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from the I-Disapprove-of-What-You-Say,-But-I-Will-Defend-to-the-Death-Your-Right-to-Say-It dept.
From an editorial in the Otago Daily Times out of New Zealand, Censorship a Trojan Horse:
It's an oft-cited maxim that the news media is the "fourth estate" upon which a healthy democracy stands.
It ensures the three traditional powers of state — the legislature, executive and judiciary — can be critiqued, challenged and curbed from quietly drifting into the arms of corruption and authoritarianism.
A free, fair, open and uncensored media is an antidote to state power and, for all its failings (and there are many), should be treasured as such. There are many countries around the world whose people would give anything for such a freedom.
Yet calls for the banning of certain opinion pieces, cartoons and commentary have risen in recent months, especially from those using social media, a world where such talk is becoming a trend. It is a trend we must confront.
Censorship is to suppress the harmful, the unacceptable, the obscene and the threatening from the media and other forms of public communication. Like a virus attacking democracy from the inside out, it was traditionally the tool of the dictator, though it is one used by many in power.
[...] It pays to query what those demanding censorship — be they celebrities, social-media activists or anybody else — see their ultimate goal as being.
To reduce hurt? To make the world a better place? Possibly, and those motivations are laudable. But the method employed to achieve them is not.
While censorship may be meant as a figurative horse upon which a better future rides, inside the belly of that horse lurks an army of conformity, quite capable of unwitting oppression.
History shows what happens when the fourth estate is no longer free to table all opinions.
It is a bleak picture. Without the disinfectant of exposure, power and ideals tend to corrupt even the most seemingly incorruptible.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @01:32PM (10 children)
I find today's problems in media to be about extremism not censorship. The censorship is mostly self-imposed with the goal of attracting an audience and revenue. And towards this revenue goal, with self-censorship, the media becomes more extreme/one-sided.
The problem is that many people prefer a one-sided opinion about what happened, they are not interested in a balanced view that represents both sides. They want their media to be the judge and tell them the verdict on what happened.
This is easier than trying to get a balanced view. When in a discussion with a blinded one-sided opinionist, the balanced view can't "win" because it has to cede some points to both sides, while the extreme side doesn't have to do that at all. This comes across to some as the extreme version being more certain and more correct.
When I hear something interesting and want to know more, I have to spend time and effort to try and get a balanced view of what are the actual facts and what is opinion. Scouring different news agencies and media.
Let's take a recent example:
Extreme:
Kavanaugh raped someone, he should not be supreme court judge due to his criminal behavior.
Balanced:
Someone accuses Kavanaugh of sexual assault a very long time ago. A trial would definitely be problematic due to lack of evidence after all these years. However, he is running for supreme court judge, do we want our supreme court judges to be impeccable, free from all blame and accusations? If we do, then it becomes far to easy to sabotage any candidate, if we don't, the public may lose trust in the supreme court....
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:17PM (3 children)
Like Matrix - the sequels were all VFX and no story, but they sold.
Stop! I admit, it's too bad they never made any sequels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:05PM (2 children)
I rather liked #2, it's just that the end of #2 turned it into magic instead of Sci-Fi. Which really killed #3. There may have been some other holes / crazyness, but that's what really killed the series.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)
Well it was either magic or they were all still inside the Matrix, it just had a special level for minds that tried to escape. But that also renders the whole exercise pointless and the movies nihilistic so that isn't a good answer either.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:43PM
They could have explained #2's "magic ending" in #3 by saying they were still in the Matrix, and then going from there. Instead, they decided that Deus Ex Machina was a great way to go about finishing their 3 movie series. More like a sure fire way to bury the series.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:51PM (3 children)
Balanced is overrated. Often the truth is not "balanced".
Not any candidate, just the crap ones. The real problem is the corrupt politicians the voters voted in will only want corruptible judges. And the Republicans in particular appear to have rather shitty standards.
It's like a bunch of fratboys picking their judge. Of course they're not going to pick a some strait laced nerd, that would be stupid. They'll naturally pick someone from their fraternity.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:58PM (2 children)
QED.
You're making his point for him. The truth is never balanced, it is absolute. The problem is knowing what is the truth is.
You are following the democrat herd and rejecting BK based on an unsubstantiated accusation of something a drunk teenager did 35 year ago.
There are far better reasons to disqualify him*, but this insane focus on a single unprovable accusation will probably put him in office when it is dismissed. You would almost think it had been planned by his supporters.
*duckduckgo Kavanaugh perjury and start reading.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:50AM
[follows instructions, reads]
Well, seems that's more of same.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-perjury-claims-totally-baseless/ [nationalreview.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:17AM
There's plenty of provable stuff on Kavanaugh that shows he's not good Supreme Court material. He even provides some of it himself.
You're the one with the "insane focus on a single unprovable accusation".
Go troll elsewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:09AM (1 child)
When AM talk radio drifted conservative, partly due to right-leaning oligopolies forming, Republicans did away with FCC "fairness" rules, saying that "regulation of speech bad". Now many Republicans want similar regulation BACK for Internet companies. I see political hypocrisy.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:22AM
Lets see, you managed to get pretty much ALL of that short post wrong.
Rush and AM-Talk arose as a result of the "fairness doctrine" being junked so you get the causality wrong. With the Fairness Doctrine in place it would have been illegal to carry The Rush Limbaugh Program. Fairness you know... doublespeak. And despite AM radio being a bastion of the Right, lefties are free to try, several well funded attempts have been made and had no issues signing affiliates. Their problems came when the first ratings book was issued and every one after until they pulled the plug. Humorless scolds who can't even tell a proper joke for fear of offending someone can't hold anyone's attention for a three hour block when taxpayer funded NPR offers the same boring service without the endless annoying commercials that AM radio is plagued with.
AM talk radio succeeds in spite of the problems with the format because it is almost alone in the broadcast world for people of a certain traditional Right viewpoint. The Internet is of course rapidly encroaching upon its listeners except for the grays who can't figure out how to stream or download podcasts and will keep listening to Rush and Hannity until one of them (listener or host) dies.
Now as to the hypocrisy charge. We don't want CNN banned, we don't even want lefties banned from twitter. We want a level field, especially when monopolies exist, like social media. And that is actually what the laws say, a social media company can't exist as a publisher because the legal consequences would quickly crush them. So platform they must be to escape liability, that means they can't pick and choose, they have to act as a common carrier.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:40PM (1 child)
Journalist (n): Someone who thinks that a good answer to "Who watches the watchmen?" is "We do, stupid!".
If the "fourth estate" falls on your head, it can do just as much damage as the other three. If the media watches the legislature, executive and judiciary then the legislature, executive and judiciary need to watch the media.
Also, we seem to be missing one from that foursome - "business" anybody? Because (generally) if Media isn't run by the State, it is run by Business - and how much "censorship" is caused by either the owners of the paper/channel/website pushing their own interest or advertisers shunning publications that say controversial things?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:52AM
If Media is run by Business, one could cynically observe that would make Media a giant lobbying concern.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:46PM (1 child)
The "three estates" are NOT the branches of government, as the article seems to be saying. They are clergy, nobility, and commoners. News media are the fourth on that list. They're not a fourth branch of government.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:08PM
While the synonymous usage is incorrect, the political thinking behind this usage is consistent with historical political science:
( Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy https://www.constitution.org/jadams/ja1_27.htm [constitution.org] )
i.e. When modern Americans talk about check & balances and branches of government, their forefathers thought about the three estates and Machiavelli's Rome. Which brings us to Trump...
compiling...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:00PM (7 children)
I think it's important to keep in mind that $$$-based journalism tends to have built-in mechanisms for all kinds of censorship. This is useful when considering not just what we are reading, but how and why it managed to get in front of our eyes. The following list, while not complete, serves to highlight some of the filtering going on:
Long story short, the news that reaches us may not be the news that is most important to us, the coverage that highlights the details we should really know, or even remotely even-handed. All those pressures and factors are there almost all of the time, in almost all of the news.
On top of this, we may harbor various biases that are based on misinformation, social indoctrination (the long resistance to LGBT is one example of a source of this, as is the so-called "drug war"), and dogma from from various sources.
IMHO, much thinking is called for. My observation is that there isn't nearly enough thinking being done by many. :/
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by jmorris on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:08PM (6 children)
No, that isn't censorship, it is bias and #fakenews. Everyone realizes those influences exist, that is why outside of the very short span when we had "the three networks" dominating our information flow, there have always been alternative information sources filling the gaps. The alt newspaper, underground magazines and now the Internet. The censorship is when the big media get in bed with the Deep State and merge, then start stomping out all of the alternative information flows. What we see happening now.
And just because YOU put a spurious lie in I'm going to put in a spurious rebuttal:
No, the resistance to sexual degeneracy is evolution in action. Humans who lacked revulsion to degenerate and unsanitary sexual practices DIED. They died almost as quickly as the degenerates themselves. A look at the CDCs numbers on infection rates for pretty much every sexually transmissable (and many that aren't, that part is key) across normal and LGBT demonstrates that fact beyond debate. Imagine a world without modern medicine. That was reality for 99.99% of human existence. Deep in the human firmware is where you will find the "bigotry" against LGBT, right alongside the aversion to tigers, the fast start to sudden motion in peripheral vision, etc. You fight biology and reality itself in your quest to beat people into submitting to your declaration that black is white, up is now down, etc.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:20PM (4 children)
You don't statistics very well, do you? Gay women are *cleaner* than everyone else on every metric except, IIRC, one form of chlamydia. I know, I know, lesbian invisibility; we don't even register in your worldview unless you're on a porn site. But it seems like what you have a problem with is *male* homosexuality. Now, looking closer, the data show that what we have isn't a gay problem, it's a male problem.
Face it, you men are goddamn filthy, and this is coming from someone who spends the better part of a week every month bleeding out her crotch. Males are promiscuous when they can get away with it, semen is basically white blood with all that that entails, and the rectum was never meant for sex.
I get it, you need a justification for your icks. You want data that show you have a right to be, pardon the choice of words here, a complete gaping asshole, and you think you found it. Except, they don't say what you think they say. Risky sex is risky sex no matter who's doing it, and the way males are plumbed means their sex is inevitably going to be riskier, much more so when it's two of them, both because of basic biology and because of how men approach sex.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)
I modded you informative, but I just want you to know, it was a real debate between that and modding your post funny...
...so I modded you informative while laughing. At least I managed not to spit coffee. :)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:57PM
LOL, thanks. Yes, I've done the cat /usr/local/bin/mug/coffee | /dev/marissa/nose > /mnt/desktop thing before and it's no fun. Sorry about that =P
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @11:17PM (1 child)
You missed a couple of points. Gay women may be much cleaner than everyone else now, but he was talking about evolutionary selection not the current situation.
The other thing is the historical difference in reaction to male (1) and female (2) gays combined with your assertion, actually supports his view.
1 kill it with fire
2 Meh, lets watch and then rape
They are both nasty, but from an evolutionary perspective they are very different.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:59PM
Careful with that evo-psych crack pipe there...too many people point to some half-assed evo-psych idea as justification for poor behavior. We are intelligent animals, and the purpose of that intelligence is to tell Mother Nature and her abusive pimp Malthus where to go, what to do when they get there, with whom, and for how long. Evolution is an explanation, not an excuse, and we're more than the sum of our genes.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:46PM
Wrong. It is. It is changing and/or eliminating the narrative based on agenda. That's the fundamental nature of censorship. You can't see this; but here, you can see that.
Don't let the pop culture hashtags bemuse you — I absolutely guarantee you it's the same old shit, just a new day. It's been going on forever. Lies, obfuscation, misdirection, carefully selected silences and substitute bluster.
All forms of power-mad lowlives fear the common folk having correct and complete information. With good reason. So we see this from private entities as well as the government. They feel they own the status quo, often because it is linked directly to their rice bowls, but also often just because they think they're better than everyone else.
Assholes, the lot of them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:45PM (4 children)
Haven't you noticed? No? That's because it is working as intended.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:54PM (3 children)
Where's aristarchus?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:29PM (2 children)
Where is Alex Jones?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @10:43PM (1 child)
Where is everybody?? Bueller? Bueller?
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:01AM
It's his day off......
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday October 02 2018, @11:20PM
In manipulation it is beneficial to make people argue and expend their limited time and energy on that which matters less or not at all.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:27AM
As someone who actually lives in New Zealand, can I say that I think this editorial is correct, but for the wrong reasons.
In New Zealand, we did something in the 1980's called "deregulation". What happened of course was market consolidation, and now almost every service or good for sale here is sold by a monopoly, or a member of a cartel.
The newspaper industry was one of the first to turn into a duopoly (and the two players left are trying to merge).
With no real competition, they have become (and have been for a long time) fat and lazy. Investigative journalism is hard to do well, and costs a lot of money. Twenty-three year old new grads are going to struggle, and that's who does most of the "journalism" here now, because they're cheap.
You might be shocked at the ignorance of the average media commentator here, but you get what you pay for, and it pays very poorly now.
The answer is actually more competition, but that won't happen until the big companies die.
The ODT is actually one of only two independent newspapers left in the country.