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Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

"Journalists have more accountability"

Recent history shows otherwise. All you have to do is look at the many hoaxes and lies that have been allowed to dominate the airwaves on... any... major news site. CNN? Check. Smollett, Covington, etc. Fox? Check. tons of examples exists there.

You brag of accountability when, if you pick a news source, we can find more than a handful of examples of bias, lies and misinformation.

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I really get irked by this attitude. Think of how much news is produced by the nature of how big the world is and how fast it can move. How many screwups do you think there are proportionately to that universe?

If we are gonna judge the news that harshly, then we should actually talk about how horrific a job they’re doing at their whole world order controlling thing. Because they’re leaving a lot of better opportunities to waste out there.

Is there a downside to recognizing when the media deliberately deceives their audience? We should do more of that, not less. These media companies do not have your best interest at heart.

Journalists are human. They will make mistakes. They will by default trust people e.g. Smollett who may then turn out to be liars. But as a profession they do seek to be accountable e.g. multiple sources and ethical e.g. protecting sources at all cost.

Should we also not trust doctors, pilots, engineers, programmers etc because they also are infallible. What exactly do you want here ?

The problem is when journalist make "mistakes" and are subsequently promoted. When Bloomberg made one of the biggest hacking accusations of the decade and failed to even remotely substantiate their claim that Apple and others were victims of a supply chain hack the journalists who wrote this story didn't get fired or disciplined. In fact one of the co-authors, Michael Riley, was promoted to be in charge of all of Bloomberg's technology security reporting.

mistakes != agenda

With a few exceptions, I find news to be an area where you get what you pay for. The incentives are far better at publications that make money from monthly subscriptions than channels that are incentivized by clicks and Neilson ratings.

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