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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Let's go directly to the person who was trying to get the story published:[1]

>Giuliani told the Times he brought his documents to the Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."

The entire reason the story ended up specifically in the NY Post is because "the media" refused to publish it without attempting to ""prove that this evidence is in any way authentic".

It sounds like you really don't understand how journalism works if you think they will just publish everything regardless of the levels of supporting or contradictory evidence.

[1] - https://news.yahoo.com/giuliani-gave-hunter-biden-story-0547...

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Like the Steele dossier?

I'm not sure if this was an attempt at a gotcha question, but yes. The Steele dossier was very similar in that numerous news agencies refused to publish it due to their journalistic standards. Many aspects of the Steele dossier where eventually confirmed by further reporting or federal investigations. It is too early to say that is the case for these documents from Hunter Biden.

Most of the major papers published false (and hence unverified) claims from the Steele dossier before the 2016 election. Buzzfeed then published it in full in January 2017.

Look it up, it’s easy to find examples.

I don't know what you are considering examples of claims from the dossier or what you consider proven false means. Rather than me guessing, you could provide examples if you want me to make any effort to refute them. Otherwise I will point to the Wikipedia page which I believe backs up my previous comments[1]

>The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations, while Trump has denounced it as fake news...Some aspects of the dossier have been corroborated, in particular its main allegations that Putin and Russia actively favored Trump over Clinton and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had multiple secret contacts with Russians. However, many allegations in the dossier remain unverified. One allegation against Michael Cohen was dismissed by the Mueller Report, a court ruled that another of the claims was "inaccurate and misleading" and stated another claim was inaccurate. Goldman and Savage have described it as "deeply flawed". The Daily Telegraph has reported that anonymous sources believe Russian intelligence agencies may have sought to create doubt about the veracity of the dossier.

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

You’ve got about three levels of ad hominem attacks in this post.

These aren't ad hominem attacks because they get to the central issue we are discussing. Different news agencies have different reputations for verifying that authenticity of what they report. I'm not going to give a story in the National Enquirer the same credibility as a story published in the New York Times. It isn't an ad hominem attack to voice that opinion.

Although I do notice that you did not address the merit of my post. There is a little irony there.

No, they are ad hominem attacks because they only attack the credibility of the source and not the information.

As I’ve said, the NY Post is hardly a bastion of journalism. The thing is, neither is The NY Times, the Washington Post, or basically any media source other than CSPAN. They are all biased and anyone paying the slightest bit of attention over the past four years has noticed this. So to somehow claim that the “real journalists” would have done otherwise is absurd, considering that they’ve done the exact same thing repeatedly.

Everything is on the level of Fox News now.

You are the one who brought up the credibility of the media. How it is ad hominem to say that there are different levels of credibility? It is not a binary in which every news organization is either "CSPAN" or "Fox News". Some organizations are more committed to real journalism than others. The Post is not one of those organizations. This story ended up there because of this fact. Even Fox News turned it down over concerns about credibility.[1] Refusing to ignore that aspect of this is not an ad hominem attack.

[1] - https://www.mediaite.com/tv/exclusive-fox-news-passed-on-hun...

I didn’t say they were all equal, I said they were all biased. My only point was that criticizing the Post for publishing unverified information should mean you criticize the “real journalists” for doing the same thing. This has happened numerous times in the last four years.

I find it funny you were labelling my comments as ad hominem. I thought we were only allowed to discuss the merits of a specific story.

We were talking about the New York Post and the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't know what unverified information you are referring to here or how that would be relevant to this discussion. What is clear is that many "real journalists" were not satisfied enough with the evidence to publish it. That even includes organizations like Fox News that have a bias that would seem to align with publishing the story.

You seem more interested in personal attacks, insisting that I don’t understand journalism, etc. than discussing the story.

I’m sorry but I really have no interest in that kind of conversation. I’ve already made my points clear.

I legitimately don't know what you are considering to be a personal attack. You said the media don't care about verifying their stories. I said you don't understand journalism if you think that is true. That isn't intended to be a personal attack. Maybe there is something else I said that you took offense to. I will happily apologize if you point it out and it truly crossed a line.

You are free to ignore this since you said you have no interest in this conversation. If that is the case, I will take a cue from the upvotes I am receiving and the downvotes you are receiving that the HN community thinks I am in the right here.

If you think these news sources are all operating under the same amount of good faith, then I think the disinfo campaigns have succeeded. I see quite a bit of daylight between Fox and CNN.

The legitimacy of those networks are definitely still in question. I remember during the 2015 primaries, CNN got the nickname "Clinton News Network" because of the incredible amount of bias they showed. It seems to have only gotten more extreme (on both sides) since then.

Not to say that it was an ad hominem attack. The comment above was extremely relevant and got to the point.

Unfortunately I don’t see much difference anymore. CNN used to be the gold standard, but they have fallen into the partisan trap just as much as Fox. They just do a better job at presenting a polished viewpoint.

I don’t think that is true. I’m not defending CNN, I’m calling out Fox. Fox is pretty bad. Really bad.

If you ask me, Fox News, aside from its evening opinion-based shows, has been moving toward the center since Ailes left.

And CNN's home page looks more like an anti-GOP blog than a legit news site these days. Given that CNN was once my go-to news source back in the day, it's just sad.

I remember when all the major news sites, including Fox, covered essentially the same stories, albeit with a different spin.

What is your point? What are you trying to say?

Fox and CNN are not the same, whatever flaws CNN does have.

How are you evaluating this?

By watching a variety of news sources over the past four years?

Not meaning to attack you, but is it fair to say that your evaluation is entirely subjective?

Disinformation campaigns aim to change your lens of how you view, process, and store those evaluations. The experience you have can also be explained by having your heuristics changed from disinfo.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818637

Seems relevant to that response.

NONE of the news agencies are good faith actors anymore. It's all infotainment to the last atom. I mean, that's itself the subject of the linked blog post.

It's ok to recognize this. It's healthy to recognize this. It doesn't mean you wasted your time watching CNN (or Fox), it means you learned a valuable life lesson, one that vaccinates you against the next attack on your attention.

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