Comment by TomMckenny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TomMckenny | Hacker News Reader

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The Post runs the same stories seen in essentially all papers in the world. A lot of them implicate the president negatively. But how does precluding the pentagon from it's first choice on these grounds good for the country?

In a free and uncorrupt country, you don't allow leaders to intervene in national security issues because they are embarrassed by a paper's coverage. Thus few people are directly saying that amazon should loose the bid because their CEO has a paper the president doesn't like.

More common and to be consistent with the notion of a corruption free democracy, the defense for this is the claim that, despite significant pressure, this surprising turn of events would have happened anyway. This is the story being promoted more but it does require a improbably interpretation of events that only supporters could really ever internalize. Especially since Trump's own secretary of defense flatly said the goal was to screw Amazon over the Post.

There's no such thing as "corruption free" country. The US is very, very far from corruption-free, both in the government and outside it. It's less corrupt than, say, Zimbabwe, but that's not saying much. Basically one has to ask themselves a question: given that the mainstream press is wildly unprofitable (with very few exceptions), might there be a reason why its owners sinks hundreds of millions of dollars into keeping it afloat? I think you know what that reason is, Chomsky has been railing against it for several decades now. They're instruments of propaganda. They manufacture consent. They are literally no better than Pravda nowadays, although instead of being government controlled, they're controlled by five rich men. It's better than government control, but not by much.

In my reading, your post implies that everyone is exclusively motivated by short term self interest. I do not think this is true, neither for myself nor for others, and I suspect you do not either for yourself and people you know.

The problem in general with negative fatalistic views like this one is that it is non falsifiable: there is not a single positive / selfless action to which you could not ascribe base motives.

That's the problem with assuming you can read people's minds, which seems quite frequent nowadays. The key "tell" for this is saying: "so what you're saying is" followed by the opposite of what the person is really saying.

No, your reading is incorrect.

> Chomsky has been railing against it ... they're controlled by five rich men

That is a real problem, certainly in normal times. And likely decades of derailing reforms in the interest of consumers and employees is what led to the frustration that created the current catastrophe. I note even now broadcast media certainly dwells on the trade war far more than other more pressing problems.

So stories should be confirmed by looking at serious publicly owned and overseas news sources. And if a particular series of stories is in the WaPo and NPR and BBC and the Guardian and Der Spiegel and FAZ and NHK and Le Monde and El Pais then we know it is not a rich man's plot. And if privately owned media has a pro-wealth bent, maybe an autocratic kletopcray is a bit much for some of them. Especially for non-hereditary billionaires many of whom really do want to make the world better (within certain economic constraints of course)

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