> We understand that DoD plans to cease publication of Stars and Stripes on September 30, 2020 and completely dissolve the organization by January 31, 2021 as a result of the proposed termination of funding in the fiscal year 2021 President’s budget. We urge you to take steps to preserve the funding prerogatives of Congress before allowing any such disruption to take place, for the following reasons.
> First, the House-passed version of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2021, contains additional funding not requested by the Administration to continue operating Stars and Stripes. Second, the Senate has not yet released a defense appropriations bill, nor had an opportunity to conference with the House position, leaving it as a real possibility that Congress may not agree with the proposal to eliminate this funding. Third, the standard text of a continuing resolution – that funds are provided “at a rate of operations… for continuing projects and activities” as provided for in the previous year’s Department of Defense Appropriations Act – places a legal obligation on the Department to not act on a termination of a program until a full-year appropriations bill is enacted. We seek your written assurance that the Department will comply with this obligation and avoid steps that would preempt the funding prerogatives of Congress.
One thing I've always wondered about when it comes to the temporary nature of US presidential terms and their respective administrations - why does it seem like it's so much easier to dismantle things than to create them in the first place?
Especially for things that took a substantial amount of time and effort to build, shouldn't we require much more scrutiny before considering an action that effectively dismantles/dissovles/destroys
them? Instead it feels more like we are at the mercy of the whims of whoever is the current temp-employee-in-chief.
> why does it seem like it's so much easier to dismantle things than to create them in the first place?
it's because it's incredibly difficult to get anything passed, the US legislative system has too many checks and balances. Every "check and balance" is another group that has to reach consensus for a proposed action and another point for an adversarial opponent to grind everything to a halt.
I contend that it is better to have a government that can reach consensus easily and act, and that is easy to change if they no longer reflect public consensus, than to have "checks and balances" where absolutely 100% of the government needs to be in consensus to do anything. Gridlock should not be a design feature of a government but that's how the system was engineered (deliberately - it dates from a time when states didn't view themselves as federal subjects but independent states, and this was supposed to help get everyone on board that "no, really, we're just going to do the things that absolutely everyone agrees on", there were many groups who were afraid of being steamrollered without their own special little body and checks on other authorities).
Unicameral parliamentary systems are better - one house to pass legislation, one PM who is a member of the majority in parliament, so everyone is on the same page. Snap elections if they do something that nobody likes, if they don't want to listen to the public then the queen can dissolve parliament and call for new elections.
(the queen actually is a very interesting role in the UK, she is kind of an "oracle" that decides deadlocks between the public and the parliament. When the two are in disagreement about whether to call elections she can resolve the stalemate. She really doesn't do much normally but in times of constitutional crisis can serve as a trusted independent authority - a very interesting safety mechanism that evolved almost by accident.)
the faster rate of technology change makes agility in government more important. Sure, it's recency bias, but under exponential growth most history is "recent".
You can still have scrutiny with agility. That is in fact what I am suggesting.
Firstly, parliament is not unicameral, because of the House of Lords. However, the Lords has a definitively subordinate position relative to the Commons, set down in law and procedure; it's used to do largely non-partisan technical work, like originate boring uncontroversial government bills (like the Air Traffic Management and Unmanned Aircraft Bill [1]), and improve bills from the Commons (it's sometimes called "the revising chamber" [2]). They can't block money bills, and they can only delay other bills [3]. So it's not exactly bicameral, either. Sort of sesquicameral.
Secondly, it's not clear snap elections are actually helpful, because if you need a majority to call one, they will be only be called when the party with the majority thinks it can win an even bigger majority. They certainly aren't a mechanism for correcting a drift between the government public consensus. They were seen as sufficiently antidemocratic that the UK sort of got rid of them, fixing the term of parliaments [4], but it hasn't entirely worked, because the one time a government wanted a snap election, the opposition agreed to it (and then lost by a small landslide!).
Thirdly, the queen doesn't decide deadlocks between the public and parliament. The queen doesn't decide anything - she deterministically follows the advice of her prime minister, because she knows that if she didn't, parliament would finish what Cromwell started. Furthermore the idea of "the public and the parliament [being] in disagreement about whether to call elections" is nonsensical, because that's something that is entirely parliament's decision. Perhaps you think she would take a more active role during a constitutional crisis; i rather doubt that, especially after what happened last time the crown did that [5].
If this were true wouldn't the size and scope of governments decline over time? I'm quite confident that there are more governmental organizations in the US than I could name, and each one of them have numerous programs. Indeed there have been entire agencies created in my lifetime, but despite the calls to defund or abolish some, I can't think of one that's closed.
(caveat: you said "things" which I took to mean something like "governmental products" which tend to have a high amount of inertia; if you had something else in mind this may not apply)
I've heard this sentiment, but I'm not sure if it's real.
Republicans are just as adept at constructing things as deconstructing things. Look at No Child Left Behind (fundamental reconstruction of education), the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA (large new bureaucracies), or the TCJA (fundamental reconstruction of the tax system).
I think what we actually witness in government is two different phenomenons. First, Republicans act as a largely cohesive block that requires less coalition building. Second, Republican governing philosophy has as a central tenet the idea that government is inefficient and market-based solutions are better, from Reagan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." to Grover Norquist's Starve the Beast theory "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
And the inverse of this is also true, there is an aphorism about the two parties voters, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line." It seeks to explain why getting voters that agree with Democratic policies to the polls seems to be more difficult than getting voters that agree with Republican policies to the polls. This extends to the politicians, who pick largely from the same menu of issues but at different priority levels. This leads to the Democrats having to expend more effort to build coalitions, an example would be something like healthcare reform. Market-based solutions like the ACA have as much a home in the Democratic party as government-based solutions like Medicare For All (M4A). With a wider gamut of policy positions, more effort inevitably must be spent getting people to consensus.
This means that Republican governments get more of their goals done, and because of their governing philosophy many of those things are deconstructing existing programs. They are capable of putting new programs into place, I named a few but there are others, so it doesn't seem to me that the main difference is constructing new thing vs deconstructing existing things, but the amount of effort it requires to get your coalition to take action.
This all is an analysis of the efficacy of the two parties in accomplishing their goals, without really treading on the more dangerous ground of "who has the better goals?" I, like everyone else, have some opinion no this matter, but to try to keep the inevitable angry responses when discussing politics to a minimum, I'm going to just avoid discussing that altogether.
> First, Republicans act as a largely cohesive block that requires less coalition building.
Does it require less coalition building, or are they just better at it? It never made much sense to me that a pro-choice/drugs/guns/prostitution libertarian from Nevada would vote for the same team as the social conservative corn farmer from Nebraska who wants to implement a Christian theocracy, yet when push comes to shove they seem to ignore each other and vote for the same party. I don't know how to explain that, other than Republicans are effective at pandering to two mutually incompatible philosophies at once.
There are a number of theories that could explain this.
Broadly speaking, small-c conservatism, hold the following central tenets "...tradition, organic society, hierarchy, authority, and property rights." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism, I know this is a wikipedia link, it is sourced to an actual text which doesn't appear to be online and so is not conducive to hyperlinking). It could be that their preference for hierarchy and authority extends to the legislators being willing to support the party leadership, regardless of their own personal policy preferences.
Another line of thought is that there is a Venn Diagram of sorts for those two politicians, and the policies that move forward are the ones where there is already agreement. For instance, we don't see a lot of legislation legalizing drugs or prostitution coming from the Republican party, because while the Libertarians might support that, not everyone does and coalition building is difficult. We do see a fair bit of pro-Christian actions from the party, but I think that could be attributed to reframing the issue as one of Religious Liberty which allows the Libertarian to either support it or not actively oppose it.
Largely though the legislation we see passed through is about areas that likely have broad support where little coalition building is required, tax reform, military spending, moves to reduce the scope of what most Republicans would agree are wasteful government programs.
I doubt the Republicans have found some new method for coalition building, if they had then you would expect more fringe Libertarian ideals like drug and prostitution legalization to have some presence in the conversation. It seems like even in the rather tame Marijuana legalization discussion the Republicans are staking out an opposition stance. Although the desire to make profit from Marijuana has turned some of the most ardent opponents into vocal supporters, as is the case for John Boehner.
These are fair points and food for thought. It still seems to me that the DNC platform tends to be more coherent/consistent. The RNC platform seems frequently 'schizophrenic' in comparison, but their voters seem willing to overlook or ignore various things other members of their party are saying. In other words, the christian theocrats pretend the libertarians don't exist, and vice versa. Or those that want to cut government funding ignore those who want a hundred new aircraft carriers.
>One thing I've always wondered about when it comes to the temporary nature of US presidential terms and their respective administrations - why does it seem like it's so much easier to dismantle things than to create them in the first place?
This is just the nature of reality. Creation is incredibly difficult and requires immense struggle. Destruction is effortless. It took billions of years of biological evolution to reach a point where a mass of cells can be conceived, nurtured, and grown into a thinking breathing organism capable of manipulating its' environment. One single mindless, simple burst of radiation can completely destroy that. You're battling against entropy. The natural order of things is chaos, disorder, and dissolution. When the will to fight and struggle for an ideal is lost, the inevitable result is decay.
In all honesty it doesn't even have to be large, it suffices to be powerful. Like the President. If you're the president, you don't really need the 535 people from congress to act with you. You only need them to not act, which they can be relied on to do more often than not. (In fact, I believe you don't even need all 535 of them to not act, only some of them can take the action of "no action" and you can do what you wish.)
What we have learned is that you only need the Senate Majority Leader to refuse to act. It turns out that is the crucial weakness in the US government with no checks and balances on it. And, of course, isn't in the US Constitution.
> why does it seem like it's so much easier to dismantle things than to create them in the first place?
This is just the nature of things. It’s easier to destroy a car than to build one. Same for houses, plants, animals... anything complex, really. Destruction is generally easier than creation.
It's always easier to destroy than create. I mean, you can demolish a house in a few hours. This isn't new. Creation is hard. Nuance is hard. "How do we fix healthcare" is hard; "don't change anything ever" or even "dismantle the system" is easy.
Hard to mourn the demise of a propaganda publication, no matter how old it is. I know they supposedly have editorial independence, but that's hard to take seriously.
The link is the usual... stuff, so it's obvious why I cannot treat seriously any words of this "opinion contributor". So I don't have anything better than to ask HN: for those unaware of the situation, what can be considered the real reason to shut down this newspaper?
It seems like unusual thing to do, and considering the circumstances will surely cause some discontent (and, what's more importantly, if I'm not mistaken: discontent of some subset of Trump's supporters), so there must be some important reason to issue such an order. So what is it?
It seems Donny is trying to take out his frustration with lackluster polling on Star and Stripes, despite that not having been the publication that conducted the poll. It is a more widely read US armed forces publication, though.
To note on the poll, officers would rather have another Commander in Chief by about a 3-2 margin.
The Republicans and the Administration are pissed because they ordered the military to break the black lives matters protests and the army told them to get stuffed. So they are throwing a tantrum because they always assumed they'd have the army to back them up and it turns out they don't.
Unless you've got a source for that, I think you're mistaken. The Army wouldn't operate on US soil, that sort of thing would be the job of the National Guard. The Posse Comitatus Act specifically forbids the US Army from doing that sort of thing. If you told me Trump is upset at the National Guard for this reason, I'd believe that. I think I recall reading headlines to that effect.
That article does not seem to contain the claim that Trump asked the Army to break up protests, and it's not clear which 'half' you're refering to. As far as I can tell, the claim is simply false.
I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights
The piece continues:
"He said he was already dispatching "thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers" to Washington to stop the violence that has been a feature of the protests here."
Hundreds of combat soldiers with the 82nd Airborne were ordered to leave Washington, D.C, Thursday after retired generals and the nation's top officer rebuked Donald Trump over his use of the military.
Members of the elite unit had been deployed to the nation's capital to back up National Guard soldiers ordered onto the streets by Attorney General Bill Barr in a show of force.
...
While the capital is under federal control, the removal of hundreds of combat troops was a highly-visible sign that Trump had been forced into retreat on his threat to deploy soldiers under his control in protest-hit cities.
I chose the Daily Mail reporting because no one could accuse it of being a left wing mouthpiece. There are plenty of other sources if you google
If you prefer, you could take Trump's former Defense Secretary James Mattis' comments on the use of troops in Washington DC:
Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.
The actual title of this article is “The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason“. The second half of that title, which you removed, is the entire point of the article.
Altering that title does not make it more objective, it fundamentally obscures the entire point of the article. Moderators, please stop editorializing via manipulation of post titles. You are not making them “less inflammatory”, you are inserting your own perspective and misleading HN readers into thinking the article is about something that it’s not.
"The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget."
I'm OK with cutting $15.5 million from the military budget. Sure, it's a drop in the ocean, but any savings we can wring out of the military is a good thing.
I agree with the sentiment, but there are legitimate changes in purchasing/budgeting that could _actually_ impact the budget (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...). Better reporting on egregious kickbacks like this might lead to more repercussions for the Congresspeople in question, that'd be one of the best ways to trim the fat on the Pentagon budget.
When I was in the service, Stars and Stripes was so censored that to call it journalism would be an overreach. It's not 1945 anymore. Being represented in print isn't worth much these days - especially by a propaganda rag.
I feel like if it was mission critical, they would find a way to make it work. Fund a print publisher through the black-ops budget, launch some wireless satellites or something.
I also feel like they can do without, all else being equal. Not being able to read a magazine isn't the end of the world.
Cost cutting is good, but they are not going to trim $15.5 million from their budget request nor use it for the VA or something else that would benefit the troops significantly.
> Looked at the article, but didn't see any. Perhaps it was cost? Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes?
From the article:
> The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.
That's 0.0022% of the Pentagons budget, i.e. essentially nothing.
The average American pays about $10k in federal income taxes each year. Assuming they do this for fifty years, this means the average American might pay $500k in federal income taxes over their lifetime. So this propaganda rag consumed the lifelong social contributions of 31 people, every year. It isn't nothing.
No, it isn't nothing. My point is you can't wave away these numbers just by putting them next to a much larger number. These bills ultimately have to be paid, and asking whether a propaganda rag is worth >31 people's lifelong tax contributions every year is a much better framing than "we already incinerate cash, what's a bit more" - that is just utterly terrible reasoning. Try applying it to your own budget and see where that gets you at the end of the month. Things add up quickly.
It is nothing. For example, it is the equivalent of me budgeting for a single cup of coffee for the entire year. The administrative costs of removing that expense would dwarf the expense itself, and could actually result in significantly negative ROI when accounting for opportunity cost (hundreds, if not thousands of alternative opportunities to save more money are being ignored while leadership focuses on this one).
Leadership isn't interested in cutting military funding generally, so there is no opportunity cost here. I very much doubt there are administrative costs that exceed $15.5 million, certainly not for the next several years. Maybe if democrats decide to turn it into a political football for reasons that make sense only to the liberal mind.
> The average American pays about $10k in federal income taxes each year.
Do you have a source for this? There is absolutely no way this is true. Are you including Social Security contributions as "federal income tax"? Or maybe did you mean the average American household pays $10k each year?
Say it's about $10k for federal, for ease of calculation. If it's less, then that means even more people's lifelong contributions are incinerated by a propaganda rag.
> According to a recent survey of nearly 130,000 American consumers, the average American spends $10,489 each year in federal, state, and local income taxes.
I really don't know what you're arguing about here. To repeat myself, if I overestimated how much they paid, then it's even more people whose contributions are incinerated. Yay for my original point I guess?
I think the argument is that simple numbers don't really mean much, especially when misrepresented. If you have an point to make, it should be correct.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... says that payroll taxes and corporate income tax (in 2015) together are about the same contribution to federal income as individual income taxes, which puts a factor of 2 the other way in your estimate.
In addition to the comment mentioning that it’s conflating federal, state, and local...
That’s the average that an American tax payer pays. That’s not what the average American pays. The difference is subtle, but meaningful. If I said, “I am an average American, how much can I expect to pay in federal taxes?” That number will not be $10k.
"average" usually means "mode" or "median" when used as "average person". The meaning can be inferred from context or clarified.
"Mean" is almost never correct for distributions that aren't near uniform, and never correct for distributions that aren't even near normal and not near symmetric.
> Looked at the article, but didn't see any
> Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes?
The answer to this question is in the eighth paragraph of the article, right before the discussion on how congress actually refunded the publication, the decision now resting with the senate and how the Pentagon ordered it to shutdown anyway which is unusual.
I will hasard that when you said you looked at the article it was to be taken literally and didn't imply that you actually read it.
By cutting Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon will finally afford to add a few more developers to the lean-and-mean F-35 program, which is sure to speed up the software delivery. Smart management.
It's worse than you can imagine. I once witnessed a defense client creating a $5 mil project with a defense contractor out of thin air, because they didn't want to lose the money at the end of the fiscal year (which was 3 months away).
Overnight, the defense contractor assembled a team of 20 people that were on the bench, so they could bill for the project. 20 random people that had never worked together before, all to work on an experimental java project the agency didn't need until that Monday (and I'd argue, didn't need even after that Monday). I suggested in that meeting "why don't we just return the money to the taxpayer?" and got glares from at least two senior executives.
Right there is 1/3 of the $15 million that is spent on Stars and Stripes.
With a $700bn budget, based on what I've seen of the defense industrial complex, I'd suspect at least 10% of that goes to complete waste (and toilet paper isn't waste. I mean things like IT projects that don't see the light of day, etc).
Sounds like you witnessed federal contract fraud, which is a felony.
Unfortunately there is no longer any good way to report this crime. Official whistleblower channels are compromised or ineffective, and going directly to the public... well, there are plenty of cautionary examples of how poorly that tends to go.
Well I never witnessed any government employee saying this. I just realized my language sounded like I did. Oops. I was in a (private sector) meeting where they relayed the situation.
So I wouldn’t say I witnessed it. I was called into a brainstorming session for “how can we spend this money? We need to come up with something quickly.”
Let's say you need to clean out your garage. It's piled full of stuff and it's going to take you a while to clean up. Do you first reach for the biggest thing in the bottom of the pile, or do you grab the small stuff on top that's closest to you first?
Only, you're not cleaning a garage, you're a tin-pot dictator and you control the budget of a newspaper which has recently covered a narrative that you don't like.
> In February, the Trump administration proposed eliminating all of the publication’s federal support in 2021. That’s more than $15 million a year, about half its budget. “I can’t think of a graver threat to its independence,” the paper’s ombudsman, Ernie Gates, told me recently. “That’s a fatal cut.”
From the article it sounds like the cost is $15.5m?
> The memo ordering the publication’s dissolution claims the administration has the authority to make this move under the president’s fiscal year 2021 defense department budget request. It zeroed out the $15.5 million annual subsidy for Stars and Stripes.
> The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.
I think this is a case in which words don't properly convey the scale at hand. $15.5 million and $700 billion might better be said as $15.5 million and $700,000.0 million.
Yes, also fake news it seems. So outlandish, but the suckers just believe it. I don't think the media even has a source willing to say they directly heard it but they are
still running it.
So it seems the media is attacking him on the military front.
I think it's understandable why sources would want to remain anonymous when criticizing this President.
The key question is: will he sue for libel or defamation? I expect he won't, and I expect he won't because truth is always an affirmative defense against those accusations in US law.
It definitely is more pro-military than average, but it has done a surprisingly good job of maintaining editorial independence. It most certainly is independent from White House control, if not DoD control.
What right do you have to determine who is allowed to have an opinion, and why is serving a precondition?
I did serve, I've done time overseas including in Iraq, but I did not do so out of some distorted sense that it made my citizenship or opinion somehow more valuable than any others.
I served to protect and defend the rights of every person under the Constitution. Suggesting that somebody's speech be curtailed or ignored because they did not is frankly antithetical to the oath we took.
And frankly, it's not surprising to me that somebody who so callously disregards one aspect of the 1st Amendment would treat the rest of it with the same level of disdain.
But I'm certainly not going to allow you to attribute an opinion to most who serve without standing up as a counter example.
I appreciated The Military Times and S&S when I was overseas, and I know many other service men and women who did as well.
> I also don't think taxpayer money should be going to VOA or PBS or NPR for the very same reasons.
VOA is literally a federal government foreign propaganda service that is operated (in theory, mainly as a defensive countermove against hostile government propaganda) to advance US government information interests abroad.
Now, it's usually operated in a standard journalistic manner because the US government has both seen truth as the best the long-term defense against hostile propaganda and seen VOA being seen as trustworthy as the best way to not get target populations to learn to ignore it.
Local PBS radio stations do get more funding through the CPB (corporation for public broadcasting), but that seems to be only about 12% from local/state/federal sources.
The CPB itself seems to get about $450 million a year from Congressional apportionment.
Sounds like you're trying to ascribe malice to a pretty reasonable question. I'm just trying to understand your position: if taxpayer money should be withheld from what you view as politically biased media, then should it also be withhold from explicitly politically biased campaign events? Seems like it should be, but then again I'd like to hear your opinion.
Not the OP, but I think political parties have no legitimate role in government and should be banned from using any public resources, using government buildings (even by rental,) using dmv resources or otherwise involving themselves in voter registration, etc. Nor should it be legal to list them on the ballot..
It is absolutely the case that corruption is laundered through organizations. If a person profits it is illegal, if he directs profit to his organization and takes back a commission it is somehow fine?
Do you have any evidence of that bias? Or are you of the opinion that any criticism of the President's policies is necessarily biased and therefore, in your words, BS?
Because you used the expression "orange man bad," which is often used by defenders of the current administration to counter what they see as unreasonable criticisms. Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding you.
Can you provide an example of the allegedly biased reporting in S&S?
Are the people who say "respect the role" now the same ones that said Obama was a secret Kenyan that ran a human-trafficking ring in a pizza parlor though? Not trolling, this is a serious question because I don't think we all realize yet just how gaslit and completely bonkers every crevasse of discourse is after years of Trumpian propaganda and reactionary media.
> now the same ones that said Obama was a secret Kenyan that ran a human-trafficking ring in a pizza parlor though?
I have never heard this. Apparently we get our news from different sources. Did I miss anything, or are my filters working properly?
The military has rules of professional conduct which help establish a non-toxic culture. "Respect the role" flows from that. When you're given orders, you're not going to make a personal judgement on the president. You're going to do your job. A toxic culture could cost lives.
The military can be a strange world for people who have never served.
Having served the Military of my country (NATO member) I can tell you that one can both obey orders AND believe that their President/PM/Minister of Defence is a dick :)
Edit: regarding the "sending you to war" cough ..Saddam-weapons of mass destruction.. (???)(rings any bells??) cough
I think your comment may have been fine without the last line, which discards your cogent and reasonable argument up to that point and invites the world to engage in a culture war brawl that benefits no one.
I agree: bias is part of human nature, and cannot be fully removed from news. Given that, what's wrong with Stars & Stripes?
Also, I think GP question was pretty reasonable. Why are you trying to infer an "agenda"? It makes you look unreasonable.
Everyone has their own opinion. It's not a leading question.
When you accused GP of using a "leading question," when he asked your where you get your news, it sounds like you cynically interpret any question as an attack. You can tell me which agenda you're assuming on the part of your interlocutor.
And I've asked you a few times for evidence of bias in S&S. I understand that it's your opinion that S&S is biased, but surely that opinion was formed on the basis of evidence.... right?
My god it's hard to take you seriously. Your attitude is insufferable. The most innocent, obvious question is interpreted as a coordinated attack. "That's a leading question...Are you a white house correspondent?" Everyone is met with scrutiny here, you're not special, you just can't hold up against a slight breeze of pressure. Just like the pres.
> Only difference is I don't limit my sources by their viewpoint or bias.
Difference from whom? Do you think most people do this or were you speaking specifically to the person whose comment you were responding to?
Every article, and in fact every utterance, is inherently biased, if for no other reason than your choice of word of what you leave out to make a point, is itself a choice.
The telegraph and subsequent rise of news bureaux (first Reuter’s, then UPI and AP in the us) lead to a theory of “neutral” news in the hope of increasing the customer base (sell to more newspapers of all leanings) but it’s still inherently biased on its foundations.
Unbiased news sources don't exist in today's world. It's up to you and your critical thinking to digest all this bs and come up with your own conclusions. What I'm saying is journalism shouldn't be about convincing you or reinforcing a point of view. It's about presenting facts without bias to let the consumer make up their own mind. That doesn't exist in today's over-charged political environment, which is a whole other discussion.
> about presenting facts without bias to let the consumer make up their own mind. That doesn't exist in today's over-charged political environment, which is a whole other discussion.
I see this card being played to justify how they ignore and cherry-pick facts that suits their personal agenda, because they treasure their tribal view of politics over making informed, rational decisions.
Show me one in the last generation or two that did?
Who harassed more journalist and whistle blowers during their time in office, Trump or Obama. Neither was great but the prior administration set new standards for threatening those who would make government justify its actions. The difference is one was a media darling and the other is a media flashpoint
No contest: Trump harasses journalists at every rally – by now, hundreds or thousands of them. And whistle blowers? He fired Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman and his brother after Vindman testified. His lackeys in the House exposed the IRS whistleblower by name.
It’s true that Obama was pretty agressive about prosecuting whistleblowers, but it also true that no president in modern times before the Donald has called the press ‘the enemy of the people’ and calls every criticism of him ‘fake news’.
Free speech is a two-way street. Journalists are allowed to criticize politicians, but for the same reason politicians are allowed to criticize journalists. The government prosecuting journalists concerns me more than the government criticizing journalists, though both are concerning. Thankfully Trump is too impotent to make good on most of his juvenile threats, or we'd definitely be in trouble. More than Trump, I fear a hypothetical future president who's competent enough to do more than spout hot air.
I agree he’s mostly empty threats. After all, he’s threatened to revoke social media platforms’ Section 230 protection since before he took office. But when Twitter had the audacity to fact check him, he attempted to make good on his word with an executive order.
He thinks he can do a lot more than he can, but we still should be fighting back.
I don't really have a stake here, and voted for Obama but he and his justice department prosecuted a record number of journalists. To quote the Washington Post "Of the 13 people who have" (ever) "been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for leaking secrets, eight were arrested under Obama's administration"
Anyone have a full list of who they are counting as either the 8 or 13 in that quote? According to Wikipedia, the number of people who have been charged under the espionage act is much higher than 13. For example, there are 52 pages of people convicted under the act.[1] I guess it depends on your definition of "leaking". The relevant dictionary definition of leak is "to give out (information) surreptitiously".[2] Giving information to a foreign government should seemingly be classified as leaking so I'm not sure we should necessarily link it to either journalistic endeavors or whistleblowing.
Ok, don't you think that is a pretty big qualifier to leave out? It also leads us to a question of what is a journalist? Reasonable people can look at Assange and see him as either a journalist or an agent of a foreign government.
It’s in the quote, except for “to journalists” which is in the article I pulled the quote from. I suppose I could have included the next two sentences.
You're being intentionally misleading. The eight prosecuted are not journalists themselves but government employees who leaked sensitive documents to journalists.
And in addition, Vindman wasn’t prosecuted for leaking secrets. He was fired in retribution for giving testimony before Congress, a completely legal thing to do.
I think you're looking for a "gotcha" to call critics of the Trump administration hypocrites, but you will find that 1. people are never logically or morally consistent so this is a weak point in the first place and 2. A lot of people who oppose Trump from the left share your anger with the Obama administration and see him as someone who ran on progressive values and governed as a center-right neoliberal with a penchant for military adventurism.
What makes it all the more frustrating is that Stars and Stripes didn't conduct the poll, they just reported on it. The poll was conducted by Military Times with Syracuse University.
Whatever the actual situation is, and whether it's good or bad, this is the absolute worst form of journalism. It just screams bias; the author injects their own political opinions, they tell the reader what to feel and believe, they twist words and exaggerate in order to sell their political message, it pulls the usual tricks around trying to imply that Trump was directly responsible, and that you should hate Trump like the writer does - this is the complete opposite of any sort of respectable impartial journalism, it's a blatant political hit piece.
In my mind this type of journalism, this article itself, is one of the biggest threads to our country, it's so ironic. Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't have freedom of speech, or that they shouldn't be able to write what they want. I'm just saying it's possible to write horrible, damaging, biased, political hit pieces, and that is what this is.
Whenever there's a budget fight, there's brinkmanship, and this is a common tactic. Government, industry - it doesn't matter. Respond to cuts or proposed cuts by putting something on the cut pile that is unacceptable.
For those who are against this move, in general are you in favor of government journalism in general? Do you think the US would be better with more government journalism? Should there be a a US postal service newspaper, a bureau of land management newspaper, possibly a US Customs and immigration service newspaper? If not, what's so special about having a government-run military newspaper that you think it should exist, but not the others?
PBS and NPR are generally okayish, they certainly look good when compared to their commercial equivalents anyway... though that might be damning with faint praise. I'm not sure of these are valid comparisons to Stars and Stripes though.
BBC generally works pretty well and produces a lot of quality content (even many kinds that are not necessarily commercially viable but nevertheless benefit us all when they're made).
I don't see what's inherently negative about government journalism, although I certainly wouldn't trust the independence of say Voice of America based on the way it's run. But the BBC shows it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
> We understand that DoD plans to cease publication of Stars and Stripes on September 30, 2020 and completely dissolve the organization by January 31, 2021 as a result of the proposed termination of funding in the fiscal year 2021 President’s budget. We urge you to take steps to preserve the funding prerogatives of Congress before allowing any such disruption to take place, for the following reasons.
> First, the House-passed version of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2021, contains additional funding not requested by the Administration to continue operating Stars and Stripes. Second, the Senate has not yet released a defense appropriations bill, nor had an opportunity to conference with the House position, leaving it as a real possibility that Congress may not agree with the proposal to eliminate this funding. Third, the standard text of a continuing resolution – that funds are provided “at a rate of operations… for continuing projects and activities” as provided for in the previous year’s Department of Defense Appropriations Act – places a legal obligation on the Department to not act on a termination of a program until a full-year appropriations bill is enacted. We seek your written assurance that the Department will comply with this obligation and avoid steps that would preempt the funding prerogatives of Congress.
https://www.boozman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2020/9/boozm...
Additional coverage:
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/09/02/senators-espe...
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/bipartisan-group-of-senators...