5 ms·

I feel like this is a "preach to your base" response that doesn't address any of the salient points the article raises. So I think the challenge is well illust

I feel like this is a "preach to your base" response that doesn't address any of the salient points the article raises. So I think the challenge is well illustrated by the example they gave of when a president says "Go back to where you came from" to X-th generation immigrants. - I feel like I'd be kidding myself not to read this as nationalist/racist. However, newspapers have traditionally been hesitant to make "value judgements" about current politicians. How can the press be honest and realistic, without condoning or condemning such remarks? (Or to make the example harder, could you hypothetically write an article about Hitler without legitimizing nor condemning him? Would failure to condemn him in a "purely objective" historical piece not read as an endorsement?) - Or, just as easily, take Bush an Iraq. What was the correct phrasing to describe a war in Iraq based on evidence that proved to be false? Is there a way to communicate the facts without anchoring the value judgements?

thu2111 6y ago
So I think the challenge is well illustrated by the example they gave of when a president says "Go back to where you came from" to X-th generation immigrants. Was it though. That this is considered some staggeringly deep philosophy-of-journalism challenge says a lot about the level of corruption in the media. I wasn't familiar with that quote. I had read Scott Alexander's post about how Trump is constantly painted by the media as overtly racist but actually isn't, so I was curious what the context was and what caused him to say this. The quote comes from a couple of tweets: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381394234941448 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11503813942349414... "So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly...... ....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how...." Although the media repeated the "go back" part with a megaphone, they entirely dropped the bit where he asks them to come back later, once they figured out how to better run a country. In these tweets Trump is making a political point about culture and government, not race. If he hated people based on race he wouldn't be telling them to come back to the USA when they become (in his view) less left wing and more governmentally-aware. It's a minor spin on a well worn right-wing talking point: socialist ideas have been tried in socialist republics and they're bad places to live, full of corruption and poverty. Yet this two tweet statement, easily quotable in full anytime someone wants to refer to it, is presented as a challenge of the form "how do we say Trump is racist even more loudly than we already do". It's this kind of thing that means I don't subscribe to the Economist anymore, nor do I care about other formerly respectable media outlets. I want objective facts that don't tell me what to think, with clearly separated analysis and context (ideally, separate outlets). Yet they're all engaged in massive amounts of selective quoting, manipulation, pushing their own extremist agendas on the reader base, and they're all desperate to find pseudo-intellectual justifications for even more fully embracing the total corruption of their industry.

thu2111 6y ago

So I think the challenge is well illustrated by the example they gave of when a president says "Go back to where you came from" to X-th generation immigrants. Was it though. That this is considered some staggeringly deep philosophy-of-journalism challenge says a lot about the level of corruption in the media. I wasn't familiar with that quote. I had read Scott Alexander's post about how Trump is constantly painted by the media as overtly racist but actually isn't, so I was curious what the context was and what caused him to say this. The quote comes from a couple of tweets: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381394234941448 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11503813942349414... "So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly...... ....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how...." Although the media repeated the "go back" part with a megaphone, they entirely dropped the bit where he asks them to come back later, once they figured out how to better run a country. In these tweets Trump is making a political point about culture and government, not race. If he hated people based on race he wouldn't be telling them to come back to the USA when they become (in his view) less left wing and more governmentally-aware. It's a minor spin on a well worn right-wing talking point: socialist ideas have been tried in socialist republics and they're bad places to live, full of corruption and poverty. Yet this two tweet statement, easily quotable in full anytime someone wants to refer to it, is presented as a challenge of the form "how do we say Trump is racist even more loudly than we already do". It's this kind of thing that means I don't subscribe to the Economist anymore, nor do I care about other formerly respectable media outlets. I want objective facts that don't tell me what to think, with clearly separated analysis and context (ideally, separate outlets). Yet they're all engaged in massive amounts of selective quoting, manipulation, pushing their own extremist agendas on the reader base, and they're all desperate to find pseudo-intellectual justifications for even more fully embracing the total corruption of their industry.