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The American Press Is Destroying Itself

taibbi.substack.com

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Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#531

Post by jlawson »

ls612 wrote: post #210
forgingahead wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also seem to be unaware that howling mobs move on ...you just have to wait them out. Stand firm and they'll quickly find another target to bully.

Case in point: remember last year when the governor and the AG (I think?) of Virginia were caught in blackface 30 years ago and the lieutenant governor was revealed to have raped a woman in college 20 years ago? And they all refused to resign? Everyone forgot about that a month later.

Same with Canadian PM Trudeau. Out came multiple videos of him in blackface. The media dropped it in a few weeks.

Unfortunately, the media only drops these things when it's a politician they like. Anyone right of Obama gets hounded with scandals, real or imagined, as often as possible, forever.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#532

Post by dang »

buzzkillington wrote: post #405
dang wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trolling. There's no view that requires that level of disrespect. If you continue to post flamebait to HN we will ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Even the guy who started this site had something to say about shitting on orthodoxy: >What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or eve…

pg would most likely have just banned you a long time ago. He was a hundred times quicker to ban HN users than we are, and he never gave warnings like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22709413 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606579.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#533

Post by jlawson »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #393
phaus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I was talking about. You make a bunch of assumptions about peoples' political opinions that are incorrectly portraying them as centrists and supporters of nazis if they don't adopt your world view. "Us or them" is killing America. Lack of nuance and intelligent discourse is destroying us. There's more to the extreme left than "Everyone deserves to be treated equally and with dignity." Politics in…

There really isn't more to the "extreme left" than equality and dignity. The problem is that even suggesting that equality and dignity are valid as bedrock communal values in business, politics, law, and economics is considered an aggressively extremist ultra-left position in the US - and not a sane and mature common sense centre-left view, as it is in parts of Europe. There's a reason for this, and it's to do with t…

What is North Korea? Cuba? Soviet Union? Doesn't sound like equality and dignity to me.

What you're not getting is that equality and dignity aren't even compatible if you try to push equality to extremes. Dignity means giving people freedom to make their own choices and live as they wish; the opposite of dignity is enslaving them. But as soon as people can make different choices they'll start achieving different outcomes - inequality. Not to mention the need to forcefully people who step out of their assigned 'equal' band of achievement - there's nothing dignified about crabs in a bucket.

NK and Cuba and USSR stamped out inequality pretty well, and they gave up on dignity to accomplish that.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#534

Post by jlawson »

tptacek wrote: post #256
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sullivan is on some kind of weird double secret probation and quite unhappy about it. I do not understand the comment about his not having credibility to burn. Opinion columnists aren't jockeying to run for class president. They're supposed to take various opinions in order for ideas to be more fully fleshed out. If the only purpose of the opinion section is to say things that reflect well on you or cover you in glor…

He can say whatever he wants, of course, but should not be surprised when he takes comparatively more flak for venturing forth on issues involving race. New York Magazine is a business, and can make their own decisions about whether that flak is worth absorbing. Certainly, his ideas on these topics don't seem to be worth much on their own merits.

It's always amazing how you (and all others parroting this line) can freely switch back and forth between "he who has the gold makes the rules and that's okay" and "corporations need to support this cause I support", depending on exactly who is getting hurt in each situation.

Come on - you must realize that you don't actually believe your argument as a principle, you're just using it as an excuse because you want Sullivan silenced.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#535

Post by LockAndLol »

> The American left has lost its mind

That quote stands out. For all the talk about demanding inclusiveness, American leftwings seem to be quite an exclusive group. They demand some conflicting moral standards and drown out debate by shouting down different opinions.

It's quite disconcerting to see this jump over to Europe and spread in the fashion it has. Identity and group belonging are becoming more important than reason.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#536

Post by goatinaboat »

dang wrote: post #390
goatinaboat wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's not like taibbi is speaking up for child molesters Unlike, say, the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/opinion/pedophilia-a-diso...

" Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just making an observation on what is and is not permitted to be published in the NY Times is all

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#537

Post by [deleted] »

naveen99 wrote: post #496
arkades wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always surprising to me how the basic structure of analogy is so commonly misunderstood. It's what happens when people don't have a rebuttal to the point being raised. It's generally a good sign that they're no longer engaging in good faith.

The analogy might be stronger if intra Jewish violence killed 10x more than nazis.

[deleted]

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#538

Post by xg15 »

flyinglizard wrote: post #347
csallen wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how analogies work, so this is completely missing the point. For example, if you say the Colosseum is to Rome what a roller coaster is to an amusement part, you are not saying that the Colosseum is similar to a roller coaster. No, what you're comparing is the Colosseum's relationship to Rome and the rollercoaster's relationship to the amusement park. xg15's analogy isn't meant to equate Black people in Ame…

This was no analogy, as my point illustrated - not any more than name dropping any atrocious historical event into the discussion for rhetorical shock value. The article discussed here specifically builds a significant part of its argument on the way violence inside black communities is silenced because it does not fit the current narrative. The article does not talk about police brutality itself, but about the way r…

No, it was one, csallen explained that quite well. I was trying to illustrate the point using an event were we should be all in agreement systematic discrimination and oppression happened. In that context, it's irrelevant how the oppressed behave.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#539

Post by parsimo2010 »

ghettoimp wrote: post #458
parsimo2010 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that the USA should get out of Vietnam is an opinion. You do not have to explicitly mention a party to express a partisan position. “Real” journalism reports the facts of what’s going on and lets people make their own decisions. They can interview people and report the opinions that other people hold, but they should try to avoid inserting their own biases. Walter Cronkite leveraged his position to express his…

I of course agree completely that a journalist should be open minded, aware of their own bias, conduct thorough research, interview knowledgeable people, and all of that. At the end of this process they are ideally quite an expert in whatever they are writing about. But I'm not sure I see why journalists should try to be strictly objective. A journalist is in a unique position to identify the BS, provide analysis and…

If you’ve ever read a journalist’s take on a subject that you’re an expert in, you’ll realize that they do not become experts after researching a story, nor are they any better at identifying BS than other people.

Some journalists that specialize in a particular field become experts, but it takes time to learn. Journalists don’t have some secret way to learn faster than other people.

Journalists do get training in interviewing experts and writing. That’s what they should stick to. Just like we really shouldn’t pay attention to a celebrity’s opinion of an issue that they don’t have special training in, we really shouldn’t be paying attention to a journalist’s personal opinion- we should rely on them to talk to experts and convey information, but their ability to form an opinion isn’t any better than yours.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#540

Post by wozniacki »

remote_phone wrote: post #131
wozniacki wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely removed from the merits and demerits of Taibbi's treatment of the topic at hand, I shudder at your unqualified praise of the man. Without so much as a single source to buttress your point or to qualify how you arrived at that conclusion. Thats like saying Judge Richard Posner is one of the best jurists in the country without adding anything else.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner

Have you even read any of the other articles he has written? He really is one of the best journalists of this current era, he is truth-seeking instead of motivated by dogma.

You just proved my point.

You expect people to somehow know and lionize these left-wing hacks as if their eminence should be self-evident and known to all, despite their bent (which is revealed in the 2nd paragraph where the author calls a sitting President a 'clown').

That's the problem with unself-aware people like you, who expect everyone to read the same people you do. Left-leaning people have been accused of living in their own self-made bubbles of comfy self-reinforcing left-leaning talking points.

Thats how you get to a point where a presidential candidate feels comfortable & self-assured in calling those who won't vote for her "a basket of deplorables" or a current 2020 presidential candidate saying "if you have a problem figuring out if you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black" to black voters[2].

You're not helping with this thinking of yours or your entitlement in feeling that a journalist of your liking will be liked by all or considered even-keeled by all.

[1] Basket of deplorables

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables

[2] Biden tells voters 'you ain't black' if you're still deciding between him and Trump – video

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/may/22/joe-bi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lmdnm2vgmI

https://i.imgur.com/nvFiIJi.png

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