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by Normille 1341 days ago
You're missing my point. Various news sources are reporting that Putin "threatened to use nuclear weapons" with the patently obvious suggestion that he was threatening a first strike and explicitly said that he would use nuclear weapons in that. Now I'm not disputing the inference that can be drawn from what he said. That's obvious. What I'm trying to point out is that this 'inference' we're all drawing is now being reported repeatedly as an actual statement he made. Which is completely untrue.

It's like if I said "adam has threatened to kick me in the bollocks. Well, if he does so, he should remember I have steel toe-capped boots too!" and the press all reported that as "Normille threatens to kick adam in the bollocks".

It ignores both the fact that I actually said I'd only retaliate if adam kicked me in the bollocks first AND the fact that I didn't actually say I would kick adam in the bollocks, but just reminded him that he wasn't the only one wearing big boots.

It may sound pedantic. But reporting what you inferred from what someone said as a direct quote attributed to that person is not honest journalism.

1 comments

You are in the wrong here. Putin did threaten to use nuclear weapon when he said “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal, this is not a bluff”. There is no misleading there. He tried to justify it by saying that’d be in response to some threat to Russia. We all know Nazi has been the justification for his invasion of Ukraine, no matter how ridiculous it is. Do you think he wouldn’t fabricate another threat to justify his use of nuclear weapon?

As for reporting it as threaten to use nuclear weapon as “first strike”, I haven’t seen any news that specifically mentioned “first strike”. Care to give an example?

  >Putin did threaten to use nuclear weapon when he said “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal, this is not a bluff”. 

  >I haven’t seen any news that specifically mentioned “first strike”. Care to give an example?
You're literally proving my point there.

In the first quote above you're telling me Putin did threaten to use nuclear weapons, even though he didn't say those actual words

In the second quote you're asking me to prove my 'inference' by showing you where those actual words were used.

So you want it both ways? We can infer what Putin meant and report that as direct quote. But when reporting statements from 'our side' we must stick to the actual words used?

If you can't see the inconsistency there, there's no point even debating this further.