The US political divisions and the role of lies in the media - one case

[Ziggy Stardust]

I followed the events at Capitol - not super closely, but I did.
I never caught those two minor claims and I they would not have affected my assessment of the events if I had.

I was watching the electoral college waiting for the GOP shenanigans and saw the thing unfold. Zip tie guy didn't feature at all during the reporting, and the only reporting about death were: one protester was shot, and one police officer died.

The lie this thread is peddling is:
"So, based on these lies, shamelessly fed by most mainstream media when the subject was "hot", people here talked about "terrorism". About killing the invaders of the building, as indeed one was killed. Rather nasty things that without those excuses of being a "fight against an insurrection" would be considered dangerous hate speech. But because one party had already been falsely demonized as organized coup plotters and murderers, they were fair game?"

Why did people talk about terrorism?
Terrorism:
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims

Not:
the carrying around of zip ties and beating an officer to death with a fire extinguisher

Why did people talk about insurrection?
Insurrection:
a violent uprising against an authority or government.

Not:
the carrying around of zip ties and beating an officer to death with a fire extinguisher

And it's a good thing to see most people in this thread are not falling for the lies in this particular thread. I wonder if Inno regrets spreading lies on this specific incident
[ ] yes
[v] no

 

[innonimatu]

If it was incompetence, then that's not proof.

A third is they simply don't care enough to publish the retraction. They got the hits, cynically-speaking. In legal terms, they're more than likely covered because of the sheer quantity of unknowns about the man's death (that are still unknown). And this again, is not proof of malice.

So, again, you have no proof. You have a preferred theory that matches up with your presupposed conclusions, conclusions that Greenwald's latest screed aligns with. There's nothing more to it than that. There is no proof, as much as you try to claim otherwise. This entire tangent (much like a lot of the OP in general, really), is laughable in its attempts to uncover truth in journalism.

I think Greenwald, who knows the environment of the NY media as an insider, was early in seeing how willing it was to distort news to favour one side. So he sees that as an evil, and only the other side (in the current two-sides very divided US) allows in some media time within the US. That does not mean he is working for them. It means that the truth in this case happens to be favorable to this side and the situation is so rotten that it only gets published there.

Incompetence is possible but I just can't believe it: the NYT jumped into pushing that narrative, and stuck to it a long time, because it advanced its preferred views. Not correcting it quickly can only have been deliberate.

I see no reason to doubt that NYT reported the fire extinguisher story in good faith. From what I can understand, they corrected it after the police finally said Sicknick suffered no blunt force trauma. Also, there still appears to be no definitive version about what happened to him, so it's not like they were suppressing some game-changing facts.
[...]
And in the grand scheme of things, these come across as rather minor details :shrug:

They corrected it only long after the police denied the early report. That that early report got around.

But more importantly, these things were not small details. They fed and keep feeding the current divisions, pushing people into thinking about more political violence. As @Farm Boy noted, those who heard about it then and unlikely to have heard about the correction. And this is a known situation with the kind of false reporting that was done. It's not an innocent mistake, professionals know this (the early false reporting "sticking") is a thing. For one example even tonight I was reading some guy's blog on history, not expecting anything on current politics there, and look at what I found, search for the post in January 11:

That mob then broke into the Capitol building. A matter of seconds, bought by a single Capitol Police officer holding off large numbers of intruders by himself, separated the mob from seizing senators and representatives en masse. In the course of their assault, the mob bludgeoned a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher and ransacked the building. One member of the crowd was shot and killed. Several others died and dozens were injured, including police charged with suppressing the riot. It was a violent insurrection, an act of political violence.

This guy probably made up his mind on calling it "an insurrection" because he heard of one dead by the mob. But that was a lie he had been told. The lie, and the conclusion, stands uncorrected and nu-reevaluated that blog. This is the New Your Times' doing. Reading it led me to revisit this thread and reply, though indeed I don't expect it to make much good.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

This guy probably made up his mind on calling it "an insurrection" because he heard of one dead by the mob. But that was a lie he had been told. The lie, and the conclusion, stands uncorrected and nu-reevaluated that blog. This is the New Your Times' doing. Reading it led me to revisit this thread and reply, though indeed I don't expect it to make much good.

He probably called it an insurrection because that is what it was. They stormed the Capitol Building for God's sake. One of the seats of government in the United States. What else would you call it? A tea party?

 

[Berzerker]

a riot

There is an unfortunate bias, which is probably not merely cultural, against one admitting in public to having been deceived.

This is the most powerful aid of swindlers, false prophets, corrupt politicians or treacherous lovers... what I didn't expect was that the media could still also pull this off!

The media had me believing Trump was a Manchurian candidate until ~2018. It was people like Greenwald and Aaron Mate who exposed Russiagate for me. IG Horowitz and Mueller drove the final nails.

On a sidenote, I saw Steve Schmidt from the Lincoln Project on Bill Maher recently. After lecturing us on the need to fight fascism he expressed outrage the Viking wasn't shot when he walked into the Senate chamber. Schmidt yelled shoot him!

I'll believe the media is largely unbiased when I see mistakes approach a reasonable randomness. But I watched how the media praised a child abuser and smeared his victim even when video was widely available showing the abuse. Ask Nicholas Sandmann about media bias.

 

[Wastl]

a riot
The media had me believing Trump was a Manchurian candidate until ~2018. It was people like Greenwald and Aaron Mate who exposed Russiagate for me. IG Horowitz and Mueller drove the final nails.

On a sidenote, I saw Steve Schmidt from the Lincoln Project on Bill Maher recently. After lecturing us on the need to fight fascism he expressed outrage the Viking wasn't shot when he walked into the Senate chamber. Schmidt yelled shoot him!

I'll believe the media is largely unbiased when I see mistakes approach a reasonable randomness. But I watched how the media praised a child abuser and smeared his victim even when video was widely available showing the abuse. Ask Nicholas Sandmann about media bias.

Man, that's la lot of distorting reality here...

It's truly amazing. You get bombarded with fact after fact of what has actually happened, and you twist and turn yourself into a pretzel to deny reality and claim that the opposite of truth is in fact the truth.

Somehow a violent attempt to overthrow the Republic isn't a violent attempt to overtrow the Republic. Somehow people asking for those with the means to stop a violent uprising against the Republic to do their job are the problem, not the people who are attempting the violent overthrow.
Somehow you convinced yourself that a report that found massive amount of illegal behaviour and which led to multiple convictions was indeed proof that nothing had happened, even though the only reason why lots of guilty people weren't brought to justice were that they were basically in charge of their own trial and/or protected by powerhungry cowards who cared more about upholding their own power instead of acting as per the oath they had sworn.

And then you use Greenwald as a source for anything, it's ridiculous. That guy lost his marbles a long time ago. He got thrown out of a company he founded because he couldn't be bothered to uphold even the most basic standards of journalism. And even worse, he tried to present himself as the victim, accusing those who who do actually uphold the standards of journalism of the very things he failed to adhere by. That's the difference between someone like Snowden, and people like Greenwald or Assange. The former did what he felt was his duty to help a good cause. The latter stopped doing that and instead opted for delusions of grandeur, making it all about themselves. They aren't any better than the people they proclaim to be fighting against. It's no surprise that the clowns at Fox News would bring Greenwald in on their shows though, as failing to uphold journalistic integrity is kind of their motto.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

It was people like Greenwald and Aaron Mate who exposed Russiagate for me.

That comment in this thread is just lovely.

11 out of 10.

 

[Ajidica]

The media had me believing Trump was a Manchurian candidate until ~2018.

[Citation Needed]
I could have sworn I has was having this discussion with you since Trump oozed down the escalator.

 

[stinkubus]

My answer is to read both sides and assume the answer is somewhere in the middle.

This is a fallacy.

 

[Samson]

This is a fallacy.

I shall debate this. Had I said "the true answer is always between the 2 extremes of media coverage" then you would be right. What I actually said was an accurate description of my behaviour, and therefore not at all a fallacy.

The implied statement, something like "If you read media on both sides of an issue, and assume a confidence interval bounded by the 2 viewpoints on aggregate you will do better than any single media source" I think holds up. If I am interested in a palestinian issue then Al Jazeera and Times of Israel are likely to bracket the truth. If it is the Skripal poisoning then the BBC and RT may, and on tory malfeasance then the Torygraph and Grundiad may. If you can point at a single source that will do better then I am all ears.

 

[Lexicus]

He probably called it an insurrection because that is what it was. They stormed the Capitol Building for God's sake. One of the seats of government in the United States. What else would you call it? A tea party?

I don't know whether insurrection is technically the correct term, but history is replete with examples of would-be tyrants using mobs of their followers to sieze and disrupt public assemblies conducting legitimate business. Whether this is an "insurrection" or not is ultimately a semantic point - and what happened would still be quite serious even if no one at all had been killed.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I don't know whether insurrection is technically the correct term, but history is replete with examples of would-be tyrants using mobs of their followers to sieze and disrupt public assemblies conducting legitimate business. Whether this is an "insurrection" or not is ultimately a semantic point - and what happened would still be quite serious even if no one at all had been killed.

I don't know if any of the people who stormed the Capitol were armed, though from news reports I have read, some of them apparently were...

Armed groups rushing the Capitol building = armed insurrection to me. Maybe I live in a coddled society, but a while ago when an armed guy got into Parliament and was running around scaring the hell out of people he was shot dead. I was very surprised that the security forces inside the Capitol building and the Secret Service just didn't open fire on the whole lot of them as they broke in.

 

[Gorbles]

I think Greenwald, who knows the environment of the NY media as an insider, was early in seeing how willing it was to distort news to favour one side.

The problem with this is the fact that Greenwald was more than happy to align with mainstream journalism until it stopped personally benefiting him. Even now he still uses the contacts and relationships he's cultivated - often with people in mainstream media. I couldn't disagree more with this "watchdog" status that folks are giving to him.

 

[innonimatu]

The problem with this is the fact that Greenwald was more than happy to align with mainstream journalism until it stopped personally benefiting him. Even now he still uses the contacts and relationships he's cultivated - often with people in mainstream media. I couldn't disagree more with this "watchdog" status that folks are giving to him.

You cannot say "happy to align... until it stopped personally benefiting him". HE chose to break alignment himself, because the price would be to ignore the "bad looking" stories about Biden, and even before to supress stories that exposed the dirty jobs used to prop up the russiagate hysteria. He chose journalistic integrity sacrificing personal benefit, a cosy position which he had and easily could have retained by simply singing with the choir.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I couldn't disagree more with this "watchdog" status that folks are giving to him.

That's the funny thing about this thread. On the one hand there are those who go out and look for multiple sources on a story to get informed. On the other hand there are those who found sources like Greenwald who only re-affirm their views. They will only seek out a narrow version of the news, not tainted by facts or reality. And they will parrot verbatim anything these journalistic hacks feed them.

It's easy. Anyone who disagrees with Greenwald is corrupt, anyone who dares factcheck his nonsense is censoring him. It's the same exact MO Foxnews has had for decennia. Criticism is proof of oppression. Criticism is proof of being afraid of "the truth". It's more watertight than an otter's anus.

 

[Lexicus]

He chose journalistic integrity

no he didn't

 

[Gorbles]

You cannot say "happy to align... until it stopped personally benefiting him". HE chose to break alignment himself, because the price would be to ignore the "bad looking" stories about Biden, and even before to supress stories that exposed the dirty jobs used to prop up the russiagate hysteria. He chose journalistic integrity sacrificing personal benefit, a cosy position which he had and easily could have retained by simply singing with the choir.

No, he broke with them because they weren't tolerating his increasingly outlandish and right-wing conspiracy theories. He wasn't being afforded the respect his ego demanded it be given. That's all there is to it.

Greenwald took this personally, and predictably threw his toys out of the pram and went to the camp that would re-affirm whatever he wanted, so long as it was anti-Biden: Tucker Carlson and other right-wing personalities. That's not breaking alignment. Tucker Carlson is as mainstream (in terms of conservative mouthpieces) as it gets.

 

[Ironsided]

I was hoping the muddy waters of insinuations and weak accusations against Greenwald would clear up over time. Apparently not. Not a lot other than he left the intercept which he founded in disagreement. If there is something tangibly incriminating, I think it is high time to spit it out in full now. What are some of Greenwald’s outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories exactly?

There are plenty of sources online on YouTube etc. to hear and judge Greenwald directly. He is usually focused about conversation topics, and if anything, well-disciplined not to derail it into too much partisan and punditry territory. Like most journalists I expect him to have pride and an ego, but he does not strike me as much of a self-serving or selfish person, moving to live near his spouse’s parents, running an animal shelter housing 24 stray dogs, etc.

 

[Farm Boy]

I don't know if any of the people who stormed the Capitol were armed, though from news reports I have read, some of them apparently were...

Armed groups rushing the Capitol building = armed insurrection to me. Maybe I live in a coddled society, but a while ago when an armed guy got into Parliament and was running around scaring the hell out of people he was shot dead. I was very surprised that the security forces inside the Capitol building and the Secret Service just didn't open fire on the whole lot of them as they broke in.

There does seem to be some disappointment there among the choicer turds of humanity.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The implied statement, something like "If you read media on both sides of an issue, and assume a confidence interval bounded by the 2 viewpoints on aggregate you will do better than any single media source" I think holds up. If I am interested in a palestinian issue then Al Jazeera and Times of Israel are likely to bracket the truth. If it is the Skripal poisoning then the BBC and RT may, and on tory malfeasance then the Torygraph and Grundiad may. If you can point at a single source that will do better then I am all ears.

I think this is right. I would add something like, "...provided both sources are reliable/sensible." If one of the viewpoints I select turns out to be a bunch of nutters, or not well informed, or just poor journalists, then my results will be skewed accordingly.

I think the fallacy @stinkubus may be pointing to is the assumption that any two points of view, if they disagree, must be equally biased or misinformed, and are therefore pulling in opposite directions with equal force. Some (many?) people misinterpret the adage "everyone is entitled to their opinion" to mean "all opinions are equally valid."

There does seem to be some disappointment there among the choicer turds of humanity.

Right, the lesson to be drawn by contrasting the treatment of the January 6th demonstrators/rioters/whatevers and the Black Lives Matter demonstrators/rioters/whatevers is not that 'everybody should be met with military force.'

 

[innonimatu]

I was hoping the muddy waters of insinuations and weak accusations against Greenwald would clear up over time. Apparently not. Not a lot other than he left the intercept which he founded in disagreement. If there is something tangibly incriminating, I think it is high time to spit it out in full now. What are some of Greenwald’s outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories exactly?

There are plenty of sources online on YouTube etc. to hear and judge Greenwald directly. He is usually focused about conversation topics, and if anything, well-disciplined not to derail it into too much partisan and punditry territory. Like most journalists I expect him to have pride and an ego, but he does not strike me as much of a self-serving or selfish person, moving to live near his spouse’s parents, running an animal shelter housing 24 stray dogs, etc.

I too would like to see some quote from Greenwald that could back those accusations. Otherwise it's character assassination because he dared denounce factual problems that only the right-wing does. That does not make him right-wing, it makes him a reporter reporting on things that get censored by editors in the (supposedly...) not-right wing media he had been working for.