Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
How about that the NYT is a paper of record and generally maintains at least some journalistic standards? This isn’t HuffPost here. Ukrainians being white, and factually whiter than Russians, isn’t the reason for their bad behavior being covered. It’s that NYT is a high-quality paper.
The Ukrainians have done shitty things, thats not the point being disputed. The point is that highlighting the NYtimes coverage of the war crimes does not signify a cultural change, for the NYtimes has always covered Ukrainian atrocities in observably consistent measure.
This coverage only happens though because whites, even slavs, are not a protected class. NYT consistently downplays islamist and black violence and fully supports every progressive cause uncritically. To call it a paper of record is to give credence to its framing of the current cultural mileau, and THAT is the objectionable aspect of trying to use NYT for consensus building.
The NYT was pretty willing to talk about Palestinian violence. As I recall they were critical of CHAZ(which honestly sounds like a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and ill advised toupee at an RV show, but I digress).
I don't think talking about protected classes is the right framing for the NYT specifically. The NYT maintains a certain level of journalistic standards which causes them to engage in a certain amount of warranted both-sidesism that flies in the face of their biases.
The inconvenience of material reality is something the NYT is forced to report on against their will. Wherever possible the NYT will ignore their progressive pets and try to shift blame away from the protected classes. In every article where muslim migrants commit crime there is an addendum about how migrants in aggregate are net beneficiaries, or how in black crime there also exist white criminals. Calling it the paper of record gives succour to the false pretence of evenhandedness that the journos are maintaining against their will. Look at their coverage of anything involving muslims, migrants or blacks and it is filled with exculpatory statements meant to deflect attention away from perpetrators and signify the problem ultimately lies with the enemy of the day.
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