Comment by youarefired | Hacker News Reader

Comment by youarefired | Hacker News Reader

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That interesting. I run a silly little website website that invited people to vote against one of the two candidates [1]. I watched our analytics like a hawk during the couple of weeks before the elections in order to adjust messaging, content and ads.

This, of course, wasn't scientific at all except for the fact that we were running ads to attract both sides of the discussion equally. They were geographically limited to the US. About a week before the elections the trend was unmistakable. The support for Trump in the form of CTR, engagement and votes to the hundreds of different ads out there told a story.

We actually tried to get this story out and attempted to publish a press release. It was rejected by all of the top press release agencies we used for other business. Not one of them wanted to publish that things were not looking good from Clinton, even from a silly little entertainment site.

To confirm the bias a few days later we issued a press release indicating that Clinton was catching-up and Trump was predicted to lose. Everyone published the release.

We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.

I know this is just one data point. There are plenty more from other sources. The bias and manipulation are very real.

[1] http://youarefired.com/

We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.

You say we "can't", but we demonstrably do have such a press. And you're 100% correct to discern the totalitarian nature of it.

Which is why alternative sources have become so important, and as more people's "Pravda breakers" trip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921328) the less important this old press becomes. Look no further than the former "Newspaper of Record", it's post-election front page, it's crashing revenue, and why I call it "Carlos Slim's personal blog".

Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine", which allowed right of center talk radio to become a thing, which I'm sure helped prime things for rise of the Internet. Drudge's 1998 reporting of a story spiked by Newsweek (sold in 2010 for a dollar and assumption of its liabilities) clearly marked this was a decisive change ... and yet our "press", MSM, this whole old establishment, seems determined to stay the course.

Which, just citing the two financial bits above, looks like a path to oblivion (although many of us are predicting they'll get direct government support soon enough, but that won't get them readers), and therefore self-correcting in, say, the medium term. So I'm not quite so alarmed, as long as the Internet stays free of censorship at the IP and maybe DNS levels.

Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine"

I've seen this claim before, but I'm unconvinced. Do you think that under the "Fairness" regime, things really were fair?

I'm thinking of the way that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were treated by the debate commission, where fairness is claimed to be in effect.

Errr, I'm referring to this FCC policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine a rather brutal tactic by Truman that I've read Eisenhower used as well. Zapping it allowed for frankly "unbalanced", dishonest if you prefer, and inequitable radio shows like the icontic The Rush Limbaugh Show.

And thanks no doubt to a bit of Google AI, here he is on the topic, discussing how it was back in 1980 as well as more generally: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/02/20/anyone_remember...

As the Wikipedia article notes, this has nothing to do with the equal-time rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule about which I'm expressing no opinion.

You're right that I had been conflating "equal time" with "fairness".

But it still seems that "fairness" is BS. First, I'm quite sure it can't pass Constitutional muster on the web. It was permitted back in the 60s predicated on the FCC managing a scarce resource (broadcast frequency spectrum). But for practical purposes, Internet bandwidth is unlimited, and it couldn't get away with this. Also, this seems little more than a nod. For any given issue, there's a kaleidoscope of differing ideas. It seems it shouldn't be too difficult to engineer a compliant broadcast that still manages to completely exclude specific undesired ideas, by including other views as compensating balance.

Rush Limbaugh is crap, and I won't watch him. But do you really want to live in a country where that's actually forbidden? I don't.

> when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press.

We should take control of the press, like totalitarian regimes!

(Sorry for the snark, but there really is a big contradiction here which both sides are struggling with. The American press aren't especially left-wing, they're just tremendously unreliable - story template first, facts second.)

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