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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

It is unfortunate that journalists of 2021 see an accountability issue with individuals who can speak privately - but devote zero characters to Gov officials who use private email to dodge accountability via FOIA.

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Most of the work done by some "journalists" in 2021 is regurgitating what they see on social media. They wouldn't want to be deprived of this low hanging fruit and go back to doing hard investigative work.

It's insulting to real journalists to call the people at media corporations that just browse social media all day and copy stories as "journalists." They are just part of a content mill creating medium that can be attached to advertisments.

> Most of the work done by some "journalists" in 2021 is regurgitating what they see on social media.

There is a sharp schism between subscription journalism and ad-supported content. For the most part, the former are doing investigatory work. For the most part, the latter are not.

I'll give you that paid outlets do more investigation, but they also do their fair share of filler stories based on AP releases, takes on press releases, or social media trends too

You aren't wrong.

Wasn't it the NYT, the model for online subscription funded journalism, that released that incorrect story accusing Marc Andreessen of saying the word "retard" on Clubhouse? That seems about as bottom of the barrel as it gets.

Many government officials just avoid using e-mail at all for sensitive subjects, thus side-stepping the issue entirely. I remember Janet Napoletano (Secretary of Homeland Security) saying that she did most of her business over the phone or in-person to avoid having it on record.

We have a real issue with partisan politics in the US and one of the pieces of fallout is that making a statement like that doesn't end your career. Laws on the public record exist to serve the general good and skirting them is indicative of taking actions you know will be met with general criticism and can't be justified.

> Laws on the public record exist to serve the general good and skirting them is indicative of taking actions you know will be met with general criticism and can't be justified.

Well, the counterargument is that it's indicative of taking actions that you know will be met with general criticism and can be justified.

Hrm - I'll have a go at being less vague. By actions met by general criticism and can't be justified I meant actions that would both be met with criticism and, given enough surrounding information, wouldn't remove the majority of criticism. National security positions will need to execute actions that are pretty opaque and distasteful to the general public but, with that additional information in hand, would be reasonable to most people. So arresting some fellow who looks like a family man but was actually organizing an attack would be generally criticized but justifiable - on the other hand most forms of torture tend to be ineffective at information gathering and cause excessive pain and suffering and are less justifiable.

For politicians I'm going to guess that a lot of stuff they don't want on record is specifically related to their self-betterment by somehow (even minorly) compromising their duty.

To be fair, we also have an epidemic of partial statements being taken out of context and used against their speaker. Often, when contextualized, the quote most likely means the opposite of what it's being used to claim. I can easily think of examples of this being done to politicians of both major US political parties, and a handful of foreign politicians as well.

A policy of staying off-record by default is not an unreasonable countermeasure to that problem.

This is generally advice in the private sector too, in case a lawsuit happens.

This is often part of compliance training in financial services. Don't communicate anything that even remotely seems sensitive or questionable over email or chat. It doesn't matter if it's totally innocent, all that matters is whether it can be taken out of context by the SEC or another body.

I mean, this is just plain common sense in the workplace, government or otherwise. Email is on record because of SOX or HIPAA or FISMA, so treat it accordingly.

Common sense would be not saying or thinking or acting on reprehensible things that someone would be afraid of having on record.

An email that, for example, threatens bad performance reviews if an employee doesn't show up at an optional after-hours company fundraiser, is something someone wouldn't want on record. That doesn't mean you should say it in-person in the break room where you're not on record instead of emailing it. It means you shouldn't use performance reviews as a weapon to coerce things you can't or won't contractually demand from employees.

Two tools are great for combating this sort of malfeasance:

First, slip an acknowledgement for the verbal request in an email. Something like "Hey, the company event Friday night which you mentioned was critical to my performance review. Is that business casual?" or "You told me to get this internal request for your project done before taking care of my urgent customer tickets, here it is." can help you keep a paper trail with implicit acknowledgement.

Second, as long as you're not in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or Washington, and you have an Android, install a call recorder app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.callrecord... was an app I used for a while in a sensitive situation. Even if you never use it, it's nice to have if something was to blow up.

William Brown - former mayor of San Francisco - was once asked why he didn’t have an email address. His response:

“You know what the E in email stands for? Evidence.”

Not that it really matters. His predecessors have all had plenty of evidence of corruption, have never been as productive as him and they still kept their jobs, so he probably just didn’t want to deal with checking his inbox.

Well when the same people that own media companies are lobbying and bribing politicians to receive throwbacks, seems pretty logical they'd view people speaking about this freely and privately as a problem.

The media doesn't work for us. It works for its shareholders and most media shareholders are pretty alright with corruption in government because they're part of it.

It's why I am such a fan of Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including his "Journalism Dollars" - which I don't think he coined as such, but has a similar purpose to his Democracy Dollars: $100 every year for every citizen to allocate to a journalist of their choice. This would wash out the money received from advertising by the mainstream media channels, and so the narratives that are bought directly or indirectly and lifted up into mainstream via those ad dollars being spent/received - would open up to many more narratives with much more nuance to them, and stories that citizens actually care about; it's important for Journalism Dollars to exist with Ranked Choice Voting and Democracy Dollars as well - so it's not just the 2 core narratives of the duopoly of the two party system being perpetuated/promoted.

All these dollars would go to a journalist who promises to give $50 back.

Easy problem to solve. You can implement mechanisms for integrity, e.g. whistleblower rewards for such behaviour.

Not an easy problem to solve.

Let's say you found out that someone was willing to give you $50 back if you give them $100, but then you also found out that there was a $100,000 reward for telling authorities about this scheme: don't you think at least someone will tell authorities about that scheme to get the $100,000 reward? Along with a sufficient jail time for the person/"journalist" running this scheme.

And that's not even taking into account that we'd likely require a trail for accounting to know exactly where money went, so that it can't simply be "cash spent" to give back $50 untraceable to a bunch of people.

Why don't you think that would work?

100% correct. Journalists are just looking for the adulation and affirmation of their fellow progressives, and do so by attacking the weak and defending the powerful.

Which officials are those?

How would we know which ones?

How does OP know that it happens, then?

It was a major issue around 2016, remember?

And again in 2018, as we all know too.

For future reference, Wikileaks 2016 has some examples

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