https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
I don't disagree with your characterization, but I'd also characterize cable news, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that way. These big "news and entertainment" companies do not offer any meaningful political dissent whatsoever.
You're the one who demanded specific examples, but then failed to provide any yourself, after being asked repeatedly.
What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow is an actress and not a journalist? What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow has zero journalistic acumen?
Specific examples!
By the way, have you looked up the definition of whataboutism yet, to which you have openly confessed of being guilty? It's not a "buzzword". It's not "juvenile". And it definitely doesn't mean "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason" as you falsely claim. It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda, comrade.
You also seem to be willfully misunderstanding why I brought up the Flint Water Crisis, which was simply to point out an example of the kind of embarrassing story that RT seems to focus on when reporting on US domestic issues. I brought up the Flint Water Crisis simply because it's one that most people are familiar with and the importance of journalistic coverage of the situation is obviously important to the democratic process.
I don't think Rachel Maddow is relevant at all to this discussion. If her coverage of the Flint issue was exemplary, that's great. It is not germane to my use of the Flint example at all. The fact that you and most people are aware of the Flint Water Crisis is because it happens to be one of the rare stories like this that did get significant big media coverage. Thankfully, Maddow determined that covering the story would not alienate her advertisers!
As for your dogged effort to keep this discussion about whataboutism and the minutia surrounding its definition, I have reviewed the definition and it seems to be relevant only to debates where there are two sides and one side uses the technique as a logical fallacy in an attempt to persuade or in order to distract from the truth of his opponent's argument.
The remarks I made that led to my being accused of whataboutism were some questions I asked about scenarios that seem to me to warrant a similar approach to determining the harms/benefits of journalism. Please re-read that last sentence again several times as it is critically important to my point.
I am not asking those parallel questions to distract attention from the claim you make that RT's reporting has caused destabilization, simply asking you to clarify (by applying your analytical approach to some similar scenarios) a more general rule for categorizing journalism as being harmful or helpful through the lens of political "stability" (a term which is highly loaded and rarely used without significant bias).
I understand how the technique you describe as whataboutism is sometimes used in a persuasive argumentation scenario argued by two partisans. But in this case you are the only partisan. I consider the Russian government and the US government fairly morally similar, and I'm not interested in arguing the minutia of how the US is slightly better, because I don't disagree. My concern is whether RT helps or hurts the marketplace of ideas and the search for truth in the American political discourse, and my argument is that it helps in many obvious ways, while the specific harms that you and others claim exist cannot be supported by links to specific articles, etc. The many articles about embarrassing aspects of the US are very easy to find on RT, and I view those as helpful to American democracy rather than "destabilizing".
Since you seem to be one who views "stability" as a good thing no matter what, I was hoping that you would clarify when journalism that can be perceive to create destabilization is good vs when it is bad. Your simplistic view seems to be that regardless of all other factors, if the journalism was done by a journalist whose salary is paid by a foreign government, the journalism is bad and unhelpful, no matter any other factors. But by this definition the VOA is also all bad and unhelpful, so I think it's a pretty useless definition.
Again, since I think you might be trolling, I don't want to spend too much time trying to be thoughtful in my reply. In my view, propaganda is everywhere, and the reader must understand how to filter it from the truth. That is a core responsibility of citizenship. I'll often cross-reference NYT stories with a similar story in the Globe and Mail, since omissions are much more likely to stand out than when comparing the version found in the WSJ, which may cater to a different American political constituency.
Isn't it enough that the weaknesses of our own media needs work that we don't help to undermine with those who actively chip away at the basic tenets of an open society?
Exactly the point.
Look, there's this thing in western jurisprudence called "mens rea". It's what differentiates, say, first degree murder from manslaughter.
In this case, RT and Sputnik are clearly motivated by the desire to manipulate the US election. As you've already conceded, those other outlets are not. As a result, these represent different acts, and therefore it is not unreasonable for them to warrant different responses.
And what you're suggesting is that Twitter take sides in this, support US propoganda and suppress others... How is this different than RT?
Some are starting to talk about some of our mainstream journalists as belonging in a "special kind of journalistic hell(3)."
1-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-f... 2-https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-... 3-https://www.salon.com/2016/09/20/betraying-snowden-theres-a-...
What a strange game. The only move to win is to cheat.
Please define the word destabilization. Does that mean changing the status quo? Would the NYT be guilty of destabilization if it published an expose revealing that officials in 20 US cities hid significant drinking water pollution from their citizens for years? Surely once published the article would destabilize politics in those cities significantly.
Similarly, suppose the NYT published Donald Trump's taxes, revealing information that was likely to create a multi-year impeachment effort. Would that destabilize the US? It's hard to argue it would make things more stable.
Did the NYT's publication of Judith Miller's reporting on Saddam's WMD that helped sell a war effort that killed and displaced millions of people and cost trillions of dollars cause "destabilization"?
Newspapers are supposed to publish information that leads to political change. That is the point of having a free press, so that ideas can be shared that can be vetted by the public and acted upon to make society better.
Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason? OK I'm guilty.
To further ruin the joke by over-explaining it, he wasn't literally asking you to define whataboutism, because you'd just given an excellent example of it, so his question was rhetorical, and your answer was not only redundant but also incorrect.
Your and his arguments could be labeled as “Tory” but it would be useless for me to point that out; id rather attempt to reach common ground or understanding.
You've also proven you don't know what the definition of whataboutism is. The fact that you don't happen to know the definition doesn't mean it's a "buzzword".
It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda (which is the main point of this discussion).
Please look up the real definition before trying to incorrectly define it and confess to being guilty of it, because you don't even understand what you're confessing to.
The definition you gave was wrong, even though you are guilty of doing it yourself, and what you're doing is logically fallacious and intellectually dishonest.
I looked at the definition of whataboutism on Wikipedia, and now I think I understand what you are attempting to argue.
If person A says "Russia treats political enemies badly" and then person B replies "Well, the US puts its political enemies in Gitmo", you would call that a scenario where person B should have said something specifically to refute person A's statement, but instead made a parallel assertion that does not have any direct relation to the statement made by person A.
In your view, in order to refute the claim made by person A, someone would have to provide evidence that in fact Russia does not treat political enemies badly.
When someone is heavily partisan and makes the comment of person B above, the intent might be to deflect attention from person A's point. If you view person A and B as adversaries each trying to be objectively right in some highly logical world, then only a strict logical refutation of person A's point would suffice. The definition of whataboutism descries it as a logical fallacy, which is quite telling.
The truth is, both claims may be true. Person B's statement does not refute person A's statement, but it is not meant to. In reading through the comments that you and the other person claimed were whataboutism, I think your interpretation was that I was asking rhetorical questions that I thought had an obvious answer which should logically refute your assertion.
In fact, I was simply introducing a few scenarios that seem similar to me so that I could better understand how it was so easy for you both to make very broad (and seemingly impulsive) statements with strong implications about the "appropriate" political consequences of journalism.
I was hoping that one of you would explain to me some method of analysis that offered insight into all of those scenarios in addition to this Russia stuff.
It seems that you did not mean to make broad statements about journalism, only about RT specifically because RT is obviously guilty by virtue of its association with the Russian government.
To me that is not obvious, and so when I hear words used like "destabilization" or "terrorism" (these are both propaganda words and I heavily discount any statement containing either one) I have to wonder if perhaps the person making the argument has more of a persuasive motive than a desire to understand the situation or phenomenon in question.
You're trolling in bad faith, demanding people provide specific examples then refusing to provide any yourself, and making untrue blanket statements about cable news and then trying to excuse your ignorance by claiming you don't actually know anything about cable news and never watch it. Yet you claim to know so much about RT, but never provide any links to back up any of your claims about it, even after being repeatedly asked. You said that Rachel Maddow's coverage of Flint was suspect because she made an overreach in her coverage of Russia, yet you have no problem with RT broadcasting Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine and don't think that reflects on their coverage of Flynt, to which you conveniently can't find any references, so we just have to take your word.
Your arguments have no merit, because you're being intellectually dishonest and trolling. And this is not the place for that. Take it somewhere else where it will be appreciated like /r/The_Donald, if you're not going to stop it here.
You're the one who didn't know what the word "whataboutism" meant, and who posted an incorrect definition, yet with your very own words, you actually explicitly confessed to being guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
So do you still stand by your confession that you're guilty of "whataboutism", now that you've bothered to skim (but not understand) one article about it?
There is nothing "silly" or "made up" about the word "whataboutism". That's proven by the fact that there is a 15 page Wikipedia article with 116 citations in it, including references to "whataboutism" in the Oxford Living Dictionaries and Cambridge Dictionary.
What's "made up" is your incorrect definition that you gave for it: "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason".
What exactly is so "silly" about this -- it seems pretty serious and on-topic to me, comrade:
Tactic: Propaganda technique
Type: Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy)
Logic: Logical fallacy
Active period: Cold War–present
Prominent usage: Soviet Union propaganda, Russian propaganda, Russian annexation of Crimea, Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Donald Trump,
Related: Ad hominem, And you are lynching Negroes, The pot calling the kettle black, Red herring, The Mote and the Beam, Clean hands
Changing the subject is NOT winning the argument.
Get it?
Your point would be a lot stronger if you are able to convey a consistent world view for analyzing those scenarios, or by explaining how the scenarios are different. I mention them because I think they are similar and ought to be analyzed similarly, but I'm open to persuasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destabilisation
Secondly, your whataboutism is an effort to change the subject away from the topic, a private company concluding that it didn't want RT+Sputnik's advertising money. It then ventures into not very good equivocation (Judith Miller was not the Times; indeed, she was forced to resign by the Times).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
Given this, I accept no burden of proof. It is what it is.
Of course Judith was forced to resign once the sloppy reporting was fact checked by people who did not work at the NYT. The NYT had to let Judith go to save face after it helped defeat the anti-war activists and other people who were cautious to believe George W. Bush's claims about Saddam.
Keep in mind that for a major company like the NYT firing one reporter is not a big deal at all. It should be shocking that simply firing one person is enough to make the journalistic scandal of the millennium go away.
If you think about it, your assertion that the alleged political motives of RT are inappropriate hinges upon your judgment that it is in Russia's national interest to undermine the legitimacy of powerful interests in the US, and (apparently) thus to weaken the US or put it at some sort of disadvantage.
I realize you are convinced that my views and comments fit some schema you feel duty-bound to try to refute, but I think that if you examine your belief system on the matter you will find that you simply feel loyalty to the status quo power structure in the US, which is closely aligned with its government. Thus you oppose any sort of disruptive or revolutionary behavior or ideas that might threaten this status quo that you are fond of.
Note that the status quo in the US is corporatism and militarism, and that there is really not a leftist movement of any stature in the US. HRC and Trump are both slight permutations of a more authoritarian version of Bush or Obama, since the nation has turned more toward authoritarianism as time has gone on.
Only if you view this authoritarian, militaristic course of action as being strongly in the US national interest is it possible to believe with full certainty that RT publishing stories that might appeal to the American far left or the most disempowered Americans is a bad thing. For only then does the amplification of those ideas/movements, etc., threaten anything that is a force of good.
In my view, the biggest weakness in the US is that there is very little dissent and we put far too much trust in our leaders, and apply far too little scrutiny to our institutions (public and private), allowing significant diversion of resources to various groups who benefit from the status quo.
Politicians should fear journalists and should fear the public finding out about their excesses, their side deals, and the true stories of how they became millionaires on $150K public servant salaries. If RT helps expose these fraudulent people for what they are, the US will be far better off for it. And yes, a consequence of some toppling of the existing power structures would probably be less global militarism, but I think it's hard to argue that our laying waste to so many countries abroad is remotely in the US national interest, but no disrespect intended if you do feel strongly that Trump's action in Yemen, etc., is bold and necessary to the world order.
Go learn the real definitions of the terms you're tossing around, instead of making up your own.
You're the one who actually claims to be guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
Are you proud of that? Do you wear it as a badge of honor? Those were your own words. Don't contradict yourself now by denying that you're not trying to misdirect.
As I pointed out in that more detailed comment, I was asking some questions about similar scenarios to try to understand the analytical approach that you are applying that lets you confidently judge certain journalism as harmful.
The US interferes with elections and those states combat those attempts. Other states interfere with US elections, and we must combat those attempts as well. Welcome to the game, not playing is not an option.