Instead of working with him to uncover hidden government secrets about the US proxy war in Ukraine, The New York Times and Bellingcat sold out Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira to the authorities. The kid’s now facing a lifetime in prison.
As usual, started listening but didn’t finish yet.
The topic of course is very interesting.
I wanted to comment on a point that was raised several times before in your podcasts where I have a slightly different expectations.
Several times you talked about what a journalist should our shouldn’t do.
While I agree that this would make for good journalism, but I don’t have high expectations that this will be the case in real life, all the time.
Journalists are humans, they have their biases and their motives and they make mistakes. They can try to be transparent, but critical thinkers should always ask why and what if, and not take things at face value, even from “good journalists”.
I’m eager to listen to the rest of the podcast and your take on the topic.
For me I see what the New York Times did as a sign of this Dimension A/Dimension B phenomena: they might have really thought they are helping catch a dangerous criminal! This is the best generous explanation I can have other than thinking they are pure evil!
Thanks again for the interesting topics
But why would they think that? It’s not their job to do that! In fact, it runs contrary to their own interests. It’s like employees of VW suddenly getting the idea they should help sell BMWs because those are actually better cars. It might be true, but why, at that point, do you even work for VW?
Pleae bear with me, as I’m just trying to steel man this, white being unconvinced.
Behind the faceless corporation there are humans, and they have mistakes and have their biases.
And with the recent rise of “activism” mentality, some people seem to think they are doing the work of [enter name of deity].
Thank you dor the thoughtful answer about telling the truth to friends.
Also thank you for elaborating on the point of the condescending attitude from governments and the media. Exactly what I had in mind and the dangerous trend in global politics democracies starting to disrespect their citizens.
Yeah. I wasn’t arguing against you per se. I understand that people are doing this. I just can’t understand them… 
Sadly, this is what I am starting to expect from MSM.
I’m not sure where funding for outlets like NYT or WaPo come from, but thanks to Twitter, funding for CBC in Canada tells us why we would expect this behaviour in Canada.
In Canada, the CBC and Prime Minister were up in arms when Twitter labeled the CBC Twitter account as government funded media. The Prime Minister completely lost it in an interview over this. The CBC went after Twitter and said that they were not government funded, because they make some money from other sources. Since the CBC is in fact mostly funded by the government, you can head on over to https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/media-centre/first-2022-2023-quarterly-report and see their income for 2022, which apparently Twitter did. I almost spit my rum out when Twitter updated their government funded tag on the CBC account to 69% government funded, which is in fact backed by the link I just shared.
So, when your largest media company is 69% funded by your government, don’t expect to see stories in it that go against the government narrative or cast the government in a dim light.
Well, the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. The NYT’s largest shareholder is Carlos Slim. So they are both owned by billionaires.