Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
It’s interesting how much news on this comm. comes from news agencies in the same few countries. Looking through the recent few posts, this is what I see:
Israel: Haaretz, Ynet, Times of Israel, JPost
United States: NYT, AP, CNN, VOA, RFA, Newsweek, NBC, WaPo, WSJ, Axios, Semafor
United Kingdom: The Guardian, BBC, Reuters
Ukraine: Pravda, Ukrinform, Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post
Other Europe: france24, DW, notesfrompoland, El Pais
Other (often only one article from each): straitstimes, SCMP, Al Jazeera, JapanToday, Buenos Aires Herald
This reflects a heavily American-centric lean, an Anglo-centric lean, and a Euro-centric lean. These biases are inherent based on where news is being drawn from. It’s showing only one side of the picture. People like to argue that this is because the US (and the West at large) protects media freedoms, but to that I point to:
The claims of Iraqi WMDs used to justify the invasion of Iraq
The claims of Ukrainian/NATO-backed technical superiority allowing Ukraine to push to the Sea of Azov
The “unlawful detention” of the two Canadian Michaels in China, when it was later revealed that they were participating in “security reporting operations in China” and the Canadian government is paying $3m each as compensation
Even if these media freedoms are so strong, they’re still consistently failing to capture the truth… And the truth is what news should be about.