Comment by JohnStrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnStrange | Hacker News Reader

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I completely agree with your analysis. To add to this, I've been watching US media closely over the past few months and have never seen them so biased in any matter before, including past elections. It appears to me that there is not a single news source in the US that does not entirely follow some political agenda. There seem to be no dissenters or cautious writers left.

Most of them are biased against Trump, of course, and follow a fairly obvious strategy: "Hillary is extremely unpopular, we cannot make her more popular, so let's make Trump even less popular."

It works very well. Just to make this clear, I'm a European left-wing liberal democratic socialist, not a Trump or Hillary supporter of any kind. But I've seen many US elections and it was never like that before. It's as if all US media and news organizations have sold out to the highest bidder at once. (To be fair, I don't follow that many of them, just a few newspaper sites like L.A. times, NY times, TV channels like CNN, Fox, nbc and a few social media sites.)

I think the answer is simpler than some grand conspiracy of the global media elite (insert your preferred shadowy cabal here), the sort of people who work in news agencies simply are not alienated enough from the current system to see trump as anything other than a danger to the current system of representative gov. and they also don't like being demonised and slandered by Trump, this requires no conspiracy, just that media people value the status quo (which trump threatens in so many ways to destroy and disrupt from within).

There is no conspiracy.

Agreed. I also think this is generally quite often true: what people perceive to be conspiracies are often as not instead emergent behaviors, rooted in the independent self-interested actions of a large number of individuals, acting with very loose or no coordination at all.

Conspiracies, when they happen, seem to rather often fail; those requiring secrecy are in particular prone to failure. But people act according to their own interests all the time, and when their interests are even slightly aligned the outcome can certainly resemble or even be indistinguishable from an actively-managed conspiracy.

I agree with both of you and am a bit bewildered that I came a cross as a "grand" conspiracy theorist. The is a very simple reason why the press hates Trump so much. He has not only threatened to sue journalists very often but has also hinted at times that he would limit the possibilities of journalists if he was elected.

That being said, don't underestimate the amount of ordinary collusion and the work of spin doctors during election times. My point is that this is massive this time, definitely more than in past elections.

Finally, although I generally agree, a little warning about your last comment: Since we only see failed conspiracies, we lack the data to adequately assess the question of how much real conspiracy there is. ("conspiracy theories" on the other hand, are easy to debunk, but that's another issue.)

Ok so lets take your version of events. So when this climate leads to situations were the media then starts working hand in hand with the DNC to leaks questions and give one candidate a leg up, at what point is that not a conspiracy?

At a certain point there is evidence to show people in the media coordinating in private to try and reach a common outcome. If a bunch of people in the media working together to distort the truth isn't a conspiracy then I'm not sure what is.

Such an apologist. NY Times sent stories to Hillary for pre-approval. I worked in journalism. In my time, this was a scarlet-letter offense. The conspirators should be black-balled from journalism.

The bias is off the rails online as well. Many places that used to claim a pretense of balance is now 100% dedicated to hating on Trump. Look at /r/politics, you'd think there is no political news outside of Trump is the next Stalin. At least it's avoidable though.

What really bothers me is not being able to watch any national news coverage without a constant stream of Democratic narrative. I'm genuinely curious about what other issues or political offices are going to be on the ballot, but I'm going to have to take it upon myself to research any of it. Maybe that's a good side-effect though.

Nope, you nailed it. You've read enough of our prostitutes to correctly identify the state of US journalism. Fortunately, they should be completely ineffectual very soon thanks to efforts of my write-in presidential candidate Wik I. Leaks

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