They're comedy shows. They send someone to record an hour-long interview but the whole segment is 5 minutes long and the clip they air is only a few seconds. Selective editing is built into the format, they don't spend the airtime to run the full interview and their purpose is to choose the short clip which has the most comedy value or makes the target look bad.
There was not a single interview done by LWTN for that segment, they took those from other sources. And the segment was pretty good actually, covered all the major points and didn't have any major errors. Actually, it is light years ahead of what other news outlets reported. Surey it is not on the same level as an audit report, but that is not its purpose. It is much closer to a comprehensive executive summary of an incident report than anything I have ever seen in media elsewher.
Re: selection of statements, the reports in Fukushima and Cherbobyl do the same. The point is to showcase the underlying issues with concrete examples and statements. Nothing wrong with that per-se. And in th LWTN segment, it was not done in bad faith, it is bot FOX news after all.
> It is much closer to a comprehensive executive summary of an incident report than anything I have ever seen in media elsewher.
This is the danger in it.
They pick someone they don't like and basically do a hit piece. Now sometimes the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism, and then if you try to get the real story, the real story is that the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism.
But then they'll run a segment in the same style where the target is just someone from the outgroup of the show's target audience.
> My entire point is that this style of show sometimes gets it wrong. You keep pointing to an instance when they may have gotten it right and ignoring the sometimes.
Do you have any concrete examples? You have yet to provide a direct example of this and instead only keep alluding to it happening.
As I said, their reporting has been scrutinzed a lot. Including a multi-million dollar defamition suite brought by this coal magnate. Guess what, the show didn't get it wrong. You don'z have to like the humor or bias of the show. Factually so, so far, their reporting was always as correct as possible at the time of filming. Or do you have proof otherwise, retractions they did, law suites they lost, that kind of stuff?
The lawsuit wasn't just lost, it was thrown out. That's pretty strong that they "didn't get it wrong". Now weigh that against your evidence of nothing.
You’re still not getting it. A lawsuit for defamation still has nothing to do with “getting it wrong”.
You can say many things that are literally correct while conveying the completely wrong message.
It’s like the picture with the soldier, gun, water, and the child. You can present whichever cross section of those that you want to paint completely opposing narratives without defamation.
The point is that defamation is a minimum bar not indicative of anything related to the overall narrative.
Saying 'maybe' about anything without evidence is hollow and meaningless. Maybe 'the message' is wrong? It's public, watch it and come back with evidence if you think that.
It was legally tested to be true and neither of your posts have any actual substance. Maybe the sun will explode tomorrow too. I have as much evidence of that as you have put here, which is none at all.
I don’t think you understand the difference between “not defamation” and good reporting. You can easily use a bunch of true statements to paint a completely misleading narrative.
All of those are true and would invalidate a defamation claim that the soldier on the left was pointing a gun at the unarmed guy’s head.
None of that is relevant to whatever massively biased narrative shows like LWTN present. The art of these shows is to say a bunch of true things and exclude other things so the emergent picture is grossly misleading without ever lying.
LWTN is a terrible way to stay informed. It’s an entertaining way to get a very biased take on a topic though.
We have to go by some standard, if we don't we fave full anarchy. In a democratic society, that ultimately comes down to the laws and courts at the bitter end. If we ignore that, we can just forget about anything, can't we?
And yes, the two things you mentioned are incredibly close, close enough to see them as equal outside a very deep legal discussion.
I think it's interesting how normalized it has become in our culture that burden of proof is only necessary in one direction, or is not necessary at all to adopt a belief.
Well put. Most skeptics these days are borderline conspiracists when it comes to delivering their opinions. The person above only needed to say, “trust but verify comedic claims” but instead they went down the all too common road of dogwhistling to other “skeptics.” I’m confident that quite a lot of John Oliver’s claims are verifiable (I have spent a lot of time doing my own research on the claims after watching the show). Not saying I’m a brilliant investigator but wanted to offer an opposing opinion. Blatantly sowing distrust is exactly the kind of behavior a true skeptic hopes to avoid.
They do that because nobody wants to look at hundreds of dead bodies or talk to grieving widows, or search through rubble for broken airplane parts or data recorders. That's not so funny.
Just because comedy shows focus on entertainment value doesn't mean there's no evidence. They have a different focus from investigators or courts, but in democratic countries, the funds to run investigations come from politicians and public outcry, and that comes from the people actually giving a sh*t about it. So they do perform a function.
