Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

25 years ago Amy Goodman very narrowly avoided execution while covering the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.[1] Her brave reporting brought attention to one of the worst atrocities relative to population of our lifetimes, in which perhaps a quarter of the population were killed by Indonesian forces with weapons supplied by the United States. Prior to this any mention of East Timor was pretty much mocked and there was a total media blackout on the U.S. role in supporting Indonesia's brutal government.

I think she can handle this one.

[1] http://m.democracynow.org/stories/7169

View on HN

I call bullshit.

First of all, the Fallacy of Relative Privation most definitely applies. (LMGTFY: "not as bad as" is fallacious.)

But, far more importantly, this isn't about how "hard" or "dangerous" it is for her. It's about the deep threat to a Free Press that this prosecution represents.

That's kind of an unnecessarily rude and condescending reply. The funny thing is, in your rush to showcase your command of logical fallacies you perpetrated a straw man fallacy. I merely said she is brave, worthy of our deep respect and likely to persevere in the face of adversity, not that we shouldn't be deeply concerned about this case.

Ok maybe clarify what you mean by "She can handle this one".

I have to wonder if one of the big networks, CNN, NBC or ABC were there reporting, would the same thing be applied to their journalists?

In a sense - yes, that is why they weren't reporting.

This only leaves me with more questions.

How do the reporters from the larger networks know that this kind of reporting is off-limits?

Is it common sense? And, if so, does that suggest Ms. Goodman was in the wrong here?

Were they told by the pipeline developers? Wouldn't that threat/restriction in itself be worth some amount of reporting? Would that be wise for the developers to do? Might not such behavior merely further attract the interest of journalists with the legal resources to combat the charges?

A very good analysis of these very questions is Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman.[1] It is fairly scientific, supported by case studies of mainstream coverage of roughly similar atrocities committed by U.S. allies or the U.S. itself, and official U.S. enemies.

In fact it reviews the very case of East Timor. It compares the near total silence of coverage of that (Indonesia's brutal dictator was an ally) to the coverage of the Communist Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia, which was extensive and impassioned.

They discuss a few simple mechanisms that help explain how this bias happens in our otherwise democratic society, which they call the Propaganda Model.[2] A key factor is that major media is funded by advertising, which imparts a kind of natural selection for viewpoints that favor the class interests of the business elite (which extends to foreign policy that favors a powerful American state). So by the time you get hired as a reporter for major media, you've already been selected. You don't have to be told to do the right thing, because you already believe what you're doing to be right.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

Does the Council on Foreign Relations play a role in "selecting" the journalists?

> How do the reporters from the larger networks know that this kind of reporting is off-limits

I think part of it is explainable by the economic incentive to not upset corporations that the network depends on for ad revenue.

Reporters from larger networks have their higherups "filter" their assignments for them. Ms Goodman doesn't appear to have any higher-ups.

Interesting. I knew about the journalists who broke the story about East Timor, but I didn't connect that with Amy Goodman. Was that the start of her career (or the big break, so to speak)?

While she can handle it, I wonder about other journalists, those without the fame to get nationwide attention on their plight, including articles in the Nation and on the front page of HN. How many local journalists died in East Timor, without anyone knowing their names?

Freedom is a Light for Which Many Men Have Died in Darkness

- from the/a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Reply on news.ycombinator.com