#bad journalism

[mental-mona]

BBC Gaza documentary translates ‘Jihad’ to ‘resistance,’ ‘Jews’ to ‘Israeli army’

In fresh scrutiny of controversial film, report accuses broadcaster of 'whitewashing' terror support with what an Israeli diplomat calls 'in

But please do tell me again how the BBC is unbiased...

[unchronology]

Incredible.

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

‘Imbalance’ of women doctors harming NHS, retired surgeon says | The Independent

See this? This is what people mean when they talk about poor journalistic integrity. Why are you positioning old has been as some kind of expert in NHS staffing levels instead of the retired old sexist he is?

[crazy-lizard-lover]

My school's newspaper, for their only paper copy of the year, decided to use AI slop for its front cover.

Mind you, we have an AMAZING art department that could've done this same concept far better in a multitude of mediums, yet they used AI to "rEfLeCt MoDeRn TrEnDs"

[secretneongenesis]

Yeah so until we get more evidence that isn't an unverified true crime podcast behind a paywall and (checks notes) the Daily Mail of all things, I'm gonna sit this one out. It's definitively (depressingly) possible but the sources are both very suspect.

[jewelpit]

How not to ring in pride by plugging a Matt Walsh film, courtesy of Ars Technica

(I'm posting this today because I wanted to give them the weekend to respond to it, and it's now nearly 1:00 PM EDT and there's still no official response or even message that the article has been edited, s here we are)

So I don't know how many of my friend on here read science and tech news, but for several years my favorite source for these subjects was Ars Technica, which seemed (emphasis on the past tense here) to have a higher level of journalistic quality than most of the free sci/tech news sites out there. They've even earned a reputation for being moderately progressive, with articles covering the reality of climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines.

This weekend, we learned that this veneer of progressiveness has a sharp and painful limit: LGBTQ+ issues.

Last week, Twitter's safety chief resigned after Elon Musk ordered her to surface an anti-trans propaganda piece, What Is A Woman, by Matt Walsh, a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ hate figure and major popularizer of the current push to label all LGBTQ+ people as sexual predators and groomers.

This could have been an easy slam dunk for Ars. Cover the departure, cover even the tiniest bit of backstory into Matt Walsh and why he's such a shitty guy, and then wait for the ad dollars from your progressive-leaning audience to roll in.

Instead, we got this (Wayback link here):

That was it. That was the whole article.

No mention of Matt Walsh proudly talking on Twitter about how he helped spread the "all queers are groomers" rhetoric that's spreading strong throughout much of the US (and it's only a matter of time before that breaches containment). No mention of how Chloe Cole holds rallies to try to make try to make puberty blockers and hormone treatment (which collectively have a regret rate that hovers around 1%) illegal for anyone to access until they're 18 and puberty has already permanently changed their body.

Ars' failure doesn't stop here, though I wish it did. Let's check the comment count:

Now for people who don't read Ars, that number might not mean much. Here it is in context:

Eight times as many comments as half the stories around it. Three times as many comments as an article about EA and gaming NFTs, topics that are guaranteed to create discussion. The only story that even comes close is a multi-page article about Starliner, a topic which consistently creates strong engagement on a site that cares enough about space to have its own purely-rocket themed sub-periodical.

Remember above when I said that Ars got a reputation as a semi-progressive site because they supported vaccines and the reality of climate change? That extended to the comments section, where their moderators would remove comments that called climate change fake or vaccines a scam. Let's see what kind of comments they're leaving up on this article:

Interesting how some topics are tightly moderated, and others, when they concern human rights, are left to the Ars community (which thankfully downvoted these posts into oblivion).

Save your downvote fingers, though, because these comments are locked to hell and back. No upvotes, no downvotes, no further comments. Just this:

"Culture war topics." "It should go without saying that the intent was not to spread hate." "This story was really about Ella Irwin's resignation... [and] Twitter is becoming less safe for some people seemingly by the hour."

I wonder if Ken Fisher, the founder and editor-in-chief, has any experience with running a site that's becoming less safe for "some people" by the hour? Given how they handled this this weekend, the first weekend of Pride month, I'd say he does.

Catch that part where he said the story is being updated? Here's a Wayback link to the updated version: linkle. Unfortunately it's now long enough to be a multi-page article, which means that putting it into the Wayback machine is a hassle, and it's so much longer that I'm not going to link it in here, but I suggest giving it a read.

Notice anything missing? Anything like... any kind of notice that the article was updated? A timestamp for updates? Nope, gonna just drop a modified version and pretend that this was the only version that ever existed. Thanks for the great article and amazing updates, Jon Brodkin.

...

...

Wait a second. So Jon Brodkin wrote an article that uncritically parroted talking points from an anti-trans propaganda piece made by an openly transphobic Christian nationalist. Is this an honest mistake, or is Jon in on the bit? Let's check who he follows on Twitter (sourced from https://twitter.com/jbrodkin/following).

...and of course:

He follows some green people too, but it's just politicians and fiction writers. No pro-trans publications or pro-trans nonfiction writers. At this point, the lazy response from the journalism team at Ars Technica is pretty clear. Rather than this being a case of uninformed allies making a mistake and trying to cover it up rather than own it, it seems a lot more likely that they have an actual transphobic employee, who intentionally published an actual transphobic article, and the leadership team cares more about protecting his professional reputation than they do about not spreading hate.

Happy fucking Pride.

[jonairadreaming]

Can't believe this shit isn't satire

And no, it isn't just a ragebait headline to make people read an otherwise balanced article.

Article below the cut

One of the more moving stories in The Times this week is an account of the life of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive who was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside of a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa,” a tiny farming community north of Des Moines,Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño report. “His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain.” Thompson’s childhood was spent “going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms.”

Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed. One ex-reporter, Taylor Lorenz, said she felt “joy” at the killing. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, offered that “violence is never the answer” but “people can only be pushed so far.” Pictures of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of Thompson, have also elicited a fair amount of oohing and ahhing on social media over his toned physique and bright smile.

But if Mangione’s personal story (at least what we know of it so far) is supposed to serve as some sort of parable, it isn’t one that progressives should take comfort in. He is the scion of a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, was educated at an elite private school and the University of Pennsylvania and worked remotely from a nice apartment in Hawaii. And while Mangione, like millions of people, apparently suffered from debilitating back pain, excellent health care is not generally an issue for Americans of great wealth.

All this suggests that Mangione may prove to be a figure out of a Dostoyevsky novel — Raskolnikov with a silver spoon. It’s a familiar type. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was a lawyer’s son whose mother moved him to London before he went on to become an international terrorist. Osama bin Laden came from immense wealth. Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies can cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion.

As for the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss America’s supposed rage at private health insurers, it’s worth pointing out that a 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.” Even a majority of those who say their health is “fair” or “poor” still broadly like their health insurance. No industry is perfect — nor is any health care model — and insurance companies make terrible calls all the time in the interest of cost savings. But the idea that those companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.

Thompson’s life may have been cut brutally short, but it will remain a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life without the benefit of rich parents and an Ivy League degree. As for the killer, John Fetterman had the choicest words: He’s “going to die in prison,” the peerless Pennsylvania senator told HuffPost. “Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.”

What this complete bullshit very conveniently leaves out is that even the aforementioned "moving story" about Brian Thompson's life very much included this account of nastiness as well:

But during Mr. Thompson’s tenure, UnitedHealthcare and its parent company were accused by lawmakers and regulators of systematically rejecting health claims.

UnitedHealth Group was the subject of a blistering report by a Senate panel this year that documented insurers’ refusal to pay for the care of older people recovering from falls or strokes. Mr. Thompson’s company was cited for a surge in denial rates of post-acute care for people on private Medicare Advantage plans, which increased to 22.7 percent in 2022 from 10.9 percent in 2020.

Earlier this year, Mr. Thompson and two other UnitedHealth Group executives were accused of insider trading and fraud in a lawsuit filed by the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund.

The lawsuit claimed Mr. Thompson sold $15 million in personally held company stock while the Justice Department was starting an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth Group, an inquiry that he and other executives had failed to disclose. When news of the investigation became public, the price of the company’s stock plunged, erasing nearly $25 billion in shareholder value, according to the lawsuit. On Tuesday, officials from UnitedHealth Group declined to comment on the matter.

[supremechancellorrex]

Honestly, my respect for the BBC continues to take a nose-dive. If I had a penny for every false equivalence made by hack reporters there, I'd be a millionaire.

Comparing the "far-right" and "far-left" is comparing a dumpy wolf with blood on its mouth to a kitten. The far-right, fuelled by misinformation and immoral, self-interest billionaires and cult leaders, are an astronomical threat to democracy, to the point of violently trying to overthrow it or at least weaken democratic institutions in real-time so they can in the future. The fact the BBC even writes a sentence like this shows how unobjective they are.