Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

It's clear that everything from NPR to Fox News is a propaganda machine - plain and simple.

Anyone who spends any time investigating any story will quickly find the truth.

Take the Capital's mostly peaceful protest on January 6 (sarcasm), where the 7 people who died. Did you know the only two who died violently that day were protestors and many news agencies retracted the death of the police officer "hit with a fire extinguisher"?

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/02/23/nolte-politif...

Two people died from "medial emergencies" and don't appear to have done anything besides attend trumps rally:

https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/who-are-the-four-who-died-in-t...

Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day and there have been arrests, supposedly he died of a stroke, but to-date no medical report has been released:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/15/politics/brian-sicknick-capit...

Estimates vary, but based on reporting on the ground, it appears there were at least 500,000 people there, so it's not super surprising that there would be quite a few natural deaths.

Further, it has to be the only armed insurrection in history where the insurrectionists primarily left their weapons at home.

Not saying what was done was moral, correct, etc (it wasn't), but after watching my own city burn in the BLM "mostly peaceful protests" I can't help but recognize the unadulterated falsehoods being propagated.

https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1298863702272344064?s...

Both are bad, both were riots, and all you have to do is look to see how bad it is. We don't need to make the death count worse or ignore other riots / crimes.

The general point, if the media would focus on reporting as opposed to pandering it would have trust. As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership. However, as soon as people realize they're being sold something, they forever lose that viewer.

I tend to trust journalists a bit more, such as Glenn Greenwald:

https://twitter.com/GGreenwald

They appear to be truly investigating.

> As the post points out, they're trying to sell their narratives to increase viewership.

This is a red herring - the amount of revenue/profit produced by news media outlets is trivial. Not just nominally as compared to any other industry, but also as compared to the other sources of income that the owners of these outlets have.

The primary reason for the editorial lines that large news outlets take is to push ideas through the electorate, and to generate references that politicians and businesspeople can use to justify their support of certain issues/legislation that the owners of those outlets also support.

They're public thinktanks, not carnival barkers.

500,000 people? Source?

https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossibl...

Can't find the exact segment, but these guys who provided the videos to multiple news sources claim minimum over 500k

https://youtu.be/mE-XvGMiyRQ?t=1488

"For sure hundreds of thousands"

Those who went to the Capital are probably less, I'm not sure anyone has estimated that. I'm sure many people left after Trump's speech.

Sorry, but a link to a video of two dudes on a podcast saying "for sure hundreds of thousands" is not evidence. Not even a picture of these hundreds of thousands? Absurd.

Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6.

Edit: registered White House press core

Edit: they had their cameras, that’s most of what you see on CNN if you saw police scenes of fighting

"Registered" with whom?

And they what? Forgot their cameras that day?

>Those are two registered reporters who provided much of the coverage Jan 6.

>Edit: registered White House press core

Isn't this just appeal to authority? It's not even a good authority. If he was a crowd counting expert, and was doing a count from a helicopter, I'd be more inclined to believe him. As it stands it's still some guy making a casual estimate from his very limited viewpoint.

500000 people, eh?

Here's a photo of Trump's Jan. 6 2021 crowd: https://nxsttv.com/nmw/wp-content/uploads/sites/107/2021/01/...

Here's 100000 people at a college football game: https://blog.lime.link/content/images/2018/12/100000.jpg

This was just a small section:

https://elmoudjaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Trump-add...

All the hotels were booked for 45 min around and in DC. That is literally hundreds of thousands of people.

>All the hotels were booked for 45 min around and in DC. That is literally hundreds of thousands of people.

Source? Specifically, what's the hotel capacity "45 min around and in DC", and what's the the normal occupancy rate (ie. last year, or in the weeks leading up to the protest)?

Holy crap, that's a bad photoshop job. Look how tiny people's heads are right next to a van, and trees, and lampposts. And they're all staring straight forward...at what? It's just ridiculous that people are peddling obviously faked pictures and then don't trust the "media". So bad.

Oh, this one might be 'shopped but it is not that inconsistent with photos from reputable news agencies (AFP, Getty, AP). The thing is it's still not half a million people. Whoever thinks it was is radically underestimating the volume of half a million people.

Regarding coverage of the Capitol riots - All Sides called out the bias in coverage compared to numerous past riots at the Capitol, just two days after the incident: https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-cover...

The choice of language is also important. Lots of people are using terms like “coup” or “insurrection” causally. The experts meanwhile note why this is not appropriate, with careful comparisons to historical incidents: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/06/why-this-wasnt-a-coup-c...

Does this matter to anyone? No. After constant amplification of a hyperbolic take on the Capitol riot, the truth seemingly doesn’t matter anymore and instead its derivative stories are the new battleground (for example “should social media increase censorship of moderates and conservatives”). In short, the damage has already been done, seemingly permanently.

We saw bias in the other direction last year, with underreporting of criminal political activity. Like you, my city has experienced a constant stream of riots from BLM activists. In 2020 we literally had daily blockades of highways, autonomous zones resulting in deaths (CHAZ), widespread destruction of businesses, and more. Seemingly all of news media, social media, and even academic research studying BLM-associated rioting inaccurately portrays what actually happened.

It’s scary to see how widespread and unchallenged those prevailing narratives are. I think a lot of people forget that “propaganda” doesn’t have to come just from scary foreign state actors - in practice it is much more likely to come from domestic sources, such as masses of activists blindly repeating falsehoods in unison. The journalism industry is supposed to protect against that but it’s actually part of the same machine. The only way to counter the effect is to read and listen to many different sources with different biases.

I was thinking about Glenn’s piece on this topic as I read, I have more respect for that guy than ever especially after what happened with the Intercept and his Joe Biden article. I subscribed to his Substack immediately and intend to continue to support him directly.

Perfect example of false equivalency. Setting aside the issue of how the protestors were treated differently by capital police (many of whom supported Trump), one protest was against police brutality, and the other was an attempt to overthrow the result of a free and fair democratic election on the basis of a lie.

If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?

It was my understanding that the entire point of the protest was to publicly demonstrate their frustrations with the voting process. The hope was that such protest would give Trump the political power to do one of the following:

1. Pressure Congress to delay counting the elector's votes and perform a proper investigation (which they felt hadn't happened)

2. Pressure Congress to count the votes of the "alternate" electors sent by some of the disputed states by the losing party (who instead supported Trump). I'll stress that this was predicated on the idea that, since the election was "stolen", these were the "rightful" electors.

3. Some Q-Anon bullshit I don't care to remember too deeply, just that it was something to do with Trump doing some kind of secret investigation behind the scenes or something

All of the above (including a few I didn't list since I forget the details), were precipitated on the the idea that /someone else/ was going to be fixing this. Many left-wing people don't seem to understand this, but most modern conservatives are not activists at heart, they just roll over and let things happen. To be clear this isn't really a "right-wing" thing but a "conservative" one, they generally don't, at scale, rock the boat.

The truth is the even if there was 100% undeniable evidence that the election was blatantly stolen, conservatives would do absolutely nothing (unless you include complaining), and frankly that's kinda what happened. Looking at it another way: to many conservatives, the election really was stolen from them, and they aren't doing anything about it. A small subset of them loitering around in the capitol was the best they had.

> If I believed that the election, and American democracy with it, were literally being stolen from me right in front of my face, and this was our last chance to stop it, why on earth wouldn't I resort to violence?

You said it best yourself, why wouldn't you resort to violence? The answers is less exciting: because they are afraid and unmotivated.

>It was my understanding that the entire point of the protest was to publicly demonstrate their frustrations with the voting process.

No, it was explicitly to change the outcome of the election, by changing the way the election was certified. This is why Trump was demanding that Pence attempt to change the election outcome as he was presiding over the certification process. This is why the crowd was chanting "hang Mike pence" when he refused to do so.

This is why Trump told his supporters that they had to be strong, to give the Republicans the "courage" to do "what they had to do".

See, you bought the lie, so to you, stealing the election on the basis of a lie seems legitimate. Stopping counting mail in ballots on election night, once Trump had a lead in tallied ballots based on the on-person voting (a lead he had orchestrated by telling his supporters to vote in person), also probably seems reasonable to you.

The problem with "alternative facts" (such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump) is that when you believe them, all sorts of horrible behavior seems justified, and in fact you believe that your side "isn't going far enough!"

> No, it was explicitly to change the outcome of the election

Exactly what part of my comment refutes this? Ultimately the end result of all outcomes I listed (from the perspective of someone who believes the election was stolen, aka not me), would lead to a change in the outcome of the election.

> See, you bought the lie, so to you, stealing the election on the basis of a lie seems legitimate.

I'm uncertain if you are attacking a hypothetical here or me personally, but I feel it's the latter. Are you implying I "bought into" the lie of Trump's supporters or from Trump himself?

> The problem with "alternative facts" (such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump) is that when you believe them, all sorts of horrible behavior seems justified, and in fact you believe that your side "isn't going far enough!"

You say that but is that necessarily true? What exactly has the party that always claims to be armed and ready to overthrow the government done when faced with a scenario where they believe there was a stolen election? We can agree to disagree on this but I still have trouble wrapping my head around why people are so hysterical about random unarmed people loitering around the capitol building.

It's certainly a far cry from actual insurrections:

* Like when Puerto Rican nationalists broke in and shot at members of the house of representatives (and were later pardoned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...

* Or when the capitol building was bombed by Weather Underground (also pardoned): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Weatherman_actions#197...

To make my position on this more clear, my concern here is not the election itself, its this growing anti free speech movement spurred by fear of these "Alternative Facts". I'll remind that this is in-fact a discussion on the public's trust in the media and I believe apologists such as yourself are "buying into" their lie that this was a bigger deal than it really was. In order to retain their position as guardians of the "truth", they spread fear to achieve their goals like they always do.

The web provides us direct access to the discussions of people from all kinds of backgrounds and political ideology. One can easily get a feel for the "other sides" perspective on nearly any issue. I'm not talking about the issues themselves but the people who believe in them and why. Yet far, far too often, people rely on talking heads with an agenda, to TELL them what and why people believe something, often exaggerating or misrepresenting their intentions to make them out to be some kind of ultimate evil.

I'm not saying the election was stolen and I'm not saying they were right. I'm saying you don't have as complete a picture of this as you are suggesting because you didn't get your "Facts" from a primary source.

Exhibit A:

> such as the idea that republican officials and Republican poll watchers in 5 different states all conspired to steal the election from Trump

The impetus of all this, for many conservatives in the online discussions I was following (but not participating). Was explicitly that Republican poll watchers were complaining about their level of access to the ballot counters. Their access was restricted due to Covid, and they were disputing this restriction directly on social media.

This detail is far easier to overlook when you are fed all of your positions by journalists spinning a narrative that makes this out to be far less complicated than the reality of the circumstances. Personally I consider "spin" to be functionally the same as lying.

How much would it change your belief that this is false equivalency if you thought that the protest against police brutality was also based on a lie? There's a good argument to be made that it was.

If it makes you feel better, they are being treated much worse by the prosecutors. Denying bail to trespassing Grandmas. The double standard is amazing. Many BLM rioters have their charges dismissed outright. Some walked free after setting a court house on fire.

I'm not an American, so I can say this without repercussion. But I think its time for a regime change in America. Perhaps its better off being smaller countries.

How is literally counting the deaths "making the death count worse"?

Because they're counting deaths that weren't directly related to anything. There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot" and yet two were suicides days-to-weeks later, three were heart attacks / strokes from physical assertions (or gas/spray, we aren't sure) and one died from falling / being trampled and one was shot in front of police.

The "7 people died in an armed insurrection" is a lie.

The most accurate statement is:

"one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot",

"one officer died from suspected injuries sustained",

"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech",

"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital"

"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters"

^ These are all more accurate, but probably reduces viewership. The statement was "how did the US news media lose their viewers trust". I simply summarized one event which highlights it.

> "one protestor/rioter shot by police at the Capital riot" i.e. one rioter died in the riot.

> "one officer died from suspected injuries sustained", i.e. one officer died in the riot.

>"two people died in march to capital after trump's speech" i.e. two people died in the riot

>"two officers commit suicide after being investigated in connection to Jan 6 riot at the Capital" i.e. two officers died in connection with the riot

> "one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot

>"one rioter on Jan 6 fell to their death and were trampled by the rioters" i.e. one rioter died in the riot

I'm very confused as to where the media claimed that "7 people died" as the result of being gunned down in the street. Obviously if 7 people died by being gunned down in the street, the media headline would be "7 PEOPLE GUNNED DOWN BY INSURRECTIONISTS", not "7 PEOPLE DIED IN THE INSURRECTION".

I'm confused as to where the comment you replied to claimed that the media claimed that "7 people died" as a result of being gunned down in the street. Was there an edit?

The above comment says

> There are supposedly seven people who "died in the Jan 6 riot"

And then proceeds to dispute this, by showing that... each of those 7 people died as a result of injuries in the riot, with the sole exception of the suicides.

The question is what standard of "dying in the riots" would satisfy OP, if the literal interpretation (died from injuries sustained in the riot) does not satisfy him. Presumably if they were gunned down in the streets?

Those people would not have died if Trump did not incite the riots.

Do you dispute the above?

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