The owner is South African.
They should have run the endorsement anyway and forced the asshat South African to fire them.
Do we really need to bring his nationality into this?
Like, is his asshattery greater or lesser depending on what country he exploited to profit enough to buy a newspaper?
A foreign national has no business putting their thumb on the scale in an election. The country is immaterial.
Could be Rupert Murdock (Australia) or the Unification Church (Korea).
A foreign billionaire trying to influence the election to get Trump in office is worse than an American billionaire trying to influence the election to get Trump in office?
A billionaire buys a newspaper, prevents the editorial section from publishing an opinion that directly opposes his personal viewpoint which leads to the editorial editor resigning. Would you feel differently if it were, for example, Jeff Bezos and WaPo?
I don’t know how you look at those identical scenarios and conclude that the problem is nationality and not billionaires buying elections.
Both are true.
Yes, I agree that both are true. Neither foreign nationals nor billionaires should be influencing elections.
The problem I have is the choice to use the phrase “the South African.” There are better ways to make that point than using if not bigoted, then at least bigoted-adjacent language. Calling attention solely to one aspect of a person (while not addressing them as a person) implies that the aspect is a problem, and I think it’s easy to see how that could mislead others to thinking a poster might have biases they actually don’t.
edit: “the” not “that”
They didn’t say, “that South African”. The said, “the asshat South African”. Grammatically, that is an asshat that is from South Africa. It wasn’t a racial point, but a geopolitical point that a person from South Africa shouldn’t interfere.
Semantically, structuring a sentence in that manner still makes the noun (and thus the emphasis of the point) South African and the adjective asshat. Taking out the adjective still makes the sentence problematically pejorative.
Saying “the South-African asshat” instead still adds the context that he isn’t American, but changes the point to be that he is an asshat, not that he is South African.
Both can be bad and still have one be worse. These are not mutually exclusive at all.
If we all agree that billionaires influencing the election is bad already, the next point of discussion is what differentiates the two. They are not identical, they’re just extremely similar.
If we all agree that billionaires influencing the election is bad already, the next point of discussion is what differentiates the two.
If we all agree that billionaires influencing the election is bad already, then why does it matter where they come from? Why does that differentiation need to be made at all? They’ve already crossed the line into unacceptable territory, so why split hairs? The only reason it would matter is we don’t agree that billionaires buying elections is bad, just certain ones.
Both the idea of a newspaper endorsing a political candidate, and someone possessing enough wealth to shape the information most people receive, suck.
I think it’s okay to have opinion pieces in media as long as it is labeled as such with “editorial” for example. That’s a part of democracy, not every media needs to be as neutral as Reuters and AFP.
Yeah editorials are fine, but they need to be marked that way. Most media outlets claiming they are “news” nowadays are primarily editorial in nature, and don’t specify that anywhere.
How many hours a day do channels like Fox News actually have news segments versus all the editorial opinion shows? At what point should they no longer be allowed to claim they are a “news” channel or paper?
The idea of a newspaper endorsing a political candidate is a long standing tradition.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/political-newspaper-endorsements-history-and-outcome/
This is only a problem when there are three media companies.
Under normal circumstances, I might agree. But these are not normal circumstances. Advocate of rights such as free speech will often stand in opposition to fascist authoritarianism. Today should be no different.
Weeeaahh but i can find noooo proooof that media owners support truuuuump
I have a family member who just cancelled their subscription to the LA Times over this. After having been a subscriber for decades and continuing to be a subscriber to “maybe slow the decline of traditional journalism” for the past years since its quality has severely declined, they just said,“Well, that did it.”
Goddamn.
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