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I'm curious what your thoughts are on the NY Times pushing false information that led to the second Iraq War? Should they get penalized on Twitter after pushin
by influx 6y ago
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the NY Times pushing false information that led to the second Iraq War? Should they get penalized on Twitter after pushing a narrative that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths?
From the NY Times itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...)
"But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified."
- colinmhayes 6y agoI don't think there's any evidence that the times purposefully published information that they strongly suspected to be untrue. That is what the post did. The times made mistakes, but they admitted it and apologized, as seen in the link you posted. The post maliciously overruled their own newsroom to post fake news.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoWhat fake news did the NY Post publish?
- munk-a 6y agoI think the pro-establishment lean of media back in the day (and advocacy for the Iraq war is a great example) is really the heart of the problems we've got today. Society and media is reacting to the overly heavy censorship of established platforms - but what we're seeing today with widely embraced conspiracy theories is pretty dangerous to society. Was the Iraq war a one-off event where media held far too much trust and abused it? Is it just the continuation of a pattern of media being used as a tool of the state (either wittingly or unwittingly)? I'm leaning toward the second option but I still don't know if the inherent pro-establishment bias you get with large media conglomerates outweighs the benefits of vetted news. The only thing I can say for sure is that public media funding (like PBS and the like) to subsidize the cost of media companies ends up having rather little effect on those outlets' biases, while forcing media to depend on corporate sponsorship absolutely does corrupt the messaging delivered to the populace at large. So I'm not certain what our media landscape should look like, but I'm definitely against people who decry any government sponsorship of news as being political mouthpieces - public radio and tv should form part of our news digest, their funding is diverse enough to allow them to freely criticize both national and local governments and while it probably won't yield the really valuable investigative journalism we need to fight corruption it's definitely part of the solution.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CameronNemo 6y agoFor a more recent example, see the NYT coverage of the Bolivian coup last year.