Headline: US officials admit that TickTock ban intended to censor Gaza news.
Article: Romney and Blinken blame Israel’s disastrous PR on social media and opine that this is a good reason to ban platforms like TickTock.
Well, I know what I’d lead with if I were TikTok’s lawyers making a 1st Amendment argument.
They remember the good old days when there were only three news networks
Those were the good old days. ABC, NBC and CBS only reported facts. No one dared step out of line for fear of appearing biased. Journalists took great pride in being unbiased. Any whiff of opinion on the nightly news was a career ender.
Hell, a major broadcast metric back then was, “Which news anchor do you trust the most?” And that’s with all of them basically saying the same thing.
The networks were powerful, as journalism is meant to be. Now our “facts” are splattered across hundreds of platforms and none give a shit about being seen as biased. Today it’s pick your own truth.
They were definitely still biased. The difference is that the opinion was built into what they covered vs what they didn’t cover. ABC has always been a left-leaning network, CBS a right-leaning network, and NBC somewhere between. So while they might cover most big things very much the same, sometimes what they chose to cover or how much to cover it would reveal their leanings.
That being said, they were much more in-step than our news networks are now.
I suspect it made the manufacture of consent rather more easy.
Unfortunate to see that was the reason.
Idiots
No, Romney made that rhetorical statement and Blinken looked flabbergasted that the statement was even made.
Romney’s statement was made in the context, ironically, that certain social media “news” is made in the absence of any historical context as appeals to emotions instead of facts. The fact that the Twitter poster made an obvious cut to give “context” to Romney’s strange claim is an example of what Blinken said is wrong with certain social media news “sources”.
TikTok ban discussions have been going on for a long time, well prior to Hamas’s October attack, and it’s a distortion of reality to claim motives otherwise.
Romney should not be a role model for anything other than uncompassionate conservatism. If this type of “news” article is indicative of how many people get their information, then reality really is fluid for a whole lot of people and that’s scary. Though it’s hardly unsurprising with the amount of obvious propaganda sites posting “news” about the conflict that people take as gospel.
