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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

This kind of equivocation is exactly why we're in this mess to begin with. Yeah, the mainstream networks are not perfect. But they're not in the same league as Brietbart, which in turn is not in the same league as a chain-facebook post stating that the Pope had endorsed Trump.

Words do matter, and they do have a bearing on the real world. Every news story out there is falsifiable (or identifiable as an opinion piece.) For every news source, you can tally a scorecard of how accurate they are.

You can't just equivocate truth away by arguing about who is a clown and who isn't.

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The Iraq war weapons of mass destruction fabrication was and is far more damaging than anything Breitbart et al could ever hope to conjure up and the MSM were 100% complicit. It was clear, at the time, to anyone with even the remotest capability for critical thought that the whole thing was a fabrication in order to have a pre-tense for an illegal invasion and war yet they each and every one of the major publishers went along with it.

But they were receiving reports directly from the government.

Do you honestly believe that the WMD discussions were on the same level as "Hillary keeps killing her aides and Bill keeps covering it up" stories? Or "Trump keeps molesting 13 year old girl" stories?

I can't imagine anyone being able to defend these as being in the same category.

They aren't in the same category, the Iraq ones were so much worse. They cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. The death toll is still rising more than a decade on.

> They aren't in the same category, the Iraq ones were so much worse. They cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. The death toll is still rising more than a decade on.

What? Am I missing something? I mean what exactly is the press supposed to do when the pentagon and the whitehouse are reporting on WMDs? There was conflicting information and it was terrible that they lied about that shit, but is that CNNs fault?

Seriously though, what would you have them do? How would you have them verify that information ahead of time?

And why do you think it's on the same level as completely false information that's easily refutable?

Maybe they could actually investigate claims instead of repackaging government press releases? Pretty much everyone in the world knew how bullshit all those WMD claims were except for America and it's media (and to a lesser extent, UK and Australia).

The media were essentially cheerleading the invasion and deserve their chunk of responsibility for the invasion and it's fallout.

I'll agree more in-depth investigation was warranted. The end-result fallout was/is still incredible, and if the media could have played a part in preventing and or mitigating the war in Iraq, it definitely would have been a definite good thing.

However, on the "fake-news" front, do you really consider the government misleading the press in 2002/2003 to be on the same scale as the widespread adoption of the recent tabloid-quality news?

From the studies and reports I've been reading lately, it sounds like the election was heavily swayed by the online equivalent of the national enquirer.

Doesn't that bother you?

> But they're not in the same league as Brietbart

What concrete evidence leads you to think this is true? What is it about the process that produces "mainstream" journalism that you think makes it more reliable than something like Breitbart?

Because it doesn't even pretend to serve the truth instead of a particular agenda. "We are the platform of the alt-right" are words Bannon has used, verbatim.

This bias is evident in even a cursory analysis of their headlines on any given day. They ran virtually no stories critical of Trump during the election, and mentioned every single salacious speculation about Clinton.

As far as I can tell, they are very nearly the definition of a partisan, biased news organization (i.e, propaganda).

And I'm going to go ahead and preempt your "but the MSM is worse!!" response. First of all, it's not. The stories it chooses to cover are demonstrably more diverse than those of Breitbart, and any bias is much more subtle.

But even if it did have the same sort of agenda, saying that "CNN is just as bad" doesn't in any way justify that kind of behavior from anyone else. We all need to be doing better. We can't buy into the epistemological relativism that allows us to say that fake news isn't an issue, no matter where it's coming from. Truth is real and truth matters.

I agree with you for the most part. But I invite you to consider why we put so much instinctive faith in NYT/CNN/etc., especially on political topics. What have they done to earn our trust? The fact that they have a neutral tone does not speak to their accuracy. There is big talk about neutralness and impartiality, but do we know that there are effective practices to enforce these things? Have we closely considered the process that produces their content and determined that it maximizes accuracy? I have almost never seen anyone arguing in these terms.

I see no reason to believe that standard journalistic practice leads to high accuracy. Consider that the NYT encourages writers to fit stories to a predetermined narrative:

"By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line." http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-...

Furthermore, consider journalistic practice around quotations--an area where newspapers would want to be extraordinarily accurate, because quotes are easily verified and people expect them to be verbatim. On the contrary, it is standard practice to give paraphrastic, i.e. incorrect, quotations: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6200

None of this is to say NYT is worse than Breitbart, based on my personal judgment. But being better than Breitbart is a pretty low bar. My point is, on what basis do we privilege the old, established media?

> Yeah, the mainstream networks are not perfect. But they're not in the same league as Brietbart

You're right. MSM is worse because it openly works with the authority sector as an unofficial department of the executive branch.

Fake news also means the intentional timing of pieces, intentional coverage allocation, and intentional nonmentions of inconveinent facts in my book.

But you're doing it again. You're bringing emotion and "us vs them" and "good guys vs bad guys" to what ought to be (as much as possible) an objective analysis of facts.

MSM has been openly doing this for two decades now. They poisoned their own well which why they are getting ready to run to the government to craft legislation to protect themselves after such a horrendously off-the-mark Clinton obsession.

By "clinton obsession" do you mean the coverage of her email "scandal" more than any other political topic combined? Yeah, that was absolutely a media failure.

But the answer is to hold media accountable, not to throw truth under a bus and promulgate nonsense with the excuse of "the other tribe is just as bad!"

This behavior exactly matches something described by Sartre in the last century. Replace "anti-semite" with "Trump supporter" in the following passage and it is strikingly on point:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

- Sartre, "Anti-semite and Jew", 1944

CNN collusion with Clinton?

Rolling Stone's fake rape story to double down on the feminist (and thus pro-Clinton) narrative?

Complete MSM involvement to sell the war in Iraq?

As far as I'm concerned, as long as MSM acts as the executive branch's lap dog, it should be considered an official wing of the government and should qualify for constitutional regulation just like the other branches.

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