Yes, the US is far from perfect, which it why is a good idea to get news from a variety of sources. I try to read about the Ukraine war from other perspectives, for example.
But those instances are:
illegal and therefore quite rare
generally limited to instances of revealing state secrets (as in the case of Assange, Snowdon, etc)
very unpopular
So in general, journalists have much more freedom to criticize their government here in the US vs Russia or China, and to me that has value. It’s not perfect and you can certainly get a lot of misinformation through strong biases here (i.e. many people assume their country is in the right), but it’s way better in pretty much any western country than a country with a much more authoritarian government.
Your argument just seems like classic bothsidesism. Yes, western media isn’t perfect, but western news media is far more free than Russian or Chinese media. So I’m gonna have a lot more skepticism about Russian and Chinese media than I do with US or European media.
In this case, I’d prefer something outside both regions. So maybe Indian news? Or my go-to, Al Jazeera.
No, our standard is, “we’re killing journalists (very rarely) and stifling perspectives (rarely), and that’s not okay, but at least that’s just not expected like it is with the other guys.”
That’s under the assumption that perspectives are only rarely stifled…
Which I’d love to think is true, but really is a question of whether you consider “publishable but no one will read it” to be a stifled perspective or not.
What it really comes down to is how often journalistic suppression actually happens. I like to look at the extreme examples, such as the Edward Snowdon case. There was certainly some interference there, but that’s surely nothing compared to what would happen if something similar happened in China or Russia.
The bigger issue that we have, imo, is that major media companies self-censor because they want to drive a narrative. But there’s still high quantity journalism going on, you just need to look outside of the major news networks.
But if your high quality journalism only reaches 1% of the population while the other 99% of the population considers it fake news, what’s the point? It’ll have no political impact anyway, which defeats the purpose of journalistic integrity because good journalism isn’t getting attention or shifting public perception.
Yes, the US is far from perfect, which it why is a good idea to get news from a variety of sources. I try to read about the Ukraine war from other perspectives, for example.
But those instances are:
So in general, journalists have much more freedom to criticize their government here in the US vs Russia or China, and to me that has value. It’s not perfect and you can certainly get a lot of misinformation through strong biases here (i.e. many people assume their country is in the right), but it’s way better in pretty much any western country than a country with a much more authoritarian government.
You can argue pretty much the exact same three points about government intervention in journalism everywhere.
Not really selling your point.
Your argument just seems like classic bothsidesism. Yes, western media isn’t perfect, but western news media is far more free than Russian or Chinese media. So I’m gonna have a lot more skepticism about Russian and Chinese media than I do with US or European media.
In this case, I’d prefer something outside both regions. So maybe Indian news? Or my go-to, Al Jazeera.
So our standard is… “we’re killing journalists and stifling perspectives, but not as much as the other guys?”
Great. I guess Western news media is driven by profits instead of government objectives, which makes things so much better.
No, our standard is, “we’re killing journalists (very rarely) and stifling perspectives (rarely), and that’s not okay, but at least that’s just not expected like it is with the other guys.”
That’s under the assumption that perspectives are only rarely stifled…
Which I’d love to think is true, but really is a question of whether you consider “publishable but no one will read it” to be a stifled perspective or not.
What it really comes down to is how often journalistic suppression actually happens. I like to look at the extreme examples, such as the Edward Snowdon case. There was certainly some interference there, but that’s surely nothing compared to what would happen if something similar happened in China or Russia.
The bigger issue that we have, imo, is that major media companies self-censor because they want to drive a narrative. But there’s still high quantity journalism going on, you just need to look outside of the major news networks.
But if your high quality journalism only reaches 1% of the population while the other 99% of the population considers it fake news, what’s the point? It’ll have no political impact anyway, which defeats the purpose of journalistic integrity because good journalism isn’t getting attention or shifting public perception.