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The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks put the lie to their claim of being a journalistic entity. Julian Assange has an agenda against certain people/parties, and
by rosser 8y ago
The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks put the lie to their claim of being a journalistic entity.
Julian Assange has an agenda against certain people/parties, and has demonstrably leaked things that support that, and not leaked things that refute it.
I say that as a detractor of many of the same people and institutions Assange dislikes, so check your assumptions of bias before you throw them, please.
- vkou 8y ago> The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks put the lie to their claim of being a journalistic entity. It really doesn't, though. You don't have to be unbiased to be a journalist, a journalistic entity, or whatever you want to call it. Fox News, biased as it is, is still news.
- rosser 8y agoFox News isn't journalism. It's opinion wrapped around selective "reporting". EDIT: Yes, of course it's impossible to eliminate bias. To extrapolate from that to accepting overtly biased and selectively published content as journalism is unsupported, at best. It's the selectivity of reporting that compromises the claim of journalism, not the bias. When you don't report on things that don't support your narrative, you're no longer reporting.
- woah 8y agoWeird definition of a "journalistic entity" I don't think that any news source satisfies your requirement that it be complete non-partisan, even such a thing was even logically possible.
- rosser 8y agoI don't expect journalism to be non-partisan. I expect it to be affirmatively transparent about its partisanship. You're right, though, that nothing actually meets that bar. It's a human institution; it's necessarily flawed. That's why you source across biases and ideologies, and correct accordingly. The thing I'm talking about is instead the deliberate pretense of not being partisan. Fox News calling itself "fair and balanced", or claiming "We report. You decide." are just particularly egregious examples. When you aren't presenting enough of the picture for someone to form an informed opinion, you're peddling propaganda. I know the propagandist can't admit that's what he's doing, so I hold journalism to the standard of integrity of knowing, and owning, its biases. But it's ultimately a spectrum, and it's on me to gauge where on that spectrum any given source lands. Some things are more propaganda than journalism. Some things are more or less one or the other to different degrees on different topics, at the same time. Sometimes they're at different points on the same topic, on different days, or in different stories. It's complicated, sure. But, holding as nuanced an appreciation of this mess as I hope I've implied, I hope also that you'll give me the credit of not merely talking out my ass when I say I find Assange to be towards the propagandist pole.
- zeth___ 8y ago>You're right, though, that nothing actually meets that bar. Then your post is content free. If you find nothing to meet your personal standard of being journalism than you finding wikileaks to not be journalists merely means they are the same as the New York Times.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rosser 8y ago
- boomboomsubban 8y agoPlease demonstrate all the examples where Wikileals could have leaked things that refute that agenda and chose not to.
- DINKDINK 8y ago>The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks What GOP documents did Wikileaks receive that they didn’t release?