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."

Comments

Same thing Washington Post did with Palin's

[Salo2112]

http://www.politico.com/blogs/...

It's fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have already randomly tagged some :)

Re:WSJ is owned by NewsCorp now, right?

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:WSJ is owned by NewsCorp now, right?

[nbauman]

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

Re: WSJ is owned by NewsCorp now, right?

[ClickOnThis]

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.