Building trust in media
On America This Week, Walter Kern and Matt Taibbi discussed the 60 minutes‘ edit/collage of the Kamala Harris interview.
Walter declared the 60 minutes television format is dead because it required the good faith of the audience and the integrity of the network okay and the producers and the editors
It’s not just the 60 minutes video format. Walter says he currently avoids print media because they can take a statement you made and make it seem that it occurred in an entirely different context than than when you made it and there’s no way you know there’s no way for the audience to tell
Would Walter be more willing to do print media interviews on the internet, if print media agreed that they would:
Isn’t it outrageous that this year at the 2024 Oscars, an Oscar winner Jonathan Glazer went on stage and said: Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness
. What a disgraceful thing to say!
No, the director of Zone of Interest did not disavow his Jewish identity at the Oscars (Vox)
Today, a lot of the media carried a quote in which Donald Trump says: if I don’t get elected it’s going to be a blood bath
. Television is seldom able to present the whole context of a quote, given space limitations. This could be an advantage for Substack writers because CiteIt enables interested readers to have the option of pursuing a quote’s context without commandeering the attention of all viewers.
CiteIt becomes like an advanced form of footnotes that works across:
In his inaugural address John F. Kennendy said ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
.
What else did Kennedy’s famous inaugural address say?
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address is remembered for the line: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself
If you cite the source with CiteIt, the reader can explore the historical context, so that the quote lives as more than just a soundbite.
After the Civil War, Southerners objected strenuously to the fact that Union debts were repaid, while Confederate debts were repudiated. Fear that Congress might lack the votes to pay interest on the debt or repay principal, due to Southern obstinacy, led to the addition of an obscure clause to the Fourteenth Amendment preventing this from happening. It states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned
.”
When Republicans came very, very close to defaulting on the debt 10 years ago, a number of legal scholars argued that the Fourteenth Amendment and the president’s inherent constitutional authority could be used by President Obama to simply ignore the debt limit and sell whatever bonds were necessary to finance the spending Congress had already authorized. These included Garret Epps of the University of Baltimore, Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University, Eric Posner of the University of Chicago and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard, Neil Buchanan of the University of Florida and Michael Dorf of Cornell, Jacob Charles of Duke University, and numerous others. Former President Bill Clinton agreed.
With CiteIt, writers can evoke the Jack Nicholson line:
You can’t handle the truth
! — by pulling in the context from a YouTube video.
This contextual citation doesn’t provide factual context, but rather helps the reader recall a favorable memory.
Wesley tells Inigo: Get used to disappointment