Don't expect everyone to feel sorry for media outlets who inflame our current divisions, destroy teenagers lives and publish gossip masquerading as journalism. And thats just this week alone!
Software engineers are not in a profession that is explicitly designed around seeking the truth.
Passion is also a poor substitute for knowledge. Gell-Mann Amnesia is still as true as ever too. The entire profession has an undeserved reputation of accuracy and impartiality, and now they're eagerly self-destructing what remains of it.
Most of all, they always stay within the same broad lines. As I saw someone observe recently... If the French gilets jaunes were happening in a South American country, would the coverage be remotely the same? When it comes time to beat the American war drum, will the result be any different from the last couple of times?
The envy of tech, and the associated aspersions are also highly misplaced. Nobody forced the press to embed five dozen trackers on every page and chase clickbait with informational junkfood. Nobody forced them to give up their autonomy to social media, instead of building their own infrastructure. The people whose self image put them several rungs above those icky nerds are still inappropriately bitter about that inversion of status, for sure.
To me, the model for 21st century journalism seems obvious: wikipedia, except not written by the obsessed and the mentally ill. Give me an ever-updating impartial dossier on each major topic and conflict, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and providing a timeline of key events with deeper elaborations one click away.
If the profession matched its self image, they'd have succeeded at doing something like that, instead of racing buzzfeed to the bottom.
Personally I'm really waiting for the rest of that 85% to go.
They didn’t even cover the racist stuff said against the kids. Just some fluff about white supremacy, and MAGA hat being akin to KKK. All the headlines were inflamatory racial tensions inciting and all the corrections were STILL misleading and headlines seeming the kids were wrong. I’m talking about NYtimes, cnn, msnbc, not just the buzzfeed rags.
And then they pull up a picture from 4 years ago that’s misleading and not at all related to the kids. Get called out for fake news, and then they push another fake narrative from an out of context video and that turns out that the kid isn’t even from the school. Then finally another fake narrative about some kid not allowed to speak because he’s gay, turned out fake.
The journalists on twitter wishing for death to the kid based off a smirking clip and no rebuke for the actual racists are terrible human beings who themselves are racist. I unsubscribed from the NYTimes over this. Fox News during peak birther conspiracy wasn’t a 1/10th of this ridiculousness. Legit racists run these companies and legit racist are employed.
Oh and get this, just saw on Facebook my High School History teacher posted a bunch of basketball players holding up the “3 point shot” sign arguing how the school is racist because apparently an “ok” sign is code for white supremacy when literally every nba player makes it after a shot. That post has 35 likes. It’s like our collective IQ dropped 30 points in 2016. There’s a certain rationality you expect when you have a discussion with someone that seems to have completely dissipated into emotional tribalism.
The main premise of your argument is that the birther situation is racist and a big deal. In my post that’s what I clearly stated. The most racist and stupidest thing I’d seen journalists do in my lifetime was the Obama birther BS supported by Fox News and I commented that even that was 1/10th of this Covington story. They were calls for doxing minors liked hundreds of thousands of times by popular celebrities and journalists based on an innocuous clip and 10,000 plus death threats. Likely hundreds of thousands of people like you feeling no sympathy for teenagers getting death threats wearing MAGA hats and completely ignoring the blatant racism against them. The difference between us 2 is that I condemn the racism against Obama and the racism against these kids and I do feel pity for the other side. You’re quite off the deep end if you don’t.
I’m sure this individual was a very bright person pre 2016, but the collective 30 point iq drop seems to have had an unequal effect, harming some more than others as clearly demonstrated here.
Today we had a white man kill a black man allegedly due to wanting to start a race war (I didn’t double check and media lies like crazy so might be misleading, but let’s assume it’s true). You have Breitbart and other far right rags basically baiting this. Inflaming racial tensions like crazy. Against blacks, Hispanics, and Asians via crime, illegal immigration, and h1b abuse. They take 3 legit problems and tie racial tensions to them to cause division and hatred.
The left which went off the deep end after Trump are doing the same thing demonizing white people, men, and the wealthy from legitimate problems of race, violence, and income inequality. You take these already serious problems and tie race divisions to them and you get the fringes to grow larger and the extremists to increase in number. More and more will do extremist things. I mean you have a poster here that doesn’t care about kids getting death threats and tries to defend it by mentioning unrelated issues and HN is way critical thinking than the average person.
There is no media or journalists, just propaganda and propagandaists.
I think Twitter is a huge problem that has really inflamed this.
Do not do this on HN.
You can't differentiate between some twitter trolls doxing, to a major party platform working overtime to de-legitimize the first black President hand in hand with the biggest news channel in America. Are you this naive ? And the fact that our current President was the lead cheerleader of this effort. Should I point out the hundreds and thousands of stories that conservative media and politicians commented about Michelle Obama's looks. Should I point out about the massive systemic effort that conservative states create to disenfranchise minority voters ? Trump and MAGA is this whole movement in steroids. It is part of an overall effort to turn back the clock of progress in America. And you think that is 1/10th of some new story that people will forget in 2 weeks. Are you kidding me ?
That's just one point. Most of the other points you made can be equally refuted or are just ridiculous - "dog whistles," come on. That's code for "they didn't say anything bad but I'm going to interpret bad intentions because I don't like them."
I don't like the guy but I hate the lies and misinformation about him more. Not because they're damaging to Trump but because they're harming our democracy itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/15/opinion/leonh...
I don't think the way forward is to claim half the country is racist. Some of the Trump supporters are, but I feel like it's an easy/unfair explanation for why Trump was elected.
It's been talked to death, but Democrats made a lot of mistakes in 2016, and should look inward to try and fix things before 2020. I feel like the things they are focusing on are just making the division worse, and alienating voters they could win over.
Do you seriously not understand the point of that statement being made to people wearing MAGA hats? Notice I said understand, not agree with. Because labeling statements that are designed to use the absurdity of the MAGA's hatters position on various topics as a rhetorical tool against themselves as "racist" in order to fabricate some sort of "gotchya" talking point tells me you don't.
>I unsubscribed from the NYTimes over this.
Spare me.