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Comment by hnauz | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to suspect they are trying to extort better ad prices from Facebook. This won't stop until they cave. I hope they don't cave. The press already has enough power as it is.

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It might not even be about ad prices. Facebook was instrumental in taking a lot of eyeballs from the news sites as news stories end up on your feed and some people might not bother to open the article.

Also, regular NYT users now have feed stories coming from other news sources as well so their reliance on NYT as the only source gets reduced.

Good. The press should have more power than corporations. Especially corporations with the moral standing of Facebook.

In what sense is NYT not a corporation like FB, looking after the interest of their shareholders? They are public and listed on NYSE with a market cap of $4B, and their stock has still to recover from the 2002 prices, which probably makes all the main shareholders pretty mad considering the large market bull run of the past decade.

Mind you, I'm not defending FB in any capacity, I just find it odd to not treat NYT articles like what they are: just another biased piece put out by a biased giant media corporation.

The NYT is a corporation. A corporation who lied about the WMD, garnering support for a war which caused death and endless suffering to millions of people.

That particular episode is old enough to have graduated high school now. The editor and reporter responsible were also fired, and it wasn’t so much that the reporter “lied”, let alone the paper, but that they were lied to by the administration at a time where there was still a general assumption that even Republican officials would not actually blatantly lie to the American public.

So update your talking points. (yawn)

Journalists should have power but the press historically has been abusive and manipulative, and seems like it still is.

What does “better ad prices” mean? The NYT doesn’t sell ads to or from Facebook in any significant amount.

This is a conspiracy theory that fails even the “theory” part.

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