Except news outlets get so caught up in being “neutral” and “fair” that they won’t accurately report on things when shit gets really fucking bad like now. As an example, NYT basically made no mention of the concentration camps when they were publishing during WWII, or it was relegated to back-page short articles, because they were afraid of being accused of “bias” if they reported the truth, which was “hey Germany is literally carrying out a genocide while waging this war.” You see it NOW with tons of media outlets going “Donald Trump suggests immigrants don’t belong here” when what was actually said was “we should unleash the military to drive them out by force.”
I always liked this quote from Hunter S Thompson, from his scathing eulagy of Nixon:
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Someone needs to stand up and say that people like Nixion and Trump are scum human beings, are not worthy of the respect of objective journalism, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Except news outlets get so caught up in being “neutral” and “fair” that they won’t accurately report on things when shit gets really fucking bad like now.
as the aphorism says, neutrality is not “five minutes for hitler and five minutes for jew”. if a fact is that the candidate for president is scum, that should be indeed reported. the problem in today’s journalism is the pseudo-neutrality, which in fact thwarts efforts for good reporting.
so i agree with you, but i still stand behind the fact that news should not take side. they should report facts and the problem is they are sometimes not doing that in the name of said pseudo-neutrality.
Except news outlets get so caught up in being “neutral” and “fair” that they won’t accurately report on things when shit gets really fucking bad like now. As an example, NYT basically made no mention of the concentration camps when they were publishing during WWII, or it was relegated to back-page short articles, because they were afraid of being accused of “bias” if they reported the truth, which was “hey Germany is literally carrying out a genocide while waging this war.” You see it NOW with tons of media outlets going “Donald Trump suggests immigrants don’t belong here” when what was actually said was “we should unleash the military to drive them out by force.”
I always liked this quote from Hunter S Thompson, from his scathing eulagy of Nixon:
Someone needs to stand up and say that people like Nixion and Trump are scum human beings, are not worthy of the respect of objective journalism, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
as the aphorism says, neutrality is not “five minutes for hitler and five minutes for jew”. if a fact is that the candidate for president is scum, that should be indeed reported. the problem in today’s journalism is the pseudo-neutrality, which in fact thwarts efforts for good reporting.
so i agree with you, but i still stand behind the fact that news should not take side. they should report facts and the problem is they are sometimes not doing that in the name of said pseudo-neutrality.