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Comment by qwantim1 | Hacker News Reader

The scary part of journalism is when it’s about activism vs. the truth. Activists can lie if the truth isn’t important.

Lying for ratings, though, is also very bad.

Activists lying for both activist causes and ratings is extremely bad.

Activists, at the very least, exaggerate wildly. I’m a huge fan of and regular donor to the ACLU. But I had to stop reading their newsletter because Anthony Romano (or whoever writes these newsletter updates in his name) has a loose relationship with the truth. I would read about some criminal case they were involved in, and work up the intended frothy outrage. Then I’d read the Wikipedia article on it, and find out that they’d left out hugely important facts and mischaracterized the whole story. There was one about a teenager who had gotten together with a gang of his friends and murdered a pizza delivery driver in broad daylight in front of his family. The newsletter completely left that part out, making it seem like he was simply present when his friends had unexpectedly done something. Now there was a real legal issue buried in there. The folks on the legal side are top notch—and it’s entirely right and proper to get a bad person off on a technicality to defend an important legal principle. But the ACLU PR team would just fluff up the underlying story to make the party involved seem sympathetic as well.

I can stomach this and just not read the newsletter when it comes to activist organizations. They’re in the business of leveraging outrage to further good causes. The blurring of lines between activism and journalism, however, is a total disaster. When the media whitewashes issues to further some perceived good cause, all it does is light their credibility on fire.

The ACLU went off the deep end sometime in the last 20 years.

Ok, but can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and please not use HN primarily for political battle? We're trying to avoid those things here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The same is true for science. Just recently there was an article that claimed that global warming is responsible for the corona pandemic. What a load of bullshit, and the "scientists" probably knew it very well.

Virologists are getting sponsored by the pharma industry, climate researchers are green warriors (while at the same time being funded by insurance companies), social scientists going completely off the rails turning universities into ideological war zones. These are interesting times, we have to be careful.

Have you got a link to that article?

And I wonder how much “good” scientists lend their support to not-so-great scientific claims out of fear that refuting them might damage the public’s trust in “science” as a whole.

Only found this article, but it is directly from the PIK, which is considered the highest authority on climate research in Germany:

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/climate-chang...

If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything suddenly starts looking like a nail.

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