Context:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC5LyaCdpEI
My letter to the editor:
As someone who is re-balancing his news consumption after the election of Donald Trump and the battle lines that are being drawn, I wanted to make sure it was known that the Wall Street Journal has, in my view, published fake news for the political left.
Due to this, I will not be consuming the Wall Street Journal going forward.
This is not a call to publish fake news for the political right. It is a call to publish actual news.
The article “Disney Severs Ties With YouTube Star PewDiePie After Anti-Semitic Posts” by Ben Fritz, Jack Nicas, and Rolfe Winkler was extremely offensive to me. It is attempting to be the moral police and has a definite agenda along with conclusions that were reached long before the research was done on these topics.
I am highlighting a portion of the article with extremely regressive and pro “Big Media” tenor below:
“The videos illustrate the risk for companies such as YouTube and Disney that, eager to reach young audiences, make deals with talent who may push boundaries on what is acceptable within the company’s standards or basic social norms. By distributing the content to a wide audience, companies are vulnerable to criticism when a user’s words are deemed offensive. In Mr. Kjellberg’s case, a major neo-Nazi website has embraced his statements.”
The way this article is written is clearly meant to make users presuppose that what PewDiePie did was wrong. The order of which information is delivered is extremely important (as the Wall Street Journal knows) and words used to describe things with no context are extremely important. The article started off with a purposefully provocative phrasing and attempt to build imagery:
included two men laughing as they held a banner that read, “Death to all Jews.”
This description is purposefully provocative. It is a lie through omission. The below (more accurate) sentence would make PewDiePie seem much less sinister.
“included PewDiePie questioning what he had paid for and then covering his mouth in shock as the two men unfurled a sign that said ‘Death to all Jews’ while laughing.”
Both of these sentences are accurate to what happened, but paint entirely different pictures. The picture painted by the Wall Street Journal is fake news and should be removed.
I do not subscribe to PewDiePIe. I do not find his videos funny on most occasions. I just find it essential that free speech is upheld. The new form of censorship is by shutting down dissenting voices in the town square via what the Wall Street Journal has done with their hit piece.
I will never read another Wall Street Journal article again and there is no chance I would ever subscribe to it. This statement will remain true until a retraction and an apology is released and the three journalists involved are released due to being unable to write unbiased journalism.