I am trying hard to agree with you… but from outside of the States, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to give you guys the benifit of the doubt 
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Not on Breitbart, Fox, Daily Caller, etc. The places his most rabid and fact-free supporters hang out will only run with the initial lie.
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[quote=“dfaris, post:16, topic:91941, full:true”]
I don’t know. I think you exaggerate the stupidity of the average American.[/quote]
It’s not stupidity. It’s not all ignorance, either. It’s just people trying to keep their head above water in terms of work and home who’ve been conditioned over a lifetime to accept what they see from trusted mainstream media brands without giving it further analysis. When those outlets are doing their bloody jobs, it’s not so bad. When they aren’t, you get wars of choice based on false pretexts and cartoonish confidence artists getting into the White House.
One thing I’ve noticed about the marks of grifters is that they often willingly (and sometimes happily) lean into the BS after discovering themselves to be so buried in it that they can’t get out without a major struggle. It’s a weird phenomenon, and yet it happens again and again.
I know what you’re saying and agree in terms of actual investigative journalism, but Gessen is using the term to describe what we might call “serious print outlets” or “newspapers of record”: institutions like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. that have copy editors, fact-checking in some form, and in-house legal departments to vet and support in-depth pieces.
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Opinionated is fine, but sensationalistic is not. You can have as strong an opinion as rice has starch, but steer away from the adjective mush, at least in the headlines.
BB is a blog, not a news website. You’re looking for something that simply isn’t going to be here because the editors have zero obligation to provide it to you.
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I agree with you except for the part about WaPo. They have an agenda. They will do real journalism if it fits their agenda, but otherwise they will suppress it.
Most of the site’s editors and writers do fine in that regard. I find that @doctorow is most prone to needlessly hyperbolic headlines and phraseology that sometimes conflict with the facts – odd because he’s a fine and thoughtful writer who could get the same effect without the sensationalist stylistic tic.
Still, this is their joint. People who don’t like what’s being served here have plenty of other choices.
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Also, journalism is there if we seek it out, so it’s not as if it’s being actively suppressed at the moment. However, these outlets are far flung and don’t have the same reputation as the mainstream media, who are now broken beyond repair and no longer deserve their reputation
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Unfortunately, there’s a solid chunk of psych research showing that debunking doesn’t work. The lie is remembered, the disclaimer is forgotten.
Besides, Trump voters won’t be watching media that critiques him.
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Please keep in mind that we’re not singling you out @beschizza in particular. I think we all started reading Boing Boing because we saw something different here: something better. I for one hope that BB doesn’t succumb to the desperate measures that keep me from reading so many other voices.
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go fuck yourself, son!
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And you have an agenda. And I do. And so does everything done by humans either individually or in groups. I studied media, and political science, and yeah, consider myself pretty darn media-literate. More people should be, in this hyper-mediated age. Know your media, know its agenda, and ideally, have a media that is more upfront about its agenda(s), and let the consumer decide. WashPo is ONE of my sources, among, hmmm, LOTS? In the case of Trump, they are one of the few actually appearing to even dig a little.
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I have no agenda. I just need to know the facts, whether they are facts I want to know or not.
You might be used to spending time around smart, well-informed people. That’s not the norm. A majority of people in the U.S. can’t find their own state on a national map, let alone other countries, don’t know basic history facts, can’t accurately figure out the tip on a restaurant bill, and don’t know HOW to figure out what they don’t know so that they can learn to do better. (And get angry and self-righteous if you point it out to them, because that would be admitting they weren’t as exceptional as they think they are in their own minds.)
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The thing is, I think its pretty obvious to EVERYBODY, on all sides, that the mainstream media, from CNN to MSNBC to Fox News to WashPo to NYTimes to WSJ etc. etc. are ALL broken at this point, to a large degree. Now, some people are gravitating toward fake headlines like Obama is not American and Hillary is murdering people (outside of wars she’s supported, hah). Some people are finding The Nation and Mother Jones etc. etc. shrug We’ll see where it goes.
So you’re a bot, eh? That’s cool.
Edit: I guess your avatar is a logic gate, and yes, my fundamental belief is that we are all, essentially, bots. Heehee.
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Trump can tweet anything – anything – and it’ll be an news article somewhere. And really if they just added “Trump says” or “Trump claims” or the like, the headline is still the same and the nuance of the difference will be lost on most.
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Exactamundo. The message is being defined unilaterally. And it’s so obvious and it’s making me absolutely CRAZY that they are mostly all falling for it. They are devoting like major journalist man-hours to deeply theorizing on the what-ifs of the next random thing he tweets at 3am, instead of doing actual investigative journalism into Trump. OK OK I know this is obvious to most of us on here, but humph I had to vent a little. FUCKING AAAAA!!! 
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The majority of US citizens can’t find their own state on the map? Source?
If wanting to be challenged is being a bot, then I guess that makes me a bot 
“Everybody has an agenda, get used to it” is why we have fake news. If all we see is different sets of people spreading different sets of lies, then we lose sight of what the truth is. We stop caring about truth, and “all sides do it” becomes a serious argument instead of something a five year old says.
Bipolar junction transistor. The top and bottom are cut off, but say collector and emitter respectively. The current direction shows this BJT is an NPN type.
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