There is a lawyer (Alec Karakatsanis) who has been writing about police driven propaganda for years. His recent book "Copaganda" is fantastic. He carefully breaks down how major papers (NYT is chief among them) create stories that fit a narrative by using very one-sided sources. Like an article on crime written in bad faith where the only people quotes are police, police consultants, and ex-police.
It's a really good book, I wish more people were aware of it and read it.
Didn't read the book but I think it's more insidious than what you wrote. The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.
In the end if a journalist can get their story out faster by leaning on a few 'trusted sources' and then move onto the next article, most of them will and their managers will encourage it. Maybe you'll get a more in depth story if it makes it to On The Media a week or two later but that's basically all we have at this point which is very sad.
> The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative (they think they're unbiased). They just don't have the judgement (or will?) to look beyond the initial narrative which is police-driven.
No, they know what they are doing and you can tell they know what they are doing by the careful way language is used differently for similar facts when the police or other favored entities are involved vs. other entities in similar factual circumstances (particularly, the use of constructions which separates responsibility for an adverse result from the actor, which is overwhelmingly used in US media when police are the actors—and also, when organs of the Israeli state are—but not for most other violent actors.) This is frequently described as “the exonerative mood” (or, sometimes, “the exonerative tense”, though it is not really a verb tense.)
Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.
I think your observations about tense and mood are very true, but you are undervaluing the extent to which someone can do something automatically and out of habit, especially when their paycheck depends on it.
I absolutely believe that a journalist can present two analogous sets of facts in two completely different ways without even consciously realizing it. These assumptions and biases are baked in deep, especially when you are writing day-in and day-out on short deadlines.
> No, [journalists] know what they are doing ... Carefully calibrated, highly-selective use of (often, quite awkward) linguistic constructs does not happen unconsciously, it is a deliberate, knowing choice.
The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith. The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith, which makes me believe the arguments of the parent ("The journalists don't think they're writing these stories to amplify the police narrative") more so than the argument you're making here.
> The incredible vast majority of people in the world are acting in good faith.
Maybe, maybe not. It is also true that the incredible vast majority of people in the world aren’t corporate journalists, also.
> The way you are framing this is that nearly all journalists are acting in bad faith
Nearly all American corporate media has a conscious, top-down policy starting with the owners and editorial board to favor certain institutions, which is enforced by hiring, firing, promotions, and assignments of staff. The specific beneficiaries of this vary somewhat between outlet and outlet and over time, but both American police broadly and State of Israel are common beneficiaries across most outlets.
Journalists either comply are they aren’t journalists in the corporate media covering the issues to which these biases are relevant for long. Corporate media journalists aren’t independent actors.
The problem is that it is essentially impossible for a journalist to exist in the western world and not have heard of the criticism about how cops' actions get reported.
The term 'past exonerative tense' is dated to 1991.'"Mistakes were made" was popularized by Nixon.
To continue pulling this nonsense is wilful ignorance on the journalists' part, and effectively equivalent to bad faith.
It's more perverse than that. Journalists know if they don't toe the party line, their access to voluntary information from law enforcement will be cut off entirely. Hard to write an article when everyone refuses to talk to you.
I thought insidious means sinister/evil, but what you point out just shows that we as a society don't value news enough to pay for anything more than the 1-4 hours of time invested per news article.
Police propaganda is serious problem. But this seems like the least appropriate thing to dismiss as "just police propaganda". What's bad about police propaganda is it perpetuates a certain politics by maintain atmosphere of fear as well as pushing certain stereotypes of ethnic groups. But when the police are exaggerating the terrorist potential of actual organized criminals, things seem much muddier. I think people should concerned about organized scammers - their victims are usually the poor, notably. It's true their terrorist potential is overstated but only because they are profit-oriented but it's not like their other activities should be ignored.
Eyewitnesses. Often the police and the news narrative are very different than eyewitness accounts. Even if everyone knows what happened, it's completely obvious, the news and police still obfuscate.
You've lumped everyone you don't like into one bucket - "criminal" - without considering their individual nature. You're probably a criminal (there are lots of stupid laws that people break all the time) but do you have a reason to lie?
Breaking laws doesn't make someone dishonest. You should really think about why you think that's the case. Perhaps someone has an active interest in you believing that.
I think https://github.com/caddyserver is the best option here. Automatic handling of SSL certs, it's incredibly lightweight, and has super clear config syntax.
Give https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts a look, the latest update enables use of MS Edge cloud-based TTS so you don't need a local GPU and the quality is excellent.
The best part about this discussion is seeing all the people pop up to defend the money (sometimes fantastic amounts) they have spent on their business/executive coach.
You can do this today, though you would definitely be breaking copyright (you need to strip the DRM from the epub), and if you're cloning someone's voice without their permission you're probably breaking some more laws. You're pretty safe though assuming you don't distribute it or try to make money.
Check out https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts for creating an audiobook from epub. Take a look in the utils directory for notes about fine-tuning a voice clone. I can tell you I've done some voices that are close enough to the original to be pretty shocking.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, it's pretty fun making your own audiobooks with the reader of your choice!
I wrote https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts and the quality is pretty phenomenal if you use XTTS for the voice generation. It's really excellent, but requires the book not have DRM.
I put together a script to read epub books using Coqui TTS and I think the results are not far off from this. It's super quick if you've got a GPU, but it's reasonable too if it's just using CPU to do the text to speech.
Many/most shelters will not let you bring in a pet. If you've never had any hard times in your life and had a dog companion at the same time you might not understand, but for many people having that pet is the only thing sustaining their will to live day to day.
Many/most shelters will not let you sleep with your companion, even if you're married. The comfort of another human is an easy thing to get used to, and can be devastating to go without. Generally though if you're running a shelter and taking in people with MH issues or other challenges this one makes some sense, you are always at risk bringing of in folks who can't respect boundaries and will want to have inappropriate intimacy in the open (for instance).
All shelters have a strict limit on how many personal belongings you can bring in. If you have no house, but you do have a shopping cart full of possessions, what are you supposed to do with them?
I think these are good examples and there are probably viable solutions to them. I’ve heard of the purple leash program that is looking to expand the number of shelters that allow pets for example. Thanks for elaborating!
I can go see the the homeless. Pets are not keeping the masses of homeless out of shelters.
Not being able to take drugs when ever the hell they feel like it is what keeps them out.
The only thing that will fix this is if we change the laws. And those laws are going to feel weird at first. But we need to classify people who are homeless for more than 6 weeks as mentally ill. And at that point we force them into rehab facilities.
We haven’t been able to involuntarily house the mentally ill for decades in the US, though. I fear this approach would just exacerbated a stigma around mental illness
The asylum/institution model was abandoned largely because there appeared to be widespread abuse, neglect, and poor outcomes, which were typified by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
The trouble is that people apparently decided that the abuse, neglect, and poor outcomes were due to inpatient status and not anything inherent to the treatments themselves, so in the 40+ years since asylums all closed, we've basically reinvented invisible asylums with a massive apparatus of voluntary, inefficient outpatient programs which are rife with abuse, neglect, and poor outcomes.
Case in point: there's a huge Medicaid scandal in Arizona right now regarding Native Americans. What happened is that there were dudes in vans going to New Mexico, and basically kidnapping natives (mostly Navajo who were off the reservation) and promising them addiction recovery services, mental health treatment, and stuff, if they would only get in the van and cross state lines.
The homes they took them to were unlicensed, mismanaged, and committing fraud, and often dumped the natives out on the street with no resources or way home.
Talk about abusing a doubly-vulnerable population; it's appalling. And to think that there is little stopping someone like me from being caught in that.
It's a really good book, I wish more people were aware of it and read it.