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WSJ Crowdsources Investigation of Hillary Clinton Emails
PvtVoid writes: The Wall Street Journal now has a page up that encourages readers to sift through and tag Hillary Clinton's emails on Benghazi. Users can click on suggested tags such as "Heated", "Personal", "Boring", or "Interesting", or supply their own tags. What could possibly go wrong? I'm tagging this story "election2016."
The news side is fairly reliable. The editorial page has been brain-dead since the Carter administration, and that was long before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/...
Remember that the Wall Street Journal is owned by the same people who own Fox News and several tabloids that are even worse, the News Corp (i.e., Rupert Murdoch); you can even see WSJ reporters on Fox.
It's well established that their owners exercise few journalistic ethics and little regard for the truth, and they publish pro-GOP propaganda, along with incitements to prejudice, anger and hate. Why does anyone trust them?
This stunt should not be a surprise.
Saying someone is not credible because they are part of an organization that is not credible is not ad hominem.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
I have already randomly tagged some :)
Guess what Slashdot, people read other websites. I don't read /. for political news. And except for AM radio conservatives, nobody gives a shit about Benghazi.
Please. Someone name me ONE Hillarhea!!! accomplishment outside of her marrying Bill.
1. She was a senator
2. She was secretary of state
3. She was a successful attorney
4. She was an extremely successful commodities trader
I think that 'Association Fallacy' would be closer than Ad Hominem
However, I do not think that it is a fallacy to doubt the credibility of any 'news' source that is part of the News Corp family
News Corp has demonstrated a decided bent in favor of the American right wing of the political spectrum, and it would be wise for anybody to take that into consideration when weighing the value of 'news' generated by any member of the New Corp family
Wherever You Go, There You Are
By some accounts the regular articles are not that biased; it's the editorial section that resembles the usual Rupert style.
Table-ized A.I.
It is still a fallacy though.
Let me help you understand how to stop fallacies:
X must equal Y because Variable M that does not require under all circumstances that X must equal Y given the presence of Variable M.
So for example, does news corp or the wallstreet journal ALWAYS lie? Obviously not.
What is more, MUST they lie? For example, if we had a computer program that reported on a binary value and it always gave the opposite value to whatever it read. Then you could conclude that variable X was the opposite of whatever that program said. Neither newscorp nor the Wallstreet journal are reliability reporting the opposite of anything.
Therefore it is logically fallacious to say that something they said is a lie because they said it.
See?
Fallacies are about LOGIC. Not you fucking politics.
You can't say anything is automatically bullshit no matter who says it because no one is reliably wrong 100 percent of the time.
You can of course take what they say with a grain of salt. You can choose to ignore them. You can hold any sort of opinion you want.
You cannot say that everything they say is wrong or that any given thing is wrong simply because they said it.
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
If you can't be bothered to do that, then your opinion is based entirely on your own bias and the value of your opinion is based on the value of your bias. Which in this place is literally nothing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
After you wade past the trolls, Disqus is already the best fact checker for any story out there. Obviously, you have to follow up with a search to confirm what you read in the comments, but that's where I usually find the most important (unreported) portion of most stories.
Same is true of slashdot. Which is why most of us don't even RTFA.
It's the paper for business-oriented conservatives. Their news sides has always been pretty good (it's not smart to invest on what you want to be true), but the editorial side has never been what non-business conservatives would describe as "sane."
They're always convinced the world would be a paradise of joy if only the big bad government would let businessmen have their way with everyone else. During the Civil Rights movement they were squishy about Dr. King on their best days, they were the ones beating the "FDR is a Commie" drum when he created Social Security, etc.
Ah yes I remember how the WSJ and FOX went after Bush, Cheney, Libbey and Rove when they used a private email server (gwb43.com) for a private email server for use in the White House whose stated purpose was to avoid FOIA requests. You know the instance where Bush and Rove were embroiled in two competing scandals — the Valerie Plame scandal, in which operatives for Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, including Rove and Scooter Libby, were accused of unmasking Valerie Plame, a CIA specialist in the black market for weapons of mass destruction, for purely partisan reasons, and the U.S. Attorney purge, in which Rove’s political operation in the White House was accused of ordering Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to purge eight U.S. attorneys who were qualified prosecutors and replace them with political hacks with little or no prosecutorial experience. During the investigation, it came to light that Rove’s server had been used to send official, non-political emails — correspondence that was required by law to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act. On April 12, 2007, Rove’s operation admitted that it had deleted at least 5 million emails from the server. In December 2009, technicians who had examined the server reported that the number of emails that had been deleted was far greater — 22 million.
It is not an Ad Hominem attack nor addle-brained Fox Derangement Syndrome when the group we are complaining about the attacks on Clinton, but under similar if not identical circumstances they didn't attack Bush, Cheney and Rove
Okay, post-acquisition, did WSJ make a point of investigating the Sarah Palin private yahoo e-mail that she used for business while in power as the Governor of Alaska to circumvent Alaskan law? I don't remember coverage of that being terribly strong. I also don't remember WSJ asking the public to comb through through the gwb43 e-mail personally.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yes, let's stick to the news sources that are unbiased like...
no... its not libertarian. We dont like fox anymore than you do. if you were correct, they would not have treated ron paul the way they did, and they would not be treating rand paul the way they are now
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You are referring to the mathematical logic concept known as "implication". Just because P implies Q doesn't mean that Q cannot be true event if P is false, only that Q MUST be true if P is false.
Therefore just because Q is true, that doesn't make P a credible indicator. When Q is true, it is true regardless of P's truth or falsehood and therefore lends no credibility to P.
And except for AM radio conservatives, nobody gives a shit about Benghazi.
You would think so, but evidently not. If nobody cared, the State Department wouldn't time the release for take-out-the-trash Friday (the day when you get the least news cycle result). Instead, the timing points to an obviously politically motivated timing utterly inappropriate to a theoretically neutral unit of government.
But, we all knew exactly what the Wall Street Journal would become once Rupert got his greasy little hands on it 10 years ago. Just another tabloid rag.
It did and it didn't. On the one hand, it added a "New York Post" aspect that's not worth the screen space it pollutes.
On the other hand, it spews out a lot of general political nonsense in its editorial pages. But then, that largely predates Rupert's takeouver. And besides, if it wasn't for editorial pages, where would the wackos of the world get a chance to speak? Outside of talk radio, anyway.
On the gripping hand, the WSJ does seem to be reasonably sane when it comes to purely financial matters. David Wechsel's appearances on NPR always seemed to me to be relatively free of the sort of wishful thinking that ideological thinking colors interviews and reports with.
Not really. The credibility of the source does not mean what they report automatically true or false.
What I'm talking about is more elemental than what you're talking about.
Philosophy sits on top of logic as logic sits above math in the way that math is above physics and the way that physics is above biology.
Mathematics is applied symbolic logic. But logic itself is a different persuit and cannot be conflated with mathematics. And logic is itself a product of philosophy which can be neither conflated with logic nor mathematics.
When one speaks of fallacious logic, one speaks of logic... not math. You can represent most logical concepts in symbolic form though rarely with sustainable accuracy. There is a translation when you go from logic to math and frequently there are conflations of similar concepts and terms which leads to fallacies.
As such it is far more reliable to maintain the logic in a more conceptual context since it is less likely to go through translations and thus introduce errors.
Your example did just that thus baring out the wisdom of what I just said.
Sometimes it is helpful to express things in purely symbolic forms. But only when you have defined your variables properly and have not made the extremely common mistake of conflating similar concepts.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
By far the coolest part of all this is now a "crowd" will form an opinion about Clinton and Benghazi from reading her emails. Primary sources FTW. Not want any journalist wants them to think, not a quote picked carefully for a political ad, but by actually reading what was said at the time. That's more informed democracy already than I expected in this whole election cycle!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
she managed to get elected senator of my state of NY, eventhough she was horribly unqualified
She managed to become sec of state... also horribly unqualified
thats an accomplishment!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
And then there was whole problem of invading the wrong country for the wrong reason. Oops. I wonder how that happened. We still don't know.
None of the hijackers were from Iran. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. Not an Iraqi in sight. The were all Sunni member of Al Queda, and citizens of (at the time) US allies in the Arab world.
And then there was the problem with no weapons of mass destruction. Oops again. There were no biological weapons. There was no uranium separation/enrichment program. "Iraq's WMD capability ... was essentially destroyed in 1991" ... No evidence was found for continued active production of WMD subsequent to the imposition of sanctions in 1991 The chemical weapons that Iraq had in the 1980's that were used against Iran were built using technology imported from the West.
So why was all the intelligence about Iraq wrong? That is an unanswered question. The Republican controlled Congress never stepped up to the plate to ask any hard questions. Gosh, I wonder why?
Of course, there is a clue: PNAC, or the Project for the New American Century. PNAC released a Statement of Principles in 1997 calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It was signed by Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Elliot Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, Peter Rodman, Henry Rowen, and Paul Wolfowitz, who all ended up working for the Bush administration. One would almost think that they used 9/11 as an excuse and made up a bunch of crap to make it happen.
Back to Benghazi. It was a big mistake and four people died. In Iraq he US military alone suffered 4,425 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 32,223 wounded in action. The civilian death and injured toll is staggering, and still going up.
So fuck the WSJ, and fuck the Republican Party. Collectively they are mass murderers. When they scream about Benghazi it's like child molesters complaining about someone playing their radio too loud. The fact that they have so much power shows that voters in the US have less intelligence then a pack of inbreed poodles.
Why is Snark Required?
Right, and George Stephanopolus gave Hillary Clinton 75K for her "charity" without telling anybody. Amazing how nobody here was unhappy about that.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
In my professional judgment the WSJ used to be the best, most reliable news source in English. Then Murdoch took over, and turned it into a right-wing propaganda sheet. It was a tragedy. This crowd-sourcing of Hillary's emails is maybe the worst example of their partisan bias and seeking sensationalism.
I read the WSJ daily for 40 years (along with the New York Times, Washington Post, and professional magazines like Science and JAMA). I used to pick up their stories, and interview the same people they interviewed.
I knew reporters who wrote for the WSJ. I believed, and most journalists I knew agreed, that the WSJ was the best newspaper in the English language. The reason I liked it was that the news sections were as objective and fact-checked as humanly possible, and one of the few publications not influenced by advertisers and political pressure from the publisher. They really were fair and balanced.
The WSJ's defining moment was in the 1950s when they got leaked photos of the new model GM cars, which were a big trade secret. GM threatened to cancel their advertising if they published it. The WSJ told them to fuck off. Newspapers didn't do that. It was a long time before they accepted GM's advertising again.
An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy, but if he picked up a story from the WSJ, he could take a chance without checking because he could depend on them to get it right.
If I read a story in the WSJ, I could depend on them getting everything right. (The quick formula is, get all sides; and especially if you attack somebody, get their side too.)
I remember one story on welfare reform in California in which the reporter quoted everybody, from the governor's assistant in charge of welfare, to the supervisors, to the caseworkers, to several welfare mothers. The story made it clear that welfare "reform" wasn't working, merely harassing welfare recipients and making it harder for them to get back on their feet.
A. Kent Macdougal was a WSJ reporter until he retired to teach journalism. He wrote an article in Monthly Review, the marxist magazine, about his experience. (Can't find it online, sorry.) He said that in his career in the WSJ, he could write whatever he wanted, as long as he followed the formula for getting all sides and supporting every statement with documented facts, even though he was a socialist who was criticizing the capitalist system in the WSJ's own pages. The WSJ was one of the few places where you could read news stories that actually criticized the American free-market system, and stood up to companies like GM. I follow health care and drugs, and the WSJ published some of the great exposes of drug companies and the medical establishment.
The ironic thing about the WSJ was that they had a very liberal news section, and a very right wing editorial page. I used to enjoy the editorial page because every day they would publish a tightly-argued, logical, well-documented right wing argument, and I would have to figure out where they made their mistake. Sometimes I had to agree that they were right, and they changed my mind. That's a good editorial page. However, there was a sharp division between the editorial section and the news section.
When Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ, it was a tragedy for journalism and even for democracy, because the WSJ was the best thing you could read to be an informed citizen and voter.
Ironically, the best business story the WSJ ever did was their coverage of the takeover of their own newspaper by News Corporation. They gave the whole background of the ownership and control of the WSJ, and how the older generation of the Bancroft (sp?) family was committed to the mission of great journalism, but the younger generation just wanted to get higher dividends. And some of those editors and reporters, who knew they would be leaving, gave the best story ever of how un
Take Fox News and MSNBC coverage of any given story and split the difference and you might get something vaguely resembling the truth.
That is yet another fallacy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I don't know the answer to this, but I suspect I know the answer: does Hilary's printed email dump (which is all that she will provide) include the email headers and associated metadata that comes with an electronic copy of an email?
I rather doubt that she has; but, I ask because she claims that she has fulfilled her obligation by providing printed versions of the emails. So, even if we were willing to concede that incredibly dubious claim, has she really complied with the law by not providing the entire electronic record?
Obviously, this part of the email can be quite important (just ask the NSA), so if she isn't providing that, what is her justification for not doing so?
If the law doesn't specifically make an exemption for that, then it can't be omitted. When she received an email, the header is a part of the email that she received. Therefore, it is part of the official record.
Are you really so far gone that tautology doesn't look like a fallacy for you?
You say they're not credible... why? Because they're not credible? Oh well, glad that got sorted out.
So you must accept that the God invented the universe etc as well right? Because that is also backed up with tautology and circular logic.
You're expecting me to accept the GIVEN that a host organization is inherently non-credible and that therefore all subsidiaries are not credible and therefore that a given story submitted by such a subsidiary is also not credible.
Your entire argument is a cascading waterfall of fallacious shit where the shit flows through a logic tree supported by assumed givens at the top then pools at the bottom where it is pumped up and pours through the system all over again.
Genius.
As to you saying a financial adviser is credible or not... exactly how do you substantiate that position? You just saying " they don't know what they're talking about" is meaningless without some sort of supporting argument. Absent that you have an unqualified opinion that isn't worth anything.
I will take news from ANY source and evaluate it rationally. MSNBC does some good reporting sometimes and sometimes Fox does some good reporting. No one is all bad or all good. And discounting any given story simply because of the source is fallacious.
Let me explain what that means again because I don't think you understand what a fallacy is in the first place.
A statement is fallacious if it is not 100 percent true. If you say "everyone in my car is hungry after six hours in the car"... well, you might know YOU are hungry and MOST of the people in the car might be hungry but you don't know that EVERYONE in the car is hungry. It is fallacious because it isn't known to actually be true. It doesnt' follow that because YOU are hungry and everyone else SHOULD be hungry that they all actually ARE hungry. Maybe someone is dead. Maybe someone has been pigging out in the back eating snacks. Maybe anything. You don't know.
That is what it means for something to be fallacious. This passive slippery shit logic that so many people are comfortable with is inherently fallacious because people are not giving any attention to whether things MUST be true or MUST be false. You simply go with "probably" and "maybe" and "should" and thus don't actually fucking know anything.
As to bias, simply dismissing a source out of hand especially when they're passing no judgement on the source material but literally offering the RAW data for public evaluation is itself bias... on your part.
Admit it, apologize, and promise not to do it again. Or surrender any shred of intellectual credibility you were presumed out of common courtesy.
I have no patience for this shit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If they did and came to the conclusion that there was nothing illegal or corrupt about them, would you believe them? No, you would just call them shills for her campaign. So why bother. Let the left-wing media report on right-wing problems and let the right-wing media report on left-wing problems. That seems fair.
I have been modded down. Whatever.
If one side is lying and the other side is telling the truth, then the truth is not somewhere in the middle.
I'll let the reader decide which side is which.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
A judge later ordered Palin's emails released to the New York Times in response to a FOIA request they filed. The Times crowdsourced their investigation by posting the archive online (which is exactly what the WSJ is doing, by the way.) Neither the Times' professional investigation nor the crowdsourced investigation show any evidence that she conducted state business over the private emails.
You're also an incredibly stupid liar. If anyone clicks through the link, they will see that you are lying about the Carr piece. You left out the first five paragraphs of the piece. These are the first two:
Sunday was the second anniversary of the sale of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdochâ(TM)s News Corporation. At that time, a chorus of journalism church ladies (I was among them) warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck, and predicted that he would use it to his own ends.
Yet here we are, two years later, and The Wall Street Journal still hits my doorstep every morning as one of the nationâ(TM)s premier newspapers.
In 2009, Carr was worried that the WSJ MIGHT be used by Murdoch as a conservative weapon, but in the two years he had owned the WSJ to that point, Murdoch hadn't started doing so.
I'd imagine that if the WSJ had started down that path, you'd have something more recent than 2009.
Well, these are Hillary's emails from that time period. If they show her and her advisors discussing how it had to be a YouTube video, we'll know they were giving us the best information they had at the time. On the other hand, if they're talking in the emails about how it was an al Qaeda terrorist attack at times when they were claiming to the American people that it was a YouTube video, we'll know it was a coverup.
In fact, WSJ actually used to be conservative. Now, they are more loony tunes. Basically, they went from economics to political over the last 7 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm in the news business. This is a right-wing attack job.
So you're here to offer a Left-wing attack job?
An editor at McGraw-Hill once told me that if he picked up a story from the NYT, he would have to check it for accuracy...
Interesting that you go on to quote the NYT attacking the WSJ.
Now when (if) I read a WSJ story, I have to ask myself, "What did they leave out because the publisher, or some big business like GM, didn't like it?" like any other newspaper
Did you bother to identify what the NYT left out in their story? And the fall of the WSJ is, in essence, to lower them to the level of the NYT? That is damning.
I'm also wondering what you left out?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell