Doesn’t the US have a track record of literally assassinating journalists who dig into things they aren’t supposed to?
Doesn’t the US also have a track record of hunting down whistleblowers around the world? Of extrajudicial surveillance and illegal international surveillance and mass surveillance?
Not sure the Western world has a great role model there.
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.
Doesn’t the US have a track record of literally assassinating journalists who dig into things they aren’t supposed to?
Doesn’t the US also have a track record of hunting down whistleblowers around the world? Of extrajudicial surveillance and illegal international surveillance and mass surveillance?
Not sure the Western world has a great role model there.
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.