{"id":999,"date":"2009-08-22T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-22T12:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/08\/22\/time-for-journalists-to-embrace-godwins-law\/"},"modified":"2009-08-22T08:45:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-22T12:45:00","slug":"time-for-journalists-to-embrace-godwins-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/08\/22\/time-for-journalists-to-embrace-godwins-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Time for journalists to embrace Godwin&#8217;s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/northcountrypublicradio.org\/blogs\/ballotbox\/uploaded_images\/180px-Adolf_Hitler-1933-733622.jpg\"><img style=\"margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float: left;cursor: pointer;width: 180px;height: 260px\" src=\"http:\/\/northcountrypublicradio.org\/blogs\/ballotbox\/uploaded_images\/180px-Adolf_Hitler-1933-733620.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Godwin%27s_law\">Godwin&#8217;s law<\/a> is the observation, dating to the early nineties,  which states that as a &#8220;discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A second tenet of the law is that &#8220;whoever mentions the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s my entirely presumptuous advice to newsrooms.  Whenever someone in a crowd or on a podium invokes the brownshirts or the Fuhrer, shut off the cameras.<\/p>\n<p>That person has self-identified as someone incapable of thinking in interesting and productive ways about complicated issues that we face.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m going to offer a new, third tenet:<\/p>\n<p>Media outlets lose credibility in direct proportion to the number of broadcasts they air involving people who violate Godwin&#8217;s law.<span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><\/p>\n<p><\/span><sup><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Godwin%27s_law#cite_note-WiredMCM-2\"><span><\/span><\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Godwin&#8217;s law is the observation, dating to the early nineties, which states that as a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}