Comment by GW150914 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GW150914 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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