Jemy temp

The last line was kind of lack-luster in quality, I'll be changing it sooner.

I’ve heard bits and pieces about Duterte and his alarming approach to the War on Drugs, needless to say I’m not surprised that’s his approach to dealing with the press. I would say that in America, we suffer from the opposite problem: journalism is so well protected that short of suing for defamation, there are no legal consequences for poor, biased, malevolent, propagandistic, or flat out fake journalism. Corporate news in particular exasperates the problem by propping up their viewpoints over giving you the story in an unbiased manner. Of course, there’s also government funded news which usually tends to be pro-state propaganda. Ultimately, I would agree with you that good journalists are true defenders of freedom and the peoples’ check on the government. However, bad journalism can have disastrous consequences for all, especially if left unchecked.

The recently-concluded Alex Jones trial is an interesting point of reference for where free speech and the law are colliding in America today, and in this Wild Wild West of new media saturation that we're all living in.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/jury-alex-jones-defamation-case-begin-deliberations-punitive-damages-2022-08-05/

This case is a bit of an outlier, since it's so rare for anybody to be held accountable for false speech in America. The Defendant, Alex Jones, told lies about a mass school shooting that happened 10 years ago. The jury found the lies were damaging enough to the victims of this atrocity that it supported a legal judgment of nearly $50 million.

The Alex Jones case stands for the following idea: If your "opinion" is that a bunch of dead kids are "crisis actors," and that their parents aren't really their parents, and you repeat the same thing over and over again to an audience of millions, then that's not really an "opinion" at all, it's a lie that's bad enough to warrant legal punishment.

I agree, while most opinions should be protected, there is a line somewhere where lies cross over to the point of heedlessly destroying reputations and actually inciting violence. Some of the parents of these slaughtered children actually had to go into hiding from the threats they were receiving from Jones's deranged fans.

It takes significant time for any case like this to make its way to trial - 10 years in this case. But it takes no time at all for an unhinged tweet or radio rant to go viral. That's a problem. And by the time the case is heard, the damage has already been done.

Apart from rare and unusual defamation cases like this one, we're in an era where the traditional media methods of fact-checking and vetting a story before it gets published only apply to outlets that willingly hold themselves to those standards. For any media outlets, or social media personalities, who don't have such scruples, the only check upon their ability to brazenly lie is their audience's own lack of gullibility, and the fact-checkers who are always one step behind them.

From what I’ve heard from relatives there, press there is more heavily restricted than here, but still relatively very free compared to other southeast Asian nations. Here in the US, free speech is considered one of the most strongly defended rights of the Constitution. I don’t see the point with people who think we have “too much” free speech, even here, we need MORE freedom, not less! It’s the reader’s responsibility to do their research and check the veracity of the information. (Of course, there should be restrictions on libel and baseless slander.) As for the Alex Jones trial mentioned earlier, while it’s absolutely terrible to attempt to deny or downplay the tragic murders at Sandy Hook, my main concern is many triumphantly say the Jones trial will “set a precedent” for prosecuting “right-wing extremists”. I can’t help but wonder what they mean by “right-wing extremist”: does it mean only neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, QAnon wackos and the like, or does it go much farther than that? Especially with the march of American politics towards the dangerous socialistic ideas of the radical left, will the category of “right-wing extremists” only grow with time?

I wouldn't say we're really pros on everything freedom anymore

Interestingly enough, Abraham Lincoln shutdown some news outlets that criticized him during the war, even though many would see him as the ideal of freedom (given that he freed the slaves and all). Not sure if that helps or not lol.

You're not changing my mind about banning you from the Filipino stream.

You're just giving me more reasons not to unban you.

No means no. Stfu. I don't even live in Pasig.