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CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

nytimes.com

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Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#191

Post by krapp »

mduerksen wrote: post #136
krapp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assange doesn't write news, and classified documents are not, themselves, the product of journalism merely for being leaked. Writing a story about the Pentagon papers is journalism, printing them verbatim without context or comment is not journalism. If running a website which publishes third party content makes one a journalist then I guess Reddit makes spez a journalist too.

So an editor-in-chief is not a journalist to you?

> So an editor-in-chief is not a journalist to you?

I don't know, ask Wikipedia, because my comment was using the definition you provided via that site.

Either way, the answer isn't relevant to Assange or Wikileaks. He's not an editor in chief, because he doesn't run an organization which has editorial policies or which writes stories which have to conform to those policies. We disagree that the definition you provided applies to Assange - as I see it, it clearly doesn't.

There's a reason Snowden didn't go to Wikileaks - he wanted journalists to handle the release of his information responsibly, and to provide the necessary context and framing narrative to the public. Wikileaks would simply have dumped all of them onto the web, because that's what they do.

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#192

Post by cycrutchfield »

grenoire wrote: post #117
b_tterc_p wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won’t make any specific judgments to any outlets but at a certain point you’re really just a propagandist rather than a journalist if your primary goal is to sway public opinion instead of informing people on the truth. So I think relativism doesn’t help here.

It's not Assange's fault if the truth caused opinions to sway.

>It's not Assange's fault if the selectively-revealed truth caused opinions to sway due to his editorial influence.

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#194

Post by krapp »

msla wrote: post #141
krapp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing socialism with communism. Socialism is a political philosophy, whereas communism is one specific (but not the only possible) implementation of that philosophy. Socialism is also intended to be a criticism of and attempt to redress the immorality of capitalism, so morality does enter into it, at least in theory.

Socialism as it's understood now is a specific plan for replacing Capitalism, tied to a specific theory of history, not just a philosophy. At the level of implementation, it isn't morality, it's economics and politics. There might be morality behind it, but there's morality behind all actions, to some extent.

Many modern capitalist governments, including the US, employ socialist programs with no intention of overturning capitalism itself.

And the entire thesis behind socialism is that it's morally superior to capitalism, in a similar way that free software is argued as being morally superior to proprietary software.

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#195

Post by basetop »

nickysielicki wrote: post #26

I feel like free speech has never been under such attack. Culturally, we don't care about it, we find offensive content more offensive than censorship of offensive content. Politically, they can censor you completely if they want to by hitting you with an NSL. EFF says that happens 60 times a day. The most hard hitting journalist in the west, Julian Assange, was just put in jail. I'm scared about the future. It's not…

People care about it. It's the wealthy elites who don't care about it. The problem is that through control over media and social media, the elites can make it seem like nobody cares about it.

Also, the relentless censorship has been a fairly recent phenomenon. Oddly enough, pushed for by media elites like the nytimes and others.

It is a strange time where both the "left" and the "right" want censorship. But I doubt it will last too long. People are going to start pushing back sooner or later.

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#196

Post by dxbydt »

amalcon wrote: post #160
nickysielicki wrote: post #26

I feel like free speech has never been under such attack. Culturally, we don't care about it, we find offensive content more offensive than censorship of offensive content. Politically, they can censor you completely if they want to by hitting you with an NSL. EFF says that happens 60 times a day. The most hard hitting journalist in the west, Julian Assange, was just put in jail. I'm scared about the future. It's not…

Assuming we are taking a US centric view here, I feel just the opposite: that speech has scarcely ever been so free. It was less than a decade ago that the U.S. military had a policy literally called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". It was only fifty years ago that Martin Luther King Jr. was being investigated by the FBI, for speech that is now broadly considered necessary. About 100 years ago, check out the Sedition Act of…

I think you & the parent are both correct, despite holding opinions that are poles apart.

Certainly in the kinds of things we are allowed to watch, we are more free than ever before. For instance, wikipedia says the adult entertainment industry is atleast 50 years old, but the kind of material you can access today without fear of repercussions is beyond precedent. For instance, any adult site will happily serve hundreds of atm clips. Even 20 years ago, the term atm was practically unknown, and certainly you couldn’t get performers to engage in atm, let alone film it & host it online.

At the same time, what is and isn’t permissible for discussion in the public sphere has narrowed rather sharply. Especially in academia, this kind of hypocrisy & doublespeak is so blatant & overt, it makes you wonder what else is being swept under the rug. We had an incident at the stat seminar a few weeks back. A Stanford professor was interrupted by one of our professors who simply said “i don’t like lasso”. This became full blown drama, statisticians thumping desks and saying “hear hear” & so forth. What should have been an educational lecture in penalties & their properties got shut down by the moderator! If one can’t even discuss harmless on-point topic like this in an academic setting, what is the point of freedom of speech & rest of the machinery ? Are we so scared of causing offence ?

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#197

Post by cycrutchfield »

spork12 wrote: post #77
thedaemon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to America.

Indeed, we are in a sort of cold civil war in western culture right now over core beliefs and culture. HN definitely seems to have a collective bias to one side of that.

Yes, HN does tend to have a collective bias towards logic and reason, and against wild conspiracy theories.

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#198

Post by f5thesystem »

TomMckenny wrote: post #144
scohesc wrote: post #18

It's a bit telling when a media giant like CBS can't strike a happy medium by you know - both not censoring it in the US and censoring it in china - instead, choosing to censor the whole thing outright on the entire platform. It's almost like all these American companies are moving en masse to do business in China with the sole purpose of increasing profits every single quarter, irrespective of (and arguably, now enc…

Absolutely. Most corporations have no more loyalty to one "side" or the other nor any more loyalty to an ideology than the Coke/Fanta hybrid-monstrosity of the 1940s. It took employees to force Google to reverse some of its policies, not its board of directors. At the same time, as the US withdraws from the world, China fills in. They zealously sell the surveillance state and its equipment world wide just as the US e…

The last couple of days I've been learning a little more about China's emerging surveillance state and while terrifying to think about and worse sad knowing they're building essentially concentration camps, I am wondering how effective are China's policies.

i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?

Without looking at any figures, surely policing the internet, building large re-education camps, and employing a whole lot of social police gobbles up a lot of resources. The people employed could be doing something else productive right?

So would the safety gained from their extreme surveillance state increase over all productivity due to less violence or lower productivity because the net gain from a safer society is less than what would be gained if the resources were distributed to other societal needs like healthcare and infrastructure?

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#199

Post by Wowfunhappy »

russellbeattie wrote: post #180

This isn't "ironic" or a "creative solution", this is straight up censorship. Wow. China has basically made it known they will go after a company's employees. I'm sure that CBS is very concerned about general access to the Chinese market and don't want their shows banned for purely economic reasons, but the subtle threat of their Chinese employees disappearing because of a cartoon is a real thing . Let's say this was…

From the New Yorker article on this: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cbs-censors-t...

> Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California who also teaches courses on Chinese film, expressed doubt that airing such a cartoon would have exposed CBS employees to risk, although, he added, that might depend on whether network executives were seen as personally responsible for the segment.

Re: CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

#200

Post by deogeo »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #134
mikequinlan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CBS said "This is the creative solution that we agreed upon with the producers". I have been wondering if the producers insisted that the segment be censored in all regions so that everyone would know about it. Otherwise Americans would never know about the censorship.

You don't fight censorship by doubling down on censorship. It's entirely possible to show the uncensored version in America and raise awareness that the segment was censored in other regions.

What better way to raise awareness that it was censored, than by showing the censored version in the US?
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