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Comment by agentdrtran | Hacker News Reader

"Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat,"

There have been a virtually uncountable number of high-profile investigative pieces that criticise people in power published in the last 6 months! This argument is nonsense.

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This is an oversimplification. There's a difference between rocking someone else's boat and rocking the one you're riding on.

There’s two social groups, they don’t want to critique their social group.

Many more than two social groups.

Sure, pedantically.

Alternatively, us & them = 2

Yeah, and they are published either by socialites from a group that hates the group being exposed, or by "freaks" like Greenwald that no one with a public persona wants near them because they know he's a time bomb.

Long live the freaks of the world. We need them more than ever.

A-men

Here's to the rebels...

Please show me a high-profile investigative piece from the mainstream media against Biden.

It was the New York Times that originally broke the Biden Ukraine story back in 2015. Recent iterations of it are mostly just rehashing the original article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/world/europe/corruption-u...

Come on. This was not what OP implied. Of Biden as a candidate, L6M. Impossible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukr...

May 1st, 2019

It's not nonsense, because you're missing that if you criticize someone who you are allowed to criticize, there is no risk to yourself. It's going against the herd and criticizing someone like Joe Biden that will get you thrown out of the club.

So, if it's a high-profile investigative piece on a senior trump admin official, everyone will applaud you. But as soon as you start investigating the Biden family or, on the other hand, write something positive about Trump & Co, then you'll quickly find yourself out of the club.

You are right, but it goes both ways. If a writer at the Federalist or Breibart tried to publish a piece arguing AOC's economics actually had some merit, they would not be met with an enthusiastic response from their professional and social circles.

Polarization and factionalism on both sides of the media is the problem.

The right doesn't try to get people fired for saying they like AOC. They will just hit back with their own points. That's the way it's supposed to go in a civil society.

Can you say with a straight face that the NY Times or WaPo has done that with liberals or Democratic candidates? Outside of tearing down Bernie Sanders I'd say it's a firm no.

Prominent liberals like Alan Dershowitz say they're being socially blacklisted for not taking part in a pile on against Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/alan-dershowitz-martha...

Even being "neutral" is apparently not enough. It's easy to see why journalists and editors would succumb to that social pressure.

> Prominent liberals like Alan Dershowitz say they're being socially blacklisted for not taking part in a pile on against Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/alan-dershowitz-martha...

Not going to directly engage with your argument, but this framing is frankly absurd. Alan Dershowitz is not "neutral" with regards to Trump, he was literally part of his legal defense team!

> Not going to directly engage with your argument, but this framing is frankly absurd. Alan Dershowitz is not "neutral" with regards to Trump, he was literally part of his legal defense team!

That article is dated a year and half prior to Trump’s impeachment. Dershowitz disagrees with Trump on policy matters on just about everything. What he doesn’t do is let his political disagreements pervert his legal opinions on constitutional matters. And hence he gets blacklisted for not joining the hate.

> he doesn’t do is let his political disagreements pervert his legal opinions on constitutional matters

I think the idea of the "apolitical" constitution is more myth than reality. Dershowitz is perhaps a liberal in the classic political philosophy sense, but I would not call him a "prominent liberal" in the American sense.

He also might have been 'blacklisted' because he was at least somewhat credibly accused of pedophilia.

> Dershowitz disagrees with Trump on policy matters on just about everything. What he doesn’t do is let his political disagreements pervert his legal opinions on constitutional matters.

Like when Dershowitz defended Trump during the impeachment hearings, on grounds that he hadn't been shown to commit a crime, that were very tendentious and rejected by constitutional scholars? Give me a break, the man's judgement is completely compromised.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/1/30/legal-experts-r...

Dershowitz defended Trump because he wanted the US Embassy moved to Jerusalem. He played Trump like a fiddle.

NYT consistently reported on Hillary Clinton's e-mails all throughout the 2016 campaign.

That was 4 years ago. The polarization of NYT has significantly advanced since then, culminating in the Tom Cotton op-ed, which set off an internal revolt at the Times, with staffers coordinating pushback across Twitter. This led to the resignation of James Bennet, the editor of the op-ed section, the reassignment of Jim Dao, the deputy editor, and the resignation of Bari Weiss.

Unsurprising though after the duel crises of their deficiencies reporting on the Bush administration and then Trump. People often attempt to correct the wrong problem, like having a kid to save a marriage.

I recall the editorial team publishing a statement suggesting their neutralist approach (including publishing news that hurt Hillary’s campaign) was providing Trump too much of an advantage and commuting themselves to a more or less activist angle.

And her loss seems to have been a turning point for how they cover democratic candidates.

> Prominent liberals like Alan Dershowitz

While at least notionally a Democrat (and one who claims to be a liberal one) Dershowitz is to the right of even the mainstream of the dominant corporatist neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party. And sometimes quite far to the Right, such as his eager advocacy for (not defense of something already being done, but advocacy for a new and novel policy) a systematic and public policy of specific collective punishment by Israel against the Palestinian population in violation of international humanitarian law, or his proposal for "torture warrants" in the early 2000s.

> say they're being socially blacklisted for not taking part in a pile on against Trump

Dershowitz has been one of the right-wing's favorite "liberal Democrats" for a lot longer than the Trump Administration, and has been marginalized by the left of center and increasingly the Democratic mainstream for that from the early 2000s, even before the accusations that he wasn't just Epstein's lawyer, but also a significant client, and his recent campaign against the ACLU.

He's not been marginalized just because he hasn't taken part is a "pile on" against Trump.

The irony of claiming that the NY Times never tears down liberals by posting a link to the NY Times publishing criticism of liberals on Martha's Vineyard is quite amusing.

> There have been a virtually uncountable number of high-profile investigative pieces that criticise people in power published in the last 6 months! This argument is nonsense.

They have been attack dogs of one political party or the other. But its always been this way. Social media ( especially twitter ) has shown people that journalists are political actors, not dispensers of "truth". They are part of the power structure, not a counterweight to the power structure.

At this point most newspapers should just be part of the democratic, republican or intelligence agency because that's all they are.

I can almost guarantee that most of the people here attacking greenwald and partaking in the downvote brigade are news employees or members of a particular political party. It's hilarious.

A nihilist regarding truth, I see. You might want to watch this video to see why that's a dangerous attitude, and one that plays into the hands of morally unscrupulous actors and foreign adversaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nknYtlOvaQ0

"Everything is shit and everyone is guilty" is the exact thing an autocrat needs the majority of his citizens to believe to remain in power.

> A nihilist regarding truth

Nope. I believe in truth. My point is that the news industry isn't in the business of truth. They have never been. The news is in the propaganda business. They exist to form opinions. It's why pretty much every news company around the world was formed by a politician, banker, industrialist or government. If trump created "Real News Company", I'm sure you'd say only the naive would view such a company as a purveyor of truth right?

> You might want to watch this video to see why that's a dangerous attitude, and one that plays into the hands of morally unscrupulous actors

You might also look up the history of the news industry, manufacturing consent, etc. And the morally unscrupulous actors are the major news companies.

The real danger is not from those who question the news, it's from those who blindly view it as the truth.

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