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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

> How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ?

I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point.

> I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative.

I never got the impression that those news orgs were saying that actual voting counts were being hacked. But the emails were hacked and leaked.

They jumped the gun on blaming Russia, but that wasn't fake news (provided you believe prominent members of US intelligence).

Even Trump seemed to think it was plausible... At least plausible enough to publicly ask Russia to hack Hilary's emails [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ

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The point is that "election hacking" is an intentionally misleading phrase. A Pew poll found that, after this media circus, half of Hillary voters believed that Russia had tampered with vote tallies.

The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.

I found the Pew poll regarding Russian involvement in the email hack but not one involving direct hacking of tallies. Do you have a link?

I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.

It looks like it was from The Economist and YouGov - I falsely remembered it being Pew. Here's a WaPo article with a summary and a link to the raw data:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/am...

Thanks. Yeah, those are some disturbing results...

Do you think it's mostly from misleading mainstream news stories? Or from smaller outlets (social media, celebrities, memes, etc)?

Misleading mainstream media, IMO. I'm conservative and the headlines about "election hacking" actually duped me until I had the time to read a thorough article about it.

I totally agree with you there. Most online news articles use those annoying click-bait titles and try to make the story seem bigger than it is (in a misleading way). Even weather.com does that crap with weather stories.

> I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point.

my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).

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