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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

sigh... this again. He's being downvoted because statements like

> "A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy. Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function."

are applause lights that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation.

Pick a bunch of random people-- hell, even random politicians-- and ask them if a free press is essential to democracy. I guarantee you 100% of them will say yes, and probably 100% of them actually believe it and aren't just cynical liars. This suggests that the causes of this muzzling are deeper than people simply not realizing how important a free press is, and that the solutions are more complex than repeating two-sentence mantras that everyone already agrees with.

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Given that the press doesn't have that much freedom in most of the world (even supposedly democratic countries), I think your statement that "everyone already agrees with" these mantras is plainly false.

Given that the entities suppressing that freedom are powerful minorities, I think the statement still holds.

"Everyone" is a colloquialism meaning "most reasonable people" in this case.

You're making assumptions. You're assuming that your position is "reasonable", and you're assuming that most people (at least in the western world) agree with you. And then to make your logic work, you're assuming that there's a vast conspiracy to oppress most people to prevent them from having freedom of speech and press.

The reality is that there aren't a lot of places where there's anything close to an absolute freedom of speech or the press. America really sticks out as an anomaly there, by having it written into the constitution. If it were really a strong part of a nation's culture, you'd think this wouldn't be so unusual, but it is, and in fact other western nations have laws completely contrary to this to some degree. Just look at the UK, where the truth is not an absolute defense against libel.

> that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation

What does ignoring the (debatable[1]) bulk of a post - arguing that democracies should support whistleblowers, rather than persecuting them - and simply downvoting because of a repeated platitude, contribute to the conversation?

[1] Unless you think "everyone" believes Manning, Snowden and Assange should be freed/supported.

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