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Comment by INGELRII | Hacker News Reader

> They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions.

Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic view of politics.

As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.

Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they were wrong and ignorant?

H. L. Mencken wrote:

> No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always underestimate public and see how far you can go.

View on HN

>any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.

That is what I was thinking.

Paul is writing as if credibility stems from reality. When in reality, the reverse its true. Fox news is credible, its viewers believe that, and whatever those credible people say, is reality. As long as people keep tuned in only to Fox News, that reality wont shatter. Their credibility exists because of their reach, its strength in numbers, its entertainment factor. Calling Fox News news and not entertainment is quite a leap. Most of what they have to say exists to keep people hooked, not to educate them into being more capable of performing civic duties. Fox News wants people to vote in a way that benefits Fox News, not the voter, and the same principal applies to all their coverage of everything. Coronavirus skeptic was a contrarian position to take, it divided their people from other people. Now that they are divided, they can switch sides and still maintain the artificial divide, and keep their viewers isolated from "alternate" realities.

This was a really good article by Kara Swisher of ReCode, who at the end finally convinces her mom to heed medical warnings about being out and about, cant convince her to turn off Fox.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/opinion/coronavirus-fox-n...

They can flip a 180 overnight, and the viewers will see it as people with "updated information" and continue to cheer them on.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-stars-sean-hannity-an...

There is the sad irony too, that the demographic who watches Fox news is already the most likely to be at risk (age, faith over evidence, distrusting of established medicine and government) denial not withstanding. Add denial to the mix, and youve got a real bad stew.

The problem is that the channel is named "fox news", but they have both news shows (which are actually not bad), and opinion programming, which is pretty terrible. I suspect most people don't really make a distinction between the two.

Why would you assume they want to? Opinion shows are the only thing watched on Fox News, they are the primetime lineup. Everything else is filler.

This is a deliberately built political philosophy, one of the results of Karl Rove's "reality-based community" [1] idea, from over 15 years ago. Whether or not the label was actually coined by Rove is debated, but essentially this idea is that some people lived in a world that was "reality-based" and that others were not limited by reality and thus were better/stronger politicians. In practice, what this means is the Bush administration did not have to believe in and be bound by this thing called reality, they created reality when they acted.

President Trump is just continuing this idea through today. Unlike GWB and cronies, Trump and team don't even have to act to "create reality", they merely talk and reality instantly changes for their followers. It's a powerful tool and like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...

to an outsider, americas left vs right hostility and mutual disrespect are becoming painful to watch. lets make a counter example to they one you provided, does the nyt "create reality" for their readers? they did publish their fare share of dangerously incorrect material about the virus, pandemic, the countermeasures,you name it.

This is false equivalency.

When you have to seek to find bad examples from other side, and it's the every day modus operandi the other side there is no comparison.

You could show this comment to anybody from either of the general left/right tribes, and they’d think it was true. Whether you’d use this reasoning to deride Fox News, or CNN (or pretty much any other ‘news’ organisation), would boil down entirely to your tribal affiliation. When I was younger, having “critical thinker” or “anti-establishment” views would generally lead to the conclusion that politicians and mass-media tend to lie/mislead to promote whatever their agenda is. Now, those same views seem to lead to the conclusion that “the politicians and mass-media of the other side tend to lie/mislead to promote their agenda, but the politicians and mass-media of my side are generally pretty good”. I think that’s pretty sad. But perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps things have always been this way, and my perspective has simply changed. That said, I don’t remember any counter-culture icons coming out to endorse career politicians who’d accepted millions of dollars from big business interests when I was a kid.

The downvotes on your post demonstrate the left-leaning nature of this site. It's discouraging frankly. The thousands of conversations that occur daily on this site, without emotion or incident; but insult "the other side"'s politicians or news outlets as being biased? Downvote hell

Yes, CNN and the like are just as bad as Fox news. The sooner you folks recognize that, the sooner we can have decent conversations about emotional issues. Both sides are bad. Neither is better. No, they aren't. Stop it. Blame them BOTH for getting us to this point so that we can leave them in the dark past, and we all over here can talk like adults while they sit over there and bicker, mutually accusing each other of racism and Nazism or whatever today's 5 minute hate happens to be.

WE DO NOT NEED THEM! Either of them! There is a whole universe of conversation that is not occurring because BOTH SIDES are refusing to engage in it, because if you did, you would realize -- tada -- you don't need them. And they can't have that. Viewership and income would drop.

Neither is incentivized with your best interest. And the sooner we collectively start to see it the better.

The "both sides bad" mantra is really just lazy. The false equivalence between the validity of whatever DJT says and what critics say have let even basic decency be thrown out the window, let alone facts.

You must have a reasonably short memory, because people said exactly the same sort of sensational things about Obama, and Bush Jr, and Clinton, and Bush Sr, and Reagan... There’s not really any truth or insight in what you just said. It’s simply an impassioned judgement about a politician you don’t like/disagree with/don’t trust/whatever...

The truth is that most politicians are corrupt on some level, most politicians are unduly influenced by lobbyists, few politicians truly care about their constituents, mass media doesn’t care about the truth, even though some of their employees might, they just care about revenue, for any political perspective you can think of, you’ll find a media outlet willing to pander to it.

I don’t think any of that is particularly controversial (or even insightful for that matter). I’d wager that most people would agree with that sentiment on some level. But they’ll tend to lose sight of reason when you suggest that “yes, that includes the politicians you like, and the media outlets that share your opinions”.

Any public figure of any significance is going to attract a tribe of impassioned haters. They tend to have no greater connection with the truth than that same persons tribe of fervent fans will.

But DJT lies a lot more than any of his predecessors, and hires a lot more incompetents, and fires a lot more competents, than any of his predecessors.

You must have a reasonably short memory, because people said exactly the same sort of sensational things about Obama, and Bush Jr, and Clinton, and Bush Sr, and Reagan...

But when (if) they said those things about Obama, the Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan, those were lies like Trump's.

Perhaps what you’re saying right now is a lie.

In general, I’m quite fond of being incredibly sceptical of the government and all of its agents. They should be scrutinized thoroughly. But this isn’t honest or productive scrutiny. The truth is all of those politicians lied, and all of them exaggerated details, and misrepresented facts (though trying to measure how much would be reasonably subjective). They also all did good work (again open to some subjective interpretation). But your commentary boils down to an incredibly black and white view, which ignores the sins of one group, and exaggerates the sins of another. It almost exclusively reflects your own biases over the actual conduct of any president.

> The "both sides bad" mantra is really just lazy.

"Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy. Refusing to recognize how the other news outlets aren't bastions of honorable reporting is really lazy. Refusing to recognize that none of them -- any of them, not one -- have the public's (e.g. YOUR) best interest in mind, is really lazy.

Somewhere deep down you know that but there's some emotional need you're trying to satisfy that prevents you from recognizing it. You NEED something like Fox to be evil so that your views feel justified.

So a few days ago CBS trumpeted this crying nurse from NYC complaining about lack of masks and people dying and blah blah blah. Turns out? Never happened.

The hilarious part? I despise Fox News. I just equally despise all the others. They're all complicit in fascism and the march toward corporatist dictatorship.

> "Fox News is TEH EVILZZ AND CNN/CBS/NBC/MY HOLY LOVE ARE TEH ANGELZZ" is really lazy.

Now you are being downright dishonest. Nobody said either of these things but it's demonstrably true that Fox News often publishes unverified propaganda while CNN routinely has scientists and solid source surveys to support their points.

It's interesting how you refuse to answer anything I'm saying. You're simply proving my point.

And you know full well what it is. You don't need any of them. They're all dishonest. We'd be better off having honest conversations with each other rather than tribally organizing behind ANY mainstream media (colloquially called news, but they aren't).

And yet the only thing you can focus on is attacking your perceived enemy, ignoring the enemy you choose not to see.

The world is a lot more nuanced than your manichean view is making you see.

Yes it is, and that's exactly the problem I have with defending any news outlets. None of them have those complex conversations, and they prevent us from doing so. It's important we have them. Until that massive blinder is removed, they will be overjoyed for us to bicker about which news outlet is best, because it means we aren't looking square at them and everything we miss because they never talk about it.

We are better than the world they've given us.

You want complex conversations? Try listening to Ezra Klein's podcasts, Kara Swisher's podcasts, Lawfare's podcasts, PopeHat's podcasts, and there are many more.

The founder of Vox, the editor of a Vox subsidiary, and two law blogs that have become devoted almost entirely to trying to impeach Trump. That sure is a diverse group of perspectives you’re exposing yourself to. You can be glad you don’t exist in some sort of echo chamber.

Perhaps even more nuanced than the comment you made immediately preceding this one.

> The downvotes on your post demonstrate the left-leaning nature of this site.

Not really. If you post something that certain people dislike for whatever reason, but which is unremarkable to others, the votes will never break even; you will not get enough upvotes from the latter group to make up for the former. (Even given the fact that not everyone can downvote.)

Whichever group's buttons you push then makes it seem like the site is overrun with that group. E.g. an atheistic comment might enrage theists, but to atheists it might just be "meh". Gee, what's with the downvotes? Boy, this site is just a haven for religious zealots!

I can't even begin to speculate about the grandparent comment. Maybe some users simply found it insubstantial? Shrug.

Criticizing the impact of political tribalism (as I have done above) is likely to irritate anybody with politically tribal views. When it comes to things like Fox News vs CNN (or MSNBC, or whoever else...), I’d consider them all to be on approximately even footing in regards to journalistic integrity (as in, a rather low footing). It’s easy to see how an opinion like that would trigger anybody who had strong tribal affiliation with any of those organisations (whether they viewed it as tribalism or not, people don’t tend to scrutinize their own views in that way, as far as I can tell).

That said, you can just read the thread and come up with a rather decent guess as to which side of that paradigm I likely upset.

Logically speaking what you say is true and is worth recognizing. My comment is based more on trends I have observed over the years (and HN is no more immune to the moving window than any other social media site, it's just slower here).

the two outlets are absolutely equal when it comes to making half of the americans view the other half as raging lunatics. it is basically this https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE

Trump is a lunatic, literally. Obama was a smart, measured person people didn't like.

There's a difference.

Obama killed civilians overseas and presided over massive NSA surveillance of US citizens. Trump also kills civilians overseas and presides over massive NSA surveillance of US citizens, but that doesn't make it any better that Obama did it.

"Obama carried out the duties of being President" - yes he did, one of those duties is killing people. You'd have to go out of your way, almost to the point of ignoring and not acting on threats, to not kill anyone as POTUS.

Nice straw man, the above has nothing to do with my statement.

I’m not sure that’s true. Some objective “truth” exists in the world whether it’s noticed and reported correctly or not (the tree falling in the woods), and some news outlets (NYT) report this truth more accurately than others (Fox News). It’s misleading to insist on “both siding” to make a mountain of untruths from one outlet seem to be the same size as a molehill of untruths from the other.

Bothsiding feels so mature though. Look at those petty little onesiders! Don't they know bothsides are the same!?

"like him or hate him, his administration is using it skillfully"

I couldn't agree more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-havin...

Not many people could survive this, then become president.

Politicians have survived worse.

When I heard it first I thought Trump had clinched the presidency. People publicly rail against this kind of talk but emotionally look up to people who can not just talk but behave like that. I distinctly noticed women talking more positively about him after it came out.

I think the factor you missed in relating anything prior to the Trump era is the fact that Trump is an obvious, completely symptomatic Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

When he is back out of politics, watch for the other appointees to not just be replaced due to the change of president, but actively canned because they are all cronies appointed as a personality cult, and/or as favors to his worshipers.

And yes, I'm morbidly curious to imagine what the Trump presidential library might wind up containing. I snarkily predict that nothing will be approved except autobiographies.

Right, but this might change as people they know start dying. It is easy to lie about things happening that don’t directly affect the people being lied to, but if you personally know multiple people killed by the virus, it will be hard to lie about it.

This is the only thing I can think of that could change their minds. And even then.

I think you misread the passage that you quote as supporting idealism. The full passage is:

"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."

Making a false prediction on the premise that you can bluster your way out of it doesn't indicate that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences - it indicates that they think the false prediction doesn't have consequences for them. That they can get away with it. It's "I can say what I want, because nothing bad will happen to me personally for lying."

I wouldn't call that idealism.

Bear in mind it's not just Fox News which got this pandemic wrong. "It's no worse than the flu," "this won't be a global pandemic," "you don't need to wear a mask unless you are symptomatic or caring for someone who is," and other 100% wrong takes were also pushed by Vox, NYT, WaPo, and even WHO & CDC long past when they should have been.

Which is one of the reasons why I wish we, collectively as a society, would stop blaming the blame game in this crisis. Almost everyone got this wrong.

When and why people got things wrong is also important. People who underestimated COVID-19 in January because evidence of its lethality and r0 were scant are somewhat different from people who downplayed the virus in March because it aligned them with a particular political figure. Similarly, it's a lot easier to sympathise with the epidemiologists who will turn out to have massively overestimated casualties because we took unprecedented action to shut down society to avoid them than the people still organising mass events or the people who have concluded that the disease is best stopped by attacking 5G masts.

But they should not have got any of this wrong! Check out the TED talk by Bill Gates in 2015. How could any journalist worth anything not have had that video in their research before publishing articles. Look at how Asian countries wear masks. Did the people working in the WHO think that was for fashion? The people in spokesperson positions have been caught out big time. It's a issue with how people are promoted to these positions and an example of how society favouring extroverts over introverts is a bad idea.

I look at it a bit differently. If someone's pushing the line "just listen to the experts," then it should be acknowledged that experts do get it wrong and have massively dropped the ball on COVID-19. The signs of how lethal and contagious the virus is were there in China for anyone to read by early January.

Of course, "experts (in particular our experts) don't know what they're doing" is different from "... and therefore you should listen to any yahoo who says it's 5G."

In hindsight, it is obvious that COVID19 was worse than SARS or MERS.

But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East.

But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot.

Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID19 was going to be big, but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West. They've all done 180s and are pulling out the stops to fix their earlier error.

Fox News is still saying that today (i.e., April 6). One of their talking heads just said that COVID19 is overblown just a few minutes ago.

"especially given China's clampdown on information outflow"

Come on. By late December, China's response was so drastic (including when measured against all previous coronavirus outbreaks) that the question of "suppressing" information about it was completely moot.

The CDC completely dropped the ball on this. Yes, in part because Trump slashed their pandemic response budget, but they did a piss-poor job even for the resources at their disposal.

Fox News and Trump being a source of constant disinformation and incompetence is, to me, kind of a constant of the universe. The same ought not to be true of the rest of our institutions, and yet it seems that it is.

Your memory is highly selective and simply wrong.

On Dec 31, China informed WHO about a mysterious cluster of respiratory ailments clustered around a seafood market in Wuhan. China didn't even close the seafood restaurant until 2020. The first confirmed death wasn't reported until January 11. China didn't begin a lockdown of Wuhan until January 23.

Yes, the CDC dropped the ball, but evidence coming out in March indicates that China knew about COVID19 in early December and didn't bother to tell the rest of the world about it for another month, and even then downplayed the seriousness of the virus until the end of January.

To this day China is still blocking the release of information about the severity of COVID19. WaPo reported last week that there may have been more than 40,000 COVID19 fatalities in Wuhan alone (based on manually counting the number of urns distributed by morticians) which is at more than 13x the official number of deaths reported for the entire country.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timelin...

I'm sorry, its not even in hindsight. All you needed to do is look at what China was doing. It became very apparent that there was a major viral outbreak on-going in china around Luna New Year

> but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West.

If we talk about a lot of media, they simply had the priority of making Chinese look bad in any possible way, including blaming them for "misinterpreting numbers" and ridiculing them for implementing lockdowns or wearing masks.

Which just shows how stupid some global agendas are. Media don't do that in vaccuum, but they are the reflection of the power of the interest groups that want to push the agenda.

Amazing how apparently all of the media around the world was united in a conspiracy to make China look bad, especially when much of the reporting was commenting on how much worse the situation must actually be compared to what was being reported by China, given the severity of China's response.

> all of the media around the world was united in a conspiracy to make China look bad

It's like 'memes': very little journalists today do their own research. I can see that whatever Trump says today then follows the "echo" of "media around world" (those that have U.S. sources) that last weeks.

It's a total disaster of false information, and a lot could be traced directly to Trump or the U.S. in general (there are other "sources" that are establishment but produce falsehoods, it's not that he's alone).

But enough people remain confused believing it is true, including people very close to me.

But not everyone, and that’s key. Some people and some entire countries got it right.

Fox News is the only organization that continue to let their opinion anchors downplay and politicize the virus well after it was clear it was deadly and inevitable.

Isn't tied to the size of the 'public' (crowd)?

Too few members in the crowd, and the probability for one to understand and explain to others remains too low.

Too many of them and the Big Chiefs control the media, and also live so high in the Sky nobody seems credible when it comes to criticize, moreover all non-official messages are diluted into other ones to the point of many being not even emitted because the ones understanding the situation know that they will not be heard.

Votes will be lost, because people are unnecessarily putting themselves and others at risk, and some will die.

What you're saying is that votes should be lost. Claiming that they will be is a stretch.

Actually, I think what they're saying is that voters will die, and therefore reduce the number of available votes.

Edit: and, of course, that this effect will dispropotionately affect political tribes whose propagandists under-, rather than over-, estimated the dangers of covid-19.

Exactly this.

From what Mencken book/essay is this quote?

'Notes on Journalism' in the Chicago Tribune (19.09.1926) https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MenckenNotes.pdf

Why are you picking on Fox News? CNN, MSNBC, and others were chastising Trump over the China travel ban. They were saying he was creating hysteria over nothing. They were dismissing the virus at that point.

This is the sort of false equivalency that leads to claims that they all lie, so it's okay if Fox egregiously lies. We see this on HN all the time where someone stomps their feet and cries about a news headline that they think doesn't convey just the right slant that they want, ergo it's the same as the guy inventing bullshit conspiracy theories on his blog.

No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel ban because there was no China travel ban. There was a Wuhan restriction only applicable to foreigners. Thousands of Americans were going and coming with no restrictions whatsoever. Fly into Wuhan, lick the toilet seats, fly back home. Do it the next day.

There was zero screening. Zero containment. Zero listening to the pandemic experts.

No, they aren't the same. This revisionist "they were dismissing the virus" nonsense is utter horseshit of the worst kind. It is a lie of profound ignorance and gullibility, or an intentional lie, and both are just as obnoxious.

The equivalency being drawn by the parent may be wrong, but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus and helped push the "it's not a big deal" perception that we are all now rowing against.

Completely disagree. The Fox news and related contingent and their response was drastically different than the other side. For example, SF declared an emergency in February and everyone was working from home since early March. While Florida had no such order till last week

> but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus

That's true, I guess, if you consider OANN to have reached the status of “mainstream” with the boost they've gotten with their attachment to the current US administration.

But, otherwise, show me some specific examples.

You can look on Youtube yourself and see countless examples o MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu.

I actually followed the coverage the first time, and where the ban was criticized it was almost entirely for being too late for that response to be useful, not unwarranted by the severity of the disease. Of course, if there really are “countless” examples supporting your characterization, it will be easy for you to cite some.

Looks someone else already found a few great examples.

You claimed that there were countless videos of "MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu." Which of course isn't accurate.

You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny selection of articles, having nothing to do with the partial travel restriction, arguing about the social effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles talking about the psychology/sociology.

That you think this proves the case is astonishing. I am going to say again that you are either so profoundly partisan that the truth doesn't matter, or you are logically broken.

It's the classic deflection, and it's absolutely amazing. Fox was literally at war with what they saw as the "mainstream media hoax" (in lockstep with Trump, of course, because they are his state media), claiming that they were fear-mongering about the virus. Oh but now, the mainstream media actually wasn't at all. They were understating it. The cognitive deficiency to seriously argue this...

[1] That guy whose post history is littered with claims that the response to SARS-CoV-2 is "fear-mongering", and who a month ago seriously said that the US response was and is the best, of anyone. Their single example being that Trump limited air travel from a single region...for non-Americans...long after the horse was out of the barn.

Then again, your history has continual COVID denial, such as your claim that no hospitals are over capacity. You guys are really trying to argue everything simultaneously and it must be exhausting.

None of your ad hominem counters the articles the other poster found.

Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out? I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system. Enjoy the next 4 years of the Trump administration.

"I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system"

No one celebrates the extraordinary and unending failures of this administration. We protest it. We argue against it. We see a horrendous rise of idiocracy as people celebrate their own incredible ignorance and hate.

That it's bad for you doesn't make it "good" for us.

If a miracle cure was discovered today and not a single extra person died, that will never undo the raw criminality, and total, complete incompetence of the Trump administration.

That Jared Kushner has a role greater than mail room is a fucking travesty. Hey, but what about her emails, right?

"Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out?"

Social distancing works. This surprises positively no one. Your orange buffoon, however, wants to stop social distancing. Maybe there's some miracle snake oil he can pitch and everything will be great again.

Go back to Twitter. Go back to your insular echo chamber. Your trolling, copy-paste noise just makes you look like a clown here.

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