Read the article, a non-analysis based piece on the same subject made the front page and was not removed. Reddit has other subreddits for analysis pieces, that why there are subreddits.
/r/news just got a new reader.
You should read Bill Keller's conversation with Greenwald here on the objectivity/partiality of news: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/opinion/a-conversation-in-...
It's a little long, but it's a very, very important conversation, everyone should read it really.
I really don't want this to just "fade in the background" like it happened the last time around with the NSA:
http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-...
It's all about accepting your biases and making them very clear, allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions.
Disclaimer: this requires critical thought, which seems to have fallen out of favor these days.
When in the rest of the world they are regarded as at best a necessary evil or lower than estate agents and politicians in the trust states in the case of tabloid journalists.
It's Greenwald -- what else would you expect? He is sometimes insightful, but always long-winded, hyperbolic, and shrill, which is why I don't usually bother to read him. It saves me time and head-desks to follow the Snowden thing through more mainstream sources.
I understand your impatience with Greenwald's prose style and all, but aren't you moving yourself another layer of filtering away from the real story if you won't read Greenwald at all?
Don't know about you, but I'm trusting that filtering quality less and less, so even if I think Greenwald is being hyperbolic sometimes, I'm still going to read him on anything relevant to Snowden.
I always assume that news pieces are sketches of the truth and that it takes discipline and effort to educate oneself about what's really going on -- and often times it's simply not possible. You can't rely on a single source, you have to be willing to take the analysis along with the fact lists if your goal is to try and piece together a big picture. Perfect example is the news from Syria. I can't tell you how many articles and longform pieces I've read on the situation and still can't even pretend that I've achieved some true awareness of what's really going on, though I can recite facts and figures that make me look more well read than the average person.
Before this latest leak, there was no way that you could suggest that the government was trying to influence conversations online or spying on activist groups-- you'd be decried as a conspiracy theorist aka "not serious" aka "don't listen to this crazy person".
It's disturbing that people don't understand that the frame of discussion dictates the terms of the discussion.
Judging by the reaction to the deletion of GGs stories, a significant minority or even a majority want the latter.
So the real question is does the public get what the public wants?
Well, not really. Not when creating a new subreddit is free and easy to do. If a significant minority of a subreddit audience dislikes a decision they can easily set up their own community.
Your line of reasoning is similar to the jingoistic "USA! Love it or leave it!" style reasoning. Rather than abandonment, another remedy is to actually fix the problem, namely Reddit's moderation system.
And of course abolish the NSA.
It really isn't. "USA, love it or leave it" it useless at best because people very rarely have the ability to just up and leave their home country, let alone deal with the employment and family repercussions of doing so. In short: it isn't a reasonable expectation.
To refer back to the post I replied to:
Is unbiased journalism what /r/news and /r/worldnews readers actually want?
I don't know. But the point is this: /r/news has rules. I don't see how the mods are being dishonest - the rules are stated quite clearly. If a significant minority disagree with those rules, starting a new subreddit is incredibly simple and has no repercussions beyond people adding another subreddit to their subscribed list.
I don't think "Is our precious little Public getting everything he wants?" is the right question. What the public wants is shouty-but-shallow opinion pieces and cat pictures, and in those interests they are already well-served. The point of moderation is to raise the level of discourse above the lowest common denominator.
That said, I feel like there's a certain point at which the interpretation goes from being unconsciously-manipulated to consciously-manipulated. For example, Roger Ailes presenting a narrative on a daily basis for Fox News personalities to play to is obviously a conscious manipulation.
Someday, there'll be a way some kind of biometric way to authenticate a put-forth idea as your brain's best attempt at neutral translation of an event (sort of like verifying a message is from you with PGP), but until then we'll have to rely on people being dumb and obvious in their manipulations a la Fox News.
Even if we could produce a neutral translation of an event, biases still come into play though the selection of which events to cover and which to pass over.
The problem isn't (entirely) biased news. It's that society's current relationship with it is unhealthy. These subreddits just bury stories without helping their readers understand how to identify and digest bad news sources/articles/etc...
It only perpetuates the false notion that unbiased news can exist, and that unbiased is generally regarded as "doesn't rock the boat," regardless of what bias actually goes into the reporting. (If "unbiased" reporting could exist, it wouldn't have to walk back any meaningful points made just to teeter in the middle of the national political spectrum...)
I read a column a while back that really helped me to process news, "Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism" by Matt Taibbi [0]. Funny enough, digging that link up it also turns out to be a reaction to a reaction to Greenwald.
You can still get information out of biased sources. I'd expect Fox News to be banned outright on that subreddit, but if they managed to get a scoop on (for example) the Chris Christy trainwreck I'd still want to read that. I wouldn't, and shouldn't, need CNN to synthesize another reporter's reporting for me, I need their reporting for further developments and to help me synthesize and contextualize Fox's reporting en masse.
[0] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-msm-...
How exactly do you define censorship? I'm not saying censorship is a bad thing but removing something is exactly censorship.