Do you mind enlightening us how Wikileaks was a propaganda arm of the Russian government when they released video of US war crimes (murder of journalists in the Collateral Murder video)?
If another news organization received the DNC leaks and chose to not publish them, do you think that would have been ethical?
Is your position that, one cannot be a US citizen and oppose the US government and if you do you're a Russian agent?
The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks put the lie to their claim of being a journalistic entity.
Julian Assange has an agenda against certain people/parties, and has demonstrably leaked things that support that, and not leaked things that refute it.
I say that as a detractor of many of the same people and institutions Assange dislikes, so check your assumptions of bias before you throw them, please.
Weird definition of a "journalistic entity" I don't think that any news source satisfies your requirement that it be complete non-partisan, even such a thing was even logically possible.
I don't expect journalism to be non-partisan. I expect it to be affirmatively transparent about its partisanship.
You're right, though, that nothing actually meets that bar. It's a human institution; it's necessarily flawed. That's why you source across biases and ideologies, and correct accordingly.
The thing I'm talking about is instead the deliberate pretense of not being partisan. Fox News calling itself "fair and balanced", or claiming "We report. You decide." are just particularly egregious examples. When you aren't presenting enough of the picture for someone to form an informed opinion, you're peddling propaganda. I know the propagandist can't admit that's what he's doing, so I hold journalism to the standard of integrity of knowing, and owning, its biases.
But it's ultimately a spectrum, and it's on me to gauge where on that spectrum any given source lands. Some things are more propaganda than journalism. Some things are more or less one or the other to different degrees on different topics, at the same time. Sometimes they're at different points on the same topic, on different days, or in different stories.
It's complicated, sure. But, holding as nuanced an appreciation of this mess as I hope I've implied, I hope also that you'll give me the credit of not merely talking out my ass when I say I find Assange to be towards the propagandist pole.
>You're right, though, that nothing actually meets that bar.
Then your post is content free. If you find nothing to meet your personal standard of being journalism than you finding wikileaks to not be journalists merely means they are the same as the New York Times.
>> But it's ultimately a spectrum, and it's on me to gauge where on that spectrum any given source lands.
In no way did I claim, or even imply some sort of equivalence between Wikileaks and the NYT. Please don't put words in my mouth which I explicitly disclaim just two paragraphs later.
My point is more that it's impracticable to impossible to share all of our biases, not least because we aren't aware of so many of them. When we've internalized a narrative, it becomes an unconscious bias, and can't very well be meaningfully disclosed.
Fox News isn't journalism. It's opinion wrapped around selective "reporting".
EDIT: Yes, of course it's impossible to eliminate bias. To extrapolate from that to accepting overtly biased and selectively published content as journalism is unsupported, at best.
It's the selectivity of reporting that compromises the claim of journalism, not the bias. When you don't report on things that don't support your narrative, you're no longer reporting.
If another news organization received the DNC leaks and chose to not publish them, do you think that would have been ethical?
Is your position that, one cannot be a US citizen and oppose the US government and if you do you're a Russian agent?