Not obvious to me at all. It doesn’t follow that because a country helped fight genocide in the past that somehow makes them incapable of perpetrating it themselves? Makes no logical sense.

How so?

No.

And that doesn’t make me stupid because there exist times I say yes.

Good context to have!

I’m not commenting on this particular case because I’m uninformed, the Times very well could have completely shit the bed here.

But one difference between a news outlet and an every day citizen is that a news outlet pretty much has to report on what the government’s position is. If the white house claims there are WMD’s, that’s something the public needs to know. Of course the language around how that gets presented is everything!

It sounds like there was too much blind trust in that statement and the language didn’t leave enough room for scepticism in this particular case. But it’s worth remembering that in other cases there’s a difference between towing the line and reporting words as a statement of fact. The fact being that the words were said but not necessarily that the words are true.

Regarding the WMD thing, was it proven the Times was aware of the mistakes and published anyway? Or were they also deceived by the government like everyone else?

I’m not American and I almost never read the Times, so I don’t have first hand experience. But I hear the same rhetoric about outlets here in Canada.

My take is that yes, outlets can have bias on certain issues, but that doesn’t mean we should write them off completely. Trust in media is at an all time low, journalism is struggling to survive. There’s no media outlet in the world that doesn’t make the kinds of mistakes that you outline here. The key is how do they respond to them after the fact. Do they issue corrections? How quickly? Where do they put them?

Some of your ‘evidence’ also doesn’t seem like journalistic malpractice. For example, are they obfuscating poor sources, or not revealing an anonymous source? The latter is not malpractice. The former doesn’t sound bad either… Who decides if a source is poor? Maybe the source didn’t have much to contribute so that’s why there wasn’t much detail on their background. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong, just that as an outside observer that point doesn’t seem very bad.

Anyway, I do think it’s important to be aware of any biases in the media we consume, so conversations like this are important. But my fear is that if the conclusion is to wholesale stop trusting the media anytime they make a mistake or a bias is revealed (I.e all media outlets), we’re going to be even more fucked than we already are.

Videos are about as reliable as pictures these days. Especially if they feature a very public person.

Those options seem fine for a poll imo. If you ask the same question to older demographics and more people pick “enemy”, then isn’t the conclusion in the headline valid?