this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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These are good examples, but here’s the problem with them:
This is an Opinion article, not a news article. In particular, the NYT likes to hide behind these, allowing opinion writers free rein while hedging and minimizing and normalizing the candidate in all the actual News articles.
Likewise this is an interview with an author, not a news article.
Another ‘editorial’, and Maddow is pretty great but sort of preaching to the choir. Not news reporting as such.
Another Opinion piece, they even preface the author with “Perspective by” to distance themselves from it.
This is the only actual news article of the bunch, and it is largely based on trumps famous ‘i’d be a dictator on the first day’ quote which was unfuckingbelievably outrageous in its own right. It’s probably worthy of a breakdown but I’d have to get past the paywall first. Also to note it’s on page 23 of the A section, not exactly front page anyway.
I'd be curious to see how libel and slander laws would apply to accuse a former president and presidential candidate of being a fascist
It's only libel if it's untrue.
Journalists have incredibly broad protections against getting sued for saying something like that. In general, for public or political figures, they can say whatever they want, in a way they never could against a private citizen, for exactly this reason.
There are fuzzy cases at the edges (like Bob Murray suing John Oliver), but Trump is so clearly a public figure that he can't sue them for libel without getting laughed out of court. This is why he keeps bitching periodically about the libel laws and how we have to fix them; because they protect people's right to talk about him and he hates that they can do that and he can't punish them for it.
I think fascist is an ambiguous enough term to dodge libel lawsuits. How would you ever prove that someone is a fascist or not a fascist? It's not like you get a membership card.
Well, not yet.
Well that's very much by design though. News articles are supposed to be as neutral and factual as possible, so with early newspapers a convention arose to mark any article that delivers an interpretation alongside the pure facts as an opinion piece. That doesn't mean it's not a news article and I actually think it's commendable when a news source still tries to follow this convention. Many don't anymore or never even tried to begin with.
That is the conventional thinking, however we can’t remove all perspective from a news article - it’s not technically possible. So the “as possible” part of the statement is really a kind of magic that allows us to presume news agencies are in fact trying to limit any one perspective to the maximum possible while still being recognized as written communication.
But they're not. Almost all corporate news has an agreed-upon point-of-view that they edit from. This is partially just practicality - if everyone writes to the agreed POV, then they don’t have to edit much. Things move faster when they’re in alignment.
And that agreed-upon-point-of-view is not neutral, although they possibly intended it to be read that way.
Opinion articles are there to let writers loose and say whatever - but make no mistake, news articles have opinions. Consider use of the term “environmentalist”.
As an old, I remember when it wasn’t ever a thing. And I distinctly remember hearing it for the first time - in a newscast. I remember thinking, “what? Who’s not an environmentalist? Does someone not live in an environment?” Sort of like “Oxygenists today said people aren’t breathing”.
But it was being used as a way to separate those who cared about pollution, extinction, and yes climate change, from those who didn’t.
It was envisioned as a “neutral” term - as factual as possible - but it said on the face of it, “environmentalists said …” meaning not us. It was a bias still in use today. Artificial and wielded as needed. Are you an environmentalist? You know - one of them?
Not really, it's just a reminder that every human has inherent biases and writing an entirely neutral article is thus virtually impossible. That doesn't mean journalists should go around and give into these biases without clearly stating that, and making this effort despite knowing you will fail in it is one of many indicators which can help separate serious news sources from propaganda and advertisement outlets.
Fossil fuel companies?
I don't know, I see it as media needing a term to apply to a (back then) relatively new societal movement, and environmentalist seems sufficiently descriptive and neutral to me to fulfil that role.
Yes. Are you? I don't see the problem here.
Maybe the journalist is one themselves. They didn't say? That's the point.
How? I mean, I agree - but I think you’re probably saying that’s what an Opinion article is for. But a news article that doesn’t state its biases is not unbiased. And I haven’t seen any news articles where bias is stated.
True, in the corporations-are-people sense, but use of the term predates that.
I don’t know what ‘an environmentalist’ is - as discussed, the news made it up. But as one, would you please define it and explain your bias, y’know, like a news reporter would?
Mmmnnoo, they didn’t say. You’re suggesting they would? Or that that is normally done? Again, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that.
Correct.
True, no human produced piece of writing can ever be truly free of bias.
That said:
Normal news article: Best effort of not applying your biases and just reporting raw facts.
Opinion news article: Intentionally applying bias to contextualise the raw facts.
That's all there is in this distinction, but that's nonetheless important I would say.
As per: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=environmentalist
My bias is that I have been hearing from reputable sources that we are destroying or at the very least damaging the ecosystems that supports our species for all of my conscious life. Literally all of it. Doing so seems like a bad idea.
By the way, today I learned there is apparently an older application of this term in the nature-vs-nurture debate amongst anthropologists for people who favour the nurture side of the argument (n2): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/environmentalist
Anyway, people make up new words when they need them, I still don't understand the confusion...
No, I'm saying they wouldn't self-identify as such unless it's an opinion piece, because that would be introducing bias into their articles instead of reporting on the facts.