My view, the journalists are in a self-centered way raising the question of whether Greenwald should be charged with a crime because they see their faces in the mirror of his face.
The boundaries the national security state is setting on journalism are still very fluid. The Obama administration, unfortunately, has changed the status quo of what kinds of leaks and sources will be prosecuted. It is having a chilling effect on insider journalism. Naturally all the insiders are curious about who will be called an outsider and what the fate of the outsider will be.
| Again the conversation shifts away from the
| bureaucracy and towards those who threaten it.
I agree that the focus should be on the NSA, but hopefully all of the stories about the subject matter keep the topic in the public's thoughts. Possibly enough for some people to do more research and change their minds (from "All the way NSA!" to "Hmmm. Maybe they went too far").
Still, you have to agree that the MSM way too often derails the conversation towards personalism and unrelated issues and away from actual policy topics, usually following this or that agenda, just because novels sell better than political essays. This should be taught in journalism school, nowadays, but it's clearly not the case.
"Nowadays, all you do is hear the media's description of what the candidate is saying, and one of the strange things about it is that politics is now presented in terms of politicians and not politics. I don't think the media is interested in politics, they're interested in politicians, which is a wholly different subject... who's doing this, about their private life, about their background, about what they must be thinking, might be thinking when they said something, why did they say it; but what they say is very, very hard to hear. And I think this is, in a sense, indeed quite deliberately, destroying the genuine democratic base on which people are elected."
So I should let creationists speak on stage on the same level as everyone else?
There was an editorial by (I think) the EIC of Nature. In it he talks about how giving people the floor for discussion in some way validates their positions, no matter how absurd, so the best solution is simply not to give them the floor.
If someone knows what article I'm talking about , please link it, it was extremely interesting read.
This is the same line of reasoning that leads to fringe opinions being overrepresented in the name of "equal time". Journalism is about presenting facts in order of apparent importance, the channel editor picks the cutoff point, and the audience (vaguely) picks the seeds for the next iteration.
Lately there has been relatively less talk about what the security apparatus has done, and more about the people involved in the revealing of it. History won't care where Snowden is today, or whether Greenwald is successfully tarred and feathered. The only thing on the page is going to be that the third use of the Internet (after media delivery and catalog shopping) was spying on the entire world in a way that only a decade ago was inconceivable.
Not at all. Journalism is about presenting the truth. You're talking about journamalism.
An attempt to report the news marred with shoddy
research, fact suppression, or a mere retyping of
the press release/talking points
On the same token, not reporting facts like, "some people are Holocaust-deniers," just because their views might be wrong seems to fit with the 'fact suppression' definition of 'journamalism.'
At best, it's extra noise in the signal. At worse, it's a annoying way of "reporting" by appealing to the emotions and fears of the lowest common denominator. It's no more journalism than tabloid trash in my opinion. Actually, I'd say it's worse as the unwashed masses latch on to arguments like this and may ignore more important topics either because their minds are full of crud, or because their emotional response has already been tweaked- i,e,. "I can't trust this guy, he's a muslim spy!"
Fair and balanced does not mean you have to mix facts and conjecture; that's what editorials are for. The problem is that journalism today blurs the lines between the two.
Halfway between the truth and a lie is still a lie.
Whether or not there are multiple legitimate sides to a debate that are best left to the discretion of the reader is something that depends on the facts of each particular story and is not something that can be assumed as some sort of metaphysical principle of journalism.
Did I say somewhere here that all articles on the Holocaust require an equal amount of time presenting the views of Holocaust-deniers? If not, then why assume that I'm making some sort of absolute statement?
I'd say a better candidate for Golden Rule of the Internet is the tendency of people to collapse meaningful distinctions, and think that policing those distinctions is pedantry relating to far-off hypotheticals, but not to instances of their own behavior.