5
YouTuber Johnny Harris’ lens on Eastern Europe is distorted and irresponsible
(kyivindependent.com)
It's funny, prior to this video I would have said Harris had quite a neoliberal status quo bias. But then he puts out a video almost word-for-word parroting Kremlin talking points and it seems more likely his problem is less bias and more journalistic skills (or lack thereof).
As someone on Reddit said, it seems like he's naturally skilled at doing human interest stories that tie in to greater world events, similar to Rare Earth, but his trend recently has been trying to do grand sweeping narratives focused on world events. And he's just not that good at it.
He's since taken down the video in response to criticism and put out this response video. Sadly that video isn't on Nebula, and if I hadn't randomly been viewing Reddit to go see comments about the latest Jet Lag just 1 hour after this same article was posted to the Nebula subreddit, I probably still wouldn't have seen this retraction.
It's good to see Harris respond like this and say he'll do better. He's certainly saying all the right things. The problem is that this is not the first time he's run into problems with journalistic quality and responded by saying all the right things.
Incidentally, one particular YouTuber who responded to Harris's take is mentioned by a lot of the comments under his retraction video. I strongly do not recommend bothering to watch that. I did, and it was pretty obviously at least as biased in the other direction as the video Harris produced was towards the Russian view. There were maybe one or two genuinely good points in it, but most of it was either rather obvious or extremely biased.