If you listen to WikiLeaks people or the greater associated clique, I think it's clear that they're a politically oriented group. It's not a conventional/general journalistic ethos. More like a party publication.
This is my opinion, and mostly based on speaking to people in Melbourne att of Assange's initial persecution.
In any case, even if they were just motivated by not getting scooped, the actions stand.
No. I disagree. Not everything is the same because no one is perfect. There are differences of ethos. There are also hypocrisies, but that still doesn't get you to equivalence. If you have a negative opinion of the NYT, that's fine... but why would you even bother forming an opinion if they're all the same.
In any case, if you do believe your own position... how does that change anything? Some people formed an opinion of WikiLeaks as an organisation by how they conducted themselves during an election. How does a more nihilistic attitude towards journalism generally supposed to affect that.
This is just edgelord stuff. It doesn't lead anywhere. Has no conclusions or consequences beyond attitude.
> Some people formed an opinion of WikiLeaks as an organisation by how they conducted themselves during an election. How does a more nihilistic attitude towards journalism generally supposed to affect that.
That election behaviour is sometimes seen as distasteful because it's partisan. The OP's point seems to be that all journalism is partisan, in which case that behaviour isn't actually evidence that WikiLeaks is less reliable than any other journalistic outlet.
The New York Times' political stances are just as obvious as those of WikiLeaks, and I say this as a long-time NY Times reader.
I gave the 1619 Project as an example of how the Times' political biases shine through. It's a clear-cut case in which the Times ignored the objections of the actual experts on American history (including the historian they asked to fact-check the project, but also several heavyweights of American history, such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson), and published ideologically motivated, rubbish history. The way the Times then dismissed the criticisms of academic historians (the 1619 Project lead dismissed them as "white historians") left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. This was one of the Times' flagship projects, which they put on the cover of the paper and which they have heavily promoted since.
> nihilistic attitude towards journalism
I'm not nihilistic about journalism. The NY Times, despite its obvious political sympathies, is still a very useful source of information. So is WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks published some extremely important information that the public had a right to know. The value of WikiLeaks was that it did not have the same close relationship with the US government that the NY Times has, and that it was therefore more willing to publish material that would gravely embarrass the US government.
To give you one such example of how the NY Times' relationship with the government compromises its journalism: the Times knew about Bush's unconstitutional warrantless wiretap program before the 2004 election. It refrained from publishing the story, at the request of the Bush administration. It was only when the journalist covering the story threatened to publish it by himself, outside the Times, that the Times finally decided to run it. That was a year after the Times found out. In other words, the Times withheld a major story during a Presidential election, because the President (who was also one of the candidates) claimed vague security concerns.
WikiLeaks would not have withheld that story. That's the major difference between the Times and WikiLeaks - not that the Times is a bastion of political neutrality.
Julian Assange has been sitting in prison in the UK for years, fighting extradition to the US, which wants to lock him up for 175 years. The suggestion that he's not a journalist, because he's politically outspoken, is one of the tactics the US political establishment has used to justify going after him.
>"There are also hypocrisies, but that still doesn't get you to equivalence."
You are right. Some shit is greenish yet the other is yellowish. Personally I dislike hypocrisy way more than trying to equate different shades of shit.
>"And by shades of shit we mean all of human thought, all publications, political projects, and basically everything else?"
Really, where did you get that idea from?
>"Smarty pants nihilism has devolved into a mishmash of clichés"
Is it "nihilism has devolved" or "smarty pants" hypocrisy will come up with any shitty argument to prove that "yeah we did it but we are the good guys (TM) and we did it for so ever noble reasons"? This automates even better.
The person pointed out that the NYT and journalists more broadly engage in overt propaganda — eg, lying about the Hunter Biden laptop during an election. And so the distinction the person above them was drawing between “journalists” and politically motivated actors is nonsense: the mainstream journalists routinely spread propaganda as a core part of their work.
I think you made a vapid edgelord post because you don’t have a real defense to your position:
“Guys, guys — I really trust the people who lied about Iraq WMDs to tell me the truth about Ukraine!”
No. I acknowledged the comment about the NYT, but it's not particularly relevant. We were discussing wikileaks. GP's point was that no one's opinion of wikileaks' could have been influenced by the conduct of wikileaks' because everything is hypocrisy period, no exceptions.
That's vapid, tldr edgelord nonsense. GP stands accused.
Hypocrisy exists therefore every narrative begins and ends there. By the same reasoning, you cannot have possibly been influenced by the details of 1619 fact checking or whatnot.
You have to live in the world that is. People lie. They have biases, agendas, etc. Knowing this doesn't give you the ability to see through the matrix. You still have to use judgement... and people do. People generally grow out of black pill mode by either moderating and backing out or eventually checking out, b/c even they are sick of listening to them. There isn't really a way forward.
I haven't read 1619 or taken an interest. Purely from the surrounding noise, it sounds like it's all coming from people brand new to critiquing history books or social theory.... Welcome to critical theory and enjoy trying to board the Titanic as it sinks.
> Purely from the surrounding noise, it sounds like it's all coming from people brand new to critiquing history books or social theory....
The criticism came from the historical profession. The NY Times tasked someone who is not a historian to lead their flagship project on American history (and if you follow her on Twitter, it quickly becomes clear that she's not even a well read amateur historian, and she doesn't appear to have even a better than average grasp of history at all). She made some really explosive - and straight-up incorrect - claims about American history. For example, a central part of her thesis is that the Americans rebelled against Britain because Britain was about to abolish slavery. That's utter nonsense, and the historian the NY Times hired to check the piece for accuracy told them as much. They ignored that historian and printed the claim anyways.
Some of the most famous historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War saw the newspaper of record making these kinds of absurd claims in print, and flipped out. These are liberal historians who read and respect the NY Times, so they were upset that it was making an utter mess of their field. They wrote a letter to the Times explaining their objections. The Times responded by basically saying, "We know better," and that they weren't going to correct anything. On Twitter, the 1619 Project lead dismissed those historians as "white men." Finally, the historian the Times originally asked to fact check their piece, who is a black woman, wrote an article explaining that she had told the Times they were wrong before publication, but that they had ignored her. The Times then went and did a minimal "clarification," which watered down one of their original, incorrect claims just enough so that it is now unfalsifiable.
This wasn't just some squabble between historians. It was a fight between historians and a newspaper (and a project lead who doesn't know anything about history) that wanted to sell a narrative that is simply incorrect.
Why did the Times do this? Because it fit in perfectly with the angle they had decided they wanted to pursue. The NY Times had an all-hands meeting around the time of the 1619 Project in which Dean Baquet told the staff that the paper was going to try to connect every story to race. That was going to be the Times' signature feature going forward. They did that with their big, feature historical piece, completely messed it up, and then responded arrogantly to the historical profession.
People who say that WikiLeaks isn't a journalistic organization because it has an agenda are incredibly naive about how journalistic organizations actually behave. This line of attack is being used to artificially separate WikiLeaks from journalism and justify the government's campaign against it and Assange. If we accept this line of argument, then in the future, the government can go after any organization that publishes news, but which the government claims has an agenda.
"People who say that WikiLeaks isn't a journalistic organization because it has an agenda"
We're like 15 deep into a flame thread... and I'm pretty sure no one up this thread has said anything like that.
As I said, I haven't read it or taken much interest... and hence commented only on the noise that has reached the uninterested. Seems mostly like politibait, drawing conservatives into a tussle the way Trump drew in liberals. I'll note that this thread is not about 1619, american history or NYT. It's about wikileaks. 1619 came into it as "proof" that everything everywhere is hypocrisy and only hypocrisy. Hence anyone's opinion on Wikileaks as an organisation reflects only hypocrisy, and in no cases is caused by Wikileaks conduct, ethos, etc.
This is exactly what I meant by noise. 1619 always seems to always be one person ranting to a nonconsensual partner that something they had assumed happens all the time (and don't care) is happening right now. I don't care! Go write the 1620 project in protest. There are lots of books to get angry about. Diversify. This is boring to those of us not into that sort of thing. Be considerate.
I just gave the 1619 Project as an example (alongside the NY Times burying a massive story at Bush Jr's request in 2004, so that it wouldn't come out during the election) of the political biases of the NY Times.
> Seems mostly like politibait, drawing conservatives into a tussle the way Trump drew in liberals.
Liberal and left-wing historians were actually the most outraged about the project. Trump only caught onto the controversy much later. The claim that the critics of the project were just conservatives was a dishonest deflection often used by the Times' supporters in the controversy.
The claim was made above that WikiLeaks isn't a journalistic organization because it has an agenda. Most journalistic organizations, even the paper of record, have strong biases and agendas. That doesn't justify labeling them "non-state hostile intelligence agencies" and trying to lock up their editors for 175 years.
> If you listen to WikiLeaks people or the greater associated clique, I think it's clear that they're a politically oriented group. It's not a conventional/general journalistic ethos. More like a party publication.
This is the line of attack that's been used over the last decade to build public support for the US government's campaign against WikiLeaks. This culminated in Pompeo's labeling of Wikileaks as a hostile intelligence agency (as I quoted above).
Assange is facing extradition to the US and 175 years in prison for publishing evidence of US war crimes in Iraq. The US government's case hinges on trying to separate WikiLeaks from journalism. Your argument plays right into that.
to sum up, political slant that aligns with your politics is good, the rest is bad/edgelord/nihilism.
Everything else aside, if you just compare Nytimes and wikileaks, it's easy to see who the good guys are - the one who stood up against the biggest power in the history of mankind at immense personal and organizational cost vs the ones who perpetuated lies to support Iraq Wars, US sponsored Coups, Genocides. One siding with nytimes on his/her politics ignoring everything is on him/her. Maybe from US internal politics perspective Nytimes is the good guy, but for everyone else, they are absolutely the bad guys.
journalism. noun. writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation
--> this function is what makes "journalism" special and why excessive political leanings contaminate the enterprise. Publishing a website, having an audience, makes one a part of the mass media as compared to a journalist.
People of the wrong political orientation are now cheerleading the Russians in their invasion of Ukraine, so they are bad regardless of their current position on Iraq of 2002. Wrong/bad because of the suffering brought to the world.
im not sure what people are looking for when they ask this absurd question. while this may not be the case with you, i suspect its usually asked in bad-faith by people who are trying to insinuate that all actions are equally (non)reprehensible--which is of course, nonsense.
we start with certain foundations, we hold that certain truths are self-evident. and we build from there.
