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Comment by phaus | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between objectively revealing all relevant, true facts at your disposal and selectively releasing true facts that support your agenda or actively harm your opponent, at very specific times when its most advantageous for you to do it. There's also a difference between having legitimate complaints about the United States government and actively working with Russian Intelligence to destabilize western civilization.

Journalism is supposed to inform, not manipulate.

You talk about democracy dying. If Wikileaks had their way I don't think you'd like the NWO that Putin and China would build for us.

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Honestly curious -- do you think there are outlets that meet that ideal? I used to think so but 2016 shook my faith in a lot of outlets I used to trust.

No. Alt-right tabloids like Breitbart are obviously significantly worse than mainstream media, but almost all journalism is trash. Every major network can point to really great work that some of their journalists have done. However, every day ALL of them post intentionally misleading stories designed to manipulate people that don't fact-check.

Frequently, they leave things out or use deceptive wording to change the meaning/context of events. Even when they cite facts, they often do so in ways that make telling what actually happened difficult.

This "almost all journalism is trash" is just naively cynical.

I bet what you call "deliberate manipulation" I would describe as "telling a story."

There is often no such thing as "the truth"; two people who saw the same thing happen will often interpret and describe it very differently.

It's unavoidable, and if you see the world in black and white you're blind to most of the details.

You're making an awful lot of incorrect assumptions here.

If your criticism is about news entities cherry picking facts or making sensational headlines then you’re gonna have to target more than Wikileaks and alt-right journalism. Mainstream media, regardless of the political side, does this on the regular. I’d say it’s more this than “open objective news” by a large margin.

There is no such thing as "open objective news".

Not because there isn't enough honesty in journalism or whatever.

It's because even if you just published raw video footage, that would have to eventually be lossily disseminated by somebody in the form of a "story" before it reached 99.99+% of the world, and that lossy compression is going to be biased by worldview.

Cognitive bias is something that everyone deals with. There are tons of techniques and processes that journalists are supposed to employ in an effort to minimize its effects. One example would be analysis of competing hypotheses. Another example would be an exercise where you attempt to find evidence that disproves your theory about a particular subject.

You can't achieve a perfect level of objectivity, but if you put an honest effort into attempting to be objective by employing techniques to minimize bias, you can do a hell of a lot better than most journalists are doing today.

When people say they want "open objective news" they are fully aware that perfect objectivity does not exist. So it should be pretty obvious to anyone reading a statement that news should be open and objective that the person making the statement doesn't intend to hold journalists to an impossible standard. They just want them to do the things that we and the journalists already know will work to minimize partisanship and bias. Instead they almost universally decide to manipulate the public and promote their respective ideologies.

> selectively releasing true facts that support your agenda or actively harm your opponent, at very specific times when its most advantageous for you to do it

anyone can claim this about any media report that is negative to them. bottom line is: don't do dirt if you don't want it brought to the light.

> actively working with Russian Intelligence to destabilize western civilization

if there was any actual evidence of this I am sure we would have seen it by now.

> If Wikileaks had their way I don't think you'd like the NWO that Putin and China would build for us

this is nothing but evidence free conspiracy theorizing.

The conspiracy theorizing consists entirely of you reading into what I said and turning it into an argument that it wasn't, but that you feel would be easy to dismiss.

>If Wikileaks had their way I don't think you'd like the NWO that Putin and China would build for us.

He told us factually about a progressive candidate being illegally silenced by the democratic establishment, and it has been transformed into a quasi-russo quasi-chino NWO conspiracy?

No one has argued that Wikileaks has never done anything right.

You're disingenuously oversimplifying the situation to imply that my position is ridiculous. When your ridiculous position is simply that "Wikileaks did a thing that I liked so that means they never did anything wrong and anyone that thinks its possible is just paranoid". Instead of being dismissive and condescending why not try to have a conversation?

You are arguing that it's part of an NWO conspiracy... I provided an objective view of the action you were discussing, because it seems you're drawing form inferences and assumptions, as there is clearly not sufficient evidence to support a NWO conspiracy belief.

It was an attempt to allow you to connect the dots for me, by starting from the (in my opinion) reasonable act which is implied to be the smoking gun.

I expect nation states to do what is in their best interest. Wikileaks helped Russia whether they wanted to or not. Russia's attempt to interfere with our democracy has led to one of the most toxic political climates in US history. The nation is divided and we keep shooting ourselves in the foot because we can't get along.

When I mention NWO I'm simply referring to the fact that as the US has ruined its own reputation, Russia and China have developed a stronger position with the rest of the world. If we ever got to a place where Putin-led Russia was considered more of a leader in the international community than the US it would be bad for almost everyone. Likewise, although China has made slow and steady progress towards being less terrible, if they were suddenly more influential to the rest of the world it too would be bad for almost everyone. No one says "Man I wish the rest of the world would wake up and start operating like China and Russia, that's really the model that freedom loving people everywhere should aspire to." Russian and Chinese people are just as good as anyone else, but in spite of our government being pretty shitty in many ways, their governments are still atrocious in comparison.

Its not about communism. Its about Russia's obviously hostile intent towards western civilization and Wikileaks selling out their integrity to support it simply because they don't like the US.

If revealing the democratic party's misdeeds hurt the democratic party and helped russia, then we agree that there is an element of complicity for the messenger.

Can we also likewise agree that the democratic party's misdeeds themselves hurt the democratic party and helped russia?

If so, why is it reasonable to connect "wikileaks getting their way" to a Russia/China NWO, but not reasonable to connect "the DNC getting their way" to a Russia/China NWO?

>If revealing the democratic party's misdeeds hurt the democratic party and helped russia, then we agree that there is an element of complicity for the messenger.

You're still oversimplifying it. I'm saying that they were trying to manipulate people with selective, perfectly timed releases designed to achieve a specific political goal while at the same time receiving information from and potentially coordinating with foreign intelligence agents and lying about it. You're trying to refer to that scenario as "I don't know why anyone's mad, all they did was tell us about a bad thing that happened."

I agree the information should have become public. I disagree that it needed to be intentionally weaponized in an active attempt to interfere with a sovereign nation's election by hostile actors.

>Can we also likewise agree that the democratic party's misdeeds themselves hurt the democratic party and helped russia?

I can agree wholeheartedly that any time anyone attempts to game one of our election systems that they are undermining the security of the US and helping the US' enemies. I don't think the US is even close to being a perfect country, but if it were successfully destabilized to the point where it could not be fixed it would be one of the worst possible outcomes for not only us, but almost every single country on the planet.

>If so, why is it reasonable to connect "wikileaks getting their way" to a Russia/China NWO, but not reasonable to connect "the DNC getting their way" to a Russia/China NWO?

Well, for one thing, Hillary is notably more hostile towards Putin than Trump. She's also infinitely more capable of coming up with adult solutions for dealing with them. Trump doesn't even believe all of the shit that we know for a fact Russia is doing to intentionally hurt us. His ignorance might not be legal treason but ethically its absolutely treasonous. And I say this as a person that didn't vote for Hillary Clinton or Trump. I voted for a fairly liberal libertarian (as far as libertarians go which is not very progressive) that I thought was terrible, but less terrible than either of them. If we had a decent moderate conservative that wasn't a religious nut or a decent progressive I would have voted for one of them, but unfortunately that was not the case.

Aside from that, if the DNC was doing something unethical (which IMO they were), its more than fair to call them out for it.

>I'm saying that they were trying to manipulate people with selective, perfectly timed releases designed to achieve a specific political goal while at the same time receiving information from and potentially coordinating with foreign intelligence agents and lying about it.

There is no evidence of this. it is pure narrative based upon what you perceive as motives.

> some hillary vs trump stuff, who you voted for

not relevant to this discussion at all...

> There is no evidence of this. it is pure narrative based upon what you perceive as motives.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest it. What you're looking for is a smoking gun that definitively proves it beyond a reasonable doubt, such as a leaked, signed email from Assange outlining his entire strategy or a video of him at a coffee shop with Russian Agents wearing nametags that say "Guccifer 2.0". When it comes to international espionage, that's a pretty high standard.

> Who I voted for.

So many people take sides on the Russian election interference issue based on whether or not they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. Perhaps it shouldn't be necessary, but because that's the way most of these conversations go, I thought it would be relevant to mention that I don't support either of the people that ran in 2016.

Please provide your cold gun evidence.

"taking sides" is a convenient diversion of narrative-based discussion

> No one says "Man I wish the rest of the world would wake up and start operating like China and Russia, that's really the model that freedom loving people everywhere should aspire to."

Yet you attribute that to WikiLeaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18848920): "If Wikileaks had their way I don't think you'd like the NWO that Putin and China would build for us."

I don't personally think WL is part of an NWO conspiracy, more that their actions have consequences and those consequences may result in a worse meta-stability.

Compare and contrast the release of the State Department cables. Because the bulk dump took the politics of delicate international negotiations out of the hands of the SD and laid them bare for everyone to see, the Libyan people saw how what they were told by their government about international perception of them was a lie, and they followed their anger about that lie into civil war... And the country has not recovered stability. It's still unclear whether a world where Libyans unseated their government is going to shake out to be better for Libyans or the rest of the international community than the world that came before.

International politics is a delicate process full of egos and carefully-chosen words. It does not lend itself well to open-government-style action. This is irrelevant to Wikileaks, and (lacking any counterweights) it's quite possible that the end result is a shift in the balance of power to the nations that are still capable of running their international policy with their cards held close to their chests.

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