Whistleblowers are allowed to have an agenda. In practice most do. But for society it's better that shady stuff get revealed than them staying hidden because the whistleblower is not a paragon of morality.
You can be a whistleblower, you can be a journalist. I don't think you can be both. It's the job of a journalist to keep personal grudges out. It would be their job to keep political bias out too, but I guess we can't have that.
Journalists are people, and people have not been impartial ever. I don’t know where this meme came from, but even deciding to report on a story is being partial. There is no such thing as objective reporting, and it was not better 60 years ago.
The idea that journalist are not perfect, therefore they are terrible and entirely untrustworthy is much more dangerous than any journalist’s corruption.
The idea that it used to be better a century ago is laughable.
Which meme? The straw-man you just attacked?
There is a difference between the attempt to be impartial, or "declared" partial, on one side, and reporting maximally optimized to be one-sided, manipulative and biased on the other. Many US outlets are the latter. Many German ones are still the former.
It is clearly in the job description of a journalist. The complaint is not about the inability of humans to not live up to the ethics. The complaint is about not even trying. The pervasiveness of this has certainly increased, and is not the same between countries. The thought that this has been static in a profession which has changed dramatically (print to online, just as an example), is "laughable".
There are different cultures in different countries. While journalist often had a political lean in Germany, I think it has gotten worse. And the amount of manipulative methods US media outlets employ in current times is astonishing.
The fairness doctrine meant that when they aired something considered controversial, they had to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint. That didn't mean they had to be fair, since everybody got latitude on what was considered controversial i.e. if they ban you for something on twitter now, it wouldn't have been "controversial" then, it would have been settled, so you'd get no time without at least going to court over it. Also, they could just give some objector 2 minutes to make their case into a camera and play it during the news.
The things that would end up being "controversial" are things that your local Chamber of Commerce or an international fossil fuel lobbying group would find controversial.
Its scary how easy you think it is to dictate actual fairness and impartiality in law, though. The only places that have laws like that are extremely authoritarian and corrupt, like Zimbabwe.
nor ever. The only things in the news that are not biased are the sports scores and stock quotes. A major difference between good and bad journalists is whether they are up front about their biases. Julian was very upfront.
It’s probably the one that said not to use ivermectin and now say that what they said is that they didn’t recommend it meanwhile all news orgs and social media suppressed any mention of ivermectin and when they did it was to confound it with veterinary medicine.
Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations that turned out to be best to their knowledge and not absolute truth?
No government officials promoted certain narratives which have been proven false and they walk things back and the news doesn’t push back on that.
Moreover the government had embeds and was in communication with social media and traditional coordinating what to disseminate and what to suppress.
The. You have more dignitaries at the WEF and UN COP saying how wonderful it was that Covid prepared people and provided for better government control…
I just don't see how a government body responsible for the public health having an advice for health which is pushed by some of the media counts as ministry of truth.
It's already been pointed out to you that when people say "Ministry of Truth", they're referring to the defunct "Disinformation Governance Board" created within the DHS. You chose to ignore that.
> Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations
If you think the government phone-calling people at social media companies flagging specific instances and people for "misinformation" is not a form of intimidation, then you need to familiarize yourself with the legal precedent here.
They "shut it down" when it became public due to the backlash[0]. But not really, they just started working in secret. Now we have a secret ministry of truth[1] like some nations have secret police.
Yes, the disinformation board was actually an attempt to formalize and create some oversight over the ad hoc, unaccountable process that the government has to go through today to pressure media companies to manipulate and censor the public.
I prefer it this way. It's better for people to feel like criminals who whiteboard in backrooms how to manipulate public opinion by laundering prior restraint through putting pressure on the incomes of billionaires. Formalization of this process would just be permanent institutionalization, and the US government has shown throughout the 20c to now that a public board won't prevent abuses, abuses will just be routed around the board.
You mean the fascist that kept bombing a country his own invaded because of "self-defense"? the same one who presided over the biggest government surveillance leak in the entire history, and then made sure to hunt down the leaker into the only place that would provide him safety and now conveniently uses it to discredit him?
Or you mean the fascist warhawk that actually started several wars that ravaged the middle-east and passed the patriot act to give the government untold power over its citizens, both with bipartisan support I might add?
How can Trump be seen with such disdain in comparison when at worst he's just a more incompetent version of Obama with a social media addiction and republican slant. The NSA scandal was merely a decade ago, george w bush wasn't that far back either, how short are the memories. If anything his unconditional withdraw of all troops in afghanistan is the biggest anti-fascist action the last 3 presidents have done, although this one action certainly doesn't put him above being one given he wasn't even pulling the breaks on their actions beforehand.
Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here, but let me try to engage constructively here, by pointing out that your text betrays a complete ignorance of what exactly fascism is and how it acts upon societies it infects.
Now if you want to talk about the many times that Democrats and Republicans all had a big lovefest so they could all vote together to invade a country, I'm with you on that, but it's a problem of both parties, as the voting record clearly demonstrates.
What's been happening the last decade or so is another thing entirely.
> Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here
Funnily enough, so is yours.
What I highlighted pointed towards government becoming increasingly overbearing and ramping up surveillance on its citizens(NSA and patriot act), military extremism(patriot act again and the middle east), paternalism over other cultures(fear that the people would choose the "wrong"side in a country they invaded as an excuse to keep troops or to install proxy governments), and the list goes on.
You're at a point that covering true stories like the hunter biden laptop(that now journalists are verifying its authenticity) have made people like glenn greenwald persona non-grata in mainstream journalism circles, while having the intelligence agencies saying it is false. You have people that risked and are paying with their life to make information known to the public demonized because apparently leaking things about the candidate I like is bad, regardless of it being true. You have people asking for oversight for the contributions to Ukraine being labelled as russian assets(ie:enemy of our great state). You have intelligence agencies being labelled as some all knowing benevolent protectors of the populace not even a decade after the NSA leaks. The only thing that could be disguising it is because as it stands mostly the democrats seem to be on this publically, but make no mistake the moment push comes to shove the republicans will also take such position as they had taken before trump, and with thunderous applause from the "bipartisan" population if the current outlook is something to go by.
Fascism has been acting on the american society for a long time, Trump just coincidentally showed where the allegiances lied once someone that wasn't a career politician took over, luckily for them the man was an incompetent buffoon with his own laundry list of problems who got assimilated into the machine very fast, even if he would say otherwise.
If all of this for you isn't clear signs of fascism and instead trump, who mostly just inherited the actions of his predecessors is(making him just as much as the others I might add), we'll just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Again, you need to study up on the difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarian government. If you said that the US government has been becoming more authoritarian we would have no argument, because it absolutely has been doing that, but it has only been going fascist for a very short time, relatively speaking. Many bad things happened in the last fifty years, but this is something worse that a bunch of people seem to be convinced is something better. A conflagration that they are mistaking for a light at the end of a tunnel.
Fascism arises from a bad economy and a population who feel that they have no prospects or future. This tends to create a lot of angry young men hanging out in the streets, with nothing but time and cheap beer on their hands - a resource for sociopathic power seekers.
Whether these young men are Germans living under the absurd conditions of the Versailles treaty, lads from the trampled working class in Thatcher's England, or Americans working under late stage capitalism with No Child Left Behind Act schools, the fascist always works from the same playbook: Stoke the anger, and provide a convenient, nearly always racialized scapegoat outsider, then promise to do something about those outsiders with a never-ending reign of power as the actual goal.
One way to spot a fascist is, if they lose legitimate elections, they will attempt things like insurrections where they storm capital buildings. It's like a dark spot on the society's x-ray.
Those putsches don't always succeed, but as far as getting a movement of armed thugs to fight in the streets, the playbook works every time. The Republican party has been showing signs of a willingness to engage in Fascist behavior for decades, ever since they embraced the Southern Strategy, which even [Barry Goldwater](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/777519-mark-my-word-if-and-...) said would be the death of the party. And here we are, living with the GOP that he predicted would come as a result of their doing just that.
You bring up the NSA's surveillance, the Patriot Act, the various foreign wars that everyone except Bernie voted for with a rah rah rah - these all happened under GOP presidents, with a compliant, cooperative Democratic party that got behind the president, supposedly for the safety of the nation. This is the opposite of fascism.
I leave it to you whether you're gonna choose to notice the clear difference between the recent actions of the two parties, and I hope at the very least you can employ the right terminologies. Sometime in the early aughts I got into it with a Bush cheerleader who kept saying things like "You don't understand the philosophy of terrorism. Terrorists make women wear robes that cover their entire bodies and their societies are like, sexist!" That's what your use of the term "Fascism" reads like.
Yeah I definitely don't agree with that opinion. Whistleblowing is about helping the public By doing the right thing for the right reasons. It's a highly moral act. When society puts a higher value on selfishness over selflessness corruption becomes a big part of the problem. We already live in a world where people are too selfish we don't need any more of that.
