It's not just Twitter, it's the media in general. When I watch CNBC, and they decide to stop airing the President's presser because he's lying, that says to me that the media believes that they should do the thinking for me. That says a lot about how they view the public.
We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
Some of the networks wisely determined that the speech was unfounded, baseless, and harmful. News networks do not need to be a spigot for outright lies and fabrication.
People that have a working brain shouldn't care what networks think or determine. Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.
This election has proven that US, but also Western-European media are extremely biased and see themselves as the arbiters of truth. Reading German media I noticed - without exaggeration - that Trump was getting worse press than actual real dictators. Mainstream German newspapers had articles where they invited mental health specialists to speculate on what mental afflictions Trump might be suffering from.
Extremely unethical show from the mainstream media.
> Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.
Why? Not only has this never been the case, it is also strictly impossible to report news with zero bias, because the world is a messy place with a lot of concurrent things happening and media has to weave a mostly linear story from that. There's no algorithmic way to do that.
Imagine a large protest. Most people protest peacefully. A small group of protestors riot. The police are there too. Mostly they just watch, but some of them engage with protestors who they suspect of rioting, and some of those cops use arguably excessive violence.
You're making the TV news bulletin, you have footage of all of these sub-events. You have to decide how much time to allocate to each of the sub-events. You have a big responsibility, because the amount of attention you pay to each of them may influence public opinion. Do you focus on the peaceful protest? Or on the rioting? Or on the police violence? What's the "objectively" right amount of time to spend on each of these sub-events?
> You have to decide how much time to allocate to each of the sub-events.
I'm not sure what the "right" amount of time is; that's an incredibly difficult thing to determine--probably impossible in fact. But I certainly, trivially, know what the "wrong" amount of time would be: zero. If a reporter doesn't find some non-zero balance between those three perspectives, they have utterly failed in their role as a journalist. Eliding any of those events doesn't reduce bias, it effectively maximizes it.
Even that is an untenable position, I think. You can't report on every event in the world, or even on everything that happens in the context of a particular event. So you need some sort of "noteworthiness" measure, and that is _guaranteed_ to be informed by what you personally care about.
My point is that while it's impossible to reduce bias to zero, we're supposed to have well-known measures in place to fight against bias as much as possible. If a judge is friends with a plaintiff, they're supposed to disclose that fact and recuse themselves from the case, no matter how strongly they feel they could remain impartial. Government is structured into separate branches that each control/overrule the other, so that bias on one side can be tempered by the other.
With regards to journalism, the obvious rule is that you're supposed to impartially talk to both sides: the priest and the skeptic, the corporation and the union, the president and the challenger, the victim and the rapist. I'm not complaining that people aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing perfectly; I'm complaining that world-class news organizations with (formerly, I guess) serious credibility like the NY Times are blatantly not even trying to be objective anymore.
They're not following basic, basic rules of journalism that literally children know to do (and would be penalized on their homework for not doing). For example, how is it reasonable to run a story like, "celebrity X sparks outrage on twitter with racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever tweet", without ever printing or even linking to what X actually said! How can you run a story on the response to some event without any context on the event itself?
Obviously they can't be perfectly neutral, but that should be the goal and the standards by which they're measured.
We're not at the point where networks allocate less time to certain topics, we're at the point where media organizations have decided that for certain topics there is one and only one valid opinion and they're telling people how to think. This is essentially propaganda.
Suppose Trump’s rant of inflammatory lies had gone on for 90 minutes; would CNN, Fox, et al., reasonably be expected to air it all? What if the president had called for terroristic acts against his opponents, show that in its entirety without editorializing as well?
Cutting off in the middle of the speech is not editorializing, it's essentially censorship of the elected president of the USA. Obviously he wasn't calling for terrorist attacks on anyone, let's not get ridiculous.
Yes--it's not as if Donald set forth his case in a preamble, then bolstered that case with logic and evidence, brick by brick. He started with "there was massive fraud, big fraud" and ended with "I'm hearing there was so much fraud and cheating." But there was no evidence, only hand-waving and bluster.
> Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.
Impartial coverage is important, but neutral reporting is dangerous. Good journalism requires analyzing evidence, not treating all opposing views as equal (false balance).
When evidence is clear (such as in the case of the safety of vaccinations, the role humans play in climate change, etc.), "neutral reporting" can be misleading or even damaging.
It's the responsibility of journalists to help their audience understand view points, but that doesn't require giving them equal weight.
For example, in the case of vaccinations it's important to acknowledge that vaccinations were at one point believed to be linked to developmental disorders, that the study which did so has been debunked, and that the consensus of the medical community is now clear: there is no link between vaccines and autism.
The same holds true in the context of an election. For example, journalists should be (and, in many case, are) explaining that while some believe that votes were cast or counted illegally, no evidence of this has been presented. While it appeared that Biden "took the lead" after election day, this was an illusion resulting from the way in which the Republican legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania caused votes to be counted: they did not allow counting of mail ballots to begin earlier, despite knowing that record numbers would be received this year, and despite knowing that mail ballots would favor Democrats. While convincing reasons were presented for these decisions, such as earlier counting posing problems for volunteer election inspectors, it had predictable effects on the time period over votes were tallied and it is disingenuous for Trump to refer to these as "surprise ballot dumps" and either willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading for him to attempt to claim victory on election night before these ballots had been counted.
They are at some level. Of course, a newspaper isn't going to present all sources as being of equal authority. If someone is spouting nonsense at some point you cut them off.
The media clearly has power. And it's not wrong to observe that the mainstream English language media tends to be associated with a certain class, worldview, and educational system.
On the other hand, there has never been an era when individuals had as much ability to male their voices heard or, for better or worse, such diversity of news (and "news") sources.
There's also the fact that Twitter is a platform and not a publication. And there are certainly questions of what happens when dominant platforms that control access to eyeballs start regulating what people can people can publish there according to reality as it exists for the tech world.
it's not every tv station in question it's about news stations covering the election. 'every public servant' is not in question.. it's about the current president of the USA
Most mainstream media has been pushing the well known hoax about "fine people on both sides" being about white supremacists for far too long to have much credibility left when wanting to point out others unfounded, baseless and harmful lies.
What are you talking about? CNN aired the president's presser in full without stopping it; I know because I watched it live on CNN. Are you mixing up CNN with other networks?
Ultimately at some point trump won't be president. Should the media continue to show his press conferences then? So that voters can choose which president they listen to, the actual one or the fake one?
> We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
"defer your thinking to Trusted Sources" is the world we're coming from. Our incoherent polarization is a result of the traditional authorities having been routed around (and then leaning into their own demise). We've apparently got an awfully long road ahead of us to get to a world where everyone is actually thinking for themselves, as demonstrated by how readily blatant lies spread when they're politically and personally comforting.
That's always been true of the media in general. The publisher of the NYT presumably said something (years ago) to the effect of "We don't give people what they want; we give them what they should have." Arguably there are far fewer or more porous gatekeepers today relative to the historic norm--for better or worse.
No. I just answered your question and pointed out that there's a big difference in the legal protections offered to twitter. What twitter did is borderline ethical, it would have been more honest to ban trump rather than plaster his tweets with their own opinion of them.
We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
EDIT>> s/CNN/CNBC