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Is this an onion-comment? But seriously: intent. To just name one.

by matt4077 10y ago

Clubber 10y ago
He said his intent was to make money. Do you not think the Onion has the same intent?
- danso 10y ago
  If you're going to be reductive like that, then maybe cop-killers could argue that their intent was realizing "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The Onion presents itself as satire [0]; ChristianTimesNewspaper.com didn't. Bill Clinton can't sue The Onion for libel all the times they've made fun of his infidelities. But he could make a case for ChristianTimesNewspaper, which chased pageviews by purporting to be truth. Otherwise, who would visit that site when you can find bucketfuls of blog posts calling Clinton a rapist? [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/the-onion-tweets-screams-and-gunfire--wheres-the-humor/2011/09/29/gIQASpCI7K_blog.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/the-onion... > The Onion office in New York confirmed that the tweet was not a hack, saying: “This is satire. That’s how it works.”
  - Clubber 10y ago
    I asked what the difference was. The difference he came up with was intent. The intent was the same: to make money.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      You're obviously pretending to be dense, but to spell it out: "The onion does not intent to create the appearance of a legitimate news source beyond a superficial resemblance as is necessary for the joke".
      - Clubber 10y ago
        >You're obviously pretending to be dense I'm not trying (hah), I'm trying to have a discussion about this (not) new phenomenon of fake news and examples of where we are more accepting of it. I went to the Onion (haven't in years, not my type of humor) and it's obvious to me they are trying to be satirical. It's pretty over the top. But how about the other group I mentioned, the tabloids? They make money by deception and they do it intentionally. They also write articles about political figures. I guess why this matters is that Google banned this guy's site from their ad network and cost his domain property to lose $100K in value, when they same derision isn't extended to tabloids which do essentially the same thing. I think the biggest difference between this guy and the tabloids is that over time, we recognize the tabloid brands as being full of beans, but when individuals do it, we have no frame of context, no prior body of work to examine. That will be dangerous at first, but liberating in time when people start to realize how much horse manure is out there (and not just from the hard right types). The elephant in the room is of course Fox News. They've been publishing fake news as real since Bill Clinton. Drudge too. Limbaugh since the 80s. The danger in this is who decides what news is fake? How about that Trump dossier? Is that fake news? There is certainly no proof any of it happened and most of it is impossible to prove. Should Google ban Buzzfeed and NBCNews from their advertising network?
        matt4077 10y ago
        (I can't believe I'm saying this, but..) FOX, for all it's faults, doesn't usually publish lies. Neither do tabloids except for the National Enquirer, as far as I know. They'll wilfully misrepresent, obfuscate, stretch, massage the truth – whatever you want to call it. They'll add insane opinions. But they don't fabricate complete events such as the one from the article. (Druge IIRC, has actually broken a few important stories). Buzzfeed, similarly, made abundantly clear that they could not verify anything in that document. And they, or at least the "mainstream media", did sit on it for months and didn't publish it (even though it'd been more useful to their supposed agenda) before the election. What allowed them to publish was the (undisputed) fact that Obama & Trump were briefed on it. (Note that I'm not actually a big fan of this fake-news debate, at least the part about making it illegal etc. Even though I believe the difference is pretty obvious when discussed in sane company, it plays so obviously into the narrative of this new counterculture that it's probably going to make them stronger rather than weaker)

Is this an onion-comment? But seriously: intent. To just name one.

Clubber 10y ago

He said his intent was to make money. Do you not think the Onion has the same intent?

danso 10y ago
If you're going to be reductive like that, then maybe cop-killers could argue that their intent was realizing "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The Onion presents itself as satire [0]; ChristianTimesNewspaper.com didn't. Bill Clinton can't sue The Onion for libel all the times they've made fun of his infidelities. But he could make a case for ChristianTimesNewspaper, which chased pageviews by purporting to be truth. Otherwise, who would visit that site when you can find bucketfuls of blog posts calling Clinton a rapist? [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/the-onion-tweets-screams-and-gunfire--wheres-the-humor/2011/09/29/gIQASpCI7K_blog.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/the-onion... > The Onion office in New York confirmed that the tweet was not a hack, saying: “This is satire. That’s how it works.”
- Clubber 10y ago
  I asked what the difference was. The difference he came up with was intent. The intent was the same: to make money.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    You're obviously pretending to be dense, but to spell it out: "The onion does not intent to create the appearance of a legitimate news source beyond a superficial resemblance as is necessary for the joke".
    - Clubber 10y ago
      >You're obviously pretending to be dense I'm not trying (hah), I'm trying to have a discussion about this (not) new phenomenon of fake news and examples of where we are more accepting of it. I went to the Onion (haven't in years, not my type of humor) and it's obvious to me they are trying to be satirical. It's pretty over the top. But how about the other group I mentioned, the tabloids? They make money by deception and they do it intentionally. They also write articles about political figures. I guess why this matters is that Google banned this guy's site from their ad network and cost his domain property to lose $100K in value, when they same derision isn't extended to tabloids which do essentially the same thing. I think the biggest difference between this guy and the tabloids is that over time, we recognize the tabloid brands as being full of beans, but when individuals do it, we have no frame of context, no prior body of work to examine. That will be dangerous at first, but liberating in time when people start to realize how much horse manure is out there (and not just from the hard right types). The elephant in the room is of course Fox News. They've been publishing fake news as real since Bill Clinton. Drudge too. Limbaugh since the 80s. The danger in this is who decides what news is fake? How about that Trump dossier? Is that fake news? There is certainly no proof any of it happened and most of it is impossible to prove. Should Google ban Buzzfeed and NBCNews from their advertising network?
      - matt4077 10y ago
        (I can't believe I'm saying this, but..) FOX, for all it's faults, doesn't usually publish lies. Neither do tabloids except for the National Enquirer, as far as I know. They'll wilfully misrepresent, obfuscate, stretch, massage the truth – whatever you want to call it. They'll add insane opinions. But they don't fabricate complete events such as the one from the article. (Druge IIRC, has actually broken a few important stories). Buzzfeed, similarly, made abundantly clear that they could not verify anything in that document. And they, or at least the "mainstream media", did sit on it for months and didn't publish it (even though it'd been more useful to their supposed agenda) before the election. What allowed them to publish was the (undisputed) fact that Obama & Trump were briefed on it. (Note that I'm not actually a big fan of this fake-news debate, at least the part about making it illegal etc. Even though I believe the difference is pretty obvious when discussed in sane company, it plays so obviously into the narrative of this new counterculture that it's probably going to make them stronger rather than weaker)