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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

OK, but many times that I see people making this argument they turn around and point me to some conspiracy theory from some guy yelling on youtube.

There are dark ugly forces that benefit from the destruction of trust in the press and democratic institutions. You have to maintain a balanced world view. The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy. Many times they are on your side.

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>The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy.

No, but they often are. And not just in easy to point fingers at regimes.

Not that long ago, the might NYT were writing about the fabled "WMDs", were independent bloggers (no YouTube existed yet) were speaking against that BS. To a third party those would have looked like conspiracy theorists.

Guess which side turned out to be true?

Back in 2003 there were plenty of partisan bloggers on both sides of the WMD argument.

But the NYT, along with the rest of the world, was misled by the Bush administration. Sure they could have been more circumspect in evaluating the "facts" as presented by Colin Powell - but why do you jump from them being notably mistaken on a handful of occasions to believing they are "often" "in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy"?

So, the Saddam regime was the little guy the mainstream media was out to destory? I'm not sure what this example is trying to show. That a good portion of the world was misled into thinking Iraq still had WMDs, which justified an invasion?

>OK, but many times that I see people making this argument they turn around and point me to some conspiracy theory from some guy yelling on youtube.

So special interests can pay the money to tell their opinions on TV and in newspapers so they get to be "legitimate", but people who use cheaper channels accessible to the poor are "conspiracy theorists".

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