Ask HN: Why are newspapers not talking about Wikileaks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are newspapers not talking about Wikileaks?

22 pointsangry-hacker22 comments

I always thought the media being "liberal" and skewed was overblown, but I'm amazed no one is talking about Wikileaks right now. Neither HN.

CNN has on the front page news a woman who is "accusing" Trump on sexual abuse. Am I going crazy and starting to believe conspiracy theories?

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Objective media is dead my friends.

I do not believe it is overblown. I am appalled at Twitter, facebook, youtube, and definitely the more traditional media outlets. Their selective enforcement of policy violations shows that they truly wish to censor.

There is definitely a bias against a lot of sites with a right/alt-right lean. Sadly, I believe that bias exists here on HN.

It would appear that all links to breitbart.com are hellbanned/auto-flagged or the community here simply wont tolerate it. [1]

I'm glad there are people like Andrew Torba and his gab.ai [2] project. (A twitter alternative, not artificial intelligence).

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=breitbart.com

2 - http://gab.ai

that's healthy behavior HN! we wouldn't want any bad news to be discussed or considered...

</s>

There is excellent coverage at The Intercept, by Zaid Jilani and Lee Fang.

I've seen articles in the past few days about the email leaks on the washington post, and looking on CNN right now I see an article on the Podesta emails on the politics page. I've seen a lot of talk about hacking and emails this election. I would say the media is talking more about Trump's sexual assault accusers right now because either: a) The emails haven't been verified (as far as I know) b) There's nothing in them as scandalous as a sex scandal (as far as I can tell) c) Trump keeps saying scandalous things, which draws attention to himself.

A lot of the problems with the media, as far as I can tell, stem from the fact that no one is paying for it anymore. This leads the media to going for attention grabbing headlines, which means a sex scandal will always win out over any allegations of corruption.

I flagged this mostly because I'm part of the vast international Zionist conspiracy, but partly because I believe it leads to no productive discussion at all.

Not to mention that what Wikileaks is doing is unethical, and paying attention to it enables them.

Read @zeynep's Twitter feed for a forceful argument against these document dumps, and the harm they do to democracy.

But didn't those very dumps expose the collusion between Hillary's campaign and the Democratic National Committee to marginalize Sanders and his supporters? Not that two wrongs make a right, but two negative make a positive...or something like that :-)

edit: speeeling

Is the way how documents had been obtained ethical or not? Well, too late for this is it not? The question should really be what the origin of those documents is - are they genuine or not.

It's like mounting provocation against officials so they accept a bribe. Is it ethical? Well - in some countries this is how unethically-acting people are being caught red handed. The only way they actually can be caught red handed.

The whole point is there's no way to prove they are true or not. or which parts are true or not. Now if you trust wikileaks as some kind of authority on truth...

There is a way to prove if those sources are genuine but you don't have resources to do so. However to say "there is no way to prove they are true or not" is far from true. Such documents can be cross-referenced with other documents we know are genuine, simply this requires research you have no time nor resource to conduct. But there are others out there who have both time and resources. I have seen some documents about my home government (not USA) which were all (to the last one) true.

They can't insert words into the documents they published that were originals.

God, I love this.

In realtime we're seeing the conservative position on wikileaks melt into friendly affection at "that old rascal", while the liberals are undergoing the reverse metamorphosis.

I can't stop laughing. This is so surreal.

No. The Podesta emails are damning but have got very little acknowledgment.

This is the phenomenon of circling the wagons.

I've been going through them and there's all kinds of fascinating stuff. For example if you do a search for 'ocra100' you'll see John Podesta receiving three emails that sound like he's getting intelligence reports from Moldbug. Too many WTFs to explain here. Just go and see.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1637

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/295

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/197

Well done to Glenn Greenwald though.

Receiving emails isn't damning, you'd want to establish a pattern of mutual communication and reliance on the information contained in them.

(think about it this way, if my comment replying to you is really stupid, does that somehow impugn you?)

I think the orca100 emails are more interesting than damning, both the content and the context, I am very curious to know about how this happened since everything orca100 is saying is totally orthogonal to the mainstream liberal positions.

It's just amazing in general how overwhelmingly two-faced the system is. They say one thing to each other and then the opposite to the public.

If the Americans don't trust their politicians it's probably because they're not insane.

Look at the cc list on https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1637

It's a bunch of liberal reporters. Either it's a crank sending their crank to people they think need to hear their crank or a bunch of 30 something politics beat reporters are deep insiders.

I thought that too initially but now am starting to wonder. Some of the emails sound like they were written by cartoon villains and if orca100 is a crank, it's crank that sounds like they have been put up to this, cranks are normally on the defensive and expository but this just sounds like a report with the occasional personal opinion thrown in.

I suspect that political groups send out requests to see the perspective of different factions and this may be what this is.

I would argue it's 3 large factors.

1. Scandal fatigue. People are tired of talking about Clinton's e-mails. Had this release been before the previous e-mail controversy it would have been picked up far more.

2. Sex - Sex sells. Sex scandals always blow up more than non-sex scandals. If Hillary Clinton has e-mails about banging interns it would be all over the major newspapers.

3. Sound bityness - There is a video where Trump says "Grab them by the pussy". There's nothing like this in the Clinton e-mails. There's no big damning quote they can throw up on headlines and get a billion clicks.

It's not a conspiracy, it's a prospiracy -- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=67 The prestige media -- NY Times, Vox, NPR -- all see themselves as being on the same team. They seem themselves as having a public responsibility to guide America toward a better, more progressive future, and to limit the errors of the retrograde, perhaps bigoted middle American. Thus, they all slant their coverage to fit that narrative and worldview. And if members fail to fit the narrative, if they say, "illegal immigrants" instead of "undocumented immigrants", they catch a lot of flak from their fellow teammates, they risk getting ostracized, and so over time everyone falls in line with a certain consensus.

NH is a techie site, so most people don't care (or aren't from US)

As about the US news outlets, just google who owns whom and go up that ownership chain. No conspiracy theories of any kind, just money as usual.

Sure, but twitter, facebook, and youtube have been in the news lately about their selective enforcement of policy violations. THAT is definitely of interest to this community.

... and now this Ask HN thread is getting flagged? C'mon HN! We're better than this...

Your post was flagged too. Nobody bothered to provide some feedback as to why... Truly we are better than this...

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