Fakenews from HuffPo

[Dill]

(12-21-2016, 04:07 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Any determination of a person's alleged racism or sexism or whatever will refer some action on that person's part to a definition via inference. That is called making a JUDGMENT. There can only be two questions thereafter--does the definition offer sound criteria and do the actions in question meet the criteria. Ryan made a judgment of fact in this case. One can dispute the criteria of his definition of racism or dispute that Trump referred to a "Mexican judge." Little is accomplished by claiming Ryan expressed an "opinion" and therefore what he said can't be a "fact."  It certainly can.

You keep bringing up Ryan like it is relevant to the discussion of this article.  I have already shown how this is not the case.

I bring up Ryan, in the first place, to explain why calling Trump a racist or bigot or anti-immigrant is not just "editorializing."
In the quote above, I am explaining how to assess and apply definitions. When people can agree on such standards in advance,
there is greater likelihood that labels will be actually descriptive rather than just expressing one party's whims and dislikes.

That is certainly relative to a disagreement in which you have claimed assessments of Trump's behavior are no more than "blindly hurled insults." They are neither "blindly hurled" nor simply "insults" if they accurately categorize Trump's behavior. That HuffPo writers call him these things does not establish they are "just like" Breitbart--only on "the left" (as people call social liberals in the US).

Assessing the applicability of definitions is also relevant to a discussion in which you claim it is misleading to characterize a party founded by Nazis as a party founded by Nazis. If it is important to call them "ex-Nazis" once they were forcibly de-nazified after the war, then in the interest of greater accuracy I concede the point.

And this brings us back to my point about why it is wrong to claim  that mainstream and "left" news sites in the US are really no different from Fox, Breitbart, WND and DRudge. There is a qualitative difference created by the latter's greater readiness to undermine standards, to fuzz distinctions they don't like, to circulate false information as news, to present government and mainstream press as co-conspirators, and to claim everyone else is really doing it too rather than to re-affirm standards.  To defend Trump, you have to break down standards across a range of domains--journalistic, ethcial, scientific and legal.  I refuse to accept this "new normal" and am making a claim here which can be empirically tested, as I have been doing across several threads now.

And here is an example of why this matters: On Dec. 18, Trump missed his PDB, where he might have learned China was returning the drone it had taken. That afternoon, he tweeted a taunt out to the world that the US should just let China keep the drone. He had no idea. Another: He picked a national security advisor who thinks Mexican drug cartels are creating pathways into the US for ISIS and retweets real fake news--the man who is supposed to be vetting intel for the president of the United States. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michael-flynn-conspiracy-pizzeria-trump-232227

American voters have placed in power a vulgar, uninformed celebrity whose skills at vetting information are possibly the lowest of any president in history. It affects his judgment in appointing advisors and cabinet members.  He is in power because not enough voters thought this deficiency a serious problem during his campaign, and that critical mass of indifferent voters are in large part consumers of the above mentioned right wing media.The party of personal responsibility, which once claimed it stood for principle, suddenly finds itself explaining away their party leader's behavior week to week, from reckless foreign policy behavior complicating the current president's final days to his efforts to retain his international businesses and involve his children in state decisions.