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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

Here's a recent quote from Alan Dershowitz that's illustrative:

> I received off-the-record information that an order had come from the very top: CNN executive Jeff Zucker didn’t want me on CNN any more. My centrist, nuanced perspective was anathema to CNN’s emerging brand as the anti-Trump network.

That should make it clear that a very small number of media executives ultimately decide what we see on the news.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/436059-alan-dershowi...

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Not to go way off topic here, but Alan Dershowitz is the type of person to say anything as long as there’s benefit for him (see: extremely highly paid defense attorney for billionaire child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, and last year Harvey Weinstein), and while he may not be wrong your comment sort of holds him up as having any sort of credibility on the inner workings of the media world. Nobody should take that man at his word.

As a lawyer it's his job to defend people accused of horrible things. If we aren't going to celebrate the fact that accused people can get a good defense, we might as well just do away with trials all together.

I wasn’t arguing about the merits of having aggressive attourneys, I was just indicating that this is a person who’s entire career is built around distorting the truth in his (or his clients) favor.

I agree that it's important to have lawyers defend people accused of horrible things because they could be innocent of those charges. The thing I think I disagree on is that when it is a single lawyer or a group of lawyers constantly defending a group of connected (through power and money) people, it tends to become a lot less clear that they're doing the moral duty of defending all accused instead of defending the accused that will line their pockets the most. The problem here is the one observed in the justice system as a whole, which is that routinely people with less money are disadvantaged in the system due to the lack of money to "convince" these lawyers that shield their actions behind the high-minded moral of defending all accused individuals.

In theory: All accused get representation regardless of accusation In practice: Only the rich who are accused of vile things get a proper defense.

Why should we trust Alan Dershowitz without proof? Giuliani is a lawyer and he goes on TV all the time to lie about easily verifiable facts.

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