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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Thing is, when the New York Times was "the newspaper of record", everyone read it. When they only print what will pass muster with the howling mob, for fear of losing their jobs if they offend, then only the howling mob will read it. But the howling mob doesn't have enough members to support the New York Times.

That is, catering to the most vocal segment of the Right Thinkers is a ticket to an ever-shrinking readership, because 1) everyone who isn't a card-carrying member of the Right Thinkers leaves, and 2) the Right Thinkers shrinks as the majority repeatedly throws out people for not being right thinking enough.

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People also seem to be unaware that howling mobs move on...you just have to wait them out. Stand firm and they'll quickly find another target to bully.

Case in point: remember last year when the governor and the AG (I think?) of Virginia were caught in blackface 30 years ago and the lieutenant governor was revealed to have raped a woman in college 20 years ago? And they all refused to resign? Everyone forgot about that a month later.

> And they all refused to resign?

Which is why a system based on policing corruption through public outrage is doomed to fail. You need to have a system that has actual mechanisms--investigations, prosecutions, and convictions--to keep a lid on corruption. Public shaming doesn't work because the public has only so much attention span, and there is soooo much corruption.

In this case two of them hadn’t committed crimes and the third had a statute of limitations that had passed so there wasn’t really corruption involved, just a refusal to listen to protests.

Like I said, mechanisms, not animus. Get laws on the books (or into the constitution of your state if necessary) that provide avenues for removal. Spell out standards of behavior and consequences for violating them and enforce those standards. The mob is not the solution.

The only thing I admire about Trump is his megalomania and ignorance makes him impervious to politically correct McCarthyites. The Twitter mobs will move on, just wait a little while.

Easy to be impervious to one mob when you have an equal but opposite mob to support you.

And yet, his so called mob has done... nothing here.

Which, I know, is very frustrating to those who are salivating at the thought of seeing them provoked. The unanswered cries of "where's the 2FA crowd now?!" have, admittedly, been very satisfying to watch.

I for one am glad that most the 2A crowd, on both sides of the aisle, don't seem to presently think shooting people is be a good idea. As for people not in that crowd who seem to think otherwise (or at least criticize the 2A crowd not thinking otherwise)... well I'm glad they don't own guns. If you don't actually think otherwise, it seems very perverse to criticize them for their restraint.

Same with Canadian PM Trudeau. Out came multiple videos of him in blackface. The media dropped it in a few weeks.

Unfortunately, the media only drops these things when it's a politician they like. Anyone right of Obama gets hounded with scandals, real or imagined, as often as possible, forever.

But they tend to burn down whatever they are around before moving on.

>you just have to wait them out.

I'm not sure this is true. My experience is that either the mob is destroyed by force, or they manage to convert enough out of fear that they end up controlling the institution they were attacking.

There's a flip side to that though which is that the other side of the aisle is also a howling mob. The discourse across the board has become so radically polarized that it's impossible to reconcile the competing world views. In the mean time, there's apparently a belief in the news room that centrists are rare enough that they need not be catered to.

Centrists would be somewhat rare it it hadn't become a slur for both extremes to label anyone that's not an extremist.

Moderates are far more common than centrists. But these day's you're either completely toxic and insane or you get ridiculed as a centrist for not caring enough.

Do you have any evidence to support your theory? The NYT recently hit 6 million subscribers (print and digital) which is a record high.

Margins on digital products are lower than on print products but that's not unique to the Times and it's largely outside of their control. Ad margins have collapsed since their astronomical highs of the 90s and early 2000s because of the divorce of classifieds and news, rather than a collapse in total circulation.

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