this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
24 points (100.0% liked)

World News

22058 readers
53 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.


Guidelines for submissions:

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.


For US News, see the US News community.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The untold spy story of a mole in ASIO's ranks who sold the Soviets highly classified intelligence and got away with it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Great article. I wouldn't use quotation marks around traitor in the title! He was absolutely a traitor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Btw the reason most of these news companies use quotation marks for things like "traitor", "sexual assault" is not to show that they disagree with a particular stance.
They do it to show that they themselves aren't calling someone a traitor, instead they are quoting someone else who calls that person a traitor. So that way they are not implicating themselves in case problems arise.

Otherwise they can have legal consequences if the things that they say about a certain person lead to that person suing them. This way they can easily say "hold on, we didn't call you a traitor, it was those people, we were just quoting them"

Or at least that's how it is to my knowledge. (aka covering my ass in case I'm wrong :)) )

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Australia has pretty brutal anti-defamation laws. Just look at what YouTuber Jordan Shanks aka FriendlyJordies went though. A politician basically admitted to corruption, Jordan essentially quoted him in the video, but then Jordan was found to be guilty of defamation because what the politician said was covered by parliamentary privilege. So, basically, even an absolute truth is not always a defence.

That being said, the dude in question is long dead, so I'm not sure who exactly could claim to have been damaged by the assertion that the dude in question was a traitor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Australia has incredibly punitive defamation laws that protect people with enough money to go to court, so news orgs are very careful with their wording to avoid being sued.