The double standards are becoming increasingly obvious when it comes to "misinformation" in media.

in free •  3 years ago 

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Even the Discovery Channel is currently pushing a documentary with a "Psychic Medium Detective", which is clearly a lie and the whole idea of psychic detectives has been a problem for years.

Anybody remember when Sylvia Browne was showing up on Montel every week, on network television, pretending to be a psychic and giving parents fake information about their missing children? Remember when she said that Shawn Hornbeck was kidnapped by a Hispanic man with cornrows and the Shawn was dead and his body would be found in a park between two rocks only to have show up alive a few months later being held captive by a white guy with a crew cut? Remember how even after that she was still appearing on Larry King, CNN, and every other major network until her dying day with little pushback? Remember how no lawmakers were pushing to have her censored (of course, it's right to not call for censorship).

Remember when major networks were broadcasting John Edward and James Van Praagh every weekday and editing their programs creatively to make them look like legitimate psychics while knowing full well that they were getting more stuff wrong then they got right? Remember when all of these networks were forcing audiences to sign agreements which legally forbade them from talking about their experience on the show?

It's not just psychic bullshit on these platforms either.

Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Stephen Colbert made careers by creatively editing material to lie to audiences about what their political opponents said. Stewart was always the best of talking out of both sides of his mouth and trying to be taken seriously as somebody who was providing information at one point and saying that he was just trying to entertain in the next breath. Even if you just watched those shows for laughs, you have to acknowledge that a lot of people take them seriously. Jim Jefferies went so far as to release a complete hatchet job on an Israeli national and, when he got caught and the Israeli tried to enter the USA, Comedy Central falsely claimed they he was a violent threat and got him kicked out of the country.

Apparently scare tactics to convince people that genetically modified foods are all acceptable version of misinformation because we hear it every day.

It's perfectly fine for The Young Turks, MSNBC, CNN, etc. to openly lie about monumentally important criminal cases, I guess.

It seems that nobody cares that the New York Times published a full series of historically inaccurate claims and quietly ended the claims when they were fact checks with no retractions being published.

I could go on; but, the truth is important and the focus on trying to censor people like Joe Rogan is both evil and stupid. I'm not in favor of censorship in any way. The duty to find truth belongs to every hearer of speech. If you're smart enough to notice a lie or misinformation, you have a choice between giving everybody else the same respect that you give yourself or being a narcissistic asshole.

Still, we should punish liars. We shouldn't resort to violence or censorship. If people do simply get something wrong, we should demand a retraction and an apology; but, we should accept the apology and let the person move on. That's what we should do with Joe Rogan.

That's not what we should do with MSNBC or The Young Turks. That's not simply getting stuff wrong. That's lying and, in one case, a literal attempt at tampering with a jury. They should be sued into oblivion. Some people may deserve jail time.

Still, what we all need to do is be vigilant and morally consistent.

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