this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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What a load of waffle. "Appeared to" lift verbatim passages, really?
this is just legal ass-covering and is typical of news coverage in the absence of a conviction or similar--nothing new or unique about it.
I mean, yes and no. Is it probably safer to say 'accused'? Sure. Is it weasely, waffley bullshit to spend as much time as they did on the specifics of the apology, but completely gloss over the specifics of the accusations? Absolutely.
Anyone reading that article could easily come out of it thinking that the guy's being accused of doing a bad job of citing his sources. Anyone who watched the actual video has seen the evidence that he did it knowingly and with intent.
It's absolutely some false neutrality nonsense where they hold back the meat in order to make the story seem 'neutral' when the truth is clearly not.
i mean i think the more likely explanation for any weirdness of that sort is just that this is a very low-stakes story for NBC. what is essentially Youtube drama just isn't the wheelhouse i expect them to send their best to cover, or in which i think anyone is going to super care what "side" they take or how they present it.
I don't mean to say that false neutrality is some sort of conspiracy or something on behalf of NBC to protect their bottom line. I think it's something lazy writers do to protect themselves when they're doing surface-level stories about things they didn't bother to spend much time researching. They probably don't know the specifics of the accusations because they were buried in a 3 hour long video.
If you don't bother researching something, it makes sense to hedge a bit if you have to stake your reputation on it. On the one end you get a kind of weak article like this, but on the other you could end up at the center of something nasty. Of course all of that could be remedied with a smidge of journalistic integrity but 🤷♀️