Regulation for thee, but not for me.A joke of an assertion. There is no difference between the 1st Amendment rights of "news outlets" and those of "independent fact checkers". The press is a technology, not a class. https://t.co/2hlNrY0ekf pic.twitter.com/olb7ZiB2XM
— Will_Duffield (@Will_Duffield) May 27, 2021
*No, we can’t; but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I'd like it if they'd stop calling reporters and "opinion journalists" "journalists." They're really not in the same business. And I'd like to see "opinion journalists" who lie called what they are, liars. I'm all for fact checking if the fact checking is transparent and they don't give half-marks for half-truths which are total lies, something which they so often do. What I'd really like to see is people who can prove to a preponderance of the evidence being able to sue the media that lies about and defames them into not doing that again. And for those who bring false suits of that kind to have to pay multiple costs to those they bring slapp suits against. It's complicated, but no one promised a judgeship was going to be a rose garden. Though a lot of them seem to insist that their job should be that.
ReplyDeleteI'm not that impressed with "fact-checkers." They tend to strain at gnats and swallow camels. Rather than tell me "Yes, it's true; No, it's false," i'd rather they function as reporters and simply tell me the whole story. I'll decide if the "facts" are indeed "facts." I find the standards "fact checkers" apply tend to be arbitrary and capricious, and usually very subjective, too. Besides, I'm more interested in why somebody said something stupid and false, than simply "That wasn't true."
ReplyDeleteThere more and more repoting, for example, that is about election "audits" or the November vote, that not merely notes the stories are false and the allegations/assertions groundless. It's a step up from "he said/she said" journalism that used to "both sides" lies to death. Even NPR this morning reported on the Biden Admin. plan to investigate claims COVID started in a Chinese lab by noting, repeatedly, there was no reason to believe the conspiracy theories Trump ginned up to distract from his handling of the virus (that was stated explicitly by the reporter). Time was when reporters could only say that if they were quoting some Democrat who had said that, because "both sides" and all.
Lawyers have to talk that way in court, because lawyers cannot present evidence, only witnesses can. But that's a highly specified role, based not on being 'objective," but on not being witnesses to the case. Reporters don't operate under such constraints, or in the representational role lawyers fill, but they acted like they do/act like they do. Long past time to quit trying to pretend they are "professionals" like lawyers. They can acknowledge when some people are trying to manipulate with baseless lies grounded in demoagoguery. That, after all, is the real reason we have a 1st Amendment.