The Sovietization of the American Press | Hacker News Reader

The Sovietization of the American Press

taibbi.substack.com

130 pointsandrenth78 comments

To me its crazy too about how the rioters in the Capitol are rightly prosecuted, but the riots in Portland Federal Courthouse as still going on and nytimes wont even mention it.

EDIT: I hate bringing politics on HN, but cnn/nytimes have become the mirror of fox. Biden/Democrats are wonderful and do no wrong, Trump/GOP are always doing bad things. Just as the Taibbi article says.

Not a single firearm was recovered from the Capitol riot. Only a few people are believed to have been carrying weapons, a few were charged.

In CHAZ / Seattle their self-proclaimed warlord was handing out AK47s from the back of a car. They set up blockades with semi-automatic weapons and intentionally murdered two teenagers, shooting at their vehicle.

But yeah, the great superpower almost got couped by the guy in the buffalo hat, walking around calmly like a moron. The Capitol Police intentionally, very plainly, let the rioters walk into the building (opening the doors and standing aside), and it's all on video, which you can find across Twitter. None of this is allowed to be discussed, all of it is being aggressively censored by the big technocrat autocracy.

I heard the term Blue Anon the other day for the first time. So I go to Google to find out what it is. Google had censored the term and results. That was the first time I got the chill of feeling like I was living in firewall China. You'd think that term led to something illegal, but no, it was trivial, and they still couldn't stand it and had to try to control it.

The theater game going on in DC right now with the national guard? I've got one word for you: staged.

It's a sick joke. The cultural civil war is well underway.

edit: and of course now this link is being censored from HN, naturally

Turns out the policeman who died was from a stroke, he wasn't hit with a fire extinguisher. Doesn't fit the narrative either.

> Not a single firearm was recovered from the Capitol riot. Only a few people are believed to have been carrying weapons, a few were charged.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/ron-johnso...

> Fourteen people tied to the Jan. 6 attack are facing federal charges related to bringing or using dangerous weapons inside the building and two are facing firearms-related charges, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

So 14 people may have had weapons out of several hundred thousands, and that's enough for Politifact to pretend it's an armed insurrection? They do have a certain sense of hyperbole. So these 14 people were going to take the Capitol in hostage and hold power with what means exactly? It's not like the US military would be afraid of a few guys with guns...

> of several hundred thousands

That’s extremely inaccurate.

> several hundred thousands

Several thousand, coming from Trump's rally which only had about 20k total.

What I said is correct. Only a few people were charged, no firearms were recovered from the riot, and few people were carrying.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/03/04/fac...

"The U.S. Department of Justice has charged at least three people on gun charges stemming from the Jan. 6 riot, including one whom prosecutors said Metro police found carrying a loaded handgun with an extra magazine."

Whoa, three people! They nearly took down the great superpower! Close call.

As we've learned from the super unbiased media, governments work on a "king of the hill" system so if a guy in a wolf hat gets into your government building and does some chants then he's the new king. Thats literally the definition of armed insurrection according to CNN.

According to your link, 7 people were found carrying guns, and 7 people carrying other weapons - or, "a few". So I assume you are linking it as evidence to support the parent.

It's pretty bizarre how much overlap there is between HN commenters and people who have been rewired by the Facebook news feed.

I believe Garland was asked about this specific issue in his hearing. He said that the distinction was that in Portland the 'riots' are not disrupting the normal function of government.

I like Merrick Garland, and thought it was tragic he's not on the Supreme Court.

That being said, the riots in PDX (my brother lives there, and I was there in the summer when it was happening) were an example of a complete, willful capitulation of local government to radicals. The Capital Riot was an involuntary capitulation of the police to radicals. There is something very insidious about the former. It's reminiscent of the local government collaboration/capitulation to the KKK in 1960s Dixie.

Also, what about the occupation of several blocks in Seattle all summer long? People in congress who said absolutely nothing about a months long, armed occupation that took place with no buy-in from residents have moaned and feigned fear for their lives over a single, day long occupation of their workplace. I completely lost respect for Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez over the appalling disconnect between her perception of danger, vs the actual danger she was in during the riot. It really had the hallmarks of narcissism when viewed with the perspective of utter silence and indifference to the armed occupation of an entire neighborhood of Seattle for weeks.

President Obama's final interview before leaving office included a statement of his deep concern for the "balkanization of the media" landscape. He was right.

The armed "security" in CHAZ killed an unarmed black teenager and it was a non-story.

He drove at them after driving recklessly through a park. The shooting got lots of press coverage. The city dismantled the protest zone the next day and sent in the police the day after.

That wasn't the only black teenager killed in CHAZ. That was the second incident.

And they absolutely didn't dismantle the protest zone the next day. They dismantled the protest zone the day after protesters showed up outside of the mayor's house.

The glossed over and inaccurate nature of your comment reminds me of talking to someone who watches highly partisan media. I'm going to take a wild guess that you thought CHAZ was a good idea, didn't you?

The shooting they mentioned was June 29.[1] City workers removed barricades June 30.[2] Police cleared the area July 1.[3]

You seem to be talking about Lorenzo Anderson. He was shot just outside the protest area. The person identified as the shooter wasn't security. People who knew both of them said it was a long running feud.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200629153640/https://www.seatt...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630174716/https://www.seatt...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200702035844/https://www.seatt...

What about the functioning of the populace and business? The purpose of government is to have a stable society, letting those things go seems to completely fly in the face of all of that.

Translation: It doesn't affect the ruling class or the elite class so who cares?

Which is silly -- if they damage the building at night, and the people can't work there the next day, doesn't that 'disrupt the normal function of government'?

Simple. The people at the Capitol were not their rioters so they were armed hostage takers, a thrust for a coup, armed insurrectionists etc.

The people at the Portland Federal Courthouse are their rioters who are brave dissenters expressing civil disobedience in the tradition of Gandhi and MLK. They are advancing the cause of marginalized communities who lack a voice. Portland is a tertiary city so no govt business of note happens at the federal courthouse hence no disruption of normal function. /s

See how easy it is? Of course when the tables are turned the other side will do the same inversion and law and order will degenerate and so will our society.

Maybe because one is actually a treasonous riot and the other just a protest?

Treason is kind of a stretch.

A real coup involves the military and people actually taking over the role of government. We were not even close to that. January 6th was incredibly embarrassing, but it wasn't even a proper attempt at overthrowing the government.

The Capitol riots were basically just the kind of thing that happens when you have too many morons in the same place at the same time. Sort of a critical mass of idiocy.

> it wasn't even a proper attempt at overthrowing the government

It was a difference of competence, not intent, and even an incompetent attempt poses grave dangers. John Hinkley Jr. didn't make a "proper" attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, but he paralyzed James Brady and -- despite not firing a single shot on target, just as "embarrassing" as any of the Capitol rioters -- came very very close to killing the president.

The mental gymnastics to reach this conclusion (assuming you are not being scarcastic) are astounding!

When did the rioters in Portland breach the building ?

So... trying to set government buildings on fire with people inside is okay as long as you don't enter... got it.

Nice deflection - pure ad hominem with no supporting facts or counter argument. I wonder what you are trying to say.

> just a protest?

That's called bending reality after half of year of burning and looting in major cities I guess?

treasonous

Genuine question: what do you think about “autonomous zones”? Isn’t seceding from the state usually pretty serious? The US fought a civil war over it last time someone did that.

Many states have autonomous regions.

The capitol riot was a single event tied to a specific circumstance. Whilst the Portland situation has been ongoing in different forms since last summer. The continuation of that does not prove a lack of police action. Merely that police action has not effected the motivation of some people.

The FEDS & other entities have infiltrated all major dissident "movements" on the political left & right, paying/lightening sentences of convicted criminals and/or manipulating gullible ideologues to do sensationalist acts.

Que Bono? Many parties. News Outlets & Social Media get more clicks from the outrage, Agencies get bigger budgets, Shows are made, Startups can build products to "combat disinformation" & "fight censorship", Researchers receive grants to study the population, Politicians have a distracting cover story to pass legislation/EO's that would have caused alarm in calmer circumstances, etc.

It's all theater or Professional Wrestling. Enjoy the show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

I first learned about Kayfabe from here https://coronacircus.com/2020/06/02/welcome-to-kayfabe/

However you characterize the Capitol riot, it's fair to say it was a huge story. And the NYT flubbed it badly - they misreported the most incendiary detail, spreading the false claim that a police officer had been bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher wielded by members of the mob. But NYT seems to have suffered zero loss of status due to this - very peculiar.

Also interesting was that the only TV reporter on the ground when the event was happening was from ITV News, a British station.

> But NYT seems to have suffered zero loss of status due to this - very peculiar.

Not peculiar at all: in the modern age of constant media feeds, what matters most is something to post and get views/clicks. Whatever happens after that is immaterial

This is why I began actively avoiding the news. What they show is arbitrary: their real goal is just making you think there's a breaking scoop in the next few minutes/posts, so keep consuming. If it's uninteresting, boring, incomplete, or misreported as in your example, it doesn't matter to them. So why should it matter to us?

Why is this post flagged? It’s like someone actually wants to prove the author correct in his views.

There's plenty of places for flamewars; and the HN mods try to avoid hosting them. I can't disagree, the flamewars need to happen, but they don't have to happen here, and the HN policies have been applied with a consistent excellence that I respect.

I found the article interesting is all, probably because I just read a historical fiction book on post wwi Russia and so I thought it was a thought provoking article, that is good to discuss even if biased.

I think it is a fair point, and flagging it just seems to prove the point that criticism of “The Party” isn’t allowed.

I think HN mods do a good job too, but that is why this is disappointing to me. I’ve seen far more biased articles around politics, causing much more heated flame wars than this, that haven’t been flagged.

Users flag. Not moderators.

Oh. I didn’t know how it works.

The mods will regularly remove flags from articles that are coming from a progressive point though, so I don't think the "no flamewars/flame bait" actually holds water.

I’ve brought this up on an article flagged in the past questioning the covid lockdown, but it was from a statistical based view and while I disagreed with some of the authors conclusions others I agreed with. That article’s flag was removed and dang responded to my comment. I wouldn’t assume all the moderators are biased.

I don't think it's an all out censorship-bias that you'd see on some echo chamber subreddit.

Rather, it's the moderators deciding that this submission isn't "interesting" and therefore remains flagged while the umpteenth anecdote about "X is discriminating against women" is interesting and novel and is totally not flamebait or identity politics and is therefore protected from being flagged.

It's fine, it's their site. I don't think it's useful to have illusions about it though.

Maybe HN should support flagging moderators’ misapplied flags? :shrug:

Yes, we have one party here. But so does America. Except, with typical extravagance, they have two of them!

- Julius Nyerere

It arguably wasn't even a legitimate win, and questioning it was censored away by big tech, as well as censored during the election period (e.g. the Hunter Biden story).

This censorship was executed brazenly and openly.

See: https://www.creators.com/read/dennis-prager/01/21/the-most-i...

Many of us on the centre-right are fed up and aren't even engaging anymore. I've unfollowed all my politics feeds. The left can eat themselves for the next 4 years.

Yeah, this is where I'm at too. Whenever I see any story from WaPo or NYT I refuse to click. The lies and blatant propaganda are just too much for me. My values have shifted quite a bit in the last year, with the rise of the crazy cancel culture, censorship, and race baiting.

Honestly I wish I had been born in China at this point. I would rather not be able to criticize the government than live in this stupid politically correct shithole.

If you think about the Press as being the SEC, and the political elite as Wall Street, what we have today is a full regulatory capture of the corporate media by each political party.

The GOP got Fox, WSJ, and a bunch of smaller players.

The Democrats got basically everything else.

It should be noted that only the elite, corporate friendly wings of each party controls these media orgs. Not the more grassroots elements.

Just a quick note that I consider WSJ (Wall Street Journal) neutral, they mostly report on business news and I find their news to be fairly non-biased.

I just finished reading “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles, and it gives good (though likely biased) context after the Bolshevik Revolution, that made reading this article more thought provoking than I think it would be.

Though even if you hate Biden, he isn’t Stalin, just as Trump wasn’t Hitler. The media is absurd to me though. Seriously they lack any sort of principle it seems. Whatever “The Party” is doing is right. (For Fox News the party being Republican, and democrat for all else)

And of course - flagged.

The news is catering to people's appreciation of the change from the Trump era. We'll get bored with it after a while, and they'll have to spice things up.

I think it's very difficult to figure out where we go from here, though. American mainstream media has always aspired to be nonpartisan in the sense of being politically inclusive, a common ground where people come to get not only facts but also a sense for the range of reasonable opinion about the issues of the day. How can you give a sense for the breadth of opinion in a country that contains congressional districts that elected both Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC? (To be clear, I don't mean to denigrate AOC by mentioning her in the same breath as Greene.) How can you maintain journalistic integrity and also present opinions that can only be explained by repeating a litany of known falsehoods?

I think it will require a new approach from staid old-school media outlets that tend to make everything sound blandly reasonable unless they are actively denouncing it. That approach won't last, because it's tiring to read the same outrage time after time. Soviet press could get away with it because they had a monopoly, but American newspapers won't keep doing something that wears on readers. They need to figure out a way to inform readers of the full range of beliefs of Americans without making them all sound reasonable, and at the same time without endlessly resorting to outrage.

what if... the soviets had had an internet and computers? what would have come from central planning? would it have been a failure?

Maybe the chinese will answer this questions...

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet...

>Maybe the chinese will answer this questions...

I think they did that already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

That doesn't answer his question.

A giant network who can control what your allowed to, where do you spend your money and which civil service you can use, and having surveillance from your smartphone to streets-cameras truth face-recognition? Yes i think that answers his question perfectly.

you can see how central planers screwd us economy, and how seeds of capitalism turn china in to top economy.

27% of chinese peoples (in 2011) have around 5$ per day...top economy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

Snide Response: In Soviet Russia, media watches you!

Substantive Response: Mass Produced Journalism, be it's consumption or production, is purely a therapeutic exercise for the vain and the neurotic. Actual Investigative Journalism is dangerous for the investigators.

The only thing keeping journalist outfits going is the monumental amount of blackmail they've accumulated since the dawn of the camera. We all get to suffer with the journalist's delusions of grandeur because they have footage of a Rothschild grandchild slumming it once.

To your latter point, the Jeffrey Epstein case was the first time I'd really considered kompromat on American politicians and other elite as a prime motivation for many of the decisions we see out of DC. Was that also an eye opener for others? Maybe it just reflects naivety or lack of imagination on my part.

Understand why Bezos bought WaPo now?

Big ol' CIA-authorized blackmail stash in their archives

It's a shame that the necessary work of criticizing our media is so often undertaken dishonestly.

>When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties

This is not what happened.

Donald Trump denied that the Saudi royalty was known to be behind the murder of Khashoggi despite the conclusions of U.S. intelligence. He was part of the coverup, obscuring the known facts to preserve his relationship with bin Salman. Joe Biden, on the other hand, said bin Salman was responsible for his murder but decided not to penalize him.

Both of those decisions are unacceptable to me. That does not make them the same.

Say what you will about the New York Times, but they rarely tell lies as brazenly as Mr. Taibbi.

Also interesting is a comparison of the articles of Trump and Obama by Wikipedia's founder

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Hacker news?

pg is a known fan of the cancel culture complaint think tank industrial complex

Cool cool. Is that why it got flagged?

I would argue that many of these changes the world is going throught are technological in principle.

the perpsective that the pandemic merely accelerated already ongoing trends towards remote work, and the growth of internet-centric society?

i.e. all because of the internet?? I know it's a stretch...

It just amazes me how QAnon crazy opinion pieces are making it to the front page of HN now. I find this way more disturbing than I should I guess.

How can it be crazy if you can literally see the different headlines for the same thing?

Matt Taibbi is QAnon now? What isn't QAnon in your mind?

At least two of the articles cited as problematic are opinion columns.

>Biden's historic victory for America

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/06/opinions/biden-gop-relief-bil...

> the paper joined most of the rest of the press corps in howling in outrage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trum...

So, you are saying that editors, publishers of the paper just print whatever opinion pieces they receive?

Opinion columns openly take sides. They are not news and they do not pretend to be so.

Yes, that's the point. One side is being taken.

Oh sure, the left definitely just falls in line and makes excuses to protect their own regardless of issue or logic.

Except not. The left DESTROYS their own. I think you have parties confused.

Reaching for "soviet" comparisons is like going to a Nazi reference, the conversation is essentially over.

Both parties destroy their own.

There are a number of anti-Trump Republican politicians. For standing up to Trump, they face primary challenges and other career-affecting blow-back.

The left also destroys its own sometimes. An interesting recent case is Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who after (1) making a decision that we now understand is poor which lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths, (2) forced a government health organization to change a report solely for political reasons, (3) has bullied pretty much everyone in New York state politics, AND (4) now has 6 credible (i.e., not necessarily true, but believable) accusations of impropriety from women that worked for him, Democrats are suggesting that maybe he be investigated.

The comparison to the Soviets should always be careful. The original article does a good job showing actual examples of the parallels, so we can see that the comparison goes only as far as media treatment.

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