US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2814

On October 31 2020 13:50 WombaT wrote:

Part of journalism is ascertaining if a story is credible enough to be published, it’s not just throwing anything out there as long as you name your sources.

If nothing else because the impact of a scoop in the public consciousness tends not to be equally counteracted by a retraction. An odd quirk of human nature, but a pertinent one nonetheless. One that should be factored in to what one puts out there.

On November 01 2020 00:24 Danglars wrote:

You won’t have a way to report on the story (Giuliani has a laptop hard drive, there are pictures with the presidential candidates son and a crack pipe, there are emails) and come to a final decision on veracity prior to publication. The paper asks for comment, does its best in first pass to find corroboration, and publishes to bring more out.

This is in essence dictating to the publication what is credible enough. We’re in a post-pee-tape dossier world. You no longer have weight behind you to dictate what, to the New York Post, is credible enough to publish. And I already stated what follow up political actions meant it gained authority in retrospect (to the sound of crickets, unsurprisingly). The media and social media then turned the Streisand effect up to 11.

I trust the viewers, yes the much maligned American people, to read the truthful account of the sourcing and decide what level of doubt to apply to the actors in it. And I expect the media to attempt further verification with such hard questions as “Does the FBI indeed have this laptop and since when?” I hold the WSJ up as the sterling example of media doing their job and not moaning about how unfair it is that they wouldn’t have published and someone actually published news.

On October 31 2020 13:24 Nevuk wrote:

When you say "no you can't have any" when the media asks you for any additional information at all so that they can corroborate, you deserve to get laughed out of the room. That's all that's happening here. They wouldn't even trust the Daily Caller with the info : just Fox News and the NY Post so far.

I'm now pretty certain that no, they should not have ever been published. The NY Post forfeited all rights to be treated as a breaking source, ever again, in the future, with one story. It's incredible how blatantly a lie it was from the start : which was why no journalist there was willing to attribute their name to it.

These are the new red flags I've read just in the time since your post:

One of the sources of this whole conspiracy isn't even real. Their photo it turns out, is an ai composite, the security company they said he worked for doesn't exist, and no one with that name has ever existed in Switzerland.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-groundwork-hunter-biden-conspiracy-deluge-n1245387


The person who claims to have been an associate of the Bidens is 635$k in debt, making it super easy to compromise him. A week and a half ago he was ordered to pay it by a court, and suddenly he has a change of heart.

Order:
https://heavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/bobulinski-lawsuit.pdf
Screenshot:


He also still has literally 0 proof that anything he's saying is true. Biden's campaign is also now back to claiming that not even the alleged meeting in that email ever happened.

The only reason any narrative exists about the media is because conservative media has been pushing it in a wildly reckless manner. Responsible news media has also been especially reluctant to publish unverified info on this since it reeks of foreign intelligence interference, and it has the exact same timing and pattern as what happened in 2016.

Any "questions to be asked" about it are also ridiculous, as whatever Hunter is guilty of, he's not a factor in the election. I can trust that Biden isn't going to hire him to be part of his staff: As Ivanka is currently working in the White House, her vagaries are much more relevant but still treated with kid gloves by the mainstream media.

On November 01 2020 00:49 Gorsameth wrote:
The Steele dossier came from a reputable source and multiple parts of it were verified to be true.

The Hunter story came from an extremely unreliable source and pretty much nothing of it has been verified. Some pictures of Hunter with a crackpipe do not make a case for corruption.

Pretty sure the FBI was asked and they gave the only answer they can "no comment on an ongoing investigation".

And ROFLMAO at "trusting the American people to know the truth" when daily we see example after example of Fox or the administration lying to the American people and a certain segment of the population eating it up like the word of god.

I would point to Tucker Carlson as an example but a dog ate my links and I didn't make backups.....

On October 31 2020 23:21 JimmiC wrote:

I mean they found the package I'm not sure they found what Tucker described, since you think this proof would be something they would like to get out ASAP.

It looks like a package was lost and then Tucker came up.with this tale. Which is kind of classic, take a little bit of truth to try to make you lie more believable. Seems unbelievable that after losing this amazing evidence they would have it returned and then sit on it.

A study conducted by four Stanford University economic researchers determined that 18 Trump campaign rallies, the bulk of which took place over the past summer, “ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of COVID-19” and “likely led to more than 700 deaths.”

The study examined 18 counties that hosted Trump rallies in locations such as Tulsa, Oklahoma; Phoenix, Arizona; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, held between June 20 and September 22. It then compared the rate of post-rally Covid-19 infections in the host counties to that of comparable counties that did not host a rally. Attendance at individual rallies varied, but Trump often draws thousands of supporters to these events.

“For the vast majority of county matching procedures we employ,” the authors wrote, “our estimate of the average treatment effect across the eighteen rallies implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of COVID-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents.” The researchers — B. Douglas Bernheim, an economics professor at Stanford, and Stanford grad students Nina Buchmann, Zach Freitas-Groff, and Sebastián Otero — extrapolated that figure to the entire sample, concluding that the rallies led to thousands of new infections and, likely, hundreds of deaths.

On November 01 2020 00:24 Danglars wrote:

You won’t have a way to report on the story (Giuliani has a laptop hard drive, there are pictures with the presidential candidates son and a crack pipe, there are emails) and come to a final decision on veracity prior to publication. The paper asks for comment, does its best in first pass to find corroboration, and publishes to bring more out.

This is in essence dictating to the publication what is credible enough. We’re in a post-pee-tape dossier world. You no longer have weight behind you to dictate what, to the New York Post, is credible enough to publish. And I already stated what follow up political actions meant it gained authority in retrospect (to the sound of crickets, unsurprisingly). The media and social media then turned the Streisand effect up to 11.

I trust the viewers, yes the much maligned American people, to read the truthful account of the sourcing and decide what level of doubt to apply to the actors in it. And I expect the media to attempt further verification with such hard questions as “Does the FBI indeed have this laptop and since when?” I hold the WSJ up as the sterling example of media doing their job and not moaning about how unfair it is that they wouldn’t have published and someone actually published news.

On November 01 2020 01:43 KwarK wrote:
Lying to people and then insisting it’s a virtue because you had faith in their ability to see through your lies is a very special form of gaslighting. This “You think we shouldn’t lie to people? Do you think they’re too stupid to see through the lies? Why do you hate America?!” has to stop.

On November 01 2020 02:55 WombaT wrote:

Why do you have this faith? In theory I agree but that requires a consistently reliable media reporting of basic facts and I think the whole edifice is extremely hard to maintain in an era of innumerable alternative sources, some of whom are specialists in a particular area and in ways better than the broad-focused media, some are of extreme dubiousness as reliable interlocutors. Journalism is a full-time gig when done properly, laymen don’t have the time or sometimes the skillset to journalism the journalists.

To that end Nevuk posting on the topic quite extensively in a thread I frequent in my daily routine has been much appreciated, otherwise it’s not a story I’d be particularly chasing down.

Perhaps I am reading you wrong here. I’m merely saying that in a world with so much informational complexity that stories need to be solid as possible when they ship. By want of a crude analogy, not like a computer game shipping with bugs and being patched after the fact.

If something is published journalists should (and many do) point out the flaws in allegations or potential motivations of the actors within their own.

As per your pee dossier example, doesn’t really pass my smell test anyway. Trump the known germaphobe and all that. Should that have even been published, or if published with that caveat front and centre? But it was and there’s probably lots of people out there who actually believe that, but wouldn’t if the story exists. And probably would be hard to dislodge from believing it, even if I, noted Trump fan think it seems highly dubious.

On November 01 2020 03:03 Nevuk wrote:
I will also note that a lot of journalists thought the dossier shouldn't have been published by the press, and that Buzzfeed justified publishing it to the public because all of the press had access and had been referencing it repeatedly (and it was being used by the FBI and McCain, but no one knew that at the time).

On November 01 2020 03:28 Danglars wrote:

This is in fact not how Buzzfeed justified publishing it to the public.