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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

"Stars and Stripes embodies that most American of values: the right to speak truth to power."

Which is the last the thing current administration wants anyone to be able to do.

Stars and Stripes is a government ( DoD ) newspaper. How does it speak truth to power when it is a pentagon run entity?

It definitely is more pro-military than average, but it has done a surprisingly good job of maintaining editorial independence. It most certainly is independent from White House control, if not DoD control.

Trump just tweeted that he won't let this happen.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13019688734875648...

"let" is not accurate word choice, for mukrtiple reasons.

Show me one in the last generation or two that did?

Who harassed more journalist and whistle blowers during their time in office, Trump or Obama. Neither was great but the prior administration set new standards for threatening those who would make government justify its actions. The difference is one was a media darling and the other is a media flashpoint

No contest: Trump harasses journalists at every rally – by now, hundreds or thousands of them. And whistle blowers? He fired Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman and his brother after Vindman testified. His lackeys in the House exposed the IRS whistleblower by name.

It’s true that Obama was pretty agressive about prosecuting whistleblowers, but it also true that no president in modern times before the Donald has called the press ‘the enemy of the people’ and calls every criticism of him ‘fake news’.

Free speech is a two-way street. Journalists are allowed to criticize politicians, but for the same reason politicians are allowed to criticize journalists. The government prosecuting journalists concerns me more than the government criticizing journalists, though both are concerning. Thankfully Trump is too impotent to make good on most of his juvenile threats, or we'd definitely be in trouble. More than Trump, I fear a hypothetical future president who's competent enough to do more than spout hot air.

I agree he’s mostly empty threats. After all, he’s threatened to revoke social media platforms’ Section 230 protection since before he took office. But when Twitter had the audacity to fact check him, he attempted to make good on his word with an executive order.

He thinks he can do a lot more than he can, but we still should be fighting back.

I don't really have a stake here, and voted for Obama but he and his justice department prosecuted a record number of journalists. To quote the Washington Post "Of the 13 people who have" (ever) "been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for leaking secrets, eight were arrested under Obama's administration"

Anyone have a full list of who they are counting as either the 8 or 13 in that quote? According to Wikipedia, the number of people who have been charged under the espionage act is much higher than 13. For example, there are 52 pages of people convicted under the act.[1] I guess it depends on your definition of "leaking". The relevant dictionary definition of leak is "to give out (information) surreptitiously".[2] Giving information to a foreign government should seemingly be classified as leaking so I'm not sure we should necessarily link it to either journalistic endeavors or whistleblowing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Persons_convicted_und...

[2] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leak

*For leaking secrets to journalists

Ok, don't you think that is a pretty big qualifier to leave out? It also leads us to a question of what is a journalist? Reasonable people can look at Assange and see him as either a journalist or an agent of a foreign government.

It’s in the quote, except for “to journalists” which is in the article I pulled the quote from. I suppose I could have included the next two sentences.

You're being intentionally misleading. The eight prosecuted are not journalists themselves but government employees who leaked sensitive documents to journalists.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/5/obama-and-le...

And in addition, Vindman wasn’t prosecuted for leaking secrets. He was fired in retribution for giving testimony before Congress, a completely legal thing to do.

EDIT I misunderstood the post -

It’s unethical to report on a violation of ethics? That makes no sense.

I was confused by the wording - the post seemed like it was saying that it was legal to fire vindman or okay - but I just misread it.

I think you're looking for a "gotcha" to call critics of the Trump administration hypocrites, but you will find that 1. people are never logically or morally consistent so this is a weak point in the first place and 2. A lot of people who oppose Trump from the left share your anger with the Obama administration and see him as someone who ran on progressive values and governed as a center-right neoliberal with a penchant for military adventurism.

Whataboutwhat?

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