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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28337 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.

But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.

News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:

WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:

I beat you to it by six minutes!

But yeah, to me, this is about as blatant of an example of the media often lying as you're going to find. Any attempt to rescue this from being an example of the media often lying is going to rely on the most pedantic possible reading of the text of articles while completely ignoring the titles.

That'll teach me not to refresh in a separate tab before hitting post!

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