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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   21716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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It's interesting to see a certain weird tic that's become common in various American stories make its way into this one:

Western officials paid tribute to his courage as a fighter for freedom. Some, without citing evidence, bluntly accused the Kremlin.

Without citing evidence. Without. Citing. Evidence. Are you people fucking kidding me? Who is doing the editing for this that they feel the need to inject that phrase into every claim that isn't bibliographically footnoted and addended with appropriate Bayesian odds? Yeah, when the leader of political opposition to an autocrat dies in a prison colony at 47 years old, the default is that they were murdered by the regime. Even in the event that they didn't do anything in particular to him that day, any reasonable person looking at the basic facts would conclude that the regime is responsible for his death, because that's the whole point of sending to him to a Russian prison colony in the Arctic Circle called the Polar Wolf.

On the flip side, I had assumed that this stupid editorial tic was mostly just directed at the American right, but it seems that it's now standard practice.

It's a weird bit of gertruding but ultimately comes down to - most statements, even official statements are made without evidence. The choice to highlight this in this situation is made, I think, thoughtlessly - it's appropriate to describe it as a tic.

It has absolutely lost its original propagandistic edge and become all-purpose filler. A recent NYT article about a scandalous Russian party made me laugh out loud:

The suggestive photos and videos that surfaced on social media soon after were unremarkable. Yet the blowback was immediate and severe.

“The country is at war, and these scum, beasts, are putting on this,” one of the country’s most prominent propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, wrote on his Telegram channel hours after the event. “Cattle who don’t give a damn about what’s happening.”

Some prominent conservatives went further, claiming, without offering evidence, that the party was a satanic ritual because it occurred, according to their calculations, on the 666th day of the war in Ukraine.

Perhaps it was a joke? Is anyone here willing to own up to entryism at the New York Times?

[Edit - instead of being so snarky, I feel like I ought to give more weight to the opposite interpretation, that it was an occult signal, a quiet protest or a cry for help from within.]

Yeah, when the leader of political opposition to an autocrat dies in a prison colony at 47 years old, the default is that they were murdered by the regime.

I agree this is by far the most likely explanation but it's still a good practice for a newspaper to avoid "everyone knows what really happened" style of citation.

I think that it's better expressed just by saying "we are unable to confirm this claim".

They can just say that people accused the Kremlin, that's a factual statement about what transpired. Nothing meaningful is gained by inserting "without citing evidence" in that statement.

I agree, I'm not a fan of that kind of cursory disclaimer. I probably would've phrased it as this but it adds to the wordcount: Western officials paid tribute to his courage as a fighter for freedom. Some bluntly accused the Kremlin, referencing the history of suspicious deaths of opposition leaders, but citing no direct evidence.

Most western leaders did not explicitly reference the history of suspicious deaths of opposition leaders (and the fact that Navalny was poisoned once). It's just obvious to everyone

I think it’s a CYA phrase. This way if it turns out he was eaten by a bear or had bad genetics or was shivved by a druggie they don’t have to issue a retraction and be wrong. It has nothing to do with politics, it just makes the paper look bad when they make a naked claim accusing someone of something and get it wrong.

Here, though, the paper isn’t making any claim. They’re just reporting what Western officials said. They could remove “without citing evidence” without impacting the paper one bit.

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