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The American Press Is Destroying Itself

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Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#571

Post by pasabagi »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #546
pm90 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your confusion is warranted. Context is important. I wanted to cite more from Cottons op ed but was afraid it would be too much words. This is the beginning of his essay: > This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s. > New York City suffered the worst of the riots Monday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by while Midtown Manhattan desce…

You: It’s immediately clear that it’s not a nuanced argument he seeks to make, in his view protestors and rioters are one and the same. Tom Cotton: Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants. You're doing exactly what Cotton warns against just a paragraph l…

He explicitly claims that rioters sometimes outnumber both the national guard and police. I think it’s unlikely that such a statement makes sense without drawing no distinction between protesters and rioters. Saying that the ‘peaceful’ shouldn’t be confused with the ‘roving bands’ seems more rhetorical, or even aspirational, given that he’s not really trying to distinguish himself (and this is clear throughout the piece).

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#572

Post by goatinaboat »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #402
ramphastidae wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is that if not a partisan political opinion? What was partisan about what he said? He made no mention of US political parties. He simply said that the war was failing and it needed to end. May I suggest you are projecting your partisanship onto this? Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other. Should all journalism…

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…

And yes, a journalist covering the creationism vs. evolution debate should research and interview people from both sides.

Well this is Hacker News, if you phrase it as a question about are we living in a simulation they will take it seriously, but of course a simulation would imply someone or something running it...

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#573

Post by account47t83 »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #208
watwut wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The peaceful protesters explicitely don't want that. You may disagree with them, but don't pretend it is for them.

I do disagree, and it is for their safety, many of them are getting hurt. I don't care if they want it or not, if they don't, they don't know what's good for them.

The problem here is that the protestors are against what they perceive as excessive use of force. Sending in the national guard would escalate the situation further. One of the reasons these protests persist is that they elicit from the police much of the behavior they detest. The protests are self-fueling.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#574

Post by gfodor »

jmeister wrote: post #527
zipwitch wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't take Taibbi and Greenwald's antagonism against "elites" seriously when they take every chance possible to defend the actions of a billionaire President and his billionaire-stuff Cabinet.

It’s their policies and actions that matter. Looking at everything from an identity lens is a disease that has corrupted discourse in this country.

Yep actions > words > identity

This concept has been lost on many.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#575

Post by leereeves »

pm90 wrote: post #563
leereeves wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No quarter" wasn't in the essay. It was a tweet. Does "his editorial staff" review everything he tweets? And should everything anyone says be given the worst possible interpretation, or should we, as in the Hacker News guidelines, "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

> Does "his editorial staff" review everything he tweets? Most Senior Government officials do, yes. And Occam’s razor applies: I would argue that using an alternate interpretation of what he said rather than the well known one is going absolutely against the spirit of that hacker news guideline.

Between the colloquial meaning listed in dictionaries, and the technical meaning found in military law books, which is "the well known one"?

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#576

Post by wozniacki »

remote_phone wrote: post #569
wozniacki wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 liv…

Lol your response is utterly nonsensical. This “left-wing hack” just excoriated the entire media and left-wing movement for essentially being fascists. Did you even bother reading the article?

You almost never judge based on one piece of writing.

You judge based on the oeuvre of their lifetime work.[1]

People like him are particularly adept at changing their tone based on which way the political winds blew at that particular time.

The whole of the Left is filled with such noxious people who wouldn't think twice before throwing one of their own under the bus, if it suits their cause.

That's how they've abandoned Noam Chomsky who was once the Left's darling and could do no harm. They're a sickly bunch and a death cult and cannot be trusted with anything resembling power.

[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi#The_eXile

[2] Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy

How elites on both sides of the political spectrum have undermined our social, political, and environmental commons.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-neoli...

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#577

Post by thu2111 »

pm90 wrote: post #564
hombre_fatal wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He couches all of his points in a painful separation/distinction. It's one of the main points of his op ed. Is your brand of rhetoric here the reason why everyone feels like they have to belabor their points by "refreshing" a distinction every two paragraphs lest you forget? It's a weird amnesia, and I want to you consider the possibility that you want him to equate rioting with peaceful protesting because without th…

It’s fine to be wrong. I missed that paragraph in his essay. But there is a reason why that paragraph was missed, and Ive tried to portray the reason why that might be in my other comments. I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m trying to address the reasons why his op ed was deemed to be so revolting. A lot of the comments seem to confess a kind of willful blindness to the awfulness involved in that essay and I’m t…

I've read all your comments and like others, find your thought process confusing.

You started by saying, "I would advise care when reading it". Now you're saying you somehow "missed that paragraph in his essay". So you've been attacking Cotton without having actually read what he wrote despite telling others to read it carefully, but that's OK because "it's fine to be wrong". In fact you seem to be suggesting you ignored it deliberately: "there is a reason why that paragraph was missed"

In one comment you said, "Nobody is misrepresenting what Cotton wrote". Yes they are: that's what this entire subthread is about. You have been constantly mis-representing what he wrote and people keep pointing that out by quoting the article.

I suspect the core problem is revealed by this comment:

"Context is extremely important and words in isolation mean absolutely nothing ... that paragraph was explicitly designed to protect the outcome of what he’s really calling for."

Words in isolation mean absolutely nothing? Context matters sure, but not to the extent that actual words mean nothing at all. Your position here is that what people say they believe doesn't actually matter in the slightest, and should be ignored in favour of vaguely defined "context". Who defines this context? I guess you do. In fact in this world view Cotton can say something as clearly as possible and it should still be ignored, because what he "really" means is - obviously - the exact opposite.

But you're also trying to have it both ways:

"This is a US Senator whose essay was reviewed by his editorial staff before being sent to the times. He is saying exactly what he meant to say"

So now I think we're all hopelessly confused. Which is it? Is Cotton saying "exactly what he meant to say" or is he saying the opposite of what he meant?

Finally, you state "I’m trying to address the reasons why his op ed was deemed to be so revolting". I'm afraid you aren't succeeding. I can't figure out if it was revolting because of the words he wrote, or the words he didn't write, or if those words are meaningless and it's all about "context", in which case it appears no op-ed written by him could have ever passed muster regardless of what it said. This looks a lot like a slippery argument that Sen Cotton simply shouldn't be allowed to speak at all.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#578

Post by eevilspock »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

I don't think they are. I think they are optimizing for survival. Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market. Few people would consume it (or even be capable of doing so), even fewer are ready to pay the real price of it. So they did the next best thing: they changed to please the market in a way that makes money. Grabbing a lot of attention, as cheaply as possible, so that you can sell it to the hi…

> Often, they actually can't, because their survival depend on more pressing day-to-day matters.

I agree with you entirely except for this. For the poor, yes. But there are plenty of people the more pressing day-to-day matters is not survival but how to hoard even more wealth and advantage than they already have. Like sending their children to private schools despite that only exacerbating the already gross iniquities of life for poor children vs elite children. Or figuring out how to upgrade to an even nicer house or which gentrifying neighborhood will yield them the best returns in 10-20 years once it is fully taken over.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#579

Post by ls612 »

titzer wrote: post #372
ls612 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And they all refused to resign? Which is why a system based on policing corruption through public outrage is doomed to fail. You need to have a system that has actual mechanisms--investigations, prosecutions, and convictions--to keep a lid on corruption. Public shaming doesn't work because the public has only so much attention span, and there is soooo much corruption.

In this case two of them hadn’t committed crimes and the third had a statute of limitations that had passed so there wasn’t really corruption involved, just a refusal to listen to protests.

Re: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

#580

Post by monocularvision »

jkingsbery wrote: post #500
Animats wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market. I suspect that's correct. It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why". This is a consequence of pay per click, probably. The left and the right now both have a checklist of mandatory positions required to avoid punishment. Those positions are in many cases contrary to fact. That's not good. Denial has become a cor…

For whatever it's worth: I'm a mostly conservative person who dislikes Trump (that seems to me that should be a tautology, even if it seems to others it's an oxymoron). I've been looking for tolerable media - something that doesn't give Trump a pass. I've found National Review to be an interesting read because the writers there seem to frequently disagree with each other. To my knowledge, none of them have been punis…

You should check out The Dispatch (https://www.thedispatch.com) if you haven’t already. Co-founded by Jonah Goldberg, formerly of NR.
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