|
|
|
|
|
|
by yrimaxi
1989 days ago
|
|
|
This isn’t so much a counter-argument as it’s a disjointed muddy-the-waters statement. Muffin recipes...? Of course a paragraph-long comment won’t provide a rigorous critique of the media. And I might disagree with that commenter with regards to “fake news”, since you can go a long way without outright lying (omission being one tactic). In any case, there are long-form critiques of this phenomena if one is interested. And they’re not crackpot theories. |
|
|
Not to single out the commenter above, as it's a common phenomenon.
There was nothing muddying about my comment. If someone has an issue to take up with a particular writer and their treatment of a subject in an opinion column that is one thing, but that's not what was happening. What I was pointing out and opposing is the treatment of "MSM" as "fake news" and "propaganda"[0] as a whole. So, unless recipes, arts columns, news reporting, and travel writing are also all "fake news", the NYT is not "fake news".
Media literacy always has been of severe importance, and it really begins with a base level literacy and handling of the language and context the writing comes from. Picking out a couple of opinion columns and using them to brand an entire field of work and study as "fake news" is problematic.
Frankly, the problem seems to stem with many people misreading Orwell (or not at all before raising his name as a moral objection), and not even taking a moment to read that they're browsing the opinion section before they've decided to take off with outrage.
I never argued with their opinions. I countered their understanding of the functioning of North American media with illustrations.
[0] When this word is pegged in next to "fake news", one tends to understand, given the context, that the meaning was idiomatic in the anti-journalism sense and not the larger meaning of the word.