Is it bad for the media to call out lying and police misinformation?

And of course he runs to…

https://twitter.com/sohrabahmari/status/1316458345725939714?s=21

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I appreciate your thoughtful response but I just cannot square this with the observed reality of the past 5 years. It would follow that CNN’s reporting on Trump up to the 2016 election and early in his Presidency better served the public interest than their shift toward coming right out and saying he is lying and has been lying and constantly lies. In my opinion it is the duty of any profession to put the public interest ahead of any commitment to professional guidelines on what is or is not common practice. I want doctors that help people get and stay healthy, I want engineers that build bridges that don’t collapse, I want chefs that prepare food that is safe to eat, I want lawyers that … well forget about lawyers. In any event, when the public interest conflicts with professional practice you should change professional practice.

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This is the real descent into fascism shit imo. Not parsing “falsely claimed” vs. “lied”.

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Whichever side helps his guy DJT get re-elected. The potato man is a single issue voter, Make Trolling Great Again.

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OK but in my view, reporting what happened and reporting what the pertinent facts are and letting the readers draw their own conclusions is what the media should be doing if they were primarily concerned about the public interest. Flashy headlines proclaiming that Trump is a liar? Not so much imo. FWIW I actually think a lot of reporting, and certainly basically all of what’s on CNN or MSNBC, fits into the two types of “journalism” that you described. And indeed, CNN did switch from “Public figure X claims Y, but opponents of Public Figure say not Y” to “Public Figure X claims Y, but Y is known to be untrue. Public figure X is lying about Y” pre-election to post-election. And of course they didn’t make this shift because of any adherence to journalistic standards or commitment to the public interest. They did that for the exact same reason that they obsessively covered Trump before the election: because covering Trump in that way, when everyone assumed he would lose, got eyeballs watching CNN. And as I said, both are bad journalism.

But I actually don’t think the Times straight news articles are bad, actually they’re often quite good. And if they shifted to making judgements and conclusions like calling Trump a liar, that wouldn’t be a positive change at all.

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Keeed is way off. POTUS lying to the people should be newsworthy and not just an opinion piece.

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This is certainly part of it. A pattern of lies is more significant than a single lie, even a single blatant harmful lie.

Congratulations on discovering the principle that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to debunk bullshit than it does to spew it.

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I was expecting so much more from this thread

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Is this the “enemy of the people” derail?

Right but it’s not the journalists’ fault in most of these cases in small markets. They want to do a decent job, and they make like 18-38K and are desperately trying to get by in many cases.

Of the journalist being good. Your gripe is a rightful one, but it’s with the owner not with most of the journalists busting their asses for no money and getting death threats due to rhetoric.

It does because the randos covering local sports are getting threats and harassment because of the rhetoric about “the media.”

From now on I’ll phrase it like this: the big media corporations are enemies of the people, not the journos themselves. They’re just people who happen to have audiences because their outlooks align with the institution’s agenda.

That is, NBC is an enemy in its current form, not that a news company is an inherent enemy. The press is supposed to be an important ally.

I’m not talking about NBC anchors here, I’m talking about people at local tv stations and newspapers covering city hall and high school football for $30K a year and getting threats.

What’s your point, that we shouldn’t talk about how the conglomerates are evil because that might inspire some lunatics out there to harm their local sports reporters? I would have to disagree with that.

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Opened thread, saw Keeeed was 2nd post, suspected what was going to happen, scrolled down through a few more posts, yup… Mute.

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Read the disclaimer, knew to stop, read on anyway with predictable results.

My point is that people should be more specific than just declaring “the media” or “journalists” evil, because local media are getting a significant amount of death threats over the last few years. I have a friend who’s a sports reporter who has had two stalkers in the last three years, and God knows how many threats.

The rhetoric matters. Talk about corporate media, media ownership, media conglomerates, etc.

You should try to quarantine me if you want to label all threads I am active in.

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Maybe you should just self-isolate for 14 days or until producing two consecutive negative tests.

lol Ted fking Cruz and you think this is censorship

Call him by his proper name of Reek