How do you believe their reporting differs from reality? They're writing about rising authoritarianism and those who submit to it, which is a fact of the world happening today. They use the term "toady" in its literal definition. FAIR has anti-bias and counter-spin, aka "a bias towards reality."
I've never seen Manhattan Institute, Hudson Institute, or Cato Institute using the term Toady even if technically correct. It is a term almost exclusively used by the left, typically more anti-authoritarian. Maybe you have some libertarian types using it as well.
> It is a term almost exclusively used by the left
What a strange claim.
If you search the sites you cite, all of them have at least one use of "toady" or "toadies" (which only gets a few hits on fair.org as well). Meanwhile go check the national review and they seem to love the word. Maybe recheck your priors.
Why would right-wing leaning think tanks be complaining about right wing authoritarianism they’re in favor of? You’d expect them to trot out this verbiage if a populist left wing politician with authoritarian vibes came to power.
It's not quite that simple, or at least not yet. For example the Cato Institute still seems inclined pretty much towards the rule of law and against autocracy. Perhaps "Yarvin-ists" are in power, but they don't control every voice on the right.
I recall seeing the statement "Profanity is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully." Well, these childish insults and put-downs seem to me to be the same. They may sense that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to have a serious discussion about the issue, so they just insult.
Alternatively, they're not trying to have a serious conversation about the issue. They're talking to their own in-group, not to the other side, not even to those who are neutral or undecided. Instead, they're just telling their own in-group how right they are and how stupid the others are. They aren't trying to engage at all; they've given up on that. This is a deeply non-serious response - if the situation is as bad as you claim it is, why are you not trying to persuade at least the neutrals? Why are you instead doing things that make you look childish to everyone except your in-group?
I agree with everything you said, but it doesn't seem to resonate with the masses based on voting patterns here.
They don't need to have a serious conversation to succeed. Their supporters visit their site, get their dopamine hit from being told their viewpoint is correct, and they feel empowered to lash out at any dissent so the cycle continues.
They're the equivalent of a left-wing Fox News, but get very angry when that is pointed out.
Is this an argument for sophistry or propaganda? Everyone having biases doesn't preclude people from rightly pointing out bad things in the world, like creeping authoritarianism and the undermining of democracies, anymore than it did in the lead up to WW2.
Really we're all just interested in what your line for calling a person a fascist is, and what you would call the folks who did this?
"When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.
The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey."
If you can't write with basic clarity because that makes your progressive, you might want to investigate your own bias.
Yeah, my line for calling someone fascist is not “restricting reporters access to the Pentagon”. It cheapens the word and all that it represents.
There is a wide gulf between writing with basic clarity and injecting opinions like “so and so is a toady”. I would love to see media outlets attempt to describe just the facts with as little opinion as possible. FAIR clearly does not meet that bar.
It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But this is not that. This is, “you don’t have unfettered access to personnel and facilities.” Fascism would be “if you print that we will arrest you and maybe shut your operation down.” And maybe a paramilitary squad of goons will fire bomb your offices in the meantime. This will read as snark, but I swear it is not: read about the truly fascist regimes of history. The difference is night and day.
We've all read about them. The key lesson in every one of those stories is this: don't wait for the entire building to burn down before you pull a fire alarm.
They weren't revoked from unfettered access to the Pentagon. They were revoked from all access to the Pentagon. It's hard to be a democratic society when the institutions that make democracy possible are hindered wherever possible.
Fascism is an ideology, an approach towards government. Banning reporters from the Pentagon and the White House can be both legal and fascistic.
>So it gives the appearance of “opinionated news is good, so long as the opinions are correct.”
All news is opinionated news and some opinions are objectively better than others. For example, the simple act of choosing which story to cover is an opinionated choice and if a news outlet decided to cover a random high school teacher the same way they cover the POTUS, that would be an objectively incorrect editorial opinion.
Your understanding of the word objective differs markedly from my own.
I don’t disagree with the general spirit of what you mean. But I would love to see news outlets, and so called watch dogs, pursue the unobtainable dream of objectivity and neutrality over all others. Calling people toadies and democratically elected administrations “fascists” falls far, far short of that dream.
Some people are of the opinion that the world is flat, I would say it's objectively round. That is the context in which I'm using that word. I'm not using it to describe 100% consensus, because there will always be someone who disagrees with something.
News without opinion is objectively impossible because the act of reporting the news is inherently governed by an opinion on what is worthy to report. Pretending otherwise is just pulling the wool over your own eyes.
Yeah, yeah, true objectivity is objectively impossible. We know.
The thing is, this isn't binary. There's a sliding scale between "totally objective" and "totally biased". When you eliminate the (unattainable) standard of "total objectivity", then reporters and news organizations move more toward biased. And the difference matters. You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
>You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
Part of the problem with this line of thought it that a lot of bias is not intentional. There was never a moment in history in which you could pick up a newspaper with nothing but completely unbiased facts inside. Even today, most news sources aren't intentionally misleading even if they might be biased. Recognizing these inherent and subtle biases are required in order to know "what was actually going on".
There was this thing called "yellow journalism". It was very much not trying to be unbiased.
Most US 20th century journalism tried to be better than that. And, by trying, they were better than yellow journalism. Yes, there was still bias. But the difference between, say, 20% bias and 80% bias made a real difference.
So maybe today we're at 40% bias instead of 80% bias. It's still worse than it was, and the difference still matters. (And, by the way, one of the ways it matters is in peoples' trust of the media. We don't need people who are obviously trying to manipulate us; we already have enough of those.)
Except, the news calling, for example, Bush Jr a "War criminal" is exactly objective.
His Casus Belli was false, and he knew that. We invaded sovereign countries illegally.
Would you read news that openly called him a war criminal? Reality gets extreme all the time. If you police the language more than the reality, you are just making the problem worse. You are forcing people to pretend reality isn't so bad just so you do not have to fix reality.
Guess what? Reality is bad right now. We are bombing boats off the coast of south America and posturing like we are going to war with them and bailing out Argentina because of political rhetoric and affiliations and corruption, and we wasted over $150 billion harassing brown people and sending American citizens to foreign prisons and maybe catching a few people who overstayed their visas or walked over our border.
And yet you tone police the people trying to inform you of that.
Was GW Bush convicted of any war crimes? If not, then he isn't a war criminal.
You can argue that he should be, and I probably would agree with you, but an organization supposedly dedicated to unearthing biases in the media should not inject their opinions into their own reporting.
I would say that an organization that needs to be highly objective should not call him one.
They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
> They can certainly point out that he was the leader of a group that was systematically killing millions of people with physical or cultural attributes he deemed undesirable and people will reach the same obvious conclusion about him.
Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
>Because of thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants?
Then why can't you accept the "thousands upon thousands of documented accounts from eyewitnesses and participants" of him committing war crimes?
>I'm aware of what you're trying to do, but there is a difference between stating a generally accepted fact that has a tiny faction of dissenters (e.g. the earth is round) and something that is not and is therefore considered an opinion.
I think war crimes are bad. There is no "fact" involved in that statement, it is purely a value judgment and therefore an opinion. Yet I think it is inarguably a better opinion than believing that war crimes are good. Would you disagree?
Because the definition of a war criminal is something who was convicted of a war crime, not being accused of committing them or observed doing something that could be considered one.
You can't fact check opinions, no matter how morally superior they are to another one, so I don't know what your point is there.
Which are verified to meet a specific standard through a conviction in this case, which is the exact opposite of the scenario that generated the quote above.
Is an accused murderer still considered a murderer if they are not convicted of the crime?
This idea that something can't be confirmed as true unless a court says it is bizarre and totally antithetical to the idea of journalism. Journalists are not court stenographers.
Sometimes it is entirely reasonable to call someone a murderer even if they lack a conviction. I have no problem saying John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln. I have no problem saying Hitler committed war crimes. These are simply facts of history and your policing of language is implicitly arguing against those facts. So I'm going to ask you directly and I won't reply if you don't directly answer this question, do you believe that Hitler committed war crimes?
The idea that a criminal conviction needs to occur for someone to be called a criminal in the media should not be remotely controversial. Journalists certainly can and do perform research that can lead to arrests and/or convictions, but are effectively a mouthpiece for the court stenographer once a trial is underway.
An unbiased reporter would (and nearly all journalist actually do) say something like "accused <insert criminal charge here> <insert name here> <insert rest of sentence here>" at any point in a criminal proceeding prior to the jury handing down a guilty verdict.
The fact that you only seem to be able to generate examples of extremely high profile situations where the alleged perpetrator was killed while evading capture (by themselves or law enforcement) only strengthens my argument.
Or they could just say Hitler committed war crimes but killed himself before he could be put on trail. Because that's what he did. It's not an opinion.
He ordered the actions of a number of people who were convicted of war crimes. He himself was never tried because he was already dead. Still, in that case, I think we can say that yes, he was.
