Please check the mod logs. I submitted a story to the US News group linking to an official statement by the Ohio House of Representatives on their decision to not respect a recent election result enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution. I linked to their actual statement at the Ohio government web site. That is a canonical source. And it was removed for not being actual news because it didn’t link to a news publisher.
This is an insane result. One no actual news organization would ever choose to do. They link to canonical sources.
I am objecting to this in the support group because I don’t know where else to go. The issue here is not about my submission, it is about journalistic standards. This is not acceptable.
EDIT Because there remains a dispute witj admins on what constitutes proper sourcing of documents published by a state government legislative body…
Please contact the main administrative offices of Poynter, The Columbia School of Journalism, or The Neiman School at Harvard and say that you run an online news forum, explain the particulars of this issue, and ask if a professor of journalism or other professional in referral is willing to give an informed opinion on proper practices of sourcing in this situation. Please get an external reality check by a professional in the field. Not for this submission, as that’s water past the bridge, but to craft a reasonable policy going forward for future submissions.
I believe if you’re concise and respectful and do not debate the individual, you’ll have no trouble getting an informed opinion.
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Just my $.02 - while newsworthy, a political statement by a political party is politics and not reported news. I get that it’s frustrating, but I also kinda prefer having the ability to sift between “purely political” and “reporting with known bias” in my feed.
Removing an official government statement as the admin of a news group is actual censorship. Don’t kid yourself.
It’s an official party statement, which means that it’s purely to rile people up either to garner support in the form of public displays or donations. It falls outside of the posting guidelines for !usnews, which I happen to like.
That is the party in power. They hold a majority in both houses and the governorship.
This is an insane decision. On the grounds of preventing bias it is biased. It deprives the audience agency to understand by a canonical source.
You are in fact arguing for editorializing the words of an official public document in the name of unbiased news. That is the very definition of editorial bias. That is, bias in the name of removing bias.
That source stands on its own. Especially given this is link aggregation site.
EDIT Here’s the modlog. Note the Mod/Admin statement, ‘what the GOP says isn’t news’ (paraphrasing) and compare that to the fact that the link went to the official Ohio State House of Representatives website. Not the Ohio Republican Party website. That is not a statement by the GOP, it is an official statement by elected officials acting under state authority. That makes it NEWS, not opinion.
I’m concerned that my affect over text is coming across as combative or dismissive and that’s really not the case - their stance is deplorable on any level of humanity and rallying support against them is of paramount importance.
If it were the AP, or Reuters, or a local Ohio news agency (or other news group) reporting blurb that linked to the party statement, it would fit the posting guidelines by being a news report.
Every community has rules about what content is on topic, and if you post something else it will be removed. That’s not censorship.
A government statement is a government statement. It is not news. A proper news organisation would, for example, fact check whatever statement the government made and consider if the reader should be given additional context - perhaps details the government might be omitting in order to increase their chances of being re-elected.
On an issue as politically charged as this one, it’s especially important for the full journalistic process to be followed. You’re essentially attempting to post to the community as if you are a journalist yourself. But you’re not… and even if you were there’s no team of people fact checking what you wrote.
There are communities where you can do that, but US News one one of those communities.
Look, I will not change your mind. But I also will not agree with you. And if a policy like this persists, I will not participate.
No worries. You got it.
I will be happy to leave BeeHaw if admins wish it. Just ask. Or ban me as you wish. It’s your site.
Take a deep breath. No one is asking you to leave. We are trying to educate you about the community guidelines set for U.S. News.
No one is asking you to leave.
At this point, I am wondering if maybe someone should be asking them to leave. I’ve interacted with this poster in other threads. I think they might be psychologically unwell and I also think that their primary purpose for interacting with Beehaw and, honestly, any other Lemmy instance is based around finding ways to antagonize site administration/moderation and complain about their (routinely off topic and incredibly opinionated) content being removed.
Actually, now that I think about it, a ban is probably exactly what they’re fishing for.
Sorry, I meant I want you participating. Just, post the purely political stuff to the politics community and the reporting on stuff to the news ones, that’s all.
So, what was the problem with posting it to !politics@beehaw.org?
It’s your site too if you stay - even if not technically true. I’d hate to see dissenting voices leaving or afraid to speak up. I understand the moderation argument, but I also know that having your contribution removed will feel like being silenced because that’s what happened. There was a reason, but there’s always a reason and the blow won’t soften unless you agree with the reasoning.
You wanted to get the world out and couldn’t. I believe people are listening here, on beehaw in general. You felt you were censored. I can’t really deny that, but I’d suggest to still give the place a chance and see if a pattern emerges. Maybe don’t visit for a while, it really worked for me getting away for several weeks.
I’m actually much more concerned that those running the community do not understand sourcing standards in news. So I worry not about this submission per se, but about future decisions as the audience grows.
The same thing happened at reddit. People who’ve never worked in a newsroom or done any J school run a news aggregation site with millions of subscribers. And the consequence of that is the audience there is poorly served.
The Mod/Admin here removed the submission on the grounds it was political statement by a political party, when in fact it was posted on the Ohio State House of Representatives website under color of official duty by elected officials. That’s a big difference.
That mods/admins here do not understand this distinction and instead focus on the content of the message itself doesn’t bode well for accurate news coverage in that community.
This is a serious issue. It is not personal.
it was political statement by a political party, when in fact it was posted on the Ohio State House of Representatives website under color of official duty by elected officials. That’s a big difference.
No, it’s literally not. It’s literally just a statement by them, it’s not policy, it’s not an action, it’s literally a press release.
If you think that them being legislators makes it automatically carry some kind of legal weight, you are mistaken.
Objection noted; but this is not the forum to publicly air your disagreement.
Also, to wit there is a difference between beehaw admins and beehaw moderators. You are speaking about actions taken by beehaw moderators, of the community you posted the original post at.
This person must be fun at parties.
Also, does nobody reach out to people privately to resolve conflicts these days? Even a simple “Hi, I saw my post was removed. Could you please clarify why it doesn’t fall under the news category” would do (Not “I object. I’m right and you’re wrong” though). There are more efficient ways to clear disagreements without immediately making a fool of yourself in public.
Why not post a link to an article about the statement? That way, the same information and the same discussion about it could be present in the news community.
An article did not exist at that time.
The Associated Press:
https://apnews.com/article/ohio-abortion-overthrow-judicial-powers-77a68c1e6ee6fc79462f6aaf4ea1a323
This is largely moot given that this will stand. The issue was never the topic, but the source.
Your edit reveals your inability to understand sourcing. None of the places you listed will care about a Beehaw mod decision, and if someone does happen upon this thread, you’d be very disappointed by their conclusion.
⁸The admin in question is telling me an official public statement by the governing party of Ohio, on a state government web site, is biased and therefore not appropriate for the news community at BeeHaw. There is not a single editor or reporter in the free press who would ever make that argument.
I encourage admins here to seriously reconsider this policy. Find yourself a professional journalist or journalism professor outside this dispute and ask them what the standards actually are. Not what you want to to be.
Now that there’s been a bit of a cooling off period, I may be able to better explain to your satisfaction the issues at play here.
Blanket statements like “there’s not a single editor or reporter in the free press who” … well, citation needed. “Find yourself a professional journalist …”
Hi.
I’m not holding against you the fact that you didn’t read the link in the sidebar that sets expectations for the community that were agreed upon with the admins before I was empowered to set the tone. It explains I was an editor at daily papers for 15 years, which is why I was trusted to make the sorts of calls you’re taking offense to here.
Assuming I’m blithely making the rules up as I go because you don’t like them reveals less about my qualifications than how personal this topic is to you. And I get it. Removing the story because it was not reported news does not mean I’m not alarmed that this is the direction the Ohio GOP has chosen to go in, but as a press release, it’s a tantrum, not policy. It’s also not exactly stop-press in terms of tactics. Nationally and regionally, the GOP’s stance has for years now been to tell voters that they’re wrong for wanting progressive policies. I live in Texas, so Ohio’s got it easy in that voters can actually make decisions for themselves.
We likely agree on the implications for democracy, but those do not impact “what the standards actually are.” If anything, I’m hewing to more objective standards than you run into today, in that objective context is what turns an antidemocratic diatribe into news.
I rose quickly in newspapering by standing up for values imparted upon me by an upbringing that cherished the role of shielding people from believing a political statement was itself news. I’m aware this feels out of place, but I’m keeping the goalposts where they were before all hell broke loose after 9/11. I ran my first professional newspaper at 24, 20 years ago, precisely because I told my bosses at my first paper whenever I thought they were veering off from objective journalism. The city ed there didn’t much like the fact that a kid kept questioning some of the editorial decisions, but when he got his own paper, he wanted that check.
I have been quoted by journalism professors over the years and didn’t end up at a metro obscenely young not because I didn’t have the opportunity, but because I wanted to change the world, which is far easier when you don’t have three layers of editors above you. I’m here for the same reasons I dropped out of college four times to get my career started: imparting actual news.
You are not being singled out, and what is happening in Ohio is wrong. But every time we allow outrage to move the needle on news value, the term loses more meaning … if there remains any left that’s consistently agreed upon.
As I said, I’m a columnist. That’s actually what got me in the door of my college paper. But I quickly learned that while it’s fun to spout off, far more fulfilling is letting voters know about the shenanigans their “representatives” get up to. But you can’t just give them column inches … they want people to hear their unedited bullshit, they can buy an ad.
In today’s environment, allowing that link to stand would have been saying to our user base (which seems to like the standards I proposed for U.S. News) “we said we’d stick with news, but here’s some political speech all the same,” thus creating a false equivalence that takes away from any gravitas built up around the late-20th-century model of journalism I’ve chosen to uphold and that the admins and community have shown approval for.
Making an exception here to the expectation of reported news would have been malfeasance.
It sounds like you’re confusing opinion with news. Or maybe you mean the community is meant to be “news reports”. But to claim that something isn’t news because it links directly to sources is just an absurd take.
Saying that an announcement by the ruling party of a state isn’t news. Do you actually hear yourself?
The point is that an announcement is just that; non-actioned words.
When someone else actually verifies that they are following through with that, it becomes news. Otherwise, you are just amplifying their press release under the guise of reporting, when in fact nothing has actually happened.
That is such a ridiculously high, and incredibly arbitrary, standard for what’s considered “news”
Not at all, this is literally what actual news sites do.
Go to CNN, AP, Reuters, anyone- Do they just reprint sources wholesale, or do they summarize key points, give context, give counterpoints, and omit self-serving partisan speech? Obviously the latter. That is news reporting.
There are TONS of dumb political statements put out by politicians all over the world every day, and most of them go unreported-on, because they’re not newsworthy.
The fact that these politicians stated the intent to do this stuff, is news. You can convey that actual news in a couple sentences, which is about how much the AP quoted from the GOP statement. All the rest of the GOP’s statement is not news, and posting it is, as I said, political amplification.
Of course they do more than just reprint raw sources. They have to provide value. They’re in the business of news reports. That doesn’t mean that the original sources aren’t news.
The fact that these politicians stated the intent to do this stuff, is news. You can convey that actual news in a couple sentences
So you’re saying it IS news. It seems what you want is commentary, which isn’t news. Or opinion, which isn’t news.
I was going to avoid responding, but you are mischaracterizing my responses to your ongoing harassment via DM.
This is not about “bias.” This is about you wanting a political party’s opinion about an election to be considered the same as reported news. It is not.
May I post the PM thread in public?
By all means.
Thank you. Please read in reverse chronological order. It might help to load in a separate tab for reading.
I will now exit this discussion with you. My objection remains on the record.
I agree, it’s propaganda. Has no reason to be on a pure news community. The reason you aren’t able to find reputable news outlets reporting about this is that they came to the same conclusion.
It was posted on the Ohio State House of Representatives official website by elected officials under color of statutory authority.
That makes it NEWS. Not opinion.
I’m not arguing the content of the statement. I’m arguing what news organizations consider to be accepted news sourcing.
A write up has also been posted by the AP now.
That makes it NEWS. Not opinion.
The fact that they released the statement is news; the statement itself is not. There is a VERY important distinction there.
The statement is NOT factual. It’s not legislation. It’s not an official order. It’s literally just a claim they are making that they will do X, and (mis)using their platform to do it.
If you write,
“the Ohio GOP legislators released a statement asserting their intent to remove judicial review of constitutional matters as they pertain to the recent abortion ballot measure”,
you have conveyed the news. The actual source from the idiot GOPers adds nothing to that except propaganda.
You will note that the news reporting by the AP is not just a reprint of the GOP press release, because that’s not how news works.
i think we’ve about extinguished the usefulness of this thread since a reason has been given and the rules of the community in question explained repeatedly, so locking.
