[Luis Dias]

Journalism has been long replaced in the mainstream by clickbait emotional discourse produced to get your eyeballs for publicity money. I love the idealism. I just don't see it with my eyes.

You are aware that there are plenty of newspapers which operate with a classical subscriber system and don't rely on publicity money?
Like, those paper things? Don't take Gawker or Breitbart or Fox as the arbiter of everything journalism.

You mean these newspapers?




This dying industry? It's over. No one reads paper anymore.

Becuase doing anything else would mean they would get into a lot of trouble. There are quite a few nations with plaintiff friendly libel laws, and falsely accusing someone of corruption with falsified evidence is, well, awfull. Why do I even have to explain you this?

I haven't read any direct accusations of anything. "Allegedly" and "Apparently", "According to these leaks" and so on are quite the semantical tools that all journalists employ. There is no real danger of "trouble", especially if the "papers" doing the so-called "accusations" are well written and located in more "free speech" countries (and in here, the US is quite the special place I have to admit).

oh, it's 2003 and the American political establishment says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. they won't show us the solid evidence? but they swear they have it? OK, well they wouldn't just lie right? I mean the consequences to that would be disastrous to them once it was found out there was nothing.

It's 2016 and I'm happy there are still naive people around... I don't know exactly why, but it warms my heart a bit. It also irritates me, but in a lesser degree.

[NGTM-1R]

I haven't read any direct accusations of anything. "Allegedly" and "Apparently", "According to these leaks" and so on are quite the semantical tools that all journalists employ. There is no real danger of "trouble", especially if the "papers" doing the so-called "accusations" are well written and located in more "free speech" countries (and in here, the US is quite the special place I have to admit).

Really doesn't matter. There's more than enough to get sued in the UK or Australia for this unless you can prove it true, particularly given their libel law does not have a presumption of innocence as such.

[Luis Dias]

Well, even in the US you get libeled and the process itself is enough punishment. I don't think the underlying truth has any bearing on there being law suits or not. It's merely a calculation of "is it worth it?", and probably given the current popularity of these kinds of leaks versus the Streisand effect it is absolutely not worth it regardless of there being truth to it or not.

The worst outcome for some of these rascals is if there are wild exagerations to their case. What are they gonna say? "They are lying, I never laundered *that* amount of money, they are totally blowing things out of proportion!", that wouldn't work would it?

[Bobboau]

actually a lot of the people accused are using the accusation to their advantage, saying "it's a Western plot! rally around me!"

[NGTM-1R]

Well, even in the US you get libeled and the process itself is enough punishment. I don't think the underlying truth has any bearing on there being law suits or not.

It absolutely does; if you lose a libel case in most jurisdictions in the US or UK you have to pay the other sides' fees almost as a matter of course. The publishers are well-resourced; simply suing them is not going to get them to back down, they have the means to go to the mats.

You're making an argument like they're normal people. They're not. The decisions are functionally very different.

[karajorma]

Given the newspapers backing this, they'd probably be very happy if someone was dumb enough to sue them. It would give them a fairly major trial to cover and allow them to get their lawyer to ask all kinds of juicy questions under oath which the plaintiff wouldn't otherwise touch with a bargepole.

[Luis Dias]

Processes like these drag on for years. I do take your point of hope that the crumbling media will totally back their journalists over this issue like Gawker is in their totally important Hulk Hogan hundred million bucks case. I hope these are "Spotlight" type journalists, that they are intelligently protected and they get as much snake blood as they can. I'm sorry if I feel that's too optimistic regarding that, but hey hope should never die.

[FlamingCobra]

USA is a good boy! USA didn't do nothing wrong!

dindu nuffin

[Bobboau]

just saw a headline that reminded me about the recent end of this thread

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/20/the-deep-and-disturbing-decline-in-global-press-freedom/