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Comment by epmaybe | Hacker News Reader

Is it baffling? They're doing what they can to influence the public (and jury, as impartial as they will try to make it).

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It is baffling because it does a poor job at influencing. Frankly it sounds kinda unprofessional and "Uberish".

I might have agreed that this type of rhetoric does a poor job at influencing about a year ago. Unfortunately, as this past US presidential election has show, it seems to be pretty effective.

Yes because this kind of rhetoric was never used effectively before /s

I just didn't have a glaring example of its effectiveness to point to before :/.

Many said similar things about Trump's rhetoric a year ago, yet here we are.

It could be Trump rhetoric, if it were a little less coherent and drew from a smaller vocabulary.

Uber's legal team has done this a couple times recently - really strong tones for things.

Both legal teams have done it. It's what lawyers do, especially in a case playing out so publicly.

What is "it", and could you give an example of Google's legal team doing "it?"

Here's an articles that cites statements where they are both doing "it":

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/28/15891136/alphabet-alleges-u...

"It" are allegations and statements that very liberally interpret convenient facts, ignore inconvenient facts and inject conjecture to support the narrative they want the public to believe. I'm shocked that anyone would think lawyers for only one side would do that. It's all heresay, allegations, conjecture and bullshit by lawyers all sides until evidence is presented in a court of law and a judgement has been made. And even then the judgement may be wrong for all sorts of reasons.

FWIW, Recode is one of the few places covering the case fairly equitably (probably because it's run by one of the few journalists in Silicon Valley with any scruples and minimal conflicts of interest, Kara Swisher).

I'm surprised to hear Kara Swisher described like that. I feel like most of her writing is near tabloid gossip quality, and she seems to have an unhealthy obsession with trashing Yahoo/Marissa Mayer. I did work there for a while, so I'm certainly biased, but I've never seen a journalist so intent on badmouthing a single company/CEO with such wild speculation and over-dramatized commentary. She did seem to have a good source so maybe she was milking that but it went way beyond reporting the facts.

She's certainly not perfect. She obviously has her own biases, but they seem more personal and certainly aren't blatant conflicts of interest like most of the other tech journalists that have taken money from VCs do. Many of the others do not bite the hands that feed them. They make sure to cover investments of their investors positively and competitors of the investments of their investors negatively. It's all so horribly incestuous.

Kara Swisher's main career was been publishing leaked Silicon Valley documents (including Google's) while being married to a Google Vice President. (They are now separated and the VP is no longer at Google)

I think it's because you know significantly more about the legal battle than the average person. Now, a jury may not be convinced by this stunt, that I'll give.

They understand most people aren't paying attention.

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