3 ms·

She's not a solid author though, it seems. https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-scotland-conspiracy-theories https://www.vox.com/2014/10

She's not a solid author though, it seems. https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-scotland-conspiracy-theories https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-...

jMyles 7y ago
Reading that article, do you think that her quotes are used fairly in each case? The article repeatedly tries to read between the lines, accusing Wolf of "implying" a number of outrageous fact patterns, but I'm not sure that her posts actually imply any such things. She states that SITE received a US government grant (true), that similar US government grants have been used to fund disinformation (almost certainly true), that the New York Times relied on a single primary source instead of sending an investigative journalist to do on-the-ground investigation (true as far as I know, but feel free to correct me if I've got it wrong here), that the US has history of militarizing Africa and empowering African dictatorships (true). She also points out that, given the quality of the videos, if they were fake (which she doesn't not assert or even imply to my eyes), then the work can have been done by just 4 people. And thus, the responsible act for a serious news gathering outfit is to confirm the authenticity of the video instead of assuming it is real on the US government's say-so alone. I hope we all agree on this. It's not like these videos are cryptographically signed by a known keypair belonging to ISIS. Real journalism means doing the hard work of confirming the provenance of pieces of media - even if doing so might require hypothesizing that a piece of media is fake and working to disprove that hypothesis. Finally, she points out that calling any organization "evil" in passing, in an otherwise dispassionate news article, is not in keeping with the traditional editorial style of the New York Times. This is also true as far as I know, unless there is a standard for "evil" defined in unpublished style guide. So for Vox (or anyone else) to jump all over the road about what she implied by pointing out these truths is not particularly relevant. I also can't help but notice that these kinds of smear pieces against her started just as she began to embrace some of the more effective and sane libertarian movements in the US (eg, her high-profile appearance at New Hampshire Liberty Forum). I assert that much of corporate media (and the ecosystem that relies on it) is unable to properly contextualize figures who cross political lines and form alliances that don't fit neatly into a right-left narrative, and that this often takes the form of painting these figures as extreme or unhinged.

She's not a solid author though, it seems. https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-scotland-conspiracy-theories https://www.vox.com/2014/10/5/6909837/naomi-wolf-isis-ebola-...

jMyles 7y ago

Reading that article, do you think that her quotes are used fairly in each case? The article repeatedly tries to read between the lines, accusing Wolf of "implying" a number of outrageous fact patterns, but I'm not sure that her posts actually imply any such things. She states that SITE received a US government grant (true), that similar US government grants have been used to fund disinformation (almost certainly true), that the New York Times relied on a single primary source instead of sending an investigative journalist to do on-the-ground investigation (true as far as I know, but feel free to correct me if I've got it wrong here), that the US has history of militarizing Africa and empowering African dictatorships (true). She also points out that, given the quality of the videos, if they were fake (which she doesn't not assert or even imply to my eyes), then the work can have been done by just 4 people. And thus, the responsible act for a serious news gathering outfit is to confirm the authenticity of the video instead of assuming it is real on the US government's say-so alone. I hope we all agree on this. It's not like these videos are cryptographically signed by a known keypair belonging to ISIS. Real journalism means doing the hard work of confirming the provenance of pieces of media - even if doing so might require hypothesizing that a piece of media is fake and working to disprove that hypothesis. Finally, she points out that calling any organization "evil" in passing, in an otherwise dispassionate news article, is not in keeping with the traditional editorial style of the New York Times. This is also true as far as I know, unless there is a standard for "evil" defined in unpublished style guide. So for Vox (or anyone else) to jump all over the road about what she implied by pointing out these truths is not particularly relevant. I also can't help but notice that these kinds of smear pieces against her started just as she began to embrace some of the more effective and sane libertarian movements in the US (eg, her high-profile appearance at New Hampshire Liberty Forum). I assert that much of corporate media (and the ecosystem that relies on it) is unable to properly contextualize figures who cross political lines and form alliances that don't fit neatly into a right-left narrative, and that this often takes the form of painting these figures as extreme or unhinged.