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Comment by Brockenstein | Hacker News Reader

With something like this, brown recluses in California. Where a lot of people believe it, because it's a "known fact". Well local media is populated by a lot of those people. They're probably not knowingly lying or creating a conspiracy. Just talking about something "everybody knows", and it just happens that that fact is mostly wrong.

There isn't a problem with saying the media is wrong, misinformed, or lying, if you have hard evidence to support that claim.

Trump's problem is he just claims any negative news are malicious lies, and rarely has anything to support his claims even a little bit. And that he, the undisciplined lair, is the only reputable source of information anyone should listen to, if they were smart anyway.

Big difference.

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Directly from the article:

> I repeatedly have seen the media in their "quest to seek out the truth" write completely speculative stories about the existence of the brown recluse in California. Unfortunately, the truth is not nearly good enough to sell news and therefore, a speculative story is fabricated based upon faulty assumptions.

He's strongly and cynically implying that the media doesn't sincerely seek the truth and runs stories based on whether the story sells. Promoting distruse in the media like this is dangerous for our society, we've see what happens when Trump does it.

He then goes about spending his entire article (and in fact, a whole ass book!: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010049221...) talking about the spider in question and why it's misunderstood by laymen. The man is an expert in his field lobbing a (valid) criticism about media representation of one specific matter.

Criticizing the media with proper rationale is fair, but he's going a step further. He's strongly implying they are doing this for the money. No need for him to imply that or even assign any motive to why the media is wrong on this topic. It suffices for him to say they are wrong and to show how. He's putting forth a bad faith theory and this is also what Trump does. This sort of cynicism / assumption of poor motives towards the media is bad for society.

There's no evidence to suggest they intentionally write brown recluse stories because it sells more. It's just as likely the media also gets innocently wrapped up in the myth. I'm not sure how you're defending that quote.

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