Re: Jernalism!
Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2023 4:56 pm
Mongrel wrote:"La Maladie Anglaise"
Republicans say state-level bans are required to protect children’s health and point to gaps in existing medical research on the longer-term impacts of gender-affirming care. Activists say the restrictions ignore the medical consensus and put trans children in danger. Here’s what you need to know.
Thad wrote:I started following Evan Urquhart on Mastodon; he runs a site called Assigned Media that examines anti-trans bias in the news media.
He has a post today called Washington Post Both-Sides Medical Consensus on Affirming Care; in particular he takes issue with this paragraph in a Post story:Republicans say state-level bans are required to protect children’s health and point to gaps in existing medical research on the longer-term impacts of gender-affirming care. Activists say the restrictions ignore the medical consensus and put trans children in danger. Here’s what you need to know.
Opponents of gender-affirming care are "Republicans"; supporters are "activists".
He spends more time breaking down that framing on his Mastodon feed.
A Yale economics professor has some ideas for how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society. The “only solution,” he said, is mass suicide of the elderly, including ritual disembowelment.
https://nyti.ms/3K2hp8R
Oliver Willis wrote:What liberals must do is cease being surprised at what the Times has become, and to understand that its behavior is part of a pattern. It isn’t necessary or helpful to spin the Times’ problems into conspiratorial theories or to criticize the paper with misogynistic allegations, but there needs to be forceful good-faith criticism of what the paper keeps doing.
It is absolutely possible — and necessary — to support a free and open press, but there is no need to constantly defer to the New York Times because they occasionally do good work (the same goes for every other outlet, like the Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press, etc.)
I don’t believe in Trump-style demagoguery, deriding every unfriendly story as “fake news” and the work of “the enemy of the people,” but at the same time it is useless to operate from a position of weakness, begging the Times to “do better.” Unfortunately they have repeatedly shown a disinterest in doing better and while they are responsive to abusive conservative criticism, they have been institutionally dismissive of critiques from anything left of center.
This requires a change in tone and approach. Discard the idea that the Times wants to do the right thing but just got waylaid or thrown off mission. They produce what they want to produce, and they do so because it is influential and brings in revenue (nobody ever got fired for a negative Hillary Clinton story, for instance).
Evan Urquhart wrote:The most profound misunderstanding of the debate around gender affirming care is that trans people and their allies don’t want careful, thorough reporting, or that they don’t want to be made aware of bad clinics, poor diagnostic practices, or unethical doctors if such things are found to exist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trans people want high quality research, high standards of care, and the best possible outcomes for youth. If there was some new treatment that had better outcomes with less medical risk, we’d want to know. If there were an explosion of transition regret, we’d want to know. The problem is that the possibility of such things keep being floated by reporters who don’t flag that thre’s no evidence that they exist. The central issue with the coverage is that it routinely advances the possibility that some other approach might work better, or something could be going wrong on equal footing with the evidence, which shows no sign it actually has.