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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I think there are two separate issues.

  1. Unnecessary snarkiness that establishes the journalist as an unreliable narrator.

  2. Journalists inserting inaccurate or uncharitable fact checks, or fact-checking opinion.

Both things could potentially be solved by journalists having better training and professional standards. For example, they could have said something like this:

"You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.” But (insert expert here) has said Trump's remarks are inaccurate, pointing out that it was Russia who invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.

It's not that hard to adopt a neutral tone if you try.

But honestly, I don't even mind. Before, far leftists were skilled at smuggling their politics into journalism under the guise of neutral reporting. Today, they reveal their power level so quickly. Within a few sentences they will say something that lets me know to stop wasting my time.

Journalists are paid to try and find the ground truth, not to act as stenographers for the two sides.

If we had a decent news media (and I agree we mostly don’t) the whole point of reading the news rather than watching the tendentious blowhards on social media is that the news media do shoe-leather journalism and get information about what is actually happening that I can’t get for myself. “Tendentious blowhard X says that black is white, pointy-headed academic Y disagrees” is low-effort slop, not journalism.

Ideally, but we were having issues with this a century ago. Look at all the journalists who were blacklisted for talking about the Holodomor, vs the ones who talked about how lovely and equitable Stalin’s Russia was.

In the absence of mechanisms to compel objectivity, I prefer ‘neutral’ journalists to do data gathering without commentary, and to get commentary from level-headed partisans on my team.

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