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Comment by notsureaboutpg | Hacker News Reader

The NYT lied to the American public to whip them up into supporting the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent).

Why won't AWS, Google, and Apple collectively ban them? Their open calls for violence were far more consequential and severe and serious than anything on Parler

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The Iraq war is a great example because it highlights how rare this is. You had to go back 15 years to find an example of the mainstream media misleading people on this scale.

It can be true that both:

- The NYT deserves a lot of blame for the lead up to the iraq war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War)

- Newspapers generally do a really good job of fact checking the articles they print

There's a really good reason for that. Journalistic standards are a defense in court against lawsuits. The truth is a defense against Libel.

But further, even just acting in good faith can be a defense against libel. It's only when you knowingly publish a false statement that you get in legal hot water.

This is why Fox news and the like have been doing 180s on voter fraud lies. It's not because they have the best interest of the public at heart, it's because they are trying mitigate liability.

>You had to go back 15 years to find an example of the mainstream media misleading people on this scale.

Have you forgotten 3 years of the MSN saying Trump's presidency was illegitament because he stole the election by coluding with the Russians?

I missed anyone on MSN(BC) saying his election was illegitimate. There were questions about it, for sure. There was the essentially incontrovertible fact that he won in the EC without winning the popular vote, which is an unfortunate feature of our system. That does lend a certain sense of "illegitimacy" but not in the sense of something illegal having happened, more a sense of "moral legitimacy". A few weeks after his election, the overwhelming majority of progressives accepted that Trump was the officially elected president of the USA. We didn't like it, but we accepted it.

The issues regarding Russian interference were not centered on collusion, but on ... well, interference (which some believe went so far as to include actual collusion).

Mueller's report and the Senate report did find conclusively that the Russians did interfere, and did so with the goal of getting Trump elected. Mueller said that they did not find evidence of active collaboration between the campaign and the Russians ... here's the current Wikipedia summary:

>did not find sufficient evidence that the campaign "coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities". Investigators ultimately had an incomplete picture of what happened due to communications that were encrypted, deleted, or not saved and due to testimony that was false, incomplete, or declined. However, the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion" but was welcomed by the Trump campaign as it expected to benefit from such efforts

Again, I recall essentially nobody in any position of power (certainly not elected Senators) saying the Trump's election was illegitimate. People did say that his election was aided by Russian interference (Mueller and the Senate investigation state this clearly), and that it was/is unfortunate to have a president elected without winning the popular vote.

I see the parallel you're trying to draw here but it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm pretty sure the US was going to war in Iraq no matter what NYT said, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

The faulty NYT reporting gave the government a certain level of cover to allow them to do what they already planned to do. Parler was a forum for participants to discuss and actively plan sedition. And there's already violence threatened in the days around inauguration so it stands to reason it could have served the same role again.

The actual reason for the war: an informant fed the government bad intel and the state looked the other way because they wanted a reason to invade Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

"the actual reason for the war...because they wanted a reason" Agreed.

> which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent).

Actually, looking up the numbers right now, the total civilian death rate is perhaps 1 million at most, more likely somewhere in the 100,000s. Iraq Body Count gives ~200k civilian deaths; estimation from the number of internally-displaced peoples (basically figuring that displaced-to-dead ration is between 5:1 and 10:1) suggests a number more like ~700k civilian deaths. Extrapolating excess death counts suggest that the latter number is more accurate.

The NYT did not make the Iraq war possible. It did not facilitate planning the war. It did not play any role in convincing the Bush administration to go to war.

Can we stop with the "whataboutism" already?

They played a large role in selling the war to the public (manufacturing consent).

When the state is lying, it is not easy for reporters to find out that they are lying. They printed what was at the time a bipartisan consensus which had formed on the basis of lies.

So I guess they were involved, but the journalists in the organization in the time did not have the power or the information to swim against the currents of what was happening. Even if they had shut down their paper, we would have gone to war with Iraq.

On the other hand, Parler has purposefully created a space for people to plan violence against the state, and refused requests to be more careful about moderating.

> They printed what was at the time a bipartisan consensus which had formed on the basis of lies.

And that is why truth by consensus is not a good way for a reporter to report compared to actually investigating somethng beforehand.

Have you ever seen anyone seriously defend what Judith Miller (et al.) actually did?

Reframing pointing out hypocrisy as "whataboutism" is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

Every tiny paradox or inconsistency can be reframed as hypocrisy, to the point where that term has lost its meaning.

Maybe.

But all humans are self-serving hypocrites, it is in our nature.

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