I don't think it's so much pushing an agenda, as it is avoiding a thermonuclear hot potato of modern life. If you start talking about gender identity, everyone has STRONG opinions they feel they must share. Worse, a subset of those opinions will be fairly extreme, and you're potentially exposing yourself to harassment or worse. If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly.
So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.
Yes, that's a reasonable possibility as well. It's not proof of an agenda, and might be prudent, but I do think it's a form of bias. There's a thin line between skipping "possibly superfluous" details and skipping core parts of a story that might provide evidence for viewpoints one disagrees with. The result is still that readers need to realize that they are being presented with a consciously edited narrative and not an unbiased set of facts.
It was quite easy to skim over some original source material from both sinceriously.fyi and zizians.info. By my quick reading, and taking a very high level view, the philosophy is responsible for the trans and also for the violence. But an article harping on the correlation as implied causation without focusing on the hidden variable behind them both is just trying to fuel the fire of the reactionary movement. In general, averaging two different flavors of extremist reporting is not a way for obtaining truth.
That seems like an argument for not ignoring the matter in media that wishes to avoid honing in on the sensitive issue. Now instead of reading an article that integrates but doesn't centre the trans issue, I have read one that doesn't mention it, which I now feel to be dishonest, and one which centres the trans issue above all else, which I view to be biased, but not dishonest. So well done to the authors of the OP, now I can't help but be convinced the trans factor is far more important than I might have otherwise.
Myopic focus is itself a lie of omission (of the larger context), so they're both dishonest. It seems like you're trying to obtain some agency by sorting through political trash, but the best you can get from that is trash. Never wrestle with a pig and all that.
Yeah, I agree. I think my perception of the second article was coloured by prior knowledge I had from the first, because on review, it is rather myopic too, it doesn't give useful context that was in the first. That said, I do find its myopia less sinister because I am inclined to believe that "rationalism", while I'm quite negative on it, and it probably contributes to these people's superiority complexes, is less likely the root cause than things which are.... I'm trying to be delicate here.... more sensical in light of the trans angle.
I disagree that you can't get anything useful out of trash though. Media literacy requires reading between the lines of what is written by multiple people with differing perspectives on a matter and sorting the wheat from the chaff. It's primarily trash, almost entirely trash, there is no choice but to go dumpster diving, or throw your hands up in despair and decide you're just not going to bother at all. The latter option is tenable in and of itself, but when I observe it in practice from people around me, it usually equates in practice to just lazily applying your prior biases to anything you hear about and being an obnoxious and uninteresting conversational partner.
> If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly.
That’s not true: 99% percent of news outlets have absolutely no fear supporting trans activism.
It’s trivial to find hundreds of such cases from sfgate with a google search.
No, that is omitting quite a significant detail. If apparently the majority of people have X characteristic that is a tiny percentage in the overall population there is some correlation or something newsworthy there,
It's fashionable to invoke the baddies of Germany but let's zoom out a bit and just live in reality. Virtually no group on this planet that is not primarily about sexual characteristics or fetishes or whatever is almost entirely made up of people from this particular group and this death cult that is, presumably about "rationalist" mumbo jumbo, is primarily made up of this group. That is certainly newsworthy.
So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.