Jernalism!

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Mongrel
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jan 26, 2023 4:56 pm

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nosimpleway
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Jan 26, 2023 5:47 pm

People with mental illnesses. People with college education. People with disabilities. People with no money. People with French.

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Mongrel
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jan 26, 2023 6:06 pm

One of the funnier (and most telling) artifacts of linguistic history is the way the English referred to syphilis as "The French Disease" while the French, naturally, called it the "La Maladie Anglaise".
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nosimpleway
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Jan 26, 2023 11:02 pm

As I understand it pretty much everybody called it "The disease from those unclean savages on the other side of the water" since it was so prevalent among sailors

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Büge
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Büge » Fri Jan 27, 2023 10:06 am

Mongrel wrote:"La Maladie Anglaise"


When you say it like that, it sounds like a fantastic dessert.
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Thad » Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:38 pm

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.

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Mongrel
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Feb 02, 2023 2:57 am

Atlantic channelling its best NYT face today

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Re: Jernalism!

Postby atog » Thu Feb 02, 2023 6:49 pm

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.

Kind of like the word "taxpayers" has become dogwhistle for white suburbia, boomers, or property owners in general.
Placeholder for something witty that doesn't make me sound like an asshole

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nosimpleway
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Feb 02, 2023 7:35 pm

“When someone describes themselves as a taxpayer, they're about to be an asshole.”

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Mongrel
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Sat Feb 11, 2023 9:33 pm

Look, we know papers of all stripes do filler and puff pieces all the time, but the NYT is really NYTing it up with this one.

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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Sun Feb 12, 2023 6:53 pm

NYT on a roll with mustard.
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
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Thad » Wed Feb 15, 2023 4:24 pm

nytletter.com is an open letter from past and current New York Times contributors calling the paper out for its transphobic reporting, and in particular for how it's been cited approvingly by politicians seeking to ban gender-affirming care.

I don't know if management is capable of shame, and the people in the op/ed section certainly aren't, but maybe it'll make some of the reporters think twice about whether their bothsiderist horseshit is really as objective and unbiased as they think it is.

Parker Molloy has more about the Times' transphobic bias (Nitter mirror of a Twitter thread), including how somebody changed the headline of a recent Jamelle Bouie op/ed to remove any indication that it's about transphobia, as well as how the paper incorrectly described the trans woman who stopped the Club Q shooter as a drag dancer and getting them to correct the error was like pulling teeth.

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Thad
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:17 pm

Nice to see this reckoning, but as Oliver Willis notes, The New York Times Is The Problem.

The current backlash is a good thing, and long overdue, but that's just it: it's long overdue. A lot of the criticism seems to take the tone "What happened to the Times?" like this is a recent development. The Times has been like this for decades. Especially on LGBT issues. Expecting (definition 2) the Times to do better is a good thing, but failing to recognize how long it's been terrible, how many ways it's been terrible, and how its terribleness is systemic severely misdiagnoses the problem.

As much as anything the problem is how goddamn influential the thing is. It's the Paper of Record. It shouldn't be. It should, at best, be treated as a source like any other, with its own biases, that sometimes gets things right and sometimes gets them wrong and should be treated with an appropriate level of skepticism, and the op/ed section is a fucking trash fire that occasionally has something good in it.

At best. My view of the NYT is more along the lines of "the whole thing is a fucking trash fire that occasionally has something good in it."

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).


On a related note: Evan Urquhart has been doing excellent work analyzing transphobic bias in the media, and today he looks at Jonathan Chait, Tavistock, and the Truth.

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.

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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Silversong » Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:27 pm

I think that's the main thing I've been missing in all this. Why does everyone care about the Times so much? Why does anybody respect them?
I never really paid them much attention (besides occasionally google-searching up one of their recipe pages) and everything I've heard about them in the last ten years has been "New York Times does something morally reprehensible or logically unsound, everyone freaks out."

However much credit they'd built to their reputation, why has it not run out yet?

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Thad
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Thad » Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:58 pm

Inertia and a feedback loop, I think.

People treat the Times as the paper of record because people treat the Times as the paper of record, and so it's gone for the past, I dunno, hundred, hundred and fifty years.

And, to be fair, the Times has done some fantastic journalism over the years, and put their money where their mouths were in important cases that defended the freedom of the press (notably New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and New York Times Co. v. United States, the Pentagon Papers case). But y'know, they've done some terrible journalism, too! And not just recently! The New Republic was calling them on their bullshit all the way back in 1920! They had a "don't say gay" rule before Ron DeSantis was even born! Oh and also there's that time in 1922 where they assured readers Hitler wasn't that antisemitic.

I dunno. I'm beginning to suspect that the reason people treat the New York Times as the Paper of Record may just be that Orson Welles decided to make a movie about William Randolph Hearst and not Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

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Mongrel
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Sat Feb 18, 2023 10:51 pm

It gets worse the more comes out.
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Sun Feb 19, 2023 6:39 pm

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Niku
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Niku » Sun Feb 19, 2023 7:45 pm

fuckin metal that's what
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Re: Jernalism!

Postby François » Sun Feb 19, 2023 8:56 pm

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Re: Jernalism!

Postby Mongrel » Sun Feb 19, 2023 9:44 pm

holy shit Zed
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