Re:The war on disinformation is a war on dissent
by geebee on Sunday February 07, 2021 @01:53PM
(#26057125)
Ah, whataboutism. It's not a magical word. You can't say "wingardium whatabousa", wave your wand, and make all your own hypocricies disappear.
To me - and this is my own standard, not a set of rules - whataboutism a fallacy is specifically used to avoid acknowledging a problem by derailing the discussion.
If a person fully and thoroughly acknowledges a problem, and does not minimize the importance of that problem, then it is not whataboutism to point out the hypocrisy of the other side during the analysis - especially if someone denies or minimizes the existence of bias from the other side.
In short, an article like this from The Atlantic (including a reference to an early pandemic NYTimes article that claimed advocating for travel bans was racist) is not whataboutism. These are not just reasonable but important observations:
And lastly, while I agree with you about much of Trump and right wing media, I was pretty aghast with the times, WaPo, and other media outlets (this link also from The Atlantic). To be fair the National Review also got this wrong at first.
As an aside, The Atlantic is an interesting publication - it is a very left leaning, but has a number of writers who are absolutely willing to go straight at the left when they feel it is behaving hypocritically.
To me - and this is my own standard, not a set of rules - whataboutism a fallacy is specifically used to avoid acknowledging a problem by derailing the discussion.
If a person fully and thoroughly acknowledges a problem, and does not minimize the importance of that problem, then it is not whataboutism to point out the hypocrisy of the other side during the analysis - especially if someone denies or minimizes the existence of bias from the other side.
In short, an article like this from The Atlantic (including a reference to an early pandemic NYTimes article that claimed advocating for travel bans was racist) is not whataboutism. These are not just reasonable but important observations:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-...
And lastly, while I agree with you about much of Trump and right wing media, I was pretty aghast with the times, WaPo, and other media outlets (this link also from The Atlantic). To be fair the National Review also got this wrong at first.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...
As an aside, The Atlantic is an interesting publication - it is a very left leaning, but has a number of writers who are absolutely willing to go straight at the left when they feel it is behaving hypocritically.