up.
And the audience will pretty much hate anyone Oliver tells them to hate. That's why they watch - to enjoy their Two Minutes Hate.
Re: selection of statements, the reports in Fukushima and Cherbobyl do the same. The point is to showcase the underlying issues with concrete examples and statements. Nothing wrong with that per-se. And in th LWTN segment, it was not done in bad faith, it is bot FOX news after all.
This is the danger in it.
They pick someone they don't like and basically do a hit piece. Now sometimes the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism, and then if you try to get the real story, the real story is that the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism.
But then they'll run a segment in the same style where the target is just someone from the outgroup of the show's target audience.
Just because comedy shows focus on entertainment value doesn't mean there's no evidence. They have a different focus from investigators or courts, but in democratic countries, the funds to run investigations come from politicians and public outcry, and that comes from the people actually giving a sh*t about it. So they do perform a function.
That was the classical role of the jester in some monarchies. They were the only person who could openly criticize the king without retribution (in theory).
Just because you learnt the exact topics that were to be examined doesn't mean you're good at the whole subject.
Likewise, those diesel cars were very good at the exact things that were tested, and terrible at everything else. They were literally engineered to the exact test syllabus.
Yet we somehow don't call the student a cheater.
In my view, in both cases, the shortcoming is with the test/syllabus designer. The test topics need to be not announced beforehand, and the sylabus needs to not be rigid and narrower than the field in the real world.
Fact is, VW engines had a mode recognizing a test and adopted AdBlue and fuel mixture to meet emission standards. On the road, these engines ran dirty. That was explicitely stated to be illegal in the applicable laws.
It was all the other brands that played, as it turned out also illegal, games with temp windows and such.
Blaming this on regulators is putting this while story on its head.
Pulcinella is the carnival character from Naples and he's a joker.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
I think Oliver is funny. His show makes good points and gives good arguments. It should not, however, by itself be the sole basis of one’s opinion on any given topic (not many things should) as many take it to be. It is intelligent and honest but also one-sided and biased.
They are, at least, not generally purposefully misleading in service of their bias, which is why I think people trust them more than a lot of other sources like cable news.
As someone who stopped taking certain news outlets on my side of the political spectrum serious after running into Gell-Mann once to often, I have to say, with decent backgroind in the topic we discuss here, aerospace and quality and such, this particular LWTN segment got it right. Heck, some of it was even than what I heard in my life from co-workers in the industry. I wouldn't go as far as doing a reverse Gell-Mann on LWTN based on this, but overall their reporting is, factually, correct. And they don't even try to hide their bias, nor donthey use to spin a story, which is refreshing if you ask me.
Another neat heuristic is that if there's a video/blog/whatever information product more often than once a week, it probably doesn't have enough research behind it to be reasonably accurate, even handed, and well, researched.
Journalism is stupidly expensive. Modern advertising actually doesn't pay enough to do it. Consider that just since 2008, newsroom employees have dropped by 20% or so, while the information space has significantly more manufactured misinformation than it ever used to. How many local government stories do you even see anymore? Are you paying for someone to keep tabs on your state legislators?
More often than not you won't find truth even if you read thousands of pages from a lawsuit.
When your entire comedy seems to be built around "Hah the stupid left thinks trans women are real women but they were born with penises", well, that's just not very funny to people who tend to have a non-homogenous friend group.