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Comment by dimitrios1 | Hacker News Reader

Yet I don't recall anyone questioning Buzzfeed News when they dropped their bombshell story years back. I remember the defenders saying something along the lines of "If the news is newsworthy and constitutes journalism, then the publication it was produced in shouldn't matter"

As HN audience mostly claim to be full of "independent thinkers" we should have no problem with this being published by the Post if it indeed is legitimate, correct?

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Buzzfeed was previously famous for apolitical clickbait articles and quizzes, they practically invented the genre. New York Post, meanwhile, has been a tabloid-level spreader of pro-conservative and anti-progressive misinformation. It's smart to be skeptical of obviously politically motivated reporting from any outlet, but especially so when one has such a concerning track record.

It's hilarious to me that the Post is now viewed as pro conservative. Framing the Post as pro-conservative is like calling Joe Rogan alt right. Finding some of the progressivism that has performed a hostile takeover of the democratic party hilarious, contradictory, and satire-friendly automatically makes you pro-conservative.

How is that funny or surprising? Every source that mentions political leaning of news media says they're right wing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post

https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-post

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-post/

Is all of the right wing conservative? Is all of the left progressive?

(turns out human beings don't fit neatly into these nice little categories)

> Is all of the right wing conservative?

Yes. That's literally the definition: "the conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system."

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+right+wing

Idk if it is that simple. Right also often refers to pro-capitalism, pro-business, low taxes.

The NY Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has been a conservative-media mogul for over 30 years.

Did you confuse the NY Post with the Washington Post?

There is skeptical and there is censorship.

Buzzfeed has been deemed left, which is a category beyond left-leaning, by an objective fact-checker [1].

As one example of why:

> In June 2016, the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 BuzzFeed stories about Barack Obama, 65 were positive, 34 were neutral, and one was critical.

[1] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/buzzfeed-media-bias

I don't think having more positive stories about a Democratic president makes a publication left-leaning, especially given that Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.

This is coming from someone who did not agree with most of Obama's policy decisions but at least could respect his integrity.

> I don't think having more positive stories about a Democratic president makes a publication left-leaning, especially given that Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.

This gave me a real chuckle.

It’s easy to not be “actively involved in scandalous behavior” when the media refuses to consider anything you do scandalous or investigate it further. It’s a self fulfilling prophesy.

> Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.

Uhhhhh... Not involved in scandalous behavior that you knew of, perhaps. Fast&Furious [0] would have been a major scandal in a Republican administration (despite the fact that it was started by a previous president), and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was a massive step in the erosion of civil liberties in the US. These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure that there are others.

Not to say that Obama was a bad president, but "no scandals I've heard of" and "no scandals" aren't quite the same thing.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal#2009%E2...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

Or using the IRS to target conservative organisations. Or spying on journalists to identify leakers. Plus the attempts to further destabilise the middle east and its disastrous effects.

Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).

> Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).

Obama might be a political opponent of Trump’s (despite not being on the ballot that year); but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things? The Russian interference / collusion was real and lead to multiple charges and convictions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_...

"but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things?" They did. They concluded that the Steele dossier was probably not reliable. They investigated anyway because their agenda was to get Trump out and throw Flynn in jail.

They investigated anyways because there were plenty of other reasons to suspect that Flynn was on the payroll of foreign powers, given that he was paid by the Russian state through their state run media RT in 2014 and accepted at least one paid speaking engagement from the Russian state in 2015 without seeking US government approval. Flynn later plead guilty to having lied to the government about some of these engagements (though he recently retracted his plea agreement). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-flynn-id...

There are a lot of primary sources detailing what happened in late 2016, early 2017, and we have no excuse not to read them to understand what happened. It’s shocking. Wikipedia is not going to be a reliable source on this, I’m afraid.

Regardless of what you think about the veracity of Wikipedia here, the list of references at the end of that article formed a tidy way to link to multiple court case primary sources.

> spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations

Something the Justice Department have concluded an investigation into and have filed no charges. Perhaps it’s time to find a new talking point.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/politics/william-barr-unmaski...

Read the primary sources - the investigative reports and the material (notes, texts, etc.). The reports have on more than one occasion stated that nobody involved is talking about their actions or behavior so we have no case, but the preponderance of evidence points to some seriously bad stuff going on. If your understanding of happened is based on a quick summary from CNN, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Don’t forget - the reason we don’t want this crap to happen is because the shoe always ends up on the other foot.

> the preponderance of evidence points to some seriously bad stuff going on

Do you really think the Trump Justice Department would shy away from releasing a statement saying exactly that, were it to be the case?

Obama had his share of scandals (and I am not saying that to downplay the clusterfuck that is the Trump admin; Obama's pale in comparison, but they are still there), like IRS targeting of right wing orgs, Operation Fast and Furious, drone-ing (of US citizens), all the Snowden revelations, and "Obama's war on whistleblowers" (as The Guardian called it), for example.

Or other things like the "De-Ba'athification" policy in Iraq which most likely played a major role in the empowerment of ISIS (not really a scandal, more of a failed policy, but yet something that can be criticized).

Point being, there was a lot of things to rightfully criticize about the Obama admin, and therefore Obama himself ("the buck stops here").

Fast & Furious was indeed a scandal as you and others have rightly pointed out but other than that I think we disagree on what a scandal is, I think there needs to be general public outrage for a scandal and we didn't see that except for with Fast & Furious. Sadly, our society didn't care about the US killing one of its citizens extrajudicially. I'm sure we'll look back on that behavior with regret as a nation in the future but I don't see that regret now.

The IRS targeting of right wing orgs was indeed a scandal but it turned out to not be true [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

The media never reported on any of his scandals because he never had any scandals because the media never reported on his scandals because....

Fast & Furious was a scandal (albeit a small one). There's a couple of other posters that outline things that should have been scandals but it's not that the media never reported it, it's that the public didn't get outraged.

Not enough people cared about the extra-judicial assassination of a US citizen because he was probably a terrorist so it only lasted one news cycle, that could have been a scandal but it was not. If people don't care about the behavior as being wrong then the event won't be a scandal.

How about when the ACLU "sued the Obama administration for detaining asylum seekers as intimidation tactic"? This was in 2014... Where was the uproar then?

See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-obama-administ...

Weird that nobody has mentioned Benghazi yet.

In 2010, left-leaning media agencies would post left-friendly news and not post right-friendly news. And right-leaning media agencies would post right-friendly news and not post left-friendly news.

In 2020, left-leaning media posts left-friendly news, and doesn't post right-friendly news. And right-leaning media posts right-friendly news AND STRAIGHT UP FALSEHOODS AND LIES DENYING RIGHT-UNFRIENDLY-NEWS, OR LIGHT-FRIENDLY NEWS.

It's not equivalent.

Don't confuse Buzzfeed with Buzzfeed News. The former is a full of lists and click-bait. The latter is an award winning news site.

What value does an award from journalists awarded to other journalists have?

What value to the Oscars have or the Emmy? Peer-awards mean that your competitors think you've done a good job and recognize that.

But even if you toss out peer-awards, Buzzfeed News has also won the Sydney award, which is awarded by the The Sidney Hillman Foundation, and was founded by the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, hardly a "journalistic" venture.

Well in that case, let me just clear my schedule to spend all of tomorrow performing an exhaustive fact check of the credibility of this story. /s

It turns out that journalism is hard to do correctly. As an "independent thinker" I'm going to independently decide to not trust a publication with the reputation of the NY Post until it's been corroborated.

So glad I see this sentiment on here. I am still blown away by HN readers inability to critically analyze news sources. If this was some research paper it would have been put under the microscope by HN readers.

It helps that research papers on scientific domains have relatively easily verifiable data. It is much harder to claim ( not impossible ) that 1 is actually 0 if looked at from the right distance. Once we get to news ( assuming we bypass the whole conversation over how what passes for news is often opinion, or clickbait these days... ) you find out that 1s could indeed become 0s, you might not know all the facts, writers have bias, editors have bias, culture won't allow certain things to be said, polite society won't have a given phrase used.. the list just goes on and on.

It is not inability. It is just a ridiculous exercise in futility. Chomsky can barely do it. And he has way better memory, command of language and reasoning skills than I do.

I'm not sure what you're implying, Buzzfeed News is independent from Buzzfeed (the clickbait site) and they do real journalism.

So real they get themselves into obvious lying situations: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/business/media/buzzfeed-n...

Buzzfeed News doesn’t have listicles, but it doesn’t have journalistic standards either.

How was that a lie? The statement from Mueller's team was vague and hardly a real rebuttal. It just says that it's not accurate and provides no clarification at all.

They had two independent government sources, which doesn't even come close to comparing to this story where the entire source is a single repairman who can't even get their story straight.

And there's a very big difference between being fed wrong information from two sources and not doing enough to verify it, in a time where said information could be crucial, vs "lying" as you imply, which is what NY Post is doing.

>As HN audience mostly claim to be full of "independent thinkers" we should have no problem with this being published by the Post if it indeed is legitimate, correct?

I've not read any comments on HN that claims that they have a problem with "this being published by the Post" whether it's legitimate or not.

It's possible that I missed such comments, but I don't think so.

I would be grateful if you could point me at a few of them.

Nobody questioned NYPost when they broke the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal either [1]. That's because the reporting was incredibly solid. But this story is incredibly flimsy.

1: https://nypost.com/2016/08/28/anthony-weiner-sexted-busty-br...

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