Whereupon We Pontificate About Poor Media Outlet Choices

So you can use his words to troll Keeed.

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Just to cite this:

A journalist who is petrified of appearing to express any opinions will often steer clear of declarative sentences about what is true, opting instead for a cowardly and unhelpful ‘here’s-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won’t-resolve-the-conflicts’ formulation… Worst of all, this model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?

I don’t know, what do you want them to do? Publish a full accounting of all Wolfe’s misdeeds at the NYT? I doubt that would go down well. If, for example, she’s been warned twice before about public displays of political allegiance and then made that tweet anyway, then fair enough.

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If you’re not going to say anything, don’t say anything. Smearing her by implication is garbage.

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I don’t agree at all. I think they’re well within their rights to make a statement like that. If it’s not true, there’s ample opportunity for people within the NYT to leak a story to WaPo or someone.

If they didn’t make this statement, you’d say the NYT was a garbage organisation. Instead they’ve made it and now you’re saying the NYT is a garbage organisation. You’re laying out a no-win situation for them here.

(And I’m aware the NYT is, in fact, a garbage organisation, but that doesn’t mean everything they do has to be construed as evidence of this)

Don’t fire her.

The probability they had a good reason to fire her and miraculously did so at the exact moment she sent a harmless tweet like that, amidst bad faith outrage from the absolute worst people in the world, is basically zero.

If they did indeed have a good reason to fire her, they should have waited a month if for no other reason than to avoid looking like they’re giving into what basically amounts to right-wing trolling. This only further incentivizes assholes like Glenn Greenwald, not a good outcome.

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No I think she did get fired for the tweet, but I assume what the NYT is saying is that this wasn’t a first offence. While I don’t think journalists should have to pretend total objectivity, I also don’t think they should be publicly cheerleading politicians, which is what that tweet was. On its own it isn’t a big deal, but if she’s done this repeatedly before and been warned, I have no problem with it.

With all due respect ChrisV, this has nothing to do with your feelings.

This is a larger issue than you are making it out to be. Riverman is spot on.

The NYT has apparently fired a journalist for expressing joy that Trump is gone and Biden is now president. The firing came after Trumpists complained about the tweet (in the most hypocritical way possible). It is literally impossible to construct a scenario in which more hypocrisy is on display (you probably know this if you know anything about right-wing media outlets).

Prior to this incident I thought that the NYT was garbage. Now I think it is utter smelly rotten garbage.

I think the tweet is out of line as a matter of my own ideas on what is proper for journalists to do publicly. I don’t give a shit what Trumpists think about it or what standards conservative “media” hold themselves to.

This is different to something like saying publicly that the election was not rigged, which is something with political valence but which concerns questions of fact. This is straight up cheering for a political candidate. If this isn’t over the line, where is the line? Would it be cool to post “YAY WE DID IT! GTFO TRUMP!” after Biden’s victory became clear on election night?

It matters that she isn’t a political reporter. She covers sex crimes in war zones. It is a different discussion if its Jonathan Martin or MAGA Habes.

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Well, I value my opinion a lot more than yours obviously. I worked for 10 years at a large metropolitan newspaper. We were all given guidelines we were expected to follow. A non-political reporter expressing joy for a new president would not have come within miles of running afoul of any of those guidelines.

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The Republican Party is objectively pro-covid, pro-insurreciton, pro-coup and anti-democracy, and instead of focusing on that the media gets dragged into this bullshit by responding to trolls sincerely. Great job assholes.

They have like 160 current members of Congress who won’t say Biden won. None of those people should be given airtime by anyone, ever. Period. Meet the Press let Rand Paul drone on without saying Biden won for 7 minutes today. Seriously, these motherfuckers just need to listen to On The Media, should be a condition of employment.

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“Hiding behind anonymity” lol gmafb. the guy posts articles that he writes under his real name on his twitter account. You can do a 5 second google search and find out who he is lol

For someone who is so online Greenwald really is terrible at twitter.

although maybe it’s a next level burn, the premise being that he’s interacted with south paw guy hundreds of times and never bothered to try to figure out who he is. Alpha af.

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man I didn’t have Pocket Chads hating The Wire and David Simon for being pro-cop propaganda on my bingo card but if it’s what you say I love it.

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A concept that OTM has articulated very well in the Trump years is the idea that being pro-democracy is a core value that’s baked into the profession of doing journalism. Or at least it ought to be. The standard “view from nowhere” style of journalism that assiduously avoids taking sides works kinda well in normal times but just falls apart when you have shameless lying ghouls that want to dismantle democracy.

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That’s what 95% of journalism is: drinking.

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How I see the theme of the wire is that necessary institutions – police, education, politics, unions, and journalism – are always susceptible to corruption and will be corrupted if communities are not willing or able to exert the political will to keep them relatively free of corruption. And larger forces or trends will often take that power out of the hands of those communities. I think he’s right.

Treme, Show Me A Hero, and The Deuce all fuckin sucked though. Generation Kill was pretty good.

He didn’t have anything to do with that story.