As will the revelation that people with evil beliefs can in fact be ordinary people leading truly banal lives across the street from you.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/2...tionalist.html
This has been a, er, good week for journalism at NYT.
As will the revelation that people with evil beliefs can in fact be ordinary people leading truly banal lives across the street from you.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/2...tionalist.html
This has been a, er, good week for journalism at NYT.
The complacency of the New York Times is breathtaking.
This would be a non-issue if the reporter delved even a little bit into the Nazi's beliefs. He seems to have no knowledge of far-right movements or ideologies. In a follow-up piece, he even admits his editor forced him to re-interview the Nazi to get a better sense of how he became that. Yet the article was published anyway.
If this had been a movie I'd have said someone owed someone with a clueless millennial kid a huge favour.
Pro tips to NYT from Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...-pasta/546737/
Now that guy's follow-up in the NYT I like. It should have been the theme for the original piece.
Afaict that would've made the theme "I don't know what I'm doing or why" but my perception may have been coloured by the criticism I've read.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Here's the NYT's... apology?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/r...e-respond.html
It appears they've learned nothing from the experience.
The apology quotes a Mother Jones writer
This is, of course, absolutely true. The guy profiled and many others (though not, of course, everyone) are "normal ass white people" with similar backgrounds and similar lives to most other Americans (and I'd wager many Europeans) who nonetheless have ended up in a very different socio-political spot. Why? In the original article the author meanders and never addresses the matter satisfactorily. In the follow-up he does. He doesn't answer the question, he never learned the answer but if he'd taken that as the theme in the original article it would have been a far better piece, IMO. Maybe that doesn't work for you? I can easily understand the idea that if you can't answer it then you shouldn't end up publishing the piece at all. OTOH I think there is value in pointing out how normal they are otherwise and that there is no obvious answer as to why they ended up believing or agitating as they do. The "beware the wolf in sheep's clothing" trope.Quote:
Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and a winner of the National Magazine Award, tweeted: “People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that.”
You know, I read an article recently (it may even have been posted here, it certainly seems like something you might have made a thread about) asking what leads people to develop kinks and fetishes. One of the ideas explored was that in pre-sexual development people encounter situations, see images, etc that triggered emotional excitement (be it fear, joy, or some other emotion which tends to "jolt" into being) and that as we sexually develop our minds grow to interpret some of these previously encoded nuggets of sense-memory as sexual excitement. I wonder if a similar mechanism might explain acceptance/embrace of other facets/memes of human thought which society considers taboo?
I doubt there's a single route to Nazism. For some, it's because they (or someone they cared about) had a traumatic experience at the hands of another group. Others become Nazis because it's socially acceptable (see the guy's wife). Others are devil's advocates who spent too much as teens around politically active leftists. Others just need an excuse to hate or hurt people. Plus the road to Nazism from New York City would be very different from the one in rural Ohio.
One heck of a non-apology.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
And some are just edgy shits who really shouldn't be called Nazis. I'd be willing to be that 95% of the keyboard warriors claiming to be Nazis wouldn't have the balls to actually witness a Jew being killed let alone actually carry something out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
I didn't read the article (so won't comment on the poor journalistic angle) but wanted to weigh in on the tendency to "demonize" people with different views. I suppose it's always been that way, to a degree, but it seems more prevalent and heightened these days. Either it's a post 9/11 effect, or internet changes in news and social media, plus polarized politics, but something makes it feel different.
Ya know, that Nazi (or white supremacist) has always been some 'normal ass white person' living next door. But the Islamic jihadist terrorist also lives next door, along with every other mobster, arms dealer, sex or drug trafficker. Even HS kids that go on shooting sprees, or builds bombs, and anyone who "goes Postal" is someone's neighbor.
It seems different now, like we're fast and eager to assign an "evil" status to whole groups of people.
I think that some of the criticism of the NYT piece is overblown. Obviously there were some deep flaws in the piece, but I read it as an attempt to show the banality of evil rather than an attempt to normalize it. I do think they failed - by skirting around the fact that the ideology he supports if entirely, completely, evil and unacceptable, they strayed into 'normalizing' territory. But anyone with half a brain would realize that this impression was despite the best (fumbling) efforts of the reporter, not because of them.
I think it's really important that the press takes a long, hard look at the drivers of the Trump wave - not just the crazy Nazis (which are, still, thankfully few) but also the broader disaffected multitude who don't really mind being fellow travelers with Nazis. It's important to understand where they're coming from and how to peel off their support. Obviously this piece was not successful in its goal, but it didn't incense me as much as it seemed to have done to others.
One could do a whole lot of evil without ever witnessing it in person.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
The story got the banality, but forgot the evil.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
I am not convinced that assigning "evil" to an ideology, or a person, or a political movement...or any particular behavior....can help us prevent bad things from happening.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Maybe "evil" has been overused in our modern history, to explain the criminal mind? After all, when we can't explain why men rape women, or why husbands beat their wives, or even their own children, and we don't understand drug epidemics.....but we do know the correlation between poverty and desperation and rage, and self-medicating, yet we refuse to fund public works like education or birth control or drug addict rehab....who's the crazy criminal now?
Isn't there an "evil" in that, too?
This is the part that irritates me. "The press" should be objective and not give a rat's ass about the impact of their news pieces. Opinion columns are one thing but the broader press as a whole? Bull shit. if they want to have their pieces 'cause impact' or 'and how to peel off their support.' Unless the 'press' starts every piece they run with "I'm a Democrat and I believe in X and Y and my goal is to convince you of Q."Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
Lewk, he was saying the press should take a hard look at the Trump Wave. Or WHY Trump won despite predictions saying otherwise.
Seems clear to me that the press should have done a better job at covering the Electoral Collage and gerrymandering.....especially in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania
"It's important to understand where they're coming from and how to peel off their support."Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
This isn't about reporting the news it is about attempting to 'guide' the populace into political positions they think society should have.
I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you about Fox and Breitbart.
Fox News is Fair and Balanced it says so right on their page!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
That being said, obviously Fox News leans conservative. Just like CNN, CBS, MSNBC, ABC and many others lean left. There are a few differences. On Fox debate is thought of as a positive and even though they sometimes pick some really dumb liberals to beat up on - at least they are allowing another voice to be heard. Secondly despite their 'fair and balanced logo' almost everyone understands that the network leans right. However turning on the TV to listen to a CBS news anchor the average person never realized the person talking to them was blue dyed liberal with an agenda.
Now people know. Now the trust in press is pretty damn low.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/a...s-new-low.aspx
Generally that's a good thing but it can lead to the balkanisation of news and facts. The liberal bias is the news not only made it possible for fakes news to exist it created fertile soil for it to grow. If they had been objective and presented the news as facts without regard to the impact of said news there wouldn't have been a demand for alternative voices. Sometimes those alternative voices agree with you on your political position so you trust them. Since there is no longer a single objective source available you have people living in an alternative reality. Thanks liberal media.
Can you provide some actual examples of the liberal agenda of CNN, CBS, etc? I think we need to compare and contrast some actual reporting, rather than speak in abstract generalisations about 'both sides'.
Wrt bias, mediabiasfactcheck.com places CNN nearly as far to the left as Fox is to the right, due to bias in selection of events and topics and inclination to use loaded language. In terms of accuracy, Fox has no real competitors among established media organizations--it is the champion of unreliable reporting. This is without getting into the matter of its role as official US state media and the non-stop barrage of opinion-enhancing features (libruls dum, trump smrt). There are maybe two people on the cable side of the business with actual integrity and sometimes it seems like they're just there to get bullied. This is not surprising given the audience. There is bias on all parts of the political map, but some things really do stand out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
I'm lying in bed surfing and the current track playing is "it's just a love affair" when I come across this:
https://www.google.se/search?num=50&...ws_rd=cr&dcr=0
This is how you write about Nazis:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...n-nazi/544119/
I think this is actually a really important point to discuss, and I'm a bit surprised at your position given your consumption of media that doesn't even make a pretense of objectivity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
I'm not expert on journalistic ethics, so the following is merely my thinking about the issue. I think that news organizations must be factual and complete in their reporting, and that is a large part of what we might describe as 'objective'. Subtle things like word choice are also important - e.g. choosing to use intensifiers, or to label one thing terrorism and not another, or to sensationalize things - all of these can lead to a loss of objectivity and should be guarded against. Typically news organizations have exhaustive style guides and fact checking to help limit these problems, but they still frequently fail, especially when it comes to live broadcast journalism.
But there's a less obvious element of journalism that cannot, and I'd argue should not, be completely objective. That involves editorial choices - what stories to cover, from what angles, and in what depth. There are many more stories than fit in a given paper/magazine/hour of broadcast television. How do you choose what to cover? There isn't some perfect objecto-meter that will tell you that this pile of stories merits coverage while the rest are too unimportant. Rather, journalists must choose to cover stories that are relevant, salient - even essential - to their audience. I don't think that it's any secret that the editorial staff of most news outlets in the US - from the National Review to the New York Times - feels strongly that the current President has come to power among deeply worrying trends with his supporters, including an apparent emboldening of racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, misogynistic, etc. forces that are normally relegated to the very fringes of society. Editors are worried about these forces, the apparent willingness of a large part of Trump's base to tolerate such voices, and the President's own unwillingness to directly confront them time and time again. I think it's entirely fair to say that the question of a resurgence of neo-Nazism and white supremacy in a major American political party is of essential importance to their readers.
It's not 'objective', no. These editorial decisions are driven by an appreciation of the value of the press as the fourth estate in America - they are not merely parrots who repeat information about current events; they investigate trends of importance to their readership and provide detailed analyses. Determining what is 'important' is an incredibly important - albeit subjective - task. Maybe a news organization will decide that reporting on every incident where an undocumented immigrant commits a crime is relevant, or every time a police officer is hurt in the line of duty. I would disagree, but it's fair to say that it's an issue of some salience to today's issues. Similarly, I don't begrudge those publications that are trying to figure out how the broad populism that swept Trump into office got mixed up with some of the vilest rhetoric that should be beyond the pale for any mainstream political movement. It's not objective, no, but it's certainly their job.
Actually I probably consume about as much liberal slanted news as I do conservative slanted news. I find circle jerking and preaching to the choir boring. If more people agreed with my viewpoint on this forum I'd probably post less.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
And when they push an agenda all that I ask is that they be honest about it. "I'm a liberal and I'm here to persuade you that Democrats are better than Republicans." It would be honest and fair. The issue is that too often the editorial board feel it is their job to *shape* opinion. They will think 'hey if I do this story is it going to help or hurt the political cause that I believe in.' That is a huge problem because when you can't trust the supposedly objective source... who do you turn to trust?Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
I'll tell you who people turn to. Whoever is saying what they agree with. Do you understand how the liberal medias behavior has given rise to fake news and people who believe wildly inaccurate things. Not policy positions but basic facts. And there is NO arbiter that is trusted to say which facts are accurate or not. Government? lol. Do you see how dangerous of an environment this blatant bias in the media has created?
I think we have a diversity of press and not a single voice precisely because different outlets are going to cover different things. They must all hew closely to the facts, of course (something some news outlets fail to do all too frequently), but it's okay to choose stories that they think are particularly relevant to their readership. And I don't think it's a secret where the editorial board of the NYTimes has their sympathies in this current government - when even their ostensibly conservative columnists and their entire editorial line is broadly lined up against Trump, no one is going to start reading their stories assuming they come from a place of sympathy for the President or his motives.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
I think that if news sources have a clear editorial line but high journalistic standards, people will trust them, and can tell the difference between them and the scourge of fake news. The WaPost might have done the digging to break the Roy Moore story, but they also did their due diligence - and didn't report stories they found fishy or uncorroborated. That's the difference between principled news with a strong editorial bent and 'fake news'.
And this isn't just a liberal phenomenon. There are plenty of right-leaning outlets that also have pretty high journalistic standards - the WSJ is an obvious one. No one has argued that the WSJ doesn't have a strong editorial line, but they also don't automatically distrust news coming from them because - editorial line or not - it's journalism, not propaganda.
If you look at broadcast media - especially cable news - quality and journalistic excellence drop dramatically across the board, though Fox lives in its own unique version of the universe that goes far beyond an editorial slant. But anyone who's getting their news from cable TV might as well be reading a tabloid, so it's no wonder they have low trust in news media.
I really don't think we live in a post-truth era. Yes, people are gullible and they increasingly live in echo chambers due to self-sorting, the internet/social media, etc. - which makes them very susceptible to the kind of manipulations we've seen with fake news. But I really don't think this has been driven by a wholesale rejection of high quality journalism with an editorial slant; most people didn't even start consuming any decent media, so they don't even know the difference. All that's happened is that it's easier to access and target people with crazy shit they're likely to believe. It shouldn't take away from the important role of careful curation and editing of news meeting high journalistic standards to serve the public good.
"Nazis" are the new Red scare.
The NY Times continues to impress:
Twitter Link
CAR is sadly under-covered, but this article is so poor that it would've been better if it hadn't been written at all:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/2...-conflict.html