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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective.

How so, exactly? This is kind of an odd moment, where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out.

There are definitely some aspects of the traditional media that fit your description (all cable opinion shows are best avoided by everyone), but that's by no means all of the media.

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> where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out.

Deeply incompetent is an opinion, not a fact. So yes, it is a form of bias.

Actual fact-based reporting would be articles like "President did XXXX on YYYY" and leave the opinions and talking heads out. It would also be fairly dry and not generate outrage click traffic which media companies seem to thrive on these days.

I would find it hard to argue that any of the current POTUS work has been competent.

We just had a thread on hacker news where most folks agreed the administrations changes to the H1B program were welcome.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Competence is demonstrated over time, not in a vacuum of individual decisions. Someone that is competent at Chess proves it over an entire game. A novice can still make a few good moves over the course of that same match.

Pretty much any competency can be demonstrated that way.

No need to move the goalposts. The original comment wasn't arguing whether POTUS was competent or not, which is what you are trying to argue.

The original comment was arguing whether any of the POTUS work was competent. And that H1B change seems to have been competent, according to the general consensus on HN.

Is the entirety of the rest of POTUS' work incompetent? Maybe. That wasn't the original claim though.

But did POTUS do any of that? Part of his administration may have some competence, but the wast majority don’t seem to have the greater good in mind nor interested in respecting democracy. To me that is part of competence in government.

I think that a very real argument could be made that this PoTUS was elected as a direct intolerance of the corruption and intolerance of the normal citizenry of the US by the professional politicians. To expect him to be competent at the job was to be naive (which a lot of people were), but it was a knee jerk reaction to the options left to them, I think.

It's the same issue as social media. People love to read opinion pages so the news orgs end up providing more and more of it. The eyeballs Fox News gets is like 99% for their opinion programming.

Trump does not have the competence to responsibly constrain a pandemic to the same deaths rates as all the other first-world countries.

He has demonstrated his incompetence in wrt to this, it is not objective.

So you know what's in that "actual fact-based reporting"? Editorial decision of coverage. "What you choose to talk about" is editorial. That "fact-based reporting" is no less subject to lies of omission. And, beyond that? Contextualization of those "facts". What are these facts? What do they mean? Why are they worth reporting on? Why are they worth reading about? Are they even "facts"?

I don't blame you personally for propagating this misunderstanding of journalism as there is a lot of power and money behind not having actual journalism, but "actual fact-based reporting" is a canard designed to keep the populace dumb. Reportage--journalism--has always contextualized information and explained why you should care. That cannot, repeat cannot, be divorced from the act of reporting. A stock ticker is not journalism. You can get it if you want. But it doesn't mean squat to the overwhelming majority of people, nor is it expected to, and the dull ignorance of a wave of decontextualized "facts-only" reportage is an idea designed to create a dumber and less civically capable society.

It also happens to make the comfortable and the comparatively powerful, a class to whom I belong, feel less challenged about things. Convenient, that. But bad for us, no matter how convenient it is.

There was an interesting article the other day how the current president of CNN emphasized Trump coverage prior to the last election because it boosted ratings. Coincidentally, he was also the president of NBC and in charge of entertainment programming when he signed Trump for The Apprentice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/media/jeff-zucke...

@ardy42 I think you just proved my point. To presume to know anything about what goes on in the rarified power struggles at an intercontinental/global levels requires free speech and giving serious researchers/writers a viewable voice. There are plenty of wonderful investigative reporters (Whitney Webb is a stellar example right now for example) but the editorial employees of oligarch owned media have marching orders and objectives to meet, so voices like Whitney's are invisible in the 'mainstream media', except to be undermined if their work gets through to an audience.

We don't know anything about the political layers of the onion batting for control of the US democratically elected leadership, but we do have a daily torrent of candidate abuse, undermining and negativity from the two big corporate camps and zero coverage of anything else (Greens, Libertarians, candidates rejected by their party etc etc). The person currently in power usually gets the worst of the abuse and second guessing as who-knows-who fights to depose and replace. (I'm a registered Dem in Cal FWIW, not arguing a political point here).

> There are plenty of wonderful investigative reporters (Whitney Webb is a stellar example right now for example) but the editorial employees of oligarch owned media have marching orders and objectives to meet, so voices like Whitney's are invisible in the 'mainstream media', except to be undermined if their work gets through to an audience.

I spent about a half hour scanning some of her stuff, and I'm getting a strong conspiracy-theorist vibe from that person:

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/09/investigative-reports/b...:

> [Rosa Brooks] was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP’s director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving assenior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years.

> OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF’s ties to these manufactured “revolutions” include Ukraine in 2014 and the “Arab Spring,” which began in 2011 and saw several governments in the Middle East and North Africa that were troublesome to Western interests conveniently removed from power.

The Soros stuff is a bit of a red flag. Also, Ukraine wasn't non-aligned, but aligned towards Russia. Anecdotally, the Ukrainians I know weren't fond of Yanukovych and were happy to see him go, both times.

https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status/1312730357175902209:

> Good ole sheep herder Bernard!

Referring to people as "sheep"?

https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status/1312430264870674438:

> My opinion:

> This is about ramping up fear and distracting everyone from the VERY DISTURBING revelations in just the past few days on something the creepiest part of the military you've never heard of is up to. Stay tuned!

The "this" she's referring to is Trump getting Covid-19. Apparently she thinks it's part of some kind of coverup rather than the very obvious end-result of the choices he's made for himself and his staff.

@ardy42 voices like Whitney need to be heard whether you agree or not, there are vast swathes of 'unreported' things going on right now, my original point. The mainstream media is anodyne in comparison... Separately the term 'conspiracy theorist' is both anti free speech and extremely unhealthy in a democracy. One person's investigative reporter is another persons 'conspiracy theorist'...

> @ardy42 voices like Whitney need to be heard whether you agree or not, there are vast swathes of 'unreported' things going on right now, my original point. The mainstream media is anodyne in comparison...

The mainstream media is usually anodyne in comparison to conspiracy theories, because the latter can have extra drama injected into them and push more emotional buttons.

Take that first article I linked to above. The "clear Trump win" scenario Whitney's article dwells upon and gives a sinister cast also included a large popular vote win for Biden, which she completely failed to mention and which would have undermined her "planned power grab" narrative significantly if she had. A constitutional crisis is much more understandable if the winner of the electoral college lost the popular vote badly, given it's always been a broken system and it seems illegitimate to a lot of people for the winner of an election is not be the person who got the most votes.

But it's way more dramatic if you can make it sound like the Democrats are planning on stealing the election regardless of what happens.

> Separately the term 'conspiracy theorist' is both anti free speech and extremely unhealthy in a democracy. One person's investigative reporter is another persons 'conspiracy theorist'...

Nope, sorry. I'm not impinging on anyone's free speech rights by using the term "conspiracy theorist." I'd argue it's also rather healthy term to use in a democracy, since a democracy will fail to function effectively if such thinking becomes too dominant.

One person's investigative reporter is another persons 'conspiracy theorist' depending on your beliefs and views. You are promoting your beliefs and views on this thread, and attempting to argue about the credibility of a writer you don't agree with or believe. This is what the broader thread is about, you're proving my point again.

> One person's investigative reporter is another persons 'conspiracy theorist' depending on your beliefs and views. You are promoting your beliefs and views on this thread, and attempting to argue about the credibility of a writer you don't agree with or believe. This is what the broader thread is about, you're proving my point again.

And some people think ancient aliens and UFOs are serious areas of study, but most reasonable people think it's nonsense. That disagreement on this kind of thing is possible doesn't make every perspective equally credible or vital.

I actually agree with your point:

>>>>> To presume to know anything about what goes on in the rarified power struggles at an intercontinental/global levels requires free speech and giving serious researchers/writers a viewable voice.

Where I disagree is that people like Whitney Webb can shed any more light on those power struggles than Bob Lazar. If the article of hers that I read is a good representation of her oeuvre, she offers tendentious and misleading interpretations of already public information. I think the best that can do is offer a false sense of deeper understanding.

A real deeper understanding needs someone to take serious risk, like Edward Snowden did, to bring secret things into the light.

You're all over the map with Bob Lazar & Edward Snowden here. Webb has done amazing work on uncovering Maxwell/Epstein facts and connections ignored by the corporate media. Your idea that 'reasonable people' ignore anything not promoted and discussed in the corporate media (Snowden for example) again proves my point.

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