John Oliver recently did an episode on the Boeing shitstorm. And while I would take anything a comedian says with a large grain of salt, the undercover staff interviews seemed pretty damning. I'm not sure if it's criminal negligence on Boeing's part, but it seems pretty obvious that engineering excellence isn't on the top of their minds.
> the undercover staff interviews seemed pretty damning
This is the least credible possible evidence, because shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.
Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
That doesn't really tell you anything. The way the format works is they take a large amount of material and pare it down to whatever they can find to make the target look stupid or nefarious. It works the same whether they were holding the camera or not.
Also:
> Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
As someone who read the official reports on the B737 MAX and the 787 battery fires and who is from the industry, I can tell you that your accusations are completely unfounded in reality.
By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct. Not like, say, Fox News with its usual defwnc ein court that boils down to "who in his right mind would take us for a serious news outlet employing journalists".
>By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects.
There is no law for "wrong reporting". LWTN has not lost a defamation suit, which is very narrow.
"Wrong reporting" is a much broader ethical category of lying by omission to create a narrative or choosing unreliable sources. Think of things like NYTimes and the Iraq War. Or basically any article of the format "x% of some group wants Y evil thing".
What do you think of those "man on the street" interviews where they ask people questions like "point to America on a map," and everyone gets it wrong, except the last person in the segment?
Of course they were smart enough not to make a factual claim like Murray was intentionally getting people killed. They were able to convey the same message using jokes and a few cherry picked facts, and thus be immune to defamation suits.
With jokes like "looks like a geriatric Dr. Evil", "appears to be on the side of black lung", and "[his political activity is] the equivalent of watching My Girl and rooting for the bees" they suggested that Murray was evil without making any actionable claims.
And in their show after the case was dismissed, they embraced the "who in his right mind would take [this] seriously" defense wholeheartedly: accusing Murray of things like being Epstein's prison guard.
Factual (even if obviously untrue), but not defamation because, much as the court wrote in the case against Tucker Carlson (and before that, a similar case against Rachel Maddow): “the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation”
Looking for that, I found wrongful death lawsuits that were settled under nondisclosure agreements, so they probably weren't LWT's source.
I also found that Genwal Resources, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Murray Energy, agreed they had violated two safety regulations.
They were fined $500,000, but the government said "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse"[1].
LWT didn't include that. Instead they simply said "the government's investigation...found it was caused by unauthorized mining practices." Don't you think "we were unable to prove [that]" should have been included by LWT?
Now I could do my own digging, or I could trust Murrays lawyers doing that for their law suite against LWT (no idea why I kept adding a N...). A law suite they lost. If LWT reporting were factually wrong, I assume it would have been brought up in court.
> As someone who read the official reports on the B737 MAX and the 787 battery fires and who is from the industry, I can tell you that your accusations are completely unfounded in reality.
You're defending this particular story when I never claimed it was necessarily false.
> By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct.
That is how "out of context" works. They don't affirmatively lie, they lie through omission. They have lawyers who know how defamation laws work.
Man, you started all of this by pointing to the interviews in the particular show about Boeing, and you wonder why people keep coming back to that particular show?
You did point out those "interviews", which weren't even interviews to begin with but recording of shop floor banter, without realizing they were done by Al-Jazzeera and not LWTN, not realizing they covered the B787 and were done over a decade ago.
And then you accusse others of discussing out of context? Difficult to have context when you din't even get your basic facts right, isn't it?
I watched the original report from Al-Jazeera on the 787 (called "Broken Dreams") where those factory line scenes were filmed when it came out in 2014. There's no editing from LWTN to make it look worse, in my opinion the original reporting was much more damning than what the clips show.
That's how reporting and journalism works. No one watches a multi hour interview with Putin by Tucker Carlson. It's boring as hell and just Putin talking about his dreams. The only known instance of this would be the Frost-Nixon interviews, which occurred after the US elected an actual criminal to the highest office.
No one makes a career about reporting how the free coffee in the break room was changed to a pay your own way plan.
Wow, Richelieu. You know what, this changes if whatever was written is backed up by actual facts, like recorded quality issues being left unmittigated that let to hull losses and serious incidents as it did in the case of Boeing. That is the context that was provided.
If you read the official reports on Chernobyl and Fukushima, you will find the same quotes to drive the reported points home.
Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing. In general The Daily Show and its offspring -- not the interviews that happen in front of the audience in the studio, the ones for the pre-recorded segments.
Have you seen this show at all? It generally dedicates the bulk of its episode to a single story and goes in depth. Not saying this can't be happening, and there's always going to be stuff left out in even a 30 minute timeframe, but it tries to educate on the "complete picture" with nuanced points on a single issue per ep
Further, they're relying on prior reporting. Like Sagan did for science, Oliver is simply popularizing current events. Oliver's not claiming to be like 60 Minutes or Frontline.
1. Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms
2. Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
3. Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
Even when I agree with the narrative, the mechanisms by which the audience is persuaded feels quite disingenuous to me. Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism. My perspective is based on episodes I watched in 2016. The small bits I've seen from him and other similar formats since then suggest it is still this way.
It is a comedy show after all. One that tackles very serious subjects in ahumerous way. Doesn make the reporting wrong.
And, this show in particular, gets the fact right almost all of the time. And it provided more context and details on the whole Boeing saga than any other news source I have seen or read so far since the door plug blew out. Heck, going back to the 737 Max crashes I would be hard pushed to find main stream media reporting that was, factually and regarding context, better.
The thing that irked me was the mechanism by which it seemed people were convinced. It could be used to push whatever viewpoint they want to push. While it is a comedy show, they do a for the rest of the industry embarrassingly thorough job of investigating topics. So that puts a lot of responsibility on them.
Yeah, it's a formulaic, juvenile approach, hard to watch more than a little without feeling empty and exhausted. The research seems very solid, but the tone is shallow and teeters on the edge of Fox News-style partisan ragebaiting.
Speaking as a person with an amazing ability to offend and alienate folks on both sides of the political spectrum.
I like it when John Oliver or whoever goes after corruption and incompetence, but it still has to be said that popular comedy news shows are kind of the left’s version of Fox News in terms of shrillness, pandering, and brainwashing. While episodes on many topics are cringey to watch, at least they aren’t completely post-truth yet. When the writers do wade all the way in to culture war nonsense, I think they do this with a certain self awareness and I like to think they feel bad about it.
It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?
NPR (my old favorite) has jumped the shark. Other outlets generally harass me with paywalls when I’m already forced to sift through a total shit show of a website with op Ed’s no one asked for, celebrity gossip, and lengthy gpt-powered regurgitation all fluffing up the same few short blurbs from the AP wire.
Mainstream media for both the left and the right, domestic and foreign, all have websites with ads like “free WiFi for senior citizens” and “Just add this one weird thing to your toothpaste” next to big brain articles about dealing with disinformation in the next round of elections.
None of this is very confidence inspiring, so no, I doubt they’ll sell many subscriptions, and yeah, I expect quality will continue to decline. So I guess comedian-journalism is probably here to stay, regardless of whether I like the format
> It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?
The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.
The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.
Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.
Have they ever considered ... idk, making a compelling product? They sat around watching the whole Metallica vs Napster saga unfold while calling the internet a fad and writing articles about how "blogs aren't trustworthy".
If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.
Can we please stopping the cringe-meme of blaming MBAs? I assure you, engineers are just as prone to fall for greed and being unethical and sycophantic as MBAs, doctors, journalists or software engineers.
> Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms
> Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
> Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism.
It is foremost a comedy show yes, and they present things in a light hearted way. For an American show that means stuff like that. Mind you the jokes about Trumps' hands are more about something that Trump brings up constantly, a weird public insecurity about the size of them.
> Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
I mean. I didn't say it doesn't pick a side. But it does go in depth, and it does present opposing arguments reasonably faithfully (even if it immediately rebuts them) (in my opinion!)
I have found the Gell-Mann amnesia affect to be quite strong with this show. Generally I watch it I feel very convinced of the quality of the arguments and their research. The handful of times the topic has been about something I’ve been fairly knowledgeable on, I’ve been surprised by how poor the episode was.
These days I just assume that’s the quality of the average episode and I don’t know enough to know otherwise.
>> Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing.
Isnt this how newspapers work? Isnt this also how journalism works in general? If that wasnt the case, you wouldnt have two/three completely different takes on stories given which side of the political spectrum you're on.
That's not evidence at all; there was going to be an investigation no matter what.
That said, I was greatly amused by this in the article:
> “In an event like this, it’s normal for the D.O.J. to be conducting an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.”
A criminal inquiry that concluded with only a $500k fine, because:
> "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse," said David Barlow, the U.S. Attorney for Utah.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a very high bar to match. Certainly way higher than would be expected of even the most respectable newspaper, for example.
It's a reasonable bar to ask for before you start demonizing someone in front of millions of people.
But let's be honest, Oliver didn't hate Murray because of the mine disaster, he hated Murray for mining coal. The mine disaster (responsibility for which wasn't even proven) was all LWT could dig up.
And the audience will pretty much hate anyone Oliver tells them to hate. That's why they watch - to enjoy their Two Minutes Hate.
They're comedy shows. They send someone to record an hour-long interview but the whole segment is 5 minutes long and the clip they air is only a few seconds. Selective editing is built into the format, they don't spend the airtime to run the full interview and their purpose is to choose the short clip which has the most comedy value or makes the target look bad.
There was not a single interview done by LWTN for that segment, they took those from other sources. And the segment was pretty good actually, covered all the major points and didn't have any major errors. Actually, it is light years ahead of what other news outlets reported. Surey it is not on the same level as an audit report, but that is not its purpose. It is much closer to a comprehensive executive summary of an incident report than anything I have ever seen in media elsewher.
Re: selection of statements, the reports in Fukushima and Cherbobyl do the same. The point is to showcase the underlying issues with concrete examples and statements. Nothing wrong with that per-se. And in th LWTN segment, it was not done in bad faith, it is bot FOX news after all.
> It is much closer to a comprehensive executive summary of an incident report than anything I have ever seen in media elsewher.
This is the danger in it.
They pick someone they don't like and basically do a hit piece. Now sometimes the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism, and then if you try to get the real story, the real story is that the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism.
But then they'll run a segment in the same style where the target is just someone from the outgroup of the show's target audience.
> My entire point is that this style of show sometimes gets it wrong. You keep pointing to an instance when they may have gotten it right and ignoring the sometimes.
Do you have any concrete examples? You have yet to provide a direct example of this and instead only keep alluding to it happening.
As I said, their reporting has been scrutinzed a lot. Including a multi-million dollar defamition suite brought by this coal magnate. Guess what, the show didn't get it wrong. You don'z have to like the humor or bias of the show. Factually so, so far, their reporting was always as correct as possible at the time of filming. Or do you have proof otherwise, retractions they did, law suites they lost, that kind of stuff?
The lawsuit wasn't just lost, it was thrown out. That's pretty strong that they "didn't get it wrong". Now weigh that against your evidence of nothing.
You’re still not getting it. A lawsuit for defamation still has nothing to do with “getting it wrong”.
You can say many things that are literally correct while conveying the completely wrong message.
It’s like the picture with the soldier, gun, water, and the child. You can present whichever cross section of those that you want to paint completely opposing narratives without defamation.
The point is that defamation is a minimum bar not indicative of anything related to the overall narrative.
Saying 'maybe' about anything without evidence is hollow and meaningless. Maybe 'the message' is wrong? It's public, watch it and come back with evidence if you think that.
It was legally tested to be true and neither of your posts have any actual substance. Maybe the sun will explode tomorrow too. I have as much evidence of that as you have put here, which is none at all.
I don’t think you understand the difference between “not defamation” and good reporting. You can easily use a bunch of true statements to paint a completely misleading narrative.
All of those are true and would invalidate a defamation claim that the soldier on the left was pointing a gun at the unarmed guy’s head.
None of that is relevant to whatever massively biased narrative shows like LWTN present. The art of these shows is to say a bunch of true things and exclude other things so the emergent picture is grossly misleading without ever lying.
LWTN is a terrible way to stay informed. It’s an entertaining way to get a very biased take on a topic though.
We have to go by some standard, if we don't we fave full anarchy. In a democratic society, that ultimately comes down to the laws and courts at the bitter end. If we ignore that, we can just forget about anything, can't we?
And yes, the two things you mentioned are incredibly close, close enough to see them as equal outside a very deep legal discussion.
I think it's interesting how normalized it has become in our culture that burden of proof is only necessary in one direction, or is not necessary at all to adopt a belief.
Well put. Most skeptics these days are borderline conspiracists when it comes to delivering their opinions. The person above only needed to say, “trust but verify comedic claims” but instead they went down the all too common road of dogwhistling to other “skeptics.” I’m confident that quite a lot of John Oliver’s claims are verifiable (I have spent a lot of time doing my own research on the claims after watching the show). Not saying I’m a brilliant investigator but wanted to offer an opposing opinion. Blatantly sowing distrust is exactly the kind of behavior a true skeptic hopes to avoid.
They do that because nobody wants to look at hundreds of dead bodies or talk to grieving widows, or search through rubble for broken airplane parts or data recorders. That's not so funny.
Just because comedy shows focus on entertainment value doesn't mean there's no evidence. They have a different focus from investigators or courts, but in democratic countries, the funds to run investigations come from politicians and public outcry, and that comes from the people actually giving a sh*t about it. So they do perform a function.
I made a general comment about the format and then all of the people who remove any nuance (i.e. can't distinguish between a criticism of the format and a criticism of the story) started posting replies defending the story even though the possibility of the story being accurate was explicitly admitted in the original comment.
That was the classical role of the jester in some monarchies. They were the only person who could openly criticize the king without retribution (in theory).
Engineers stopped running such firms long ago cause they are totally inept at financial engineering. Its the financial engineers who run things, and you can bet right now whatever happens they will get the govt to bail them out. The culture will only change when financial engineering is reined in or part of tech/engineering education. Until then John Oliver will have a never ending supply of such stories from helpless engineers who are so out of control over anything they run to stand up comedians to cry about their problems.
As a half-engineer myself, I have to say this: people need to be reminded that it was engineers that were at the highest levels, CEO and down, behind Dieselgate and, yes, the issues at Boeing as well. Engineers are not per-se better at business ethics or corporate governance. Greed is universal.
Dieselgate was akin to a student learning the whole geography syllabus just before the exam, then getting a top score and claiming to be good at geography.
Just because you learnt the exact topics that were to be examined doesn't mean you're good at the whole subject.
Likewise, those diesel cars were very good at the exact things that were tested, and terrible at everything else. They were literally engineered to the exact test syllabus.
Yet we somehow don't call the student a cheater.
In my view, in both cases, the shortcoming is with the test/syllabus designer. The test topics need to be not announced beforehand, and the sylabus needs to not be rigid and narrower than the field in the real world.
Fact is, VW engines had a mode recognizing a test and adopted AdBlue and fuel mixture to meet emission standards. On the road, these engines ran dirty. That was explicitely stated to be illegal in the applicable laws.
It was all the other brands that played, as it turned out also illegal, games with temp windows and such.
Blaming this on regulators is putting this while story on its head.
This is flat out bullshit. The previous Boeing CEO under who the Maxes were rolled out and started crashing, was a career engineer at Boeing. The idiots that failed to add redundancy to a critical system, and hid all about it were also engineers. There is no magic "engineer good manager bad". People can be greedy and stupid and reckless and negligent regardless of their profession.
We live in a timeline where a comedian will actually point to more facts than, say, a "serious" anchor like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, who will just blatantly make stuff up. "I am just asking questions".
Because Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are not real reporters, they just play them on TV. They're "angertainers", stoking anger in their viewers as a form of entertainment. The anger doesn't have to be based on facts. Their viewers come to be angry, and they get what they want.
John Oliver is funny until he covers a segment that you have spent a lot of personal time researching then it becomes shocking when you realize that he selectively edits things to craft a certain narrative in the viewers mind. I also saw this with Trevor Noah when Bernie Sanders was running. I was a volunteer tasked with digging up lots of old videos of him for promotional material and I was shocked to see some of the videos I found aired on the Daily Show but deceptively cut to make him look like a grumpy mean old man when if you watched the whole clip it would show the opposite.
In the segment about Boeing they purposefully mislead the audience into believing instead of issuing a software update, the company issued stock buy backs. Looking at the dates if the source articles shows a much different timeline.
I think Oliver is funny. His show makes good points and gives good arguments. It should not, however, by itself be the sole basis of one’s opinion on any given topic (not many things should) as many take it to be. It is intelligent and honest but also one-sided and biased.
They are, at least, not generally purposefully misleading in service of their bias, which is why I think people trust them more than a lot of other sources like cable news.
Agree, nobody should base their opinions on a single source of news.
As someone who stopped taking certain news outlets on my side of the political spectrum serious after running into Gell-Mann once to often, I have to say, with decent backgroind in the topic we discuss here, aerospace and quality and such, this particular LWTN segment got it right. Heck, some of it was even than what I heard in my life from co-workers in the industry. I wouldn't go as far as doing a reverse Gell-Mann on LWTN based on this, but overall their reporting is, factually, correct. And they don't even try to hide their bias, nor donthey use to spin a story, which is refreshing if you ask me.
News in video format is guaranteed to be missing nuance. It turns out, reading a teleprompter as a funny/angry/whatever character is completely unrelated to journalism.
Another neat heuristic is that if there's a video/blog/whatever information product more often than once a week, it probably doesn't have enough research behind it to be reasonably accurate, even handed, and well, researched.
Journalism is stupidly expensive. Modern advertising actually doesn't pay enough to do it. Consider that just since 2008, newsroom employees have dropped by 20% or so, while the information space has significantly more manufactured misinformation than it ever used to. How many local government stories do you even see anymore? Are you paying for someone to keep tabs on your state legislators?
Is there a right wing comedy show that is in the format of John Oliver or Daily Show? Closest I can think of is Babylon Bee but they produce (unfunny) original parodies.
I've seen a couple of attempts - like 1/2 hour news hour - but they're all terminally unfunny. The problem is punching up vs punching down. Left-wing humor tends to make a mockery of power and social injustice, whereas right-wing comedy tends to make a mockery of groups and ideas that most of society has sympathy for. The right is simply too cruel to be funny.
This might be an example of a bubble you unknowingly live in. "Gutfeld" is the right wing equivalent and has more viewers than the Colbert late night show which you might have heard of.
Being in a bubble is not what makes Gutfeld not funny.
When your entire comedy seems to be built around "Hah the stupid left thinks trans women are real women but they were born with penises", well, that's just not very funny to people who tend to have a non-homogenous friend group.
Exactly, not all of us on the left are that stupid. It's just that a particularly stupid faction of the left is drawing a lot of attention on that topic. The rest of us see the concept of "male women" being as ridiculous as the right-wingers do.
It would make sense if it was more so a neoliberal show posing as a left wing show, comedy is one of the easiest ways to divide up a public so they can be conquered.
I’ve personally run into both Richard Branson flying Virgin Atlantic and Oscar Munoz flying United. The C Suite of an airline is likely using it plenty.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with your 'scare' 'quotes'. Qatar also famously got fired by Airbus as a customer and refused to take 787s built in South Carolina. It's not like there are a lot of other options for them.
