This kind if title is rich coming from the fear mongering media. Particularly as the story right above this in the most popular stories section is "America’s Fall Booster Plan Has a Fatal Paradox"
I find this richly ironic. One of the points of the article is that not everything is black and white, and we need to take a big picture view of things.
This sentiment is... exactly the opposite. It is completely possible for there to be problems in the media, and for there also to be content it produces that is good and makes sense.
Could the media be better? Sure. Does your almost comically negative comment really serve to help anyone? No.
I’d change the link title to “Miserable, childless misanthrope and establishment propagandist chides you for concerns over your childrens’ safety and affirms that to be fashionable you must pretend not to notice the ruling strata has deliberately undermined public safety and social cohesion for decades for cynical personal financial gain and service to the progressive pseudo-religion”
Now it’s comically negative in a “it’s funny because it’s true” kind of way.
"Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being"
> For example, Dutch researchers in 2017 conducted a study on how hard news that tends to provide a political perspective affects well-being. They found that on average, well-being falls 6.1 percent for every additional television hard news program watched a week. They explained this by noting the dominance of negative stories on such programs, and the powerlessness viewers might feel in the face of all that bad news. It’s difficult to imagine that stories about political news in America would have any less of a negative impact—especially given how fraught and contentious United States politics is now.
Prescribed remedy is to avoid such media:
> 2. Ration your consumption of politics and limit the time you spend discussing it.
> 3. Turn off ultra-partisan news sources, especially on your own side.
Fear mongering about the fear mongering media boogeyman.
Some people become truly obsessed with flamebait political news but there is more constructive criticism to be made about our free press that, though not perfect, is better than the alternatives. It should be respectfully criticized but cherished.
The shallow drive-by bomb throwing is getting a bit much around here as of late.
> Fear mongering about the fear mongering media boogeyman.
This gave me a good chuckle. I can't rebut it.
Anyway, I don't think this is best considered as a free vs nonfree press issue. The press in America are motivated by profit. If people are taught and encouraged to reduce their consumption of fear mongering media, the free press will adjust to suit the new demand.
Basically everything is motivated by profit but it is not zero-sum. You give me factual, well-written, relevant reporting and I give you money because I value that. We both win. If The Atlantic turns into a fear-mongering, low-quality, rag then they lose my money.
I definitely agree that people need to reduce consumption of fear mongering media but I'm not holding my breath! Is this just established news media trying and failing to compete with social media where the sky is on fire and falling 24/7?
and i want to add that the fear mongering article GP is talking about is the last thing i see on that page. i have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. didn't see it the first time, and had to go back.
The point has more teeth since it is the same website. The point is that no individual or organization is perfectly good or perfectly bad, and we need to be able to recognize the good without it being treated as an endorsement of the bad.
Except that it does. Life is nuanced. OP is trying to make a point based on a couple of headlines, but the actual content of the articles explain things a bit more clearly and nuanced, and are a lot less "THE SKY IS FALLING!", than OP seems to be insinuating they are based on their titles alone.
There are things that are knowable in this world, a website that claims A but does the opposite is one of those things.
Trust means said website putting their money where their mouth is. The only defense here is that it's an opinion piece and doesn't represent the website as a whole, but the solution is to possibly trust the author but not the website.
Since we're talking about nuance here, a counterexample doesn't invalidate the point being made, especially about media in general.
You're performing a trick here in here of hiding the individual differences between two separate authors by referring to "a website" as a monolith. (And then you semi-walk-it-back, but treat that as somehow... a strange thing to do?)
That's the sort of rhetorical subterfuge that helps promote a black-and-white us-and-them narrative.
I generally don't even agree with Brooks on a lot of things, so I'd go even further and suggest that in many cases one should evaluate separate texts independently (this can lead to some problems at the extreme ends, but again, it's not a black and white rule). It's hard to see anything helpful coming from your sort of blanket dismissal response.
This isn't reddit or HN where the content is purely user driven, this is a website that publishes what they themselves choose to publish, and we're free to judge them for that holistically.
One suspects that if an author submitted an article denying the holocaust, the website in question would refuse to publish it.
They can be judged by what they publish, and they acknowledge this by not publishing everything that's proffered to them.
I mean the website isn't a monolith; some parts are good, some parts aren't. Different writers have different perspectives.
I think TFA is trying to argue that it's possible to see the world as a basically safe place, despite the presence of this kind of inconsistency. The website's not perfect, but it seems like it has some things going for it, and anyway you're smart and can get by just fine in a world with imperfect media :-)
I get that you want to come across a wise and cynical. So why are you pretending "the media" is a single unified hive mind - that doesn't make any sense, and comes across as hyperbolic populism instead.
Using generalizations when characterizing a group or entity can be helpful, even if the generalization is just that (true in most cases, but not every case). In this case, I think we do all agree that "the media" very often overhypes fear -- because they have a financial incentive to do so.
It's not a single unified hive mind, just the incentives are aligned to make the most of fear mongering and make the least of educating the populace on the real meat of the issues at hand.
You're engaging in the same sort of "fearmongering" though, by lumping everything together as if they all have the same incentives and goals.
Depending on which part of "the media" you look at, you'll get very different takes on various issues, some with significantly more substance behind them than others.
The best thing to teach your kid is to clearly show them how the media and politicians lie and manipulate by showing
their contradtory talking vs behaviour vs what they actually do side-by-side meme style.
I would also suggest that we teach our children to read articles and understand the nuances within them, rather than assuming a worldview based on headlines alone.
Critical thinking is something that needs to be taught at home because schools have obviously been failing us for a long time now. Not that it's entirely the fault of schools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQR2aMGhjuw) but either way it falls on parents to fill in the gaps.
I agree overall, but I can't pretend that every article even has nuance to look out for.
Where was the nuance when almost the entire media was towing the line to cover up the Hunter Biden laptop leak articles as "Russian Disinformation"? It was a complete lie. That's not just one article, it was dozens with no nuance to be found.
Calling it a coverup is quite an accusation; do you have any evidence for that?
I also remember it differently, with that being one theory expressed at the time, and it is certainly in line with what Russia has gotten up to in the past. I wondered how it turned out. From Wikipedia, on what independent analysts hired by the Washington Post found:
"One of the analysts characterized the data as a 'disaster' from a forensics standpoint. The analysts found that people other than Biden had repeatedly accessed and copied data for nearly three years; they also found evidence others had written files to the drive both before and after the October 2020 New York Post reports. In September 2020, someone created six new folders on the drive, including with the names 'Biden Burisma,' 'Salacious Pics Package' and Hunter. Burisma Documents.'"
Sure, chain-of-custody rules would have gotten it thrown out as evidence in a hypothetical criminal trial. That doesn't mean it could not have been discussed on social media.
It was known from the very beginning that the laptop was legit because the Bidens never denied it. There are reasons to deny something that is real, but no reason not to deny something that is fake.
That's definitely too black and white. Does it contain real data from him? Yes. Might it have been hardware he once owned? Also possible, but not proven. Was the data all his? As the text I quoted said, definitely not. Do a lot of people have an interest in making the Bidens look bad without regard to the truth? Definitely.
But none of that addresses my actual question, which is asking for evidence that it's a coverup.
I don't claim that it's 100% guaranteed legit just because they didn't deny it, but it certainly puts the burden of proof on the people who would claim that it is fake.
As for evidence that it was a coverup, Mark Zuckerberg stated publicly that FB algorithmically suppressed the story because the FBI came to them warning that it was Russian disinformation (of course they used the phrase "has all the hallmarks of" so they can deny that they lied about it later). Of course he could be lying, but I don't think he is, and you just asked for evidence, not outright proof.
That's not proof of a coverup. People can be legitimately wrong. And you claiming that they phrased it carefully as part of a coverup is another thing that requires evidence.
Given that you and the other poster seem to be indulging in low-fact speculation, I think I'm done here.
Now how, exactly, would someone provide "evidence" that there was a coverup?
In Watergate, Leon Jaworski went to elaborate lengths to prove it with conversations, statements by collaborators, written documents, etc. Do you expect ordinary people to have that?
So we're left with extremely strict standards from "fact checkers" when Trump says anything, and "hey, what the hell, he meant well" when Biden says something blatantly wrong. For example:
I expect people not to make factual claims when they have no facts. If you want to say, "I have no proof but I believe in my heart it was a coverup", that's fine. If you want, feel free to build your worldview around vibes or whatever. Just don't pretend otherwise.
If someone says "all sheep are white" disproof comes from just one black sheep. So if we say "the establishment media covered up this story" you can disprove it with one, or preferably several references where it was covered fairly and prominently. But you can't, can you?
> Calling it a coverup is quite an accusation; do you have any evidence for that?
The fact that 50 "retired intelligence officers" said it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" when none of them had examined it -- do you want a citation for that?
How about that Zuckerberg said, and the FBI admitted, that they warned him about a "Russian document dump"?
How if you give us citations? Show us all the NYT and WaPo stories about the laptop before the election, and what page they ran on. Especially highlight the ones that talked about its content, or showed the pictures of Hunter?
I'm not the one making the claim of a coverup. You are, and so the burden of proof is on you.
As to the first point, assuming for the moment that whatever you're quoting is a good source, the easy explanation is that what was disclosed at the time did indeed have the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That being something that is well studied by intelligence officers, and something that Russia produces quite a lot of.
I did prove it, and all you can manage is to question (and not even question it, really) the source. Weak, weak. And if you assert it's not a coverup, then show us how they covered it. That isn't too much to ask.
You are demanding I prove a negative: that it was deliberately covered up. No, you need to show how it was NOT covered up. That only takes a reference or two.
As is your second paragraph: to only say "other disinformation looks like this, so we're just going to go with that and ignore it, instead of digging deeper into it" is what a press outlet that's in the tank does. It's not what an objective outlet does.
> You are demanding I prove a negative: that it was deliberately covered up.
That is actually a positive. You're saying people did particular things. That's a positive assertion. Asking me to show that there was no conspiracy is the request to prove a negative. Which you are correct to think impossible.
Sophistry. As I said elsewhere: you need to prove that it wasn't covered up, by pointing out the actual coverage. I believe it should all be on the Internet.
I hear this all the time. The joke is that both sides of the political divide think it's the other side that credulously believes everything the media peddles to them. It smells a lot like the usual 'both sides are bad' trope.
Of course, but that’s completely orthogonal. Nobody believes their own side’s media because it’s less easy to debunk; people instead believe that media because it’s the media from their own side, and as such tells people on that side what they want to hear and believe.
Isn't that kind of meta? Calling it the "both-sides-are-bad trope" is a trope used by one side to say they really are superior to the other. Having both sides believe this is kind of our whole problem right now in the US.
The joke is that both sides of the political divide make no difference in their actions.
The only difference is that some things are slowed down, but in the end they are implemented.
Any data to support this? Because I can name quite a few, especially one very recent popular legal action based on political divide that have very different consequences for the populace.
Instead of dismissing the point as unoriginal, why don't you address the substance of the argument and provide evidence refuting the claim both sides are bad?
> This kind if title is rich coming from the fear mongering media. Particularly as the story right above this in the most popular stories section is "America’s Fall Booster Plan Has a Fatal Paradox"
and
> The best thing to teach your kid is to clearly show them how the media and politicians lie and manipulate by showing their contradtory talking vs behaviour vs what they actually do side-by-side meme style.
Don't have much substance at all. One has an anecdote of the form "the same website has another article with a hyperbolic title!" (This is a classic sort of "disagreement implies deceit" argument as is always brought up when scientists disagree on things, or consensus changes.) The other has a claim of "what [the media] says and does is different" in a way that suggests this is distinctive/meaningfully different in that way than in terms of any other human's behavior without any supporting substance, you're just supposed to accept it on faith that "the media" are intentionally manipulative hypocrites. Even if this is correct, it's not actually a substantial argument as presented, it will only possibly work on the already-converted.
Did you read either piece to gain additional context and confirm whether or not your assumptions about them are correct, or are you commenting strictly on titles alone?
Titles, inherently by their nature, are supposed to grab your attention and entice you to read. They're not there to have an answer or tell you what you need to know - their only job is to go, "Look!". I think we should all be less reactionary towards a headline and more insistent upon discussing the actual body of content.
Many people will only ever read the title of a story, they need to entice the reader because nobody has time to read every article. They are a separate body of content, and it's fair to criticize them for being excessive fear mongering.
The actual article about COVID vaccination is nuanced and without scaremongering.
The complaint isn’t about the vaccine, but the “deadly paradox” where vaccines become more effective the more people who take them. Further suggesting the policy to only hand it out to the fully vaccinated is a mistake.
I checked, and it looks like it’s coming from “Arthur C. Brooks”, a 58 year old Harvard professor from Spokane, Washington, who has a spouse and three kids. He’s a real person, with a real life.
Check his article history. He's been pumping out one saccharine article a week about how to be happy, how to cope with not being happy, which pet will make you happy, etc. I don't see any fear mongering though.
I don't know about credibility, but he's not a fear monger.
I think you missed his point. "The media" didn't write this article, a person did.
Other people with the same job, who he doesn't know or control, wrote different opinions, so he's not allowed to have/express his without being called a hypocrite?
I worked at the Daily Illini for part of a semester, and my job was to write headlines. The main concern then was "does it fit in the column head?"
I guess now the length constraints are less, unless there's also a print edition. But in any case, it's still probably the job of someone other than the writer.
