One fundamental precept of rational thought is that arguments speak for themselves. Claims exist independently of their speakers. You can't rebut an argument by suggesting that the person who made the argument has "chosen sides" or has any other characteristic whatsoever. You have to address the content of the argument itself. The human is irrelevant.
Everyone should read Greenwald's article. He makes a good case.
I can't imagine that the people downvoting this comment would do so if they saw it in a politically neutral context. It's completely uncontroversial in what it said: arguments can be evaluated without regard to who is making them. This is middle-school citizenship class stuff.
As long as it's me that gets to determine what is "biased" and what is not, sign me up. I also have thoughts about what is a "real" religion and what isn't, if you need more help.
I think he jumped his own shark a while ago when he left The Intercept [1] and has been writing some articles that sound reasonable but then veer into BS pretty quickly.
"And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress."
This is just fringe, nutty stuff. The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is what they always do when they have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off the popularity.
It is insidious and messed up in almost exactly the reasons he mentions but not for the reasons he thinks.
> The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is what they always do when they have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off the popularity.
Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't he think of this?
I think @pixelgeek means that politicians will always bandwagon a story that has momentum in order to maximize its utility.
It sounds like they are challenging Greenwald's narrative that Democrats are doing this explicitly to silence opponents, but that they have good faith issues with the willful amplification of disinformation on FB.
> Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't he think of this?
No, the media does this so you don't need to come up with an ulterior motive to explain it. They see a story and they want to get a part of it to get eyeballs on their shows/magazines/podcasts.
The difference here is that a Democratic leadership is more likely to take an adversarial approach to its relations to Facebook and companies like it than a Republican leadership would. (Trump being banned from all the platforms forms an outlier to this)
Further to that...
Manufacturing Consent [1] in 1988 formed a pretty solid argument that what the media does is not support a side as much as it supports the status quo. Media moves to support whomever is in power. Trump obviously blew the hell out of that but you can go back and look at critiques of Bush, Reagan, Obama and other presidents to see that media will criticize the current leadership but (again excluding the Trump outlier) won't take an adversarial role too far since it needs to maintain its relationship with those in power to continue to get content to publish.
This is one of the main reasons why I think right-wing leadership made such a big deal of getting the Fairness Doctrine repealed under Reagan. It lead to the development of media that didn't rely on having a symbiotic relationship with whomever was in power and could instead push a single doctrine with its broadcasting.
Not all Conservatives in the US believe that the repeal was a good thing [2] but for the folks like the Koch brothers it was a prime focus and it has paid dividends to them.
I understand and am quite sympathetic to his argument, but Greenwald and many other posters here are ignoring the known fact that foreign actors are using Facebook at scale to sow division and misinformation throughout the US and other countries.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...