The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central Journalisming

so than why wouldn't wikileaks turn around and release it themselves?

Assange has an agenda and he uses wikileaks to accomplish his goals. Let's not for a second think hes benevolent. If hes the arbiter of free info, why did he have an issue with the release of the Panama Papers?

I guess the question then is, does it matter?

I'm certainly willing to entertain the idea that he has a bias, especially against the US Establishment, and Hillary Clinton in particular, seeing the lengths to which he and Wikileask were targeted. After all, what he as a publisher of information reaped from the US, and Hillary in particular as SoS, was attempts at extradition and USGov pressuring the financial sector to cut ties.

So if someone wants to make a case that Wikileaks has become bias against the US, I find that believable. Or if someone alleged that they had to cut deals with certain polities as a matter of survival.

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The question I posit though, is what does it matter?

Since when in the US, did we as a people, and especially the media, take a position that it should be criminal to publish true, in-context information, simply because we don't like person publishing it or their motives?

Who is benevolent? No one is. US media and govt surely aren't. But so what?

People need to take a long hard look in the mirror, and ask what is more important: That the public get truthful , in-context reporting - or that information reported suits your own personal political opinions.

I have yet to see someone articulate a a case against Assange, or the Podesta leaks, that is more intellectually robust than "I don't like the person who did it, who it helped, or why they did it."

It would be great to find one, but I don't think there is one. Paradoxically, if you attack people for releasing information because you don't like the source, you aren't any better than the authoritarian regimes doing the alleged releasing. Is acting like Putin the best repose to Putin trying to influence politics? I fail to see how those who advocate such a tihng are any better than Putin.

They are looking to generate controversy. They aren't on a grand crusade. This generated no interest, and they didn't want to belabor a topic no one is interested in.

That is not their business model, whatever the Hell their business model is.

That's just as bad or worse than fake news.

How is biased journalism not an instance of fake news?

No, because something can both be biased and still be technically factual, i.e most of what Fox News puts out. So they are not lying to their viewers but they are not presenting them with all the information. This is why you should be getting your news from multiple sources.

Fake news, unless we don't really care what the definition of words are nowadays, is just plain fake.

*addendum - Bias can happen on many different levels as well. For instance, what a news agency chooses to cover and not can be a form of bias.

Biased Journalism example: Interviewing a hundred people, then taking excerpts from the five who said something in line with the narrative you want to push, and reporting it in a manner that makes it sound like the sample was representative of the population surveyed.

Fake news example: Saying Hillary might be arrested for running a child sex ring soon, because you saw it on an anonymous 4chan post.

Another example of biased journalism is providing technically true statements that aren't actually directly relevant to the story, or are unrepresentative of the situation, to create a pejorative mental association.

For example, and this will be an unpopular example, during the Trayvon Martin case. Showing the picture of Martin as a 12-year old, and saying "this kid" , instead of using a more recent picture, giving the impression that the person shot was actually the small kid, not the 6'+ man he'd since become. Or NBC's selective airing of Zimmerman's words.

For the record, I don't like Zimmerman - but that whole incident makes for a great case study in media bias and narrative pushing, especially since they went a bit further with it than normal, making it really easy to catch and call out. Which few people do, because no one wants to give the impression of being on Zimmerman's side.

In my view, this is by far the most pervasive form of bias among the generally reputable media outlets. Especially in regards to political reporting.

Selective biased reporting is just another way of lying.

How would you spin this one against this one?

Same story, two totally different spins. When does bias become an outright lie?