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Comment by Melk | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not popular to say but I blame the Internet. When people start getting their news from social media and the so often heard "I go straight to the comments because that's where the article is always corrected" then authority flies out of the window. It has caused a distrust in science and the media and the government.

The last generation had news pundits and we have social media stars. Journalism used to have a self-regulated code of ethics but that's gone now. I don't know what the solution is other than to regulate news on the Internet.

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I haven't read the article yet, I jumped straight here to view the comments first...

We each have echo chambers, to which we endow trust and allow the source material to be filtered and pre-judged for us. The internet didn't start that. It's embedded in our tribal natures. But it sure does act as an effective crowd-fueled amplifier.

The problem has long, long, long predated the Internet. Though the Internet's not helping.

1. Look up H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippman, among others. Both were newspapermen and had tremendous insights, though they came from very different backgrounds.

2. I.F. Stone as well. His 1974 interview on "Day at Night" is on YouTube, and a very worthwhile 30 minutes or so. There's also a website devoted to his writings, highly recommended.

3. Changes in media and communications have profound influences on society, and always have. Look up Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980). Her "Preliminary Report" (1968) is much shorter and gives the general spirit of the argument: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/240164 (Full text available via http://sci-hub.cc)

Regulating news, and carrying penalties for intentional disinformation, seems one approach.

But who do we trust enough to regulate the news? Is there any entity that even the two political extremes in the USA could agree to do that regulation? Much less the ability to scale it up to an international level.

Also, how do we continue to trust whomever holds that power, given that such power will be abused eventually if not immediately? There is a common phrase about how power has a corrupting impact.

>and the so often heard "I go straight to the comments because that's where the article is always corrected" then authority flies out of the window

That's partially due to laziness, but in a large part due to a sort of Pavlovian conditioning that has happened due to how bloated and ad-infested the internet at large is. Even with ublock origin/adaway on, I rarely click on links unless it's a domain that I positively associate with or something that really piques my curiosity. For all its flaws, I think Google's AMP is doing a good job, at least for me, since I click on things more often that I would without it. That is creating a different sort of bias too, but at least Google is creating some incentives for making simpler, more readable websites.

There's blame to go around. First, certain people, predominantly conservative, realized they could monetize stupidity. That saying outrageous lies would create great wealth for them, and they gleefully jumped in. Look how wealthy Rush Limbaugh became, or how Michael Flynn, an advisor to the president, was involved in pushing Pizzagate, a theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a pizza shop [0]. This man was briefly our national security advisor.

   Six days before the election, for instance, Mr. Flynn posted on Twitter a 
   fake news story that claimed the police and prosecutors in New York had 
   found evidence linking Mrs. Clinton and much of her senior campaign staff to 
   pedophilia, money laundering, perjury and other felonies.

I also blame the institutions themselves.

The Catholic church turns out to have been, if not an organized rape group, then certainly one that openly tolerated such. The church went to extraordinary lengths to (1) preserve access to victims for priests, and (2) hide from culpability. See eg hiding records and witnesses in Rome, or a priest in WI who raped 200 deaf students [1] while Cardinal Ratzinger -- who became Pope -- personally shielded him from consequences. An excerpt from [1]:

   Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was 
   sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to 
   criminal or civil authorities.

Or remember when George Bush promised there were WMD in Iraq, and fired Larry Lindsey for saying the costs of the Iraq war might reach $100B [2], and fired General Shinseki for correctly estimating how many troops would be required [3]? Right before we proceeded to kill a half million Iraqis and 5k+ Americans for what?

Remember when we were assured by all and sundry that there certainly was no real-estate bubble circa 2007? That real estate was an investment that only went up?

Remember Katrina, when George Bush decided to hang out and watch 1800 Americans die on our own soil, while his pet horse judge mismanaged the federal disaster relief agency?

Or Enron, or Bernie Madoff, or law school is a good investment, or ...

Our institutions themselves have given us myriad reasons to distrust them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/politics/-michael-flyn...

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/26/wisconsin-prie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-ira...

I upvoted you because it's disheartening, especially in the context of this thread, to see your mini-rant downvoted when it's mostly just a bunch of easily-verifiable facts that may make some people uncomfortable.

One quibble: are those people really "conservative"? Even if so, is that the attribute that is most relevant to this discussion?

Flynn is a perfect example: he's ostensibly "conservative" but he's also a pretty twisted combination of a gullible rube, a liar, and a batshit-crazy whack job.

I don't quite have a word for that combinational trait, but I think that's the key attribute.

There are quite a few people who self-identify as "conservative" but don't fall into this additional category of truth-impervious objective-reality-deniers.

I assume you believe Republicans are conservative? Trump is a Republican, as is Flynn. Senate Majority Leader McConnell: "[...] proceeding with [the Republican] agenda which is exactly the same as the Trump agenda" [1].

I challenge you to find anything similar to Pizzagate, or Obama is a gay Kenyan, or denial of anthropogenic global warming, or similar that is widely believed and publicly supported by Democrats elected to national office. I'll admit some wackos on the left are vaccine truthers, but again: they do not hold national elective office. It's really all conservatives, and there aren't Democrats in national office speaking in glossolalia.

[1] http://www.voanews.com/a/trump-budget-priorities-speech-cong...

Yes, but most Republicans I actually know (granted, definitely not a representative sample) were aghast that Trump won their party's nomination, and didn't vote for him (thought most made it a protest vote of some kind, not voting for Clinton either).

They are "conservative" but they assumed that Trump's continuous barrage of easily-debunked lies and blatant disrespect for the intelligence of his audience would prevent his victory.

Still, I will concede your point that the "conservative" population in the USA seems to be more greatly affected by this kind of "reality rejection syndrome". I don't think Trump really has any coherent political ideology; I think he just chose to pwn the Republican party because they had the most rubes susceptible to his brand of snake oil.

(I feel like that might just be because a big segment of that population is angrier than most people, but who knows.)

Sure, but Flynn was plenty defended and people calling it a "hitjob" getting him resigned.

At some point you need to start including Pence, Preibus, Chaffetz, Mcconnnell, etc. While I fully agree that the Venn diagram doesn't include all conservatives in the reality-rejecting circle, there is a too large of an overlap to ignore.

I'm not including Miller and Bannon in conservatives, because they're clearly motivated by something else/worse.

But it's like Christians in America, or radical Muslims. Terrible things are neither inherently Christian nor Muslim, but it's not too difficult for atheists to lump those traits to bad actors.

TL;DR: I agree, to a point.

I'm not sure I believe this myself, but just to throw out a more optimistic alternative, could we perhaps teach people how to use the internet to research, corroborate information, apply critical thought etc.?

Sigh... It's so damn disheartening but unfortunately I have to agree with you. We all seem to be living in our own personal reality-distortion fields.

>It has caused a distrust in science and the media and the government.

The Vietnam War proved that our government cannot be trusted, and that happened before I was born. It hasn't gotten any better since then. What gives you the idea that this government is trustworthy and has moral goals?

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