Comments

1
The WSJ has been part of Murdoch's bullshit brigade for about 10 years now. I'm surprised that he didn't just call them "facts."
2
The Wall Street Journal hasn't been the same since Murdoch bought it. Just another Fox/News Corp propaganda tool.
3
The only thing that's bad for journalism worth discussing is Charles Mudede.

Seriously, the fact that this cretinous fucking drunk still has a job is an insult to all of humanity.
5
I don't get the kerfuffle. The memo-true or not-is primary source material for a major news story. Who comes out against primary source material? Who thinks that's not a good idea?
6
@1: But the WSJ does pair well with Bezos's bullshit brigade of the Washington Post. Better for both sides to have their own bullshit brigades.
7
Is that our spin on it now? Buzzfeed was responsibly releasing an unverified document just because it was being spread around? That's almost as bad as releasing a chain email that your uncle sent you.

WSJ is badly biased on one side, Buzzfeed on the other...and neither are helping the conversation about journalist ethics move forward.

And, in this case, yes both sides are pretty fucking bad.
8
Hearing conservatives bitch about how unfair it is to unlock unverified information to the press is ironic as fuck.
9
@5 A document that unverified should NOT be primary source material. Buzzfeed didn't release it as "look how bad our information is." It was "hey, here's this information but nobody knows how true it is, so have fun kids!"

Buzzfeed isn't a hero here.
10
@8 Are you calling me a conservative?
11
Most of mainstream media has caved to Trump's threats, and won't call a douche a douche. Buzzfeed said it was unverified, but had verified sources. That is worth publishing the info. At least they are willing to tell us what is going on out there, while mainstream media dances at Trump's feet.
12
@11: As I recall, the main stream media suppressed reporting on nasty Obama falsehoods, and the left did not complain about not knowing "what's going on out there."
13
Eh, I'm having a hard time understanding how what Buzzfeed does even qualifies as journalism.

I'm inclined to think publicizing this dossier is not helping the general slide we have been experiencing toward post-fact unreality. Kind of seems like it instead helps the fringe right conspiracy nuts argue that whatever random idiocy they pulled out of their ass yesterday is just as factual as what the 'MSM' publishes.
14
@6 clueless as fuck
15
@12, There is a difference between falsehood, and unverified, but supplied by credible sources. If Putin has blackmail material on Trump, it would be a good idea for the public to have a clue about it.
16
If all media ought to be judged by one outlet, it kind of undermines the idea that media should be diverse, as well as the idea that prior restraint is harmful. If you really think they ought to function in lockstep, why would you want them independent? The best way to achieve the goal of all media adhering to one standard is to merge them all. Put one strong authority in charge and there you go.

Alternatively, one can be allowed to fuck up -- by others' standards -- without having any bearing on the status of the rest.

Yes, the fascists will use this as a reason to justify fascism. But it's the fascists who are wrong, not the independence and incompatible journalistic standards of free media.
17
Part of me wonders if Trump himself didn't leak the material to Buzzfeed. After all, if Putin were threatening to send the to WaPo unless Trump did what he wanted, this would be one hell of a way of defusing that threat.

Or maybe it was Clinton, a last minute sucker punch that effectively shuts him up about Bill's sexual proclivities. The second he mentions Monica Lewinsky or any of the women who've accused him of sexual assault in AR, anyone is now free to say, "Yeah, but none of them pissed the bed."

If there is any good that can come out of this, hopefully it will shut moralizing conservatives up about fetishists.

As for BuzzFeed, look, nobody lost their shit at the Inquirer when they broke John Edwards' story. Nobody has ever gone to BF, or Gawker, or Private Eye or whatever, looking for a erudite, serious discussion of policy. This is tabloid journalism. They're not at the 10,000 for level, taking in the grand view of the political landscape. They're reporting on and from the sewer. This is what they do, this is what people read them for. You want to know what Joseph Stiglitz thinks about the latest ASEAN conference, go read Political Affairs. If you want to know the dick sizes of the cabinet nominees, you go to BuzzFeed.
18
@17 Nobody took the National Inquirer as seriously as they did Buzzfeed when they broke the story about John Edwards.

And nobody was having a conversation about Fake News when it happened. Democrats, especially Clintonites, have been trying to start a conversation about fake news. And then, because they hate Trump SO MUCH, they run around with an unverified piece of news as if it were gospel until other people knock them for it.

Let's go back 48 hours and see how Dan Savage presented it. He linked the pdf without presenting it as verified or unverified, and as THE memo given to Trump. He didn't even bother linking the Buzzfeed article questioning the pdf's veracity (just bits of CNN that questioned the veracity of information in some intelligence report given to Trump (which may or may not be the one that Buzzfeed scanned, but Dan confirmed it as The Memo).
19
@15: Sorry, but unverified information has no more credence than a falsehood. You would say the same about those whom had unverified evidence that Obama was not born in the United States.
20
The reality based community has nothing to gain by pretending that unsubstantiated allegations are anything more than unsubstantiated allegations.
21
@15: To be clear, I agree with your disposition about getting the truth on Trump. I'm only taking issue with your arguments about Buzzfeed.
22
@18,

216 years ago, President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson stood for election.

They both ran fake news stories smearing one another in the press. Jefferson hired a journalist to write that Adams was planning to launch a war against France, and that Adams intended to crown himself King.Adams responded by bribing newspapers to run stories about Jefferson's debauched sex life.

Fake News is older than you think.

Now, back then, people knew almost everything in the media was bullshit. Most newspapers openly declared their allegiances, in the way many UK newspapers do today. Nobody pretended to be "objective", since that is an impossibility. No one, no matter how high minded (read: pompous) is actually unbiased or objective. All of us have our prejudices, so why not just be upfront about what they are and let the reader come to their own truths based on reading multiple points of view in different papers?

This was how journalism worked until the middle twentieth century. Television seemed more believable than the print media, because here was a face talking to you, directly at you. Charlatains from L Ron Hubbard to Ayn Rand all claimed there was such as thing as objective Truth, independent of opinion or idea. Then people started to believe that if truth was independent of the observer, it was better just to shine a camera at the Truth or write about it from a "neutral point of view". So people started to believe that whatever they saw through that camera lens, or read in that news paper, was objective Truth.

It wasn't. If a major shareholder at the newspaper was also a mine owner, you can bet your ass off there weren't any stories about mining accidents, and that any stories on strikes were presented from the investor's standpoint. "Objectivity" meant having one liberal and one conservative discuss their points of view, say, a Gore Vidal and a William F Buckley. It excluded the ideas of socialists, communists, and anarchists, or anyone else who was deemed too "ideological".

And this hobgoblin stays with us to this day. In the early 2000's, the State Department under Bush released news footage complete with a reporter to various stations, all of which eagerly broadcast them without editing as if they were "objective Truth". They were propaganda, but they were fed to us as if they were reality. And everyone fell in line, all shouting that there were WMD in Iraq, that Cindy Sheehan was a traitorous bitch, that Iraq was involved in 9/11- all things we now know are false. But they were "objectively reported" and "unbiased".

It's a rare day when I get to claim the Founders had more sense than we do now. For the most part, I think they were drunk off their asses, racist as hell, sexist, homophobic and generally horrible people. But, that's a discussion for another day. For now, let's focus on the thing they got right:

THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE TRUTH.

Not in the media, anyway.

Austistic people don't have a filter for data coming in through their senses. This overwhelms them to the point where they can't function. Nn-autstic people can function precisely because we have filters. We filter out a lot of that data which we deem irrelevant, and our minds fill in the blind spots with assumptions that allow us to make decisions. To refer to Wittgenstein, we all have things we believe not because we've tested them or because we have some "objective" knowledge of them- but because someone told us it was true. You have to start from somewhere, and first principles are generally just a accpted norms, not "objective truths".

So if everyone starts with a set of assumptions, and builds from there, can anyone be said to perceive reality as it truly is? Nope. Your filters give you blind spots. And you need those filters to survive. You're screwed. Try as hard as you like, but you'll; never, ever see reality as it is. The upside is, nobody else will either. Everyone else has filters too.

What I'm trying to say is, everyone is full of shit. The whole goddamn planet. Nobody knows anything for sure, and only idiots and lunatics believe otherwise. Media darlings will tell you a story, but they're full of shit just like you. So you've got to learn to be skeptical. You've got to just accept that fake news is everywhere. In fact, its all fake news. Every last line of it.

Rather than try to abolish "fake news". which is as realistic as trying to abolish old age or death or any other unpleasant but unavoidable natural phenomenon, why not just learn to deal with it by not trusting everything you read or see on TV? Why not think for yourself instead? Why don't you just figure out how to not be so gullible?

To quote an actual TV campaign ad from 1980, "Left, Right, its all bullshit."
23
@12 What are these "nasty Obama falsehoods" that the MSM suppressed, and "the left did not complain about not knowing"? Please tell, enquiring minds want to know!

Is Faux News part of the MSM that suppressed these stories?

Please save your credibility and don't report or link to stories on Breibart, Daily Stormer, and the rest of the BigotsRU "news" sources! I just got new electronic toys and don't want any of the malware festering on those sites.
24
The fact the POTUS and the PEOTUS were briefed on a memo that contained explosive allegations is newsworthy.
25
Funny that the Right has gotten their Underoos all a-knotted over this, considering their main media outlet, FOX News, has built it's entire business on throwing similarly unverified/pulled-from-someone's-ass shit at the wall. "We Report, You Decide" is pretty much the epitome of "it's not our job to say what's true and what's not, we leave that up to our viewers."

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