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Well, that's just about the misleading conceivable way to cite the ADL, which has an whole page that is entirely critical of Bannon, its first headline reading "BANNON HAS EMBRACED THE ALT RIGHT, A LOOSE NETWORK OF WHITE NATIONALISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES." (em. original) and, in literally the next paragraph after the one you're paraphrasing about his antisemitism, says:

Nevertheless, Bannon essentially has established himself as the chief curator for the alt right. Under his stewardship, Breitbart has emerged as the leading source for the extreme views of a vocal minority who peddle bigotry and promote hate.

That is because the ADL withdrew their statement of Bannon [1], again not reported by MSM even though MSM reported the original ADL statement. Proves my point that you cannot rely on MSM to give you newsworthy information.

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/17/bannon-br...

So let's say you're an assignment editor at NYT or WaPo. A presser crosses your desk: "ADL walks back earlier inflammatory rhetoric about Steve Bannon". You immediately toss it to your politics editor, who prioritizes it below the vast cornucopia of election shit happening in the mid-November cycle because nobody cares except Steve Bannon fans. Appeal is important, and "that thing they said, they don't say it any more" is not really a story; it's an update on the "that thing they said" story, of course.

Before, we'd call this newsworthiness. Now we call it a vast MSM conspiracy to suppress coverage of an entire spectrum of people. It's weird that the kind of person who reads Hacker News and ostensibly understands creating products for a target market would then look at decisions such as these and not see them as understanding broad audience appeal. The Hill, Politico, Breitbart, all mastheads that cater to deep politics, all ran it.

It's cool to see a narrative be created that broad appeal mastheads not running something is an indictment of "mainstream media" (the clue is in the name!) simply because the guy you like is not getting the attention you want. And then someone links the MSM running the very story that started you down this path (on CNN!) and you ignore it and continue peddling your version of events.

The flaw in MSM is that there simply isn't enough time in the day to run everything, and every time I see commentary like this around a specific event, the math on newsworthiness immediately makes sense to me because I've been an assignment editor. But unfortunately it leaves an opening for your side to say "see! the terrible left is ignoring us!" and it sounds like a legitimate gripe to a lot of people.

Embracing the alt-right is not being antisemitic. Particularly given the fact that, as the ADL documents and any casual perusal of Breitbart would reveal, Breitbart is mainly anti-Muslim and pro-Jewish. From what I can tell, Bannon's view is that the west should embrace it's Judeo Christian heritage in order to win an upcoming war against Islam. He also seems to feel that Israel and the Jewish people are important allies in this fight.

That's not antisemitism. It's certainly anti-left, but that doesn't make it antisemitic.

Similarly, a protestant's failure to be catholic doesn't make them a satanist.

More or less the same applies to Trump as well. Here's an article that lays this out quite well, though I suspect you'll refuse to engage with it: http://www.socialmatter.net/2017/01/17/aggressive-stupidity-...

Take it up with the ADL. This whole story really doesn't belong on HN, and I flagged it, but I couldn't let that misleading comment go without a rebuttal.

The ADL doesn't say he's antisemitic and explicitly say he isn't.

They merely say he isn't left wing and allow the reader to draw the vague inference that he may be somehow associated with others (second or thirdhand) who are. I can understand why you might have been mislead by this, however.

No, they do not.

Really? Because this story is about the real world implications of technologies that many on HN are personally responsible for. I think it's very appropriate.

The point is the ADL issued a statement about Ellison and his fitness of leadership for the DNC. Certainly newsworthy, but the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and other news organizations declined to report this vital piece of information.

I don't care about the broader point being made, because it was made in part by deceptively taking something the ADL said out of context. My contribution to this thread is simply the observation that the ADL hasn't exonerated Bannon for antisemitism; they've done practically the opposite thing.

News organizations certainly reported on it. Here's one example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/us/jewish-groups-and-unio...

I'm sure there are lots of other examples. I certainly heard of it repeatedly. But I would not call it "vital."

Thanks for the reference. I hadn't seen anything at all until yesterday. Curiously, the article was on page A18 -- way back on in the "A" section. Nor did it mention that he was one of 8 Congressmen to vote against funding for additional missiles for the Iron Dome anti-missle system that protected Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets.

There was at least one Op-Ed about Steve Bannon and anti-Semitism but no opinion piece of Op-Ed in the NYTimes or otherwise about Ellison and his views.

It's unbelievable that your posts are still black when they're full of such easily debunked false claims.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738236

It seems like the article seems to be refuting the idea that Trump is somehow enamored with Russia and is willingly working with them.

Whereas the general vibe I seem to get is that people believe he's been compromised and co-erced.

Also - Found it difficult to continue the article after they tried to draw an analogy between Trump and Modi on account of both being nationalist.

Please don't conflate Israeli nationalism with support for Jewish people on the whole. And don't conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. As a matter of fact, the majority of Jewish people I know, American and Israeli as well, are quite critical of the Israeli state as it has acted historically.

Please read the Anti-Defamation League statement regarding Ellison. What is notable is that MSM did not report the ADL statement of Dec 1, 2016 when it was very much newsworthy. The point is that one can't rely on MSM to give us important reliable news.

> As a matter of fact, the majority of Jewish people I know.

Well, the majority I know, both American and Israeli are not critical of how the state was re-established, rather they understand that the Palestinians turned down their state in 1948 and tried to destroy the newly established Jewish nation.

It is useful news to know that the DNC was supporting a candidate who was one of only 8 to vote against Iron Dome anti-missle system funding meant to help protect Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets.

> MSM called Steve Bannon an anti-Semite when he is in fact very, pro-Israel

You can be anti-Semitic and pro-Israel, just like how in the 1960's you could support South Vietnam while holding totally racist views about them.

I find Bannon's positions quite comical to be honest; when he says the Judeo-Christian religion my opinion is that this is code for "white people". I have this ominous feeling that they really are going to attempt to round up the 11 million illegal Mexicans, which really doesn't bare thinking about. They don't say it directly because they really believe they aren't racist, they just want America for white people, like it used to be, never.

An opportunity to link to CNN, of all places? Why would I pass that up?

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/keith-ellison-anti-de...

They even quoted "disqualifying" in the lede.

> MSM chose not to report the Anti-Defamation League statement about Ellison

Do you seriously think you can make stuff up here and nobody is going to bother checking it? You literally just have to type Keith Ellison ADL into Google to demonstrate your claim is false.

Really? Where is the NY Times citation, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic? Please cite links that refer to the ADL statement about Ellison before the DNC election.

I did google each of these publications and found nothing. Nor did I find anything that cited how he was one of 8 members of Congress to vote against the Iron Dome anti-missle system that has protected many Israelis civilians from Hamas missiles.

If you meant a specific newspaper did not post about it before a specific date, then perhaps you should have said that, rather than instead making a completely different claim that isn't true.

> Where is the NY Times citation, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic? Please cite links that refer to the ADL statement about Ellison before the DNC election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/us/jewish-groups-and-unio...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/02/ke...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-keith-ellison-faces-critics-...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/keith-e...

All dated within 48 hours of the ADL statement, almost three months ago.

> I did google each of these publications and found nothing.

Now you're just proving you're lying. If you type this into Google:

Keith Ellison ADL site: [each of those publications]

those pages are the very first results.

> Nor did I find anything that cited how he was one of 8 members of Congress to vote against the Iron Dome anti-missle system

Do they routinely report on what he votes against in Congress? Or are you saying the "MSM" should for some reason focus on everything you personally happen to think is newsworthy?

> Do they routinely report on what he votes against in Congress?

This is an important vote and for Ellison to be one of 8 members of Congress suggests that he is very anti-Israel.

I had earlier googled on Ellison and anti-Semitism and did not find articles. Meanwhile, the media went crazy over Bannon who in fact is not anti-Semite in the slightest and he is very pro-Israel.

Indeed. Bias is unavoidable. Mistakes are unavoidable. Outright lies are unavoidable. Today's news operation is a blazing fast click bait operation. But even back in the days of slow news the MSM got things really wrong on a regular basis. That's largely how people like Rush Limbaugh built their right wing media empires, by pantsing the MSM on a daily basis for decades. The narrative that the MSM is biased/wrong/propaganda is such a bedrock multi-decades old belief on the right that all Breitbart and CSN had to do was SHOW UP.

Well put, but I take issue with one part:

> even back in the days of slow news the MSM got things really wrong on a regular basis

This is false nostalgia. The mainstream media may be terrible today (and I think it is) but it's still better than it has ever been. Not long ago people subscribed to a single newspaper that never needed to print retractions. There were no comment sections to set the record straight. Journalists wouldn't get held to account on twitter. Journalists used to be middle-class white men, now it's more diverse.

None of this is as clear-cut an improvement as you're suggesting. For example, take the rather dubious story about Trump's supposed secret communications channel with Russia - a dozen or so outlets refused to touch it, but the moment Salon decided to ignore the obvious issues with it and run it anyway it spread like wildfire on social media even to people who wouldn't normally read them. Social media effectively reduces the standards of the media as a whole to whatever the most clickbaity outlet is willing to initially run. Random members of the public and journalists who don't consider journalistic practices to apply to their social media also start dubious claims which spread wildly. Any corrections, retractions or debunkings never reach the same level of virality and go unseen.

We are more inundated with clickbaity trash journalism than ever before, but we also have more access to serious in-depth investigative journalism than ever before. So if you really want to figure out what's going on in the world, you now can. Corrections and retractions and debunkings only reach a fraction of their original audience, as you say, but this has always been the case. When was the last time the NYT ran a front page mea culpa, for example?

Untrue - you could figure out what was going on in the world before. Until people were allowed to get away with creating a media empire that could just pander to their audience.

Hence stuff like creationism or global warming denial first enjoying a campaign of FUD and then landing up on the news as "teach the debate" or other catchy jingles.

And then the internet came along and destroyed paper after newspaper. Magazine after magazine.

The remainder got bought over and committed 100% to survive in the shortened media attention world.

These pitfalls were highlighted but lost in the cheerleading and revolution of citizen journalism.

We lost many editorial boards and years of experience. That experience is now being relearned by people manning forums as moderators who don't have the benefit of mentors, or bloggers who are fighting for clicks.

The world Was made less clear. A false narrative was used to elevate spurious arguments, emotional coddling to Drive advertising.

When the internet hit, the structure gave way to the new necessities of survival.

The PR industry has engaged in FUD and disinformation campaigns since the 50s, far before the advent of the internet. Business and other establishment interests have attempted to control the media for much longer. Journalists that didn't fit the mold just wouldn't get hired by any newspaper, and as a result the media has always had enormous blind spots.

The loss of many editorial boards is regrettable, but in exchange we have gotten access to news from all over the world. Desperate fighting for clicks conflicts with journalistic values, but newspapers have always depended on advertisement income. The newspapers of old didn't dare offend their advertising patrons.

Major news organizations in every country should be funded by the public, just like we fund the other checks and balances in society like the courts system and law enforcement.