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Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

I think the old guard media has misstepped on this, not for ideological reasons but for clicks. More banal certainly, but somehow worse, I think. Even the conservative media continued to talk about it, railing against, because it drives clicks.

What we really need, and hopefully comes from this reckoning, is a new model of financing journalism that can be free to act in the public interest, and is built with that in its DNA.

Unfortunately, ideas on what's in the public interest are so vastly separated, I wonder if such a thing even makes sense to hope for.

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No, it's pretty clear that a lot of reporters have compromised their ethics, or never had any. The article quotes several; it is in fact the entire point of the article. Of course you might also say that the _owners_ of the media don't care about this lack of ethics as long as they're making money. That's probably true, but it's not the same thing at all. The blame goes to the people who have no ethical standards, or who compromised them in favor of politics.

How is covering one of the biggest scandals in modern American politics malpractice?

Obama never had anything similar in scope over 8 years.

Is it a scandal if it isn't true? And you're right, Obama never had anything in this scope, it's worse, because people died from things he perpetuated.

1) Fast and Furious: Continued program that caused a border agent to be murdered with one of the many guns the US sold to the cartels.

2) Benghazi: We all know this disaster that killed 4 Americans. Severely understaffed embassy that should have never even been there. No support when requested. Blamed the whole thing on a video.

3) Iran Nuclear Deal: Pallets of unmarked Euros flown over to a sponsor of terrorism in the dead of night

4) Spied on conservative reporters

5) IRS Scandal: Targeted conservatives with the IRS

6) Private Email Server: Lied about knowledge of her server, turns out he had a pseudonym on it and received emails from it. He said he found out about it from the media, woops.

7) NSA Spying: Obama forever known as the spying President.

All of those were less consequential (and with half of those unfounded) and didn't warrant a SCO investigation.

Which are unfounded, and how are deaths less consequential?

The only reason a SCO investigation was pushed for in this case is because the media stoked for it.

It was an insurance policy in the highly unlikely event that Trump was elected. [1]

1. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/strzok-page-and-the-fbi-tex...

I must take issue with two of your points:

2) The State Dept. approved some requests for security upgrades, and denied others. If they had approved everything, would it have stopped the attacks? There's no way to know. Placing blame on Hillary or Obama specifically is problematic at best.

3) Before the revolution in 1979 the Iranian govt signed an arms contract with the US and paid money into a US account. Then the revolution happened and the equipment was never delivered. The cash flown over was just them getting their money back out of that account, with 30+ years of interest.

The rest I either know nothing about, or are too general to get into here.

For what it's worth, I'm not just an Obama apologist. I also think a lot of stuff he did was problematic, especially the unaccountable drone campaigns, and especially Anwar Al-Alwaki and his son, which should have been considered a major scandal.

2) The problem wasn't stopping it, it was fighting it back. They were too understaffed to make a defense. Given how long they held out with what they had is a good indicator that they could have repelled it with more defenses. Air support would have sufficed.

3) Fair enough, but how it was done that wasn't appropriate.

The gist of the news is: Trump never had anything similar in scope either. It was a fiction, invented by the Democrats and the media.

How many Obama campaign managers did they indict? How many Obama National Security Advisors did they indict and force to resign over Russian ties?

How many times did Obama deny that the Russians attacked American interests during an election only to be rebut by the FBI with a string of foreign indictments?

Well, the Obama administration were the ones who ignored the Russia meddling. They knew about this for months. But President Obama opted to not call Russia out on it publicly or inform the American people. In fact, his administration didn’t even draw public attention to this until October, just weeks before the election.

They also ignored violations of the nuclear treaty, various previous hacking attempts, cancelled missile defenses in Eastern Europe, allowed Russia to sell air defenses to Iran. The Obama Administration was extremely soft on Russia.

> They knew about this for months. But President Obama opted to not call Russia out on it publicly or inform the American people. In fact, his administration didn’t even draw public attention to this until October, just weeks before the election.

Except the reporting was clear about the source since June. The President wanted to publicize it earlier to but McConell refused to sign a bipartisan condemnation. Even then the intelligence community was unequivocal.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/mitch-mcconnell-ru...

McConnell's office disputed Biden's account, as reported by Politico, "pointing to a letter signed by all four congressional leaders in September 2016 and sent to the president of the National Association of State Election Directors, urging cybersecurity precautions in light of reports of attempted hacking."

Comey reportedly wanted to announce the active measures in an op-ed column, as Newsweek reported in March 2017. Two sources with knowledge about the matter told Newsweek that Obama administration officials blocked the effort.

Obama should have publicized it instead of sitting on it, regardless if everyone wanted to sign on or not. Putting it all off on McConnell isn't really acceptable when you're President, but to be fair Biden pushed the blame, not Obama, Obama doesn't think he would do anything differently.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/us/politics/obama-putin-h...

This is propaganda. This is what this thread is about.

In what way? It's absolutely true. It's not possible to reason away the criminality of the people Trump appointed or selected.

I'm genuinely unsure of what would convince Matt Taibbi that Russiagate was a dud with so many indictments and such a consequential SCO investigation.

The point of mueller was to determine if Trump worked with Russia to steal a us presidential election. I may just not know the evidence so I'm asking in total honesty - what indictments demonstrate that happened?

> The point of mueller was to determine if Trump worked with Russia to steal a us presidential election.

This is false, the charter was more broad than that. It investigated interference in the Russian election including this possibility.

This is why they also prosecuted cases against Russian intelligence officers that performed the hacking operations and individuals that lied to the FBI over their ties to Russian cutouts in Wikileaks (specifically Stone and Corsi, though they gave up on Corsi).

Stone: https://www.apnews.com/1dcac576e9964f3d98b96b8052f61f8c

>After WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, released hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, the indictment says, a senior Trump campaign official “was directed” to contact Stone about additional releases and “what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had “regarding the Clinton campaign.” The indictment does not name the official or say who directed the outreach to Stone.

Russian Intelligence: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indic...

> coordinated to release damaging information to sway the election under the names “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0.”

Meanwhile I'm old enough to remember people saying Guccifer 2.0 was an "inside source". How the tables turn.

Unless you cite something that verifies your claim, you're just making things up.

I...literally linked the news reports of the indictments which link to the indictments themselves.

An indictment isn't proof of anything you said. Please look up what an indictment means. Also - muellers report is out and trump is clean. So clearly you're wrong. After 3 years its time to man up and accept that.

Why has there been a big turnover of the Trump administration these last two years? Is it perhaps that because Trump was an outsider, he went along with people saying hire this guy who'd be good for the job, and then later fired him when it turned out that guy wasn't on the team?

Trump has been cleaning house, getting rid of the liberal plants whose job was to smear and discredit the new administration. Look at the list of purges:

https://abc7chicago.com/politics/bill-shine-and-other-notabl...

That will likely be examined somewhat further by the Inspector General's report which hasn't yet been released but promises to be the real bombshell.

That's not what I was referring to. The article quotes journalists who thought about speaking up about something, but decided not to because it might help Trump. It sounds like they had a sense of ethics, but compromised that ethics because of politics. Or the journalists who spent weeks in Prague and failed to find any evidence there, and then failed to report on that failure. There's no evidence that this person ever had any ethical standards because they then joked about it while trying to sell their book. Perhaps this is less likely to be regarded as an ethical failure by journalists; even scientists are only recently pushing for pre-registration of medical trials in order to prevent unfavorable studies from being swept under the rug.

How about promising russians flexibility on national defense topics after election [1]? If Trump said this, he'd be destroyed in a moment.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nuclear-summit-obama-medv...

The entire notion of journalistic ethics has become totally self serving and delusional. It starts from the mistaken assumption that it’s possible to be free from the biases of one’s own ideology. The solution is embracing, and exposing oneself to, the opposing ideologies.

The click reasons, ideological reasons, and hate/fear reasons (of Trump as an interloper in the political class) fused into an alloy. It's impossible to separate these.

I agree with you. At least PBS news seems to honestly attempt to be impartial. Just my opinion but PBS is just on a higher level of honesty and fairness than MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, etc.

I am not from the USA, but regularly watch CNN and Fox News. For me they are entertainment and without informative value. They are not news, but political commentary.

From outside It is amazing to see that if you watched only one or the other, the USA appears to be in opposite types of catastrophes.

Similarly with r/politics and r/the_donald, the echo chamber in both of them is so strong, that it prevents rational conversation.

Personally I have seen that CBS News seems more moderate. However I think the best news for any country are the ones provided outside the country (like Aljazeera, BBC, France24, MDR, etc)

All media owned by large, profit-at-all-costs organizations is conservative media, regardless of their branding.

It seems ill-fitting to say the Washington Post, NYT, and Huffington Post are 'conservative', perhaps it'd be more accurate to say that they're entrenched in the status quo? You can see that pretty clearly when there newspapers write about companies that compete for attention. I don't think I've seen a favorable report about FAANGs out of the NYT since Tim Cook came out of the closet.

Huffington Post pretends to be very socially liberal, but really it's all about preserving the status quo which is ultimately a conservative position.

Also have you read any of those New York Times "editorial" pieces they crank out? "Trump isn't so bad" and "Why I voted Trump and I'd do it again, gosh darn it, and you should too" are typical fare.

The term "conservative" has shifted dramatically in the last 50 years. Some of today's "liberal" Democrats are further to the right of some Republicans in the 1960s. The most liberal of these large media institutions are at best hard-line centrists.

> Also have you read any of those New York Times "editorial" pieces they crank out? "Trump isn't so bad" and "Why I voted Trump and I'd do it again, gosh darn it, and you should too" are typical fare.

I haven't seen those, and I can't find them with a search. Do you have links?

You're tautologically right, but not with the colloquial definition of "conservative" that gets used politically. So for your comment to mean anything, you have to make a larger point.

(I'd argue that the colloquial "branding" definitions are a part of the problem. eg "drain the swamp" isn't conservative rhetoric)

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