Comment by justin_vanw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin_vanw | Hacker News Reader

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No, that is just not what happened.

Do you actually believe that the 'traditional media' just reports 'facts' as they are? Do you have no historical perspective whatsoever?? Because if they were just 'reporting factual truths' in this election cycle, that would literally be the first time they've ever done it.

In every election since I can remember, both sides have claimed, and many have believed, that the person on the other side was literally going to ruin the country and should they win the country was going to fall apart.

You happen to feel that way about Donald Trump. You're just as wrong as the people who thought that Hillary was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bush was going to try to become a dictator, and the people that thought Reagan was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bill Clinton was literally a murderer who killed state troopers and who killed Vince Foster, and the people that thought Obama was a Muslim 5th columnist, and on and on.

So there have always been crazies, getting obsessed with them or paying attention to them is pointless.

This time we have the 'alt-right', whatever that is, some make believe group created by being named in the media. I'm not sure where they are or who they are, but if you listen to the media they're 'out there' and they are rising.

So my advice is read some history, get some perspective, and move on as though nothing is really different than it ever has been, because it isn't.

EDIT: here is a video of the media 'just reporting facts': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NVVwZVd6ZM Look how stunned the 'reporter' is when they mess up and don't manage to cherry pick the clip to support the false narrative they are trying to reinforce..

(I read a lot of history. I do find the suggestion to "read some history," absent any actual historical argument being made, to be condescending and sort of useless, but I may be misunderstanding your intent here.)

I completely agree that asking one to perceive the world without ones' own biases is quite difficult. Would I know if I had a biased worldview? Maybe not.

On the other hand, I hear a view similar to yours quite commonly expressed. I read it as, "Both sides lie, everyone lies about the same amount, and we shouldn't try to call bullshit on those lies." That's exactly the view I find terrifying: it implicitly rejects the notion of objective truth, or at least rejects the idea that we can benefit from such truth in any way.

To take a counter view: do you think it's possible, in a given election (if not this one), for one candidate to be significantly more mendacious than the other? If so, how could we discover it? How could we agree when it is happening?

Absolutely, some politicians are more honest than others.

How can we discover it? Well that's pretty much impossible to do perfectly. There is a whole industry that for a long time has owned the mechanism by which the world is revealed to us, and if nothing else positive comes from this election, they have been exposed as being a very broken filter that is using their position to intentionally push their own agenda.

My hope is that the new forms of media that are developing step in to fill the void, and that a new kind of journalism comes about that grows beyond the irresponsible and incompetent 'traditional media'. That hasn't happened yet, and it seems like the democratization of news has actually led to more polarized outlets and given people the ability to tune into 'news' that just reinforces their beliefs.

At least with the 'mainstream media' there was some corrective pressure since there were only a few outlets and they were at least slightly sensitive to criticism, so they had to maintain at least the appearance of balance. They've completely thrown away that appearance now, and sadly the alternatives are insane.

I don't think things are going to go back to where they were, where the newspapers and other sources of reporting saw themselves as 'up against the system'. Traditional media depended on a lack of alternatives as part of their business model, and that model is dying very rapidly. Traditional news is rapidly going bankrupt, and as a result our 'best' newspapers have been sold at bargain basement prices to people who want to own that influence while it lasts. This isn't new either, but you used to have to be a massive industrial conglomerate to 'buy the news', like GE or Westinghouse. Now we have Bezos and Carlos Slim able to personally buy that influence very cheaply (while it lasts).

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