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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   683 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 19, 2024

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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These publications are generally reliable.

I do not know about rest of the world, but as it concerns Middle East, and especially Israel, BBC and Aljazeera is about as reliable as Keith Olbermann is reliable when talking about Trump.

Same goes for Reuters and AP for anything that relates in any way to US partisan politics or culture wars topics. Maybe they are super-reliable in other dimensions, but I suspect Gell-Mann amnesia may be playing a role there.

I did mention Aljazeera having a line on the Middle East.

Will make sure to keep an eye on whether Reuters coverage of US politics seems more biased. I give an example in footnote 1, but my sense was that things like that were not particularly prevalent.

I was going to present some evidence about AP, but sadly I instead saw this:

https://apnews.com/article/germany-magdeburg-christmas-market-6b2bcf305eb9f60f8d7273949dbba4c8

Just in case it changes later, the headline says: "At least 2 dead and 60 hurt after a car drives into a German Christmas market in a suspected attack". Yes, "a car drives". I think we can close the case about "little to no spin" now.

P.S. before you say "maybe they didn't know who was driving it", a) that's not a good excuse and b) they did - it's a 50 year old man from Saudi Arabia. He's in police custody.

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