Hacker News Reader

Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, so much this. You only realize how valuable good journalism is when you don’t have it, as is unfortunately very common in most parts of the world.

Journalists play an extremely important role in keeping a check on power and as such are critical to the health of a democracy. The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far; without a good, unbiased press there is simply no way to have an honest conversation about the most important problems that a country faces and the different plans by which to address them (as is becoming very clear by the botched response to the Coronavirus pandemic).

View on HN

> The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far

It would make me a lot angrier if the most popular news outlets were indeed "good, unbiased press" and not spin doctors and propaganda distributors for [insert political machine].

Both/and, not either/or. We should be angry at the president's violent rhetoric toward the press, and we should be angry at the press's bias and spin.

Well, I think that what basically happens now? Half of the nation angry at president rhetoric, and half of the country angry at press bias.

Just different halves, but being angry at many things at once is hard, mentally. But you have your wish granted, more or less. Everyone is angry :)

The reliable media often back up the claims with resources, motivations and you have the history to verify.

If a person makes a blanket statement like "press is biased" or "is a spin-doctor" for X, we need to ignore that move past it.

We tend to identify reliable sources over time, and there are plenty of reputed, reliable journalists and newspapers in the world. Just like reliable politicians. Kudos to them.

Most of the biased reporting doesn’t happen through false claims but through selective reporting. The information that fits the narrative is pushed, the information that doesn’t never gets published. It is possible to lie by remaining factually correct. Ask any lawyer or advertiser. And I see very few if not no major media outlet that doesn’t indulge into that selective reporting all over its pages. Ignore me and move past me!

Very much this. What most people consider "the press", the main stream media, has converted almost completely to infotainment, opinion, and propaganda for vested interests.

John Gruber (of Daring Fireball, Mardkown fame, etc.) coined the term "claim chowder" and started keeping a list of dubious tech reporting. I've been keeping a mental list myself and its almost painful how often a highly circulated story obviously will have a shelf life of weeks or days before being completely invalidated. As long as it makes it through the spin cycle, though, I suppose it doesn't matter to show runners, editors, and others pushing the narrative.

When news outlets run significantly fabricated stories (sometimes for months or years) and then run a genuine story how can they be believed? When news outlets never issue retractions, corrections, or apologies for misleading the public, how can they be trusted. When they actively attempt to remove or change content from their public archives in order to put themselves on the right side of history or direct the way history is being made, how can they be treated as protectors of freedom against tyranny. When they destroy the lives of who accidentally entered their crosshairs to sell ad space, how can they be considered good.

That's an insanely broad brush. The mainstream press includes the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, and NPR. Please explain how they fabricate narratives, how they destroy the lives of those who accidentally enter their crosshairs, and how they retroactively alter their archives to change history.

I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.

When was the last time you read a positive story on Putin in the NYtimes?

All those outlets are compromised expect maybe NPR. Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institutional narrative, it is on you you still consider the mainstream anything more than shadow of what they represented in the past.

Theres nothing positive about Putin because he is a murderous dictator. There’s nothing positive about Kim Jong Un or Orban or MBS either. The NYTimes’ journalistic integrity is not measured by positive coverage of dictators in fact if anything it’s the opposite.

* CBS has recently been caught fabricating lines at a drive through testing facility in Michigan

* Nicholas Sandmann

* “Experts generally agree that N95 masks have little value in the community.”

* Local “news” stories that are effectively infomercials

* https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI

* allegedly CNN removing the Larry King episode from Google Play with a call from Tara Reade’s mother

* implicitly or explicitly suggesting unrelated archive footage represents the story being reported (Italian hospital footage in a story about New York hospitals, firing range footage presented as foreign conflict)

* the my pillow guy, who retooled to support health workers being railroaded simply for standing next to Trump

* the sudden and nearly universal admiration for GWB

* NYT editing an article, without notice that originally claimed HRC implied the Russians were grooming Tulsi Gabbard.

I have a terrible memory for specific details, so those just the ones I can think of recently. I primarily listen to NPR in the car. Their bias is staggering. They present opinion as fact frequently, often misrepresenting parties in opposition.

You’re playing into his game as soon as you start talking about “the media”.

There is no one “the media”. The journalism produced by cable news opinion segments is not the same as that produced by national print outlets, which is also not the same as a local newspaper. Equating them all is something Trump and his friends would very much like you to do.

OP mentioned "the most popular news outlets". I expect that there's pretty good intersubjective agreement about which entities are in or out.

It's true in one sense that there's no such thing as "the media". If "the media" is just "the set of people who write things about current events that other people read", then I, too, am a member of the media. Groovy.

But this is an isolated demand for rigor. If you look at who's employed by "the most popular news outlets" (which can be relatively objectively determined through subscription numbers), you cannot help but notice that they are a rather distinct class. They come from particular schools, live in particular cities, have particular points of view including suppositions so basic that they often do not even realize that they hold them, understand themselves to be accomplishing particular professional and social objectives through their work, and so on and so on. None of these qualifications are strictly categorical, but as a statistical matter they are so robust as to be tedious. Which is all fine, so far as it goes, but the concept of "the media" is "a thing" inasmuch as it allows you to concisely name patterns and regularities that exist in the world. And there are an awful lot of patterns and regularities to be noticed.

Incidentally, Orwell made precisely the same point (about a distributed, decentralized press that coordinates through shared cultural background and sense of what's simply Not Done) in a proposed preface to the first edition of Animal Farm. The free, decentralized, totally-not-a-thing British media declined to print it.

I would need to see some sources on “They come from particular schools, live in particular cities...”

Even if this were true, (which I’m highly skeptical of) why would this even a bad thing? I mean, if we’re talking about elite papers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.. it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear a number of them went to elite universities – a number elite doctors likely come from difficult medical schools.

I’m also not convinced “they” all share the same beliefs, not convinced of this at all. I mean, if you want to declare that media sources who prefer the Democratic party exist, sure but for every single one of those there’s at least one Fox “news” equivalent. The simple fact of their existence doesn’t mean certain people have a monopoly on information. This argument would be as ridiculous as when people in 2017 were screeching (US) liberals run the world all while the president, both congressional houses, and the supreme court were conservative... the concern wasn’t based in reality, at all, and it’s the same with their panicky “liberal news” conspiracies, I see no evidence which shows conservatives voices aren’t being heard, none.

Anyway, I’m dubious about the idea that almost all news people come from the same class, same schools, and same cities. Unless you’re simply saying elite journalists come from the best journalism schools, at which point it shouldn’t really surprise anyone.

I would find it more surprising if journalists didn't share certain demographic regularities. As an exercise, I looked up the educational backgrounds of the current NYT masthead on wikipedia. Here are the results:

Columbia

Harvard, Harvard

UMich

N/A (the art design guy)

Notre Dame

Princeton

Yale

Columbia

Tufts

Stonyhurst, Oxford

UVA

Are those results out of line with what you were expecting? I can't say that they are for me. If anything, I consider it exceptionally broadminded of The Gray Lady to hire an ND grad.

Please recall that I never claimed this was a good or a bad thing. In some sense I regard domination by elites as inevitable, but I do think it's preferable to be explicit about it, and failing to recognize "the media" as a coherent social category tends to frustrate that recognition.

The political affiliation of journalists is a well-studied topic. Polls consistently find that Democrats outnumber Republicans and liberals outnumber conservatives by wide margins, ranging from 4-1 to 20-1 [!] depending on survey methodology (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3279453). A study which compared rates of citation of various think tanks by media outlets, vs. by Congress, found that every media outlet surveyed except Fox and the Washington Times stood to the left of the Congressional median (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098770?seq=1).

Again, I'm not making any normative claims about any of this. I'm just surprised at the resistance to taking it for granted.

Thousand times this. I grew up in USSR, and was tuning to Voice of America and Radio Liberty to keep myself informed. I moved to US not so far ago, and current state of mainstream media here is so much reminds me of Pravda, Trud and Izvestia newspapers, along with countrywide and regional TV channels. Damn shame, especially when you consider VoA and Radio Liberty are state-sponsored and state-controlled

> a good, unbiased press

I'd argue most of what is sold as "the press" is not that. Click-bait, PR mouthpieces, unverified "news", inflammatory news and padding are the majority of what people see.

"Sources say..."

Bye!

> The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far

Why? He hasn't said it should be restricted in any way, he's said it's been biased and doing a bad job. That's a completely fair criticism.

According to him it's only ever biased if it's critical of his actions or policies. That injects more noise into claims of bias and can lead people to take them less seriously than they realistically should. Bit of a boy who cried wolf situation.

That just means you disagree with his criticisms, it doesn't mean his criticisms pose any type of political threat to the free press.

Public opposition to any institution by the President of the United States is a political threat. Or rather anyone person who holds so much influence publicly attacking something is a threat.

I wholeheartedly disagree. The president doesn't lose his right to free speech because of his job or how much influence he has. There is a clear distinction between criticizing the practices of an institution versus criticizing its existence categorically.

A lot of people are purposefully blurring the lines here and it's really dangerous. The same argument could be used to say that the press has undue influence, and should therefore be regulated in what it is able to say or how it is able to report.

The press in America has the same freedom of speech as individuals do: near unlimited. They come together. If you start picking and choosing, free speech is no longer a right.

This argument make no sense. Rights don’t exist in vacuum. The person occupying the Presidency swears an oath to the country and in the process he assumes both the power endowed by the State and the responsibility to use it wisely. Yes of course he can’t say any damn thing he wants to say publicly if it engenders the institution of the presidency he has sworn to protect. The right to free speech is not absolute.

Similarly, the press give up the right to say any foolish claims without substantiation when they assume their official roles as journalists. They promise to back what they say with evidence and facts; that stops them from making baseless claims. Is that restricting their free speech? Free speech does not exist in a vacuum.

It does make sense. There is obviously a question of where the boundary lies and that's what we're exploring.

I think you do have a point. But consider what you're trying to apply it to here. The president is not saying "I think we should nuke Korea" or "the press should be abolished." He says "CNN? That's fake news." It's a criticism leveled at an organization that has had a rampant hyperbolic partisan slant and has printed fake news, making the criticism accurate.

Calling the media out for this behavior could be seen as holding it accountable. These types of criticisms mean nothing in terms of any meaningful action that could restrict the press.

I think more people need to question from where they have gotten the perspective that these attacks are particularly threatening towards a free press in the US. Was it from the press?? Go figure.

Sorry, don’t buy it. There are legitimate criticisms of CNN. But his criticism isn’t restricted to just CNN, but to literally any media outlet that will umflattre him including NYT, WaPo and Fox News. Fox News in fact chided him quite frequently during the Republican primary until he beat them down into submission. He tried to do something similar with other media outlets and has been quite enraged that they haven’t changed their tune as drastically as Fox News did.

I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.

Again, what you're describing is a personal vendetta between the press and the president. They cover him and he responds, and they attack each other. It's normal. Ask any celebrity. You are not describing a situation that is indicative of a threat to the press.

> I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.

I don't believe this at all.

His "criticisms" are not limited to specific outlets. He has publicly called the press "truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"[0] which feels like a broader attack on the press as an institution.

[0] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11142215334617907...

I think this is an error of taking literally what is figurative. It's common parlance to call the mainstream pop press "the press." That's how generalizations work and anybody reading that knows it without needing it explained.

If you were one of the Central Park Five, wrongly accused of rape, or if you were a climate change activist, facing climate-denying articles, and said "the press has got it all wrong and are the enemy of the people" how would you interpret that? As anger, representing a valid critique that should be explored? Or that this person is literally calling for the end or restriction of journalism as a practice? It seems obvious. The only way to interpret it as the latter is to interpret it in such bad faith that it borders on malevolence.

It should be patently obvious that he is chomping at the bit to muzzle the press.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-t...

I disagree with the assessment. Nearly all of the points here are either contextless, are meaningless statements in themselves, take as literal the figurative, or are about aggressions that could only be accused of influencing others' view of the press' bias, rather than offering any real threat to rights.

Trump parroting 'Fake News' every time the press ask him a question he doesn't want to answer is hardly criticism.

I mean if you already believe that the press is mostly Right in their reporting, it might be difficult to convince you otherwise. But there are so many instances of fake news related to Trump reporting that it's really not inaccurate to call it that.

If literally everything you said was twisted in a way to misrepresent you don't you think you'd get a little tired of it, roll your eyes at it, and shrug it off sometimes too? That's not an absolute defense for doing this exclusively, but he doesn't do this exclusively. He calls it out, then answers.

But this is altogether besides the point of what I was responding to, which is that this kind of talk is existentially dangerous to the press as an institution. You could claim Trump is a liar and a deflector and is doing bad things and says a one-liner instead of justifying, and that would be a fair criticism. But then it would be a danger insofar as it means we have a lack of responsibility and accountability in our leadership, not insofar as it poses a threat to the freedom of the press.

> That's not an absolute defense for doing this exclusively, but he doesn't do this exclusively. He calls it out, then answers.

he does not answer shit. He spews nonsense. He does not speak coherently about facts at all.

That's a tangent we could go down but not really the point of what I'm talking about.

Actually it’s not a tangent at all but a core part of the strategy. Flooding the system with Shit as bannon so aptly calls it.

I wouldn't call it "[accusing the press of being] biased and doing a bad job" if the most powerful president of the western world calls the press The enemy of the people[1]

As a matter of fact such statements are borderline incitement of violence when you look at some of his heavily armed, but not necessarily smart supporters.

What you argue here is borderline historical revisionism.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/07/donald-trump...

edit : clarification

If you change the article URL from 2020 to 2018 and search for "Trump" you can see the Pulitzer they handed out for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election". In 2020 that has toned down to a Pulitzer for "skewers the personalities and policies" or "illuminates the personal impact [of his anti-immigrant policies]".

The quality of the hard-hitting journalism seems to be winding back, maybe Trump wore them down?

Alternatively, you should expect hard-hitting journalism in the "Explanatory Reporting" and "National Reporting" categories, but should expect skewering in the category of "Editorial Cartooning".

What outlets come to your mind as good, unbiased? I'm assuming already that you think that reality just has a liberal bias.

A biased question about bias, nice.

Something something turtles all the way down.

I'll make assumptions about you too: you think reading things you don't like = bias.

> You only realize how valuable good journalism is when you don’t have it, as is unfortunately very common in most parts of the world.

Where do this come from? There is EXCELLENT journalism all over the world. Even in places with high censorship (which are the exception, not the rule) there a great and brave journalism.

Local papers are disappearing left and right, in the US.

Most of what they do is not Big Stories, but things like covering the city council meetings in a way that TV stations don't.

Their disappearane has a real financial effect

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...

There is no "journalism" in China. Or Russia.

Indeed there is of every kind, from community people to big media, of course, the official organs are biased, but they don't encompass all journalists, the same way American journalism is not just CNN and Fox News.

It is highly insulting and arrogant to assume there is no brave journalism there where people have lost their jobs or their lives by reporting inconvenient truths.

You need more street.

How knowledgeable are you on this subject ? Do you read Russian ? Chinese ? Watching native TV channels, listening podcasts in Russian and / or Chinese ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com