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Comment by bumholio | Hacker News Reader

It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies, as was the case with Iraq's WMDs, to online propaganda organized by private individuals to the benefit of various political candidates or their own online circulation.

What happened with Iraq was not just fake news, it was fake governing, it was another order of magnitude. Miller and the NYT were just some of the many useful idiots.

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Nah, the backlash we're seeing against mainstream media these days are, I believe, in a large part driven by those reporters that failed to do their due diligence when it came to Iraq. Reporters should expect to be told lies often, when those lies are blindly printed and distributed it does a lot of damage to society's trust. I think with Iraq it went beyond negligence, but likely not at all levels, preferring to hire hawkish reporters is an effective way to keep the train rolling.

That said, singling out NYT as the OP did is sort of hilarious, all the media outlets ran the same terrible stories and often avoided booking guests that would speak against the war.

The definition of lying generally involves intent. Do you think these journalists generally are intending to mislead with statements they know are untrue in the same way the producers of fake news do?

Nobody in this thread suggested that the journalists were lying, just that they were terrible at their jobs. They repeated the official line, without questioning the source.

The title of this article and post presents a question. The first comment in this thread appears to be answering that question by blaming it on the NYT.

Right. By blindly parroting the government's line. By failing to do due diligence, or be skeptical of the sources, etc. Those are all different things than lying. They're lapses in professional care, or shortcomings in ability. Straight up lying could also be involved, sure. But lying isn't necessary for blame to be assigned.

I would go so far to say they willingly participated by trading away scrutiny for access.

Saying the NYTimes spread lies (answering the question in the post title) in a context WMD's or other contexts is not the same thing as saying the NYTimes or journalists were/are lying (with intent).

I tend to think intent is an outmoded system of morality. It can be faked easily, even to oneself.

It is always better to judge outcomes. Actions, not words..

Lying, then, should be judged not on level of intent, but on severity. And on this metric, all those reporters involved should feel, and be judged, personally responsible for the deaths in the iraq war and aftermath.

This behaviour covers the whole spectrum from deliberate misinformation to honest belief in the lies they were fed. In between you can find journalists that don't care about the truth but are ready to write anything that pays or ones that would lie for the sake of (in their opinion) a greater good, or ones that would spread lies out of sloppiness or ignorance. This applies to producers of fake news too.

I am not sure anyone should bother finding a proper label for each shade of those lies.

Nah, the backlash we're seeing against mainstream media these days are, I believe, in a large part driven by those reporters that failed to do their due diligence when it came to Iraq.

Except that the “MSM is lying” crowd still overwhelmingly supports W. bush and the Iraq war, and didn’t seem to mind what the media had to say for 8 years of his presidency. This whole thing kicked off under Obama when “alt” news was talking about FEMA internment camps and that kind of madness, and later when Pizzagate and other stories weren’t carried in the mainstream.

If your theory were right, you’d expect the Left to be the ones who rejected the media, but that isn’t what happened.

Edit To be clear, I’m saying that this is less about skepticism (healthy) than rejection of media in favor of preferable narratives. It’s the extension of disliking what science education has to say about evolution and seeking to have Creationism taught in schools. When you can’t beat them, avoid them, craft your own narrative and reject reality.

Much of the left were jaded by Iraq; personally, I am probably stuck for life as an institutional news media skeptic, because it all happened when I was growing up.

The left has been angry with the media forever though. Have you read Manufacturing Consent?

When it comes to the Iraq war everyone was lied to. Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars. Honestly, participants in the media and those on this message board are likely to be among the less effected by wars but people from the full political spectrum die in combat.

To clarify, though, I didn't meant to say that the right wouldn't be skeptical of the media, it seems like both sides have been more skeptical of news coverage in general which is (mostly) a good thing.

And I do think a lot of people on the left have been disbursed of their enchantment with the media, there was a strong skew in coverage during the 2016 primaries in the democratic party.

> Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars.

It doesn’t matter what they like or dislike, it matters who they vote for. For most of the USA’s history, Americans have consistently voted for national candidates who ended up starting or continuing unnecessary war. This is true for both major parties. The country has been involved in voluntary military conflicts for how many years of its history?

I'll go with twelve.

You'd be off by an order of magnitude.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

As it happens in most things related to media, the left blazed a trail and the right perfected the exploitation techniques.

The internet in the '90s was a fervour of "indie media", "citizen reporting", "the revolution will not be televised", culminating in the Iraq war build-up, which was a watershed of sorts. Now the exact same attitudes are being exploited in a coordinated manner by the right, anti-vaxxers, astroturfers and other special interests.

This is not just a US phenomenon, by the way -- the same can be observed pretty much globally.

Nobody with any capacity for critical thought ever believed there were WMDs in Iraq. The government's disinformation campaign was not sophisticated at all. It wasn't the whole government -it was pretty much just Cheney, Bush, and Rice. The NYT reporters weren't useful idiots - they new exactly what they were doing. Selling papers. They pretty much admitted it later https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

>It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies

I think you're both right and wrong. Wrong because there are still interesting questions about how falsehoods propagate over networks in the case of Iraq and WMD. But right in the sense that there's an underlying structural difference how and why the falsehoods are being generated in one case vs the other.

It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government

Oh come on. The NYT et al have not hesitated or been reluctant in any way to criticise the current US government. They equally gleefully supported the WMD story because it suited them to do so, pandered to them feeling important.

Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

> Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

Yes; many of the specific bases of support they pointed to had been debunked before they were publicized by, among others, UN weapons inspectors. While it's far from proof, that alone is reason to believe that they were knowingly fabricating their claims.

Would you be able to link to a source about the UN weapons inspectors or something similar? All I have is pretty much hearsay and I was young enough when the towers fell that I understood "bad guys did it" but not much more.

I wish I could find a TV interview with a German inspector I watched back then. They got some super secret leads from the CIA, went to the locations and never found anything. The response from the US was to cut them off from information and shout even louder that they had all this bullet-proof information.

Some links: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174708587/u-n-weapons-inspect... https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-insp...

Here is something about the Iraq-Al Qaeda link they tried to proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...

I don't know if Bush and friends really believed their claims but if you looked at it from a neutral point of view it was very clear that they had made up their minds to invade Iraq and desperately tried and failed to find evidence.

You are putting the burden on the wrong shoulders. Cheney et el claimed to have extensive proof, which was later shown to be made up. Then there were things which were debunked even before we started the campaign, such as the aluminum rods which were supposedly for a nuclear reactor.

They didn't know there were none. It's hard to be sure of a negative like that. They knew the chances were too slim to justify a war without a lot of embellishing.

The joke while I was in Iraq was "We know he has WMD's because we have the receipts from the Iran-Iraq war when we gave them to him."... but we mostly knew what and where they were, their lifespan, etc, and that for the most part, "there was no "there" there". A few older things that had been heavily degraded were found.

I'll never forget being handed the same picture C Powell showed at the briefing and told "this is what we are looking for", given how we found out later that was bullshit.

Iraq was for other reasons. WMD was just one piece of how it was "sold".

It feels like you're implying that NYT should be absolved of this. Make no mistake - no one held a gun to their head and made them print those stories.

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