CDZ An idea regarding the American media

[JoeB131]

The boy was brandishing a knife or had just robbed a store after grabbing a store clerk by the neck? No, he was just standing there smiling.

But the point is, you used his age as a cover. Nope, if a 17 year old is old enough to get shot by a cop, it's old enough to be held to account for your disrespect.

You are the perfect illustration of the danger of our media as it incites very disturbed individuals to seek criminal assault against children as a response to the visions the media planted in their minds -- visions that have absolutely no basis in reality.

Uh, guy, he wasn't acting like a child. He participated in a political rally (Again- designed to change the law to oppress women on religious grounds) and then engaged other people who were having their own events. Frankly , walking up to a group of minorities wearing a Maga Hat is like walking into a Synagouge with a swastika armband or a black church with a Klan Robe... It was meant to provoke, and that's what he got.

Mac1958 did not start this thread to discuss THIS media -- the one that intentionally distorts reality in order to elicit these Pavlovian responses among those with issues. No, he did so in order to support the suppression of any news that DOESN'T conform to this twisted woke fantasy world that intentionally manipulates irrational people into reactions like yours.

I thought it was why he usually posts threads, to tell us all how superior he is.

If he was so innocent, why did his parents have to spend all this money on spin doctors and image consultants?

 

[JoeB131]

Anyhow, I won't convince you to change your mind but still don't think you viewed the 1.45 hour tape I've linked below. Stations were only showing short clips (2-6 minutes long or so) that shows the viewer nothing about which group was prompting the whole scenario. They called the boys incest victims, taunted in particular the black student, and shouted everyone was a future school shooter. These obnoxious statements were made by adults toward minors and that's an issue in itself. They were trying to provoke the crowd of boys intentionally. These media tapes, and likely the one you saw, were edited to support anti-Trump media message-same reason the group of black men targeted the boys because they were wearing Trump hats.

Well, um yeah. What they should have done was walk away, not escalate the situation further. Look, sorry, the Covington kids were not the good guys in here just because the Black Hebrew Israelites were the bad guys.

I really have to wonder what the reasoning of the School was that they thought this activity- which is again, protesting a settled legal issue that's really none of their business, and using supposed "children" as props.

"HEy, kids, let's give you this racist head gear and then send you out to where these minority people are gathered doing stuff. I'm sure it will be fine!"

 

[ClaireH]

Your statement about "walking away" confirms you didn't view the entire tape, nor even close. There was no where that student could have "walked away" to lol He was not even one of the students standing in the front row closest to the instigators, more like 4 rows back.

EDIT: that was the location they were getting picked up by the buses. They had no else to go so your "walk away" wasn't even an option, much less possible as I described.

No worries...this er...discussion, reminds me of trying to break through on political chat to discuss factual evidence versus opinions based upon originally skewed information by the media at large.

Good luck with your detection skills of determining when a story is only half of the story...in this case only a third of the story. Primary sources are the only good sources...uncut versions.

 

[JoeB131]

Your statement about "walking away" confirms you didn't view the entire tape, nor even close. There was no where that student could have "walked away" to lol He was not even one of the students standing in the front row closest to the instigators, more like 4 rows back.

They were trapped by a fence? They couldn't have just waited somewhere else for their bus?

EDIT: that was the location they were getting picked up by the buses. They had no else to go so your "walk away" wasn't even an option, much less possible as I described.

"Ring Ring- Hey, there's some kind of demonstration going on here, can you pick us up two blocks down."

Wow- Problem solved.

Good luck with your detection skills of determining when a story is only half of the story...in this case only a third of the story. Primary sources are the only good sources...uncut versions.

Yeah, whatever...

I'd be a little more trusting of Smirky's "version" of the story if his parents hadn't spent thousands of dollars on image consultants and spin doctors.

 

[JoeB131]

You wish to hurt children and the excuse you make is that they do not leave when you decide to invade their space to bully them.

That is truly sick.

If he takes grown up actions, he should expect grown up consequences.

 

[Bernhard]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

 

[Mac1958]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

 

[Bernhard]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

 

[Mac1958]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

I generally think that most of our problems are rooted in our culture -- our demands, standards, expectations -- and that applying changes or rules on the end product is essentially nothing more than the application of a band aid while ignoring the underlying problem. The end product -- media, politicians, consumer products -- are essentially a reflection of us, although that can be manipulated through the media, too.

Whatever we do, or try to do, I really think that we have to do far more than just apply band aids and pat ourselves on the back for that.

 

[Bernhard]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

I generally think that most of our problems are rooted in our culture -- our demands, standards, expectations -- and that applying changes or rules on the end product is essentially nothing more than the application of a band aid while ignoring the underlying problem. The end product -- media, politicians, consumer products -- are essentially a reflection of us, although that can be manipulated through the media, too.

Whatever we do, or try to do, I really think that we have to do far more than just apply band aids and pat ourselves on the back for that.

Yes... not sure if that's what you have in mind, but that's pretty much the reason why I find leftist speech demands so silly. Using a male or female form of a profession, not using certain labels for minority groups ... by doing so, the problem is just pushed under the rug.

What is won by a racist no longer calling a black person the n-word, when in his mind, his thinking hasn't changed a bit?

However, it wouldn't hurt if more people just stopped being assholes. It shouldn't be illegal to be an asshole, but it certainly would do a lot of good if more people decided not to be assholes.

 

[Mac1958]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

I generally think that most of our problems are rooted in our culture -- our demands, standards, expectations -- and that applying changes or rules on the end product is essentially nothing more than the application of a band aid while ignoring the underlying problem. The end product -- media, politicians, consumer products -- are essentially a reflection of us, although that can be manipulated through the media, too.

Whatever we do, or try to do, I really think that we have to do far more than just apply band aids and pat ourselves on the back for that.

Yes... not sure if that's what you have in mind, but that's pretty much the reason why I find leftist speech demands so silly. Using a male or female form of a profession, not using certain labels for minority groups ... by doing so, the problem is just pushed under the rug.

What is won by a racist no longer calling a black person the n-word, when in his mind, his thinking hasn't changed a bit?

However, it wouldn't hurt if more people just stopped being assholes. It shouldn't be illegal to be an asshole, but it certainly would do a lot of good if more people decided not to be assholes.

Oh, I'm a virulent opponent of PC and Identity Politics, both of which to me are very illiberal. And my reasoning is the same as yours. I've gotten into a few hundred scrapes with lefties here who claim to be liberal but are the first to pull that crap.

Nice to have a kindred spirit here.

 

[Mac-7]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

I generally think that most of our problems are rooted in our culture -- our demands, standards, expectations -- and that applying changes or rules on the end product is essentially nothing more than the application of a band aid while ignoring the underlying problem. The end product -- media, politicians, consumer products -- are essentially a reflection of us, although that can be manipulated through the media, too.

Whatever we do, or try to do, I really think that we have to do far more than just apply band aids and pat ourselves on the back for that.

You just helped elect the far left - aka mainstream media - darling joe biden

so you are no moderate

just a typical lib pretending to be in the middle

 

[Mac1958]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

I generally think that most of our problems are rooted in our culture -- our demands, standards, expectations -- and that applying changes or rules on the end product is essentially nothing more than the application of a band aid while ignoring the underlying problem. The end product -- media, politicians, consumer products -- are essentially a reflection of us, although that can be manipulated through the media, too.

Whatever we do, or try to do, I really think that we have to do far more than just apply band aids and pat ourselves on the back for that.

You just helped elect the far left - aka mainstream media - darling joe biden

so you are no moderate

just a typical lib pretending to be in the middle

Correct, I'm not a moderate. Nor have I ever claimed to be. The second line of my sig makes that as clear and simple as I possibly can.

One of the primary reasons I've given up trying to communicate with you people is that my politics and thought processes are not simple enough for you.

 

[Mac-7]

Correct, I'm not a moderate.

Yet you come around here talking trash about the two extremes when you are one of them

if people didnt read the fine print in your sig line or didnt know you from the past four years they would think you claim to be a moderate now

 

[Mac1958]

Correct, I'm not a moderate.

Yet you come around here talking trash about the two extremes when you are one of them

if people didnt read the fine print in your sig line or didnt know you from the past four years they would think you claim to be a moderate now

Neat. I don't know why you put so much effort into complaining about me personally.

All you are now is noise, since you only complain and offer no interesting or independent thought.

 

[Mac-7]

Neat. I don't know why you put so much effort into complaining about me personally.

You complain about me all the time without mentioning me by name

at least I am honest and upfront

the republican party at the grass roots is still for trump because he supports policies we agree with

and that drives the rabid never trumpers like you nuts

 

[Mac1958]

Matt Taibbi is my favorite journalist, and as usual, he lets both ends of the political media spectrum have it here:

 

[hadit]

Msnbc leans pretty far left. Cnn commentary does but they are fairly careful to distinguish commentary from news (which fox does not). The big three abc nbc cbs are pretty even keeled.

I realize it doesn't look that way from the perspective of most tRump supporters but that isn't their bias, its yours.

Here is an excerpt from a study that examined TV news reporting on Trump v Biden during 2020. As always with any study, there is the possibility that the author is biased. But these numbers are consistent with other analysis I have read on Liberal bias in TV news.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

.............I’ve been studying the news media and elections for more than 35 years. Trust me — there’s never been anything like it.

A new MRC analysis of all evening news coverage of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in June and July found these networks chose to aim most of their attention and nearly all of their negative coverage on Trump, so Biden escaped any scrutiny of his left-wing policy positions, past job performance or character.


From June 1 through July 31, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts focused 512 minutes of airtime on the President, or nine times more than the 58 minutes allotted to Biden. (This excludes coverage of the Trump administration in general when not associated with the President himself.) This is an even wider gap than the spring, when Trump received seven times more coverage than Biden (523 minutes vs. 75 minutes).


The extra airtime devoted to Trump consisted almost entirely of anchors and reporters criticizing the President. During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95 percent of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five percent (34) that were positive. Using the same methodology (fully described at the end of this article), we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.


Do the math, and viewers heard 150 TIMES more negative comments about Trump than Biden. That’s not news reporting — that’s a negative advertising campaign in action.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

No link, which undermines your credibility somewhat, but the simple fact is tRump did a shitload of negative things and Joe Biden wasn't holding any public office to be criticizes about.

Next.

Quid Pro had almost 50 years in office compared to 4 for TRUMP!. If you're correct, the fact that the talking heads couldn't find anything worth talking about in almost 50 years of a track record means the guy didn't do anything. That alone should have garnered some attention.

 

[Dogmaphobe]

This could be a pretty interesting conversation if we can stay calm and focused.

Point 1 - We have a serious and growing problem in this country with a media (across the ideological spectrum) that has (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the trust of the American people. We've all seen and contributed to threads that discuss and catalogue examples of gross bias from both ends of our media.

Point 2 - It's not a stretch to imagine a body that creates, maintains and enforces standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, in such a way as providing guidance to consumers and provides them with more faith that what they are consuming is, indeed, accurate. Before we devolve and divide much further. I don't know about you, but I don't see a bottom to this yet. BUT I'm not fond of the idea of such a body being government-based. For many reasons.

Point 3 - There are two bodies that provide such services in the financial services industry. The first is the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) which is an agency of the US Federal Government. But the second one is FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) that is a private corporation that also policies the industry - but it is the industry's self-regulatory body.

Idea - Could such an industry self-regulatory body work with the press? Theoretically it could (a) maintain and enforce standards of journalistic integrity and accuracy, and (b) provide consumers with some kind of roadmap so that they can easily discern fact from opinion. As in, this is an actual news resource, that is an opinion resource.

Look, I'm not going for perfection here. I can already think of some issues with this. I'm looking for (a) some improvement and (b) the hope that such a system would gradually raise standards up to a point at which it was barely needed. THAT would be the goal.

Thoughts? And by the way, if you can think of a problem, perhaps you could also provide a possible solution to discuss. We used to do that, here, in America.

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

I can't comment on the American offline media, as I don't know how big their role is in all this, and what exactly it looks like -- but when it comes to the internet, I agree with you.

It's a very dangerous tightrope walk between freedom of speech and protecting the integrity of a constitutional state -- but something *has* to be done to regulate the internet. Not in order to limit free speech, but to protect it.

In the past, freedom of speech was threatened by authorities trying to prevent certain opinions from being published, it was threatened by suppression. Today, we see the opposite problem: In an age of information overabundance, free speech is threatened by important truths being drowned and silenced and not being heard under a flood of fake news, disinformation and propaganda.

I have no easy answer either. Holding social media firms responsible for deleting fake news and inciting hate speech is a good start, but this again opens a whole new can of worms: It can't be in the interest of a free society when private companies have to decide who is being heard and who isn't. Also, this probably doesn't go far enough. The technical problems aside -- fake news pop up quicker than anybody can possibly delete them --, how do you counter the problems that come with the very structure of social media online? Echo chambers, where people choose to only listen to news that confirm their views, rather than actually looking at a problem from different sides, resulting in ever more radicalization?

Smart people should better break their heads over this.

I generally think that most of our problems are rooted in our culture -- our demands, standards, expectations -- and that applying changes or rules on the end product is essentially nothing more than the application of a band aid while ignoring the underlying problem. The end product -- media, politicians, consumer products -- are essentially a reflection of us, although that can be manipulated through the media, too.

Whatever we do, or try to do, I really think that we have to do far more than just apply band aids and pat ourselves on the back for that.

You just helped elect the far left - aka mainstream media - darling joe biden

so you are no moderate

just a typical lib pretending to be in the middle

Correct, I'm not a moderate. Nor have I ever claimed to be. The second line of my sig makes that as clear and simple as I possibly can.

One of the primary reasons I've given up trying to communicate with you people is that my politics and thought processes are not simple enough for you.

You are confusing deviouness with complexity and saying one thing but doing another as moderation.

Neither are true.

 

[BlackSand]

I've just skimmed over some of the responses here, but I guess a first step has to be finding common ground on what the problem is.

From the top of my head, I'd say there are two different problems at work:

On one side, there is bias, but on the other, there is outright fake news. Is a certain news just misleading, but factually correct, or is it verifyably false?

It would be very hard to counter bias. Everybody who has an opinion has a certain bias by definition. But ways can be found to balance the different biases: Give more space for a variety of opinions. Not sure what rules could be enacted -- didn't there exist a rule for the US press until the 80s or so, that all tv channels and papers have to give airtime/space to different sides of a question?

What about fake news, verifyably false claims? So far, they are legal in most cases. Unless there is proven libel or slander, deliberate fake news with the goal of deliberately misinforming people is covered by free speech.

In a day and age, where the internet provides the possibility to disinform and lie to people on a scale never seen before, where it has become as easy as never before to run misleading propaganda campaigns with fake news and inciting and rallying up people, the old freedom of speech laws are no longer practical -- these rules, which were designed for an old media public sphere of printed and broadcast information no longer increase freedom, but theaten to destroy it.

Tyrants like Russia's Putin or the Philippines' Duterte already turn free speech against democracy to cement their tyrannies: Massive concerted fake news campaigns in social media and online, up to the point where incited mobs harass and silence democratic opposition that fights for freedom.

And wannabe tyrants like Donald Trump ran on fake news and lies, and do so up to this point, to destroy freedom and democracy, in order to erect tyrannies where free elections, the will of the people no longer decides over who rules the country.

I'd say, if you believe in freedom, democracy and the Constitution, ways have to be found to end the spread of fake news, especially online.

Thank you.

There are problems that simply don't have fixes, and this could easily be one of them. But this particular problem is one of the primary driving forces that may be destroying us. So I guess the the first thing we have to decide is whether it's important enough to address, or whether just letting it continue to evolve/devolve is a better answer. As one who strongly advocates for a free press and freedom of expression, I find myself between a rock and a hard place here. I don't have a simplistic thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion on this, as we're seeing on this thread.

The real fix, to me, is clear, obvious and glaring: It would be for each end of our political spectrum, and the rest of us who don't inhabit one of the ends, to hold the "media" (now a nebulous term) responsible for intellectual honesty, accuracy and completeness. The "news" consumers in Trump's alternate universe will aggressively defend their alternate reality, as we're also seeing on this thread. And the bias that comes from the Left end of the media can be difficult to detect, because it's generally more vague. But it still isn't intellectually honest.

But in our present condition, I just don't see that happening. I surely don't want the government involved in this, for obvious reasons.

As for me, personally, I think the clock is ticking on this, and us.

There are no consequences for the production of unworthy 'news'.
To enforce better practices, would require either governmental oversight (unconstitutional), or the proper 'buy-in' by the media sources.

The proper buy-in is pretty much unachievable in an atmosphere where sensationalism rules the day.

Moderates have no power over the equation, because by default they fall one way or the other in a majority two-party system.
They present nothing more than a swing vote that requires pandering, that results in little change when the loons are running the show.

Are we on the course for disaster ... Hardly.
There are Americans that really don't give a rat's ass what you nut-cases think and will go on working hard to achieve their personal goals.
They will continue to trust in their own abilities and efforts, and further distance themselves from the utter minutia National politics and the Federal Government has become.

That won't serve the media well ... But, screw the media, they are not interested in ensuring they have a better or more accountable product.
They would never exist in commercial manufacturing environment, and if their product consisted of anything more than empty words.

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