Ditka - Do you think CNN should have published his identity in the story, or do you think CNN should not have tried to uncover who this troll was?
I can do both. I agree with you that they are idiots, but so what? We already knew there were ignorant people out there (that’s why the SDMB exists, after all). I find the whole NPR-DoI-Twitter-comments-and-HuffPo-story-about-Twitter-comments to be a depressing confirmation of two things I already knew:
- there are dumb people in the world, and some of them have Internet access.
- “journalism” is in a sorry state these days.
I think CNN handled the whole thing rather poorly, but probably more out of ignorance than malice. I’m speculating here, but it’s possible CNN thought they’d use this situation to set an example and hopefully elevate the level of discourse across the nation. I think they handled it in a rather tone-deaf way that came across to some as blackmailing the memer into silence, or something like that.
Across the Internet, ‘doxxing’ someone is generally considered a pretty shitty thing to do. CNN was at least vaguely aware of this (even though it wouldn’t surprise me if no one there had ever heard the term ‘dox’) because they included this line in their story:
I don’t know what the exact journalism standards / expectations are about when a source asks to not have his identity revealed, but my vague impression was that was the sort of thing they generally respected.
Imagining a similar situation, maybe where 4chan uncovered the identities of Antifa protesters, and said they wouldn’t ‘dox’ them as long as they didn’t attend any more Antifa protests, I suspect some people would view that as blackmailing them into silence, or something like that, and would generally not be happy with the situation.
CNN probably would have been better off if they had just let this one slide. I don’t know, maybe they’ll see stories like this as a win.
I sincerely doubt you’d be whining about “the sorry state” of journalism if I had posted an article that highlighted Trump supporters tweeting positive things in response to the DOC. I have no doubt in my mind that you’ve love such a story and that you’d use such a story to show how patriotic and freedom-loving Trump supporters are.
So gimme a fucking break with your sanctimoniousness. You don’t get to be sanctimonious about the “sorry state” of things after posting that inflammatory OP.
You can “sincerely doubt” whatever you want, IDGAF.
Genuinely curious here, what did you find so ‘inflammatory’ about the OP? There was perhaps a bit of flair or color added to the post to make it interesting (someone earlier called it a “hook”), but generally I tried to be even-handed and it was along the lines of: Here is an attitude I see, and I don’t understand it, could someone from your side explain it to me? In this very thread, I think we saw some examples of the attitude I had seen previously (liberals not liking patriotism / nationalism), so it seems pretty spot-on to me.
Wait, that’s a bunch of words criticizing CNN as being not as good as it should be, but you seem to be glossing over what you think journalists should do in situations like this. I think you are saying that CNN should not have tried to figure out who made the video that Trump posted? The aggravating issue, IMHO, is that the troll in question allegedly had a history of posting odious stuff.
If this is indeed what you’re saying - that journalists have some sort of obligation to protect the privacy of people who are NOT SOURCES but are the subjects of the story - I am thoroughly confused as to what you think the role of journalists is in our society.
Your counterpoint about doxxing antifa protesters really has nothing to do with journalism, or keeping the public informed about news events. As a general rule, I don’t see that some whacko joining extremist protests/riots to be a matter of public interest. It’s just intimidation. If former President Obama starts quoting from a book written by an antifa thug, then the identity of that goon is a matter of public interest.
Let’s just cut to the chase here: which is the side with bad ideas, and which is the side with bad people? I’ve heard multiple formulations of this.
I don’t see what value is added to the story by attaching a name / face / location to the ‘author’ of the meme. We already had the full apology statement from HanAssholeSolo, so I don’t see how the story gets any better with ‘HanAssholeSolo is a middle-aged man living in Somewhere, USA. He lives in his mother’s basement and works at a comic book store’ (or whatever). So yeah, I suppose I don’t think they should have wasted the time trying to figure it out, but then again, it’s their time, so they can waste it however they like.
This just sounds like the definition of a troll. Don’t they all have a history of posting odious stuff? I suppose that’d exclude the first-time trolls …
In this case, it seems like HanAssholeSolo was both a source and subject, but perhaps I misunderstood something about the situation. There’s a bit of a … movement to try to get the media to refrain from publicizing the identities of school shooters. It has kind of vaguely carried over to terrorist attacks too, I think. I suppose there’s some societal value in not making assholes famous, so maybe it’s a worthwhile thing to push for, but I must admit, I don’t have strong feelings either way.
So his identity became a matter of public interest when Trump re-tweeted his meme?
I think we all agree: it’s the other side. 
Any OP that pits “red states” against “blue states” in the touchy context of patriotism, given how politically divided we are right now and given how much shit Obama caught for not loving his country enough from your side of the aisle, is logically going to inflame tensions. I think you could have broached the subject without trumping out the tired red state-blue state device or the former president.
But I will concede that your posting history and your reflexive attack on the media makes me biased against you. Your OP is actually not that inflammatory, to be honest. But it fits in with the conservative rhetoric that liberals are not “real Americans”. And I’m really really sick of that message.
I don’t think that HuffPost piece is worthless. Perhaps if enough people read it, someone out there will be bothered to read NPR’s tweets and learn a thing or two about this country’s founding ideals. At the very least, maybe the idiotic Twitters will be sufficiently shamed into behaving themselves going forward.
Folks, if you have HBO I suggest you watch this show: “The Words That Built America.” (It kind of fits here, since it’s an amazing and bipartisan array of media, movie, political, and other celebrities reading the words of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, from Bush 41 to Robert Duvall to Mitch McConnell to Sean Hannity to Meryl Streep to Dwayne Johnson…) I’m watching it right now and, while I could object to some of the participants on libertarian grounds, it’s still excellent.
As for the creator of that Trump video, I couldn’t begin to care less if CNN outs him. If he’s going to put it into the public sphere, he should have the balls to stand behind it, and if someone forces him to do so, so much the better.
And I think those examples are vastly outnumbered by sincere, reasoned explanations of how people view patriotism, its symbols and obligations, and how they celebrate it.
You said you didn’t understand and wanted an explanation. Well, you’ve got almost three pages worth. Have you learned anything, or did you just want to pick a few responses to confirm what you already thought?
Yeah, the identity of the creator of that video doesn’t sound all that newsworthy, but CNN couldn’t have known that when they started trying to find out. What if they’d traced it to a Russian source, or a PAC that’s not supposed to campaign for a particular candidate, or a non-profit that’s not supposed to engage in politics? Sounds to me like they did what they’re supposed to; find out the truth and report the parts that are news.
Besides which, does it seem to anyone else that the coarsening of public dialog has gone hand-in-hand with the anonymity of the internet? Say what you want about Rush Limbaugh, but he puts his name behind his words. Maybe we’d all be a little bit nicer in what we say if we knew we could be called on it.
I agree. In the OP I wrote “Many in blue-state-America will likely do many of those same things, but I get a sense that there’s an undercurrent or attitude from some …”
I thought the ‘MANY’ and ‘SOME’ made it pretty clear that I knew that I was discussing a minority viewpoint, but a lot of people either missed that or misinterpreted it, and some seemed to feel that I was slandering all liberals, or liberals generally, as unpatriotic. Let me take this opportunity to clarify: I believe that most of my registered-Democrat-countrymen are also patriotic and love our shared country and want to improve it in areas they feel it’s lacking. If you felt like I was trying to paint you as ‘not a real American’, I apologize. That was not my intent. I don’t even feel that way about you if you find patriotic displays disgusting and repulsive, but I am curious about your reasoning if this describes you.
Yes, I’ve learned some things. A fair number of the responses confirmed what I already suspected, but the angle about historically-oppressed-people feeling like overtly-patriotic displays were rubbing their noses in it wasn’t one that had not occurred to me when I wrote the OP.
From the beginning I’ve thought that this was overblown by the media (not just CNN, but other outlets reporting on it). While they have points WRT the tacit approval of Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment and the somewhat tenuous threat of violence, they could have just made them and moved on. Instead we got 14 talking heads from both sides dunning it to death, with nothing resolved, as usual.
It’s the kind of humor that a bully would appreciate, which is totally unsurprising considering who retweeted it.
The CNN/reddit/doxxing thing is silly. Here’s what happened, in short: CNN tried to find out the source of the wrestling/CNN gif thing. That probably took 15 minutes for a single tech-savvy reporter (the redditor username, not necessarily their identity). Then the reporter probably took another 15 minutes and found out that this reddittor, HanAssholeSolo, had made several truly monstrous racist/bigoted posts, outright calling for mass murder as well as the worst sort of disgusting racist stuff. Presumably taken aback by these awful posts, the reporter did some rather trivial social media searching and found out the likely actual identity of the poster. Upon finding this out, the reporter emailed the guy asking about his awful posts.
The guy didn’t respond to the reporter. The guy then deleted all his awful posts and made a public apology on the Trump subreddit (which the Trump subreddit mods subsequently deleted). Then the CNN reporter published all of what he did, and said that he didn’t plan to make the identity public since the guy apologized, though if he continued trolling they might reconsider.
None of that seems out of bounds for a journalist, when the President tweets something really weird and inflammatory (i.e. “this is what the President repeated, this username is who he repeated it from, this username has also posted all this other awful stuff…”). If you disagree, which action of the reporter was wrong?
The very first part, where a CNN reporter gave 2 shits about the gif and tried to track down the source. A major news organization shouldn’t care where a dumb gif comes from.
For that matter, the 2nd part too. There’s nothing racist or violent about the gif, I care about as much about whether or not the gif creator is racist as I do about the guy who makes my coffee at Starbucks. The coffee isn’t racist, so why is that relevant?
This whole thing is just childish. It’s beneath the office of the presidency to retweet body slamming gifs, and it’s beneath CNN to respond. They should have taken the high road and done absolutely nothing.
That’s silly. It’s the President, not just some business asshole – when the President says something weird, that’s news. And I’d agree with you if CNN had put a strike team of journalists and investigators and invested weeks and weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it was a single reporter who, most likely on his own judgement, just decided to find out the source of that weird gif, and in the process, found a whole lot of disturbing shit.
This isn’t the biggest story in history, or even that day, but it seems like news to me (if a rather small piece of news, considering his track record) – the President repeats really weird and disturbing content created by a disgusting bigot. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a reporter might decide to spend 20 minutes looking into that.
It seems that, for the reporter’s 20 minutes of work, he may have gotten the source wrong. It’s probably a topic for a larger / different thread.
ETA: this was already pointed out, apparently.
She said “America”, not “Americans”, as in, their views do not reflect american values, not that the people who express the sentiments are not americans. There is a very big difference there, and it’s not subtle or nuanced at all.
So, you are walking home with her, and as you pass a homeless person, she kicks him until he is unconscious, then spits on him. You start to say something, but she gives you the look, and says “Don’t you dare criticize me on our anniversary!”
I REALLY doubt that’s what he had in mind when he said “she has some flaws.”