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This feels largely like a gish gallop away from the parts of topic that would be pertinent to the article. The article in question here is about This American
by glenstein 2y ago
This feels largely like a gish gallop away from the parts of topic that would be pertinent to the article. The article in question here is about This American life and I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives. I think it had a lot more to do with the credibility of this American life, the motivations of the person being interviewed as the primary source for the story, and the narrative beats that this American life was interested in representing to its audience.
>But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth.
I don't know that anyone here is making that argument, so I'm not sure it's a prudent use of time to be engaging with it, and I think engaging would take us further away from the article with increasingly diminishing returns.
- femiagbabiaka 2y ago> I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives. It’s valid to think that. But what actually happened was that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting bits of Americana that he and his team could validate independently, or brought in credible journalists well versed in the topics he was covering, he could’ve avoided this. But he didn’t. Why didn’t he feel that he needed to adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to be true.