• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Reporting the truth is their job though. When the UN weapons inspectors are making the rounds telling everyone that the Bush administration is lying they should have run strongly worded articles.

    When no evidence of a functional WMD program of any kind showed up they should have gone after Bush with a bucket of tar.

    Instead the myth of chemical weapons is so pervasive that even now you hedge your post. But the only thing we ever found were some rounds so old and decrepit they were more likely to fall apart the second they were moved than anything else.

    They completely abrogated their duty to bring truth to the people for the Iraq war. And then coverage turned so hard on the Iraq war people ignore the fact that the main thing was a success. The government and democracy there endures to this day.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      9 months ago

      Even in your comment you get annoyed that people are acknowledging the facts, rather than just the narrative you wanted. it is not “hedg(ing)” to acknowledge that: By the strict definition of the term, there actually were WMDs. And we would have known the scale if inspectors were allowed to do their job. They just weren’t the WMDs that were used to sell people on the war. That is nuance. That is Truth.

      People don’t want Truth. They want people to fight their battles for them under the guise of “Truth”. Journalists are great right up until they say something we don’t like, at which point they are “just as bad as the rest”.

      It is not journalism’s job to tear down a government. It is their job to provide The People with the information they need to make those decisions. Instead, republicans insisted that any journalist who acknowledged how much of a liar the bush administration was are traitors. And most of the left decided the thing they hate the most is sensationalist headlines/24 hour news/clickbait/whatever. And… after a few people got fire bombed and had to go into hiding, it just wasn’t worth the fight.

      I have friends in journalism who literally had to go into hiding or flee the country. I have had to help one of my best friends store some data because one of the tech giants was pissed at them and they genuinely feared for their life.

      And I’ve seen the outcome. The story they spent years writing and researching gets turned into a single editorialized headline on social media and the few people who even claimed to read it are arguing that it is toothless and was written by a boot licker. With the more common response being people who are genuinely proud of NOT reading it because it is “too long”.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Lmao, “we were technically correct” is not a basis for war. People fucking died. That’s not the time for edgy bullshit.

        And nobody got firebombed for going against the Iraq war. Stop trying to conflate things. In fact journalists being killed in the US is extremely rare.

        And it’s absolutely the job of journalists to expose the lies of a government. That’s literally why they’re the fourth estate.

        You’re going so hard to defend stuff not even the journalists want to defend. Do you work at NYT or something?