xgranade

xgranade , 1 month ago

Even aside from potential or actual bias, there’s a pretty wide gap between bias and the incitement that the Israeli government is accusing Al Jazeera of. I don’t have to fully endorse the entirety of Al Jazeera’s coverage to think that shutting them down and criminalizing them is a pretty huge overreach.

xgranade , 2 months ago

It’s also a question of methods; a giant company simply ignoring an unjust law is typically a pretty poor way to challenge it (as always, there are exceptions). To the extent that Australia is claiming that Musk sees himself as above the law, that’s a pretty accurate charge, that holds whether the particular law in question is just or not.

Shorter version: fuck Musk, and also fuck countries claiming they can order takedowns beyond their borders. Both can be true at once.

xgranade , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It may indeed be, I’m not familiar with Middle East Monitor, but Media Bias/Fact Check are themselves rather infamously biased towards the American right wing. For example, they list the New York Times as nearly as left-biased as their scale goes, despite that the Times has largely taken the Republican party line on a number of issues, such as queer rights (their deceptive coverage of trans rights has been a large part of the current moral panic, and has led to multiple open lettersof protest). The Times was even instrumental in elevating Trump to the presidency with their incredibly dubious decision to give Comey’s procedural memo front page placement and a misleading headline mere days before the election — a choice that Nate Silver has said was possibly deciding on the election. The Guardian is also listed as left-center despite even more extreme transphobic editorial decisions than even the Times.

Similarly, they list MSNBC as far-left, despite them having Republican-led shows and frequent Republican guests. I’ll definitely agree there’s some degree to which they’re on the left, but it’s pretty minor all told. The idea that they’re far left is just ridiculous, and one that only makes sense from the perspective of America’s right-wing culture.

At the same time, they list Wall Street Journal as mostly credible, something that just isn’t a serious take on media credibility.

(Edited to add: a lot of this comes down to the very strong bias in American media towards the “both sides” idea that if two sources disagree, the truth must be in the middle. That bias is especially clear in discussions of climate change, but it’s also prevalent in discussions of other political issues more generally.)

xgranade , 10 months ago

Artists, like all laborers, should be fairly compensated for their work. The idea that love of art should necessarily come into conflict with fair compensation is a primary vehicle for continuing the exploitation of creative labor.

That is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of piracy, though. Some of the most strongly anti-piracy platforms out there are also absolutely terrible in terms of labor rights (hence the current strikes in Hollywood, for instance). It’s notable that in this case, the studio seems to be saying fairly explicitly that piracy is indeed not the main obstacle to fair compensation, such that no conflict between their stance and labor rights needs to exist.