Talk:Democracy Now!

Lannan Foundation, Ron Glaser & Air America
"At least $350,000 in grant money has been accepted by Democracy Now! since 2001 from the Lannan Foundation that was set up by the family of former ITT board member J. Peter Lannan. Over $100,000 in grants have also been given to Democracy Now! It's done by former Microsoft VP and Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser's Glaser Progress Foundation in recent years."


 * Can we have a reference for these numbers? -plaus

"Glaser was also a major investor in the financially ailing Air America radio network."


 * I've removed this bit, it's something for an article about Ron Glaser or Air America, it's unrelated to DN. -plaus

Article full-protected
To preserve the stability of this article, I have protected it for 10 days due to edit warring. Work it out here on this talk page. I have no opinion on the merits of the paragraph being added and removed other than to note that it seems to rely mostly on a single publication. ~Anachronist (talk) 15:38, 16 August 2021 (UTC)


 * There does not appear to be a 'work it out' solution. It is clear from the discussions and citations above that Jaydoggmarco is making biased revisions to remove a legitimate section based on personal political biases, and that Jaydoggmarco has been flagged and even blocked for such editing excesses in the past. I would ask that you restore the article to its most recent edit before Jaydoggmarco began repeatedly deleting the 'Criticism' section. That section has existed for months with no automatic flags or substantive challenges.--142.254.114.23 (talk) 15:45, 16 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Also, on both my and 141.126.156.55's talk page Anachronist, you stated (EMPHASIS ADDED) :
 * "The burden is on you, the person who wants to add material that is being removed by 'MULTIPLE EDITORS' to support your position on the talk page. The burden is not on those removing your addition, it is on you."
 * It appears to me from the discussion above that there is only *one* editor who is removing the added content not 'Multiple Editors'.--142.254.114.23 (talk) 16:04, 16 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Look at the recent history. MULTIPLE editors, three different editors have removed that content:, , and . Two anonymous IP addresses have added it. This is a content dispute, and the burden is on the person who wants it added to support its addition, per WP:BURDEN. ~Anachronist (talk) 17:50, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Here is the disputed content. I note that the last citation is a wiki and cannot be included. The others may need to be reviewed at WP:RSN. ~Anachronist (talk) 18:08, 16 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Ok, now that I have figured out how to look at the history, what I see is that two of these three 'editors' (Jaydoggmarco and Calton) are clearly approaching the material with extreme political and ideological bias, *both* have been sanctioned multiple times for inappropriate edit-warring in the past, and they also apparently work together to crusade through Wikipedia to engage in such biased ideologically-driven editing.


 * For the only other editor who removed it (Ceoil) I can see no reasons stated for removing it at all - unless the claim that the final source of the section is supposedly a wiki was the reason. In that case, it is a consumer watchdog site published in a wiki format. Regardless, if that was the only issue why didn't the editor just flag that source instead of deleting the entire section? Are Ceoil's reasons for the deletion recorded anywhere?


 * Honestly, the reasons for siding with these editors (especially the first two) look pretty slim to me. There need to be some basic standards to ensure that, any editors who are repeatedly overreaching and getting *warned* for doing so, are not rewarded for it.


 * Finally, note that all of the sources *have* been checked at WP:RSN and are not listed.--142.254.114.23 (talk) 19:22, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I am not taking anyone's side. I protected the article, and now I am trying to facilitate discussion, and make suggestions. From my perspective as an administrator, my goal is to preserve the stability of the Wikipedia project, and the instability in this article has been solved by protecting the article. Protecting it from IP address edits or blocking your IP address would have also made the article stable. Either way, problem solved. I could be done here and just move on to something else, but I decided to stick around to facilitate and monitor the discussion.

Please be mindful of WP:CIVIL; you are making personal assumptions about the political views and ideologies of other editors, which is a blockable offense. Comment on content, not contributors.

As for the sources, I don't know how you claim that "all" the sources have been discussed at WP:RSN. As far as I can tell: So, until the other people in the dispute chime in to explain their reasoning for removing the content, my suggestion remains: ask RSN to look at the sources that still need looking at. ~Anachronist (talk) 21:15, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Dissident Voice has been mentioned in a narrow context at RSN 11 years ago but no judgment made as to its overall reliability.
 * Black Agenda Report has never been discussed at RSN.
 * Resumen has never been discussed at RSN.
 * Sourcewatch does not need discussion at RSN because it's a wiki (user generated content), which disqualifies it as a reliable source. Links within that source may be reliable, but those aren't cited in the passage proposed above.
 * I can see where 142.254 is coming from, but unfortunately the sources provided so far are not sufficiently reliable. Havnt researched yet myself, but intend to in coming days. Ceoil (talk) 19:40, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * All four seem to be opinion sites, Also they use very partisan and loaded language to accuse (without evidence) Democracy Now of "supporting imperialism" for reporting factual information on crimes committed by the Assad regime in Syria, It should be noted that the editor of Black Agenda Report and writer at Dissident Voice Ajamu Baraka was revealed to have been paid $120,000 dollars by the Syrian government and has promoted conspiracy theories claiming that the chemical attack in Syria was a false flag (among other things). All four sites also have various articles promoting Assad apologism and war crimes denialism. Jaydoggmarco (talk) 01:32, 23 August 2021 (UTC)


 * On Jaydoggmarco's response. 1) The claim that these sites are 'opinion' sites is false. They are clearly news sites. 2) News sites that are partisan and have an ideology, even strongly so, are absolutely *not* barred from being used as sources on Wikipedia. Do we bar MSNBC? Rachel Maddow? Fox News? Nope. So that criterion is not legitimate at all. 3) The claims about Assad, Syria and Ajamu Baraka are *irrelevant* because Baraka did not *author* any of the pieces I am using as sources. Most importantly the issue of blame for the multiple gas attacks in Syria is unresolved and strongly debated with *several* members of the *very* teams that *did* the research on the gas attack sites themselves claiming that they found no evidence that Assad was responsible (in more than one case) and that their own agency (the OPCW) has covered up their independent findings. Since the facts in these cases are clearly *legitimately* disputed, especially by inspectors who *personally* examined the scenes, it is not acceptable to take down reference to one side of that debate - nor is it legitimate to claim that such reports are "Assad apologism" or "war crimes denialism" in light of the legitimate dispute. Such "conspiracy theory" claims of this disputed issue are purely *subjective* (therefore have no place in the maintenance of an unbiased encyclopedia) and must absolutely not be used as a justification to take down a section *showing* that a legitimate dispute over the nature of the Syrian gas attacks exists. The section I added was *specifically* added to show that there are two sides to the discussion of Democracy Now's reporting (especially on these issues of Syria and alleged war crimes) and it needs to be left up. Here is the link to an Associated Press report showing that the two 'gas' cases in question are *unresolved* even to the extent that inspectors could not even verify that gas attacks happened at all. https://apnews.com/article/chemical-weapons-syria-archive-aleppo-04f6a88cb89098925d5ca2ee2d09d74b And here is a report in The Independent by Robert Fisk (one of the most awarded and respected foreign correspondents on Earth before his recent death) showing that the facts of one of the gas attacks are clearly disputed, by the very inspectors who were on the scene investigating it. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/douma-syria-opcw-chemical-weapons-chlorine-gas-video-conspiracy-theory-russia-a8927116.html  - I will have the original sources checked on WP:RSN and if they are not found to be unreliable I expect this section to be left up. I will also fix the legitimate problem noted by Anachronist of not using the "Sourcewatch" wiki as a direct citation. I will instead go to the original sources. --142.254.114.23 (talk) 08:00, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Despite WP:RSN finding the sources unreliable. TJD2 keeps trying to add the criticism section back in. Jaydoggmarco (talk) 06:45, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Criticism section
FMSky, could you please explain why did you restore the criticism section? As I have written in my edit summary, the text seems unreliably-sourced and undue to me:


 * 1) "We Need Better and More Diverse Coverage on Syria" is an open letter (a primary source) of a chapter of Veterans for Peace, an advocacy organization. The letter is republished by Dissident Voice, a WordPress-based group blog whose name already suggests that it is a fringe organization. Among other things, Dissident Voice has a post about how the Chaplyne railway station attack and the Olenivka prison massacre were perpetrated "by Ukrainian military, and/or their associated Nazi Azov Battalions", and how Ukraine has killed "tens of thousands of pro-Russian Ukrainians in the Donbass", and how the Euromaidan was a "coup" instigated by the US, and other nonsense.
 * 2) "Peace Activists Confront Amy Goodman on Biased Syria Coverage" is an interview (also a primary source) with Daniel Borgström, a member of the Veterans for Peace chapter, with Black Agenda Report, which publishes "news, commentary and analysis from the black left" and is therefore likely biased.
 * 3) The next four articles are all written by the same person, Danny Haiphong, and are published in Resumen Latinamericano, a WordPress-based blog, and Black Agenda Report.
 * 4) The last source is SourceWatch, which is an open wiki and therefore unreliable.

Kleinpecan (talk) 17:22, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
 * SourceWatch is generally unreliable per WP:RSP and the rest of it are likewise unreliable. I reverted. In general criticism should be included within the rest of the prose anyway. Where it is reliably sourced of course.  nableezy  - 17:29, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Beyond that, there is already consensus against the inclusion of this material up above. If editors come back here every few months to try to edit-war it back in should result in sanctions if it continues. And consensus that each of the sources is unreliable at RSN: Black Agenda Report, Dissident Voice, with Resumen Latinamericano coming closest to no consensus or possibly reliable. The other two, along with SourceWatch, are clearly unreliable.  nableezy  - 17:38, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Brochure idiom
The show, which airs live each weekday at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, is broadcast on the Internet and via more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide.

As I see this, there's no way to read that without your encyclopedia brain turning off, and the hundreds of thousands of puff encounters in your past life taking up the cognitive reigns.

More than all by itself is a potent Puffville trigger word. The fine print on "more than" is: this much, and it's only getting bigger. And then also the addition of the breathless call to action stuffed between the subject and predicate. &mdash; MaxEnt 16:49, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Emotive Terminology
I have noted that the page keeps being changed from what looks like to be political standpoint, rather than a more neutral one. For example, I note that changes to the intro paragraph have had the following over the last several months:


 * "Democracy Now! is a left-wing hour-long American TV radio…”
 * "Democracy Now! is an hour-long American TV radio…”
 * “Democracy Now! is a far-left hour-long American TV radio…”

I had understood that Wiki likes to keep language as neutral as possible unless there is a documented reason not to in a description, such as an organization's own self declaration/description. Edits adding the words 'far-left’, 'left-wing' etc. would, to some extend, tend to be subjective descriptives. Just about all the previous version were as follows: 'Democracy Now! is an hour-long American TV radio and Internet news program..." The change and previous version to the intro do state that the organization is a progressive outfit, which I believe is a more neutral term.

Also, as I understand it, terms like 'far left' and 'far right' are emotive descriptions as well as being subjective terms.

Additinionaly, what is considered 'far right' or 'far left' nowadays, may become considered more central in the political spectrum in people's eyes further down the line, if or when the political central ground ends up significantly moving to the left or the right. DeptfordDave JC (talk) 00:26, 7 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Because that disruption has continued since this comment above, I have semiprotected the article for a month.
 * Generally we can describe a media outlet as "far left" or "right wing" or whatever if reliable sources can be found that describe it this way. Such is the case for Breitbart News, for example, which cites 11 reliable sources (some of which are scholarly works) characterizing it as "far right".
 * However, the edits made to this article have all been drive-by edits without explanation and unsourced. I note that the lead section already describes the show as "progressive" and cites a source.
 * Anyone who wants to add such a qualifier to the lead section is free to make an edit request. ~Anachronist (talk) 23:49, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It was founded by Socialist and is overtly a trusted source for Socialist news.
 * Juan González describes Democracy Now as “advocacy journalist,”
 * When I started at Democracy Now! in 1996, there were just three of us: Amy, myself and a producer. And the show was just on a handful of Pacifica stations. And my colleagues in the commercial media would say, “What are you doing with that crazy left-wing show?” But both its audience and its influence has steadily grown over the years, to the point that we are now one of the major sources of dissident news coverage in America, and DN! now is on 1,300 stations not only in the U.S. but throughout Latin America, several hundred in Latin America, more than a million followers on social media, and a full-time staff of 30 people, state-of-the-art studios in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, and one of the few organizations that consistently covers international news. All of that started from just a few people who were convinced that there was another way to tell the news narratives in this country.
 * https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/6/juan_gonzalez_reflections_on_40_years
 * So this should be labeled Left and progressive and even "crazy left-wing show," "dissident news coverage"
 * This is also common knowledge. 2600:1700:F90:4320:0:0:0:7A8 (talk) 16:05, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
 * A primary source describing a situation from 30 years ago? And it doesn't even describe the show as socialist. No, we need reliable secondary sources. And the article already characterizes the show as progressive. Primary sources cannot be used to make assertions of fact in Wikipedia's narrative voice. ~Anachronist (talk) 19:06, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
 * He was a founder of the show?
 * "Primary sources cannot be used to make assertions" <- What is that?
 * You need to work on some personal bias??
 * Keep it classy Wikipedia. 2600:1700:F90:4320:0:0:0:7A8 (talk) 12:56, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Labeling a news source left or far-left isn't biased if said source fits the description, which in this case, it does. Few seem to have any issues with labeling conservative sources as right or far-right, so why should a page like this be handled any different? Didn't forget that this is an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias should always be as accurate as possible, and not a place for editors to shape and control their own personal narratives. Секретное общество (talk) 09:14, 29 June 2024 (UTC)