Hacker News Reader

Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

This may not be a popular opinion, but hear me out. I do have some intimate experience with witch hunting and the _current_ media... The "witch hunt" is real and fueled by the internet, misinformation, playing on emotions, and outrage.

Let me be super clear... I am not condoning Caldbeck in the least, after all, he did admit guilt. My comment is entirely focused on the hypocrisy of the _current_ media, pretending to stand on the moral pedestal of society, but really just trying to incite outrage to generate pageviews, which generates ad revenue and keeps them in business.

Second, has anybody ever taken a look at the editors, bloggers, and writers at media outlets? I'd predict they as a group are not as diverse as you'd expect. Liberal arts college educated, making middle class salaries. Probably not the group of deep thinkers and intellectuals we'd like to believe.

View on HN

The "witch hunt" is real and fueled by the internet, misinformation, playing on emotions, and outrage.

It's not a witch hunt if it actually happened. It's just news.

Is it perhaps the case that the media are now doggedly rooting out this kind of thing in SV because it's pushing page views? Sure. But why does that matter? These incidents are real, and it's about time the silence was broken about it.

Is the media, itself, immune to this kind of thing? Obviously not. Fox News provides ample examples. But, again, why is that relevant in this specific context? Does it make Calbeck's actions less serious? Should the media not pursue these very real stories? Should the victims keep silent?

I'm just trying to understand the thrust of your comment, here... because I honestly don't see where you're going with this. It strikes me as mud slinging just to make sure everyone looks equally dirty, in order to somehow minimize what folks like Caldbeck have done.

Similarly concerning about cries of "witch hunts" in the media is that the term originated when a powerful group assaulted individuals with little power to distract from their own shortcomings, injuring or killing them in the process.

That metaphor is problematic in the case of the founder of a company facing charges of employee sexual harassment. At worst, let's use "sensationalist" or "disingenuous" coverage.

When this blew up a few days ago, it spread quick. It most certainly didn't start sensationalist... it was a story posted late Friday on the NYT... a story told before.

What was different this time is people started naming names. I know myself I was having a lot of conversations with people about the story... mostly because everybody who's been on the harassment of of it, and the names name are names of people who we know as the people who funded the companies of folks we know.

So sure, there was auxiliary outlets fanning the flames. But that happens for lots of stories and gets forgotten quickly.

So instead of calling it sensationalist... I'd say it was a big story. Some parties named directly came out and confirmed and apologized (McClure). The "fake news" / "sensationalist" claim is not holding water with me since it wants to discredit the story but does not do it on the basis of facts.

> It's not a witch hunt if it actually happened

It can be. Take the case of Nobel prize winning scientist Tim Hunt who was excoriated online and off and later resigned for comments he in a speech made about woman in science.

Those comments actually happened, but later a full transcript of his speech revealed them to be just a rather poor joke amid comments praising women in science, and were not representative of his actual views and actions over the course of his career.

Then there was the Rosetta mission scientist who caught flak for wearing a risqué tshirt, which actually happened, but the outcry was far disproportionate to the crime especially as it was later revealed that the shirt was given to him in the first place by a female friend.

So it is possible for witch hunts to occur even for things that 'actually happened'

You're arguing a technicality regarding one pithy sentence in my comment.

Caldbeck sexually harassed women. Period. He confessed to it. He's now being sued for it.

This is not, in any way, shape, or form, anything remotely resembling a "witch hunt". It's literally the opposite of that, in that the person being accused of the crime is guilty of said crime.

> You're arguing a technicality regarding one pithy sentence in my comment.

You're right. My comment was nothing about the case involving Caldbeck, in fact, my entire point was to call out that pithy comment because I don't think it's something that is generally true (even if it might be true in this case).

"My comment is entirely focused on the hypocrisy of the _current_ media, pretending to stand on the moral pedestal of society, but really just trying to incite outrage to generate pageviews, which generates ad revenue and keeps them in business. Second, has anybody ever taken a look at the editors, bloggers, and writers at media outlets? I'd predict they as a group are not as diverse as you'd expect. Liberal arts college educated, making middle class salaries. Probably not the group of deep thinkers and intellectuals we'd like to believe."

As ad hominems go, this is one of the poorest attempts I've seen on HN recently. Not only it is an ad hominem, but you didn't even bother to provide anything but hypothetical accusations. Especially this part:

"I'd predict they as a group are not as diverse as you'd expect".

I'm actually surprised that you didn't use a burner account to post this.

IMO, this is not actually an attempt at an ad hominem, which is probably why it comes across as "the poorest attempt [you've] seen on HN recently". Ad hominem attacks occur when someone tries to discredit the validity of a claim by disparaging some irrelevant aspect of the person making the claim.

For example: "Don't believe my opponent because he is Jewish/Black/White/etc."

In contrast, there is no ad hominem fallacy if someone says: "Don't believe my opponent — he has an ulterior motive, and I think he has conflicts of interest as well."

This is basically what the GP said: the media has ulterior motives (profit), and they may have a conflict of interest (if their industry is also predominated by white men).

I'm not saying I agree with all of what the GP said, but I think it's inappropriate to call this an ad hominem attack. As you point out, he doesn't supply citations for his claim of media homogeneity, but this isn't exactly rare on HN.

> In contrast, there is no ad hominem fallacy if someone says: "Don't believe my opponent — he has an ulterior motive, and I think he has conflicts of interest as well."

That is absolutely an ad hominem attack.

It engages a feature of the person (their motives) instead of the actual substance of the argument.

Actually, it engages the substance of his argument, which he lays out in the first sentence:

> My comment is entirely focused on the hypocrisy of the _current_ media...

He explicitly disclaims that he is not defending the VCs' behavior — he is just saying that perhaps the media behavior is not great as well. Having limited his claim to the behavior of the media, it is not logically inappropriate (i.e., not a logical fallacy) to talk about the media's motives and conflicts of interest.

I can understand why this might seem, at a glance, like ad hominem, because it bears some similarities to the logically fallacy. In the law, this distinction is described and handled by the evidentiary rules related to impugning a witness' character. Such character attacks are generally irrelevant and not allowed — but if they relate to the trustworthiness of the witness in general, or as it relates to their specific testimony, then they are relevant and allowable.

The attack is a tu quoque, essentially a sub-set of ad hominem where the attack is the "hypocrisy attack".

The latter part is, but the main argument (they have an ulterior motive) is not. Also, since the GP made clear that his argument is actually specifically limited to the media's coverage (not whether the alleged and admitted behavior actually took place), questions of media bias and hypocrisy are actually relevant.

Again, no. The ulterior motive is irrelevant to the validity of the claim. This is the exact definition of ad hominem.

You seem to be missing what the claim is. The claim is "the media are talking about this too much". Whether the media have an ulterior motive is highly relevant to this.

The claim isn't "the media is talking too much", it's "the media is hypocritical". And that claim is a response to the thread.

It's all about ethics in journalism, again...

Hypocrisy aside, does that mean your ad hominem reduces their credibility or the veracity/importance of what they're reporting on?

I don't disagree that there's sort of a witch hunt tone about this all, but honestly? In many ways, it's also necessary. The status quo hasn't see behavior like this as sufficiently problematic in the past, which is exactly why shit like this got swept under the rug for so many years; hopefully this will start changing.

The media is doing what it needs to do in this case: It's shining a bright light on a clear problem and forcing people to make changes.

The people who find themselves in that spotlight against their will do what people always do: Blame the media. "If only those nasty profit-driven journalists weren't getting into my business and digging up dirt."

As for your last paragraph... That's just insultingly stupid.

I agree with some of your generalizations about witch hunts. I don't really see how that applies to this situation, though.

Jon Ronson (a journalist) actually wrote a book about that exact topic[1]. I think it might be of interest to you.

> has anybody ever taken a look at the editors, bloggers, and writers at media outlets

Yes. After Trump was elected, many journalists commented on the lack of diversity in journalism (although it came up before that, from time to time)[2][3].

For some reason I can't find the article now, but I remember the demographics being something like, "mostly white, almost 100% coastal, highly educated, and from wealthy backgrounds" (referring to the mainstream news sources).

After Trump, a lot of the focus was on the lack of rural/Midwestern journalists.

> Probably not the group of deep thinkers and intellectuals we'd like to believe.

I don't know if anyone thinks all of them are deep thinkers and intellectuals, but some of them certainly are.

1. https://www.amazon.com/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/B00S...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/04/journalism-div...

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/minorit...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com