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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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the way these articles all manage to omit, imo, the most important detail suggests that the journalists are idiots and/or they believe their readers are idiots.

I'm finding that more and more often since I first noticed it with Carolyn Strom. TL;DR: A bunch of news stories came out about a nurse charged with professional misconduct after she posted critical comments to her personal Facebook page. While that timeline is factually accurate, the media neglected to mention that the charges were primarily based on her subsequent actions, which were to put the Minister of Health on blast on Twitter.

More recently, the radio was covering emojis as signatures, but (unlike the article I linked) didn't mention that it was sent in response to the contract they had been discussing. They headed off on a weird tangent of which emoji would be the best for signing a mortgage, how it breaks down by age, etc. They never even alluded that texting "Yes, I agree" is a textbook example of a "signature" for that purpose, and instead warned people about being tricked into legally-binding contracts through malicious misinterpretation.

Entry-level journalists for a news site have to write 6 to 8 stories every day. There just isn’t time for research. You wait for something to bob up, read the cliffs notes, add your own colour or think of a way it could affect something people care about and then you send it off.

It’s a lot like commenting on the motte haha.