Russia to punish ‘fake news’ about Ukraine war with 15 years’ jail

Re:Russia to punish ‘fake news’ about Ukraine war with 15 ye... by cromd on Thursday March 03, 2022 @01:08PM (#30544466)

This seems to be largely about your definition of war. No elections were overturned, but could you say he waged war on elections? He had his team out there saying that Hugo Chavez created the rigged voting machines and that it was statistically impossible for Biden to have won. It was an ideological war, not a physical war. You don't have to jail anyone to nonetheless do broad damage to an institution. I agree that people can over-analyze sloppy comments from fringe weirdo politicians, but here is something the president tweeted:

>“They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs,” he continued. “They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

(https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...)

And surely media can be bad, can harm people, can lie, but "ENEMY" is interesting.

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Re:Russia to punish ‘fake news’ about Ukraine war with 15 ye... by ch4s3 on Thursday March 03, 2022 @01:33PM (#30544807)

Being a shit-bag and. a bully just isn't a "war". Arguably the controversy saved most of the legacy media landscape from financial ruin and gave them 4 more years to adjust to some new revenue models, the NYT in particular seems to have figured out how to pivot to a profitable online subscriber model that works. It wasn't clear in mid 2016 that they would be able to do that.

You can make a good case that the guy damaged the discourse and eroded trust in institutions, but news and journalism have flourished in recent years.

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