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Comment by dantheman | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget the media lied throughout that time too; let us not forget the craziness of satanic ritual abuse, or the lies that led to the vietnam war, etc...

The media and the government routinely mislead the public, look at in 2019 the intentional confusion of blackmarket thc vapes and tobacco vaping. Or more recently, the use of human trafficking.

To claim there was sometime in the past where the news was good and reliable would require overlooking a huge amount of actual historic malfeasance.

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There's a notable difference between:

  1) a media outlet that repeats government lies about why we are fighting a war (or how it is going)


  2) a media outlet that ignorantly repeats mistruths that are present in the (sub)culture

  3) a media outlet that makes up its own lies

We used to mostly have a mixture of 1 & 2, but we now have to contend with (3) as well.

In the early 2000s I went to “the south” for the first time, and on the news there was a story about a suspicious hanging of a black man ruled suicide, but his hands were tied behind his back and was dating the sheriff’s white daughter.

Found out a decade later that story never happened, and it was a big enough deal for it to be in the list of urban legends and a controversy of how the news decided to report it at the time.

We have been dealing with (3) for a very long time. We dont even know what’s polluted our minds as truth.

Reality almost never matches with your worst fears, reality is typically different and strange. You should be very skeptical if it matched your worst fears no matter what the source.

It seems as if your story corresponds with my (2), not my (3) ?

Hm I could see that, but to me “decided to report” in this case referred to making up its own lies

The difference only exists if you think government lies are better than subculture lies or private party lies. Lies are lies. There's plenty of 50-100yo examples of news organizations twisting the truth to benefit their stakeholders.

Extremely fair point. The entire Hearst empire was not exactly known for not playing fast and loose with the truth when it benefitted them, and there were, as you say, plenty of others.

> Don't forget the media lied throughout that time too; let us not forget the craziness of satanic ritual abuse, or the lies that led to the vietnam war, etc...

The satanic ritual abuse stuff was in the 80s early 90s. Lies that led to vietnam, sure. But also there were lies that led to the Iraq war in the more fractured Fox News/internet age so it seems like the more fractured, politicized news didn't help protect against that.

> To claim there was sometime in the past where the news was good and reliable would require overlooking a huge amount of actual historic malfeasance.

Sure, my point was there was a past where we had a more common narrative. That certainly has downsides, but now we're seeing that it had some advantages compared to our current fractured era.

Emma Goldman was writing about yellow journalism about prostitution and "the traffic in women" and liberal response to it back in 1910. It's 110 years later and Nicholas Kristof et al. are still publishing the same dreck in the New York Times, absolutely nothing has changed.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-whi...

> Don't forget the media lied

The significance of that varies by person. If you need social reinforcement to validate your interpretation of information the media lying is certainly significant, but then if you are more reliant upon social reinforcement you aren't acting on original interpretations of the information anyways. In other words this argument is moot.

I think it's still an argument, because in the real world, over 90% of the population is absolute cattle that do as they are told.

This upsets the 10% very much.

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