What is with the "Mainstream Media"?

[fragment]

Originally Posted by BDS

Do the newspapers have an “ethical obligation to live up to (the) expectation… for truthfulness and accuracy” expressed by posters in this thread? In the posts I’ve read here, there is no such “expectation”. Does that mean newspapers have no ethical obligation?

Would a con-man be less morally responsible for his lies just because some people aren't fooled?

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by fragment

Would a con-man be less morally responsible for his lies just because some people aren't fooled?

That's neocon-man

[BDS]

Originally Posted by fragment

Would a con-man be less morally responsible for his lies just because some people aren't fooled?

His lies would be less reprehensible if he KNEW they were not fooling people --the novelist is less reprehensible than Clifford Irving (is that the Hughes autobiographers name?).

Who is more reprehensible -- the man who bores others with the truth, or the one who entertains them with lies?

Personally, I think Thurber preferrable to the most honest and diligent society page writers. Don't you? (Of course, aesthetic and moral judgments may differ, but perhaps not as much as some might think, and we may still have to decide between dishonest fun, or honest boredom.)

[mickthinks]

Today was the first I heard about Operation Mockingbird (if you don’t count the heretofore solitary reference at by lolJerome).

Operation Mockingbird was definitely a thing, but there’s some question whether it was really a thing or whether it’s a just a made-up name for something very like it that was the real thing. Carl Bernstein seemed to think it was really a thing, which is no small thing.

So do you think it was a real real thing or just a kind of thing?

[viscousmemories]

It's certainly believable and consistent with other things we know, a lot of which is detailed in James Risen's The Last Honest Man, but it's notable (to me anyway) that Risen doesn't mention this operation explicitly (at least by this name, as far as the book's index is concerned).

[seebs]

The old quip about reality having a well-known liberal bias is somewhat accurate in the US at this time -- there's simply a very large pool of things on which the American right has committed to denying unambiguous truths about the world, and that does create a huge problem for attempts to be "fair".

Meanwhile, you can radicalize lonely people just by approving of them whenever they spout conspiracy theories:

Lies, Damned Lies, And Elon Musk | Techdirt