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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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