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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

"How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?"

The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.

So, what now?

The faux equivalency "they're all the same" (usually pointing to a tiny, minuscule fraction of stories where something was errant) is exactly how we ended up with the rise of overtly fake news. In the same way we have normalized politicians who lie overtly and repeatedly by casting them all the same: some politician took exaggerated credit or said something that in some contexts might be misleading, ergo he's the same as the one who lies maliciously at every turn. "They're all the same"

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> "Some random guy posting thoughts on Substack has remarkably turned into anti-"MSM" advocacy. Amazing."

I wonder if there's a snappy name for this fallacy that professionals are somehow responsible for the failings of amateurs. It's pretty common.

- Blogger writes poorly researched post -> "mainstream journalists are much worse"

- Crypto project is fraud -> "banks are the real scams"

Applying this logic to the tech industry, we get:

- Random Wordpress plugin is poorly designed -> "the real incompetents are software engineers at FAANGs"

I mean, it might be true, but there's really no relationship between the two and it doesn't absolve the amateur.

>this fallacy

It's a garden variety false equivalence.

A bit more specific than that, it has elements of both conspiratorial thinking and “look what you made me do” gaslighting.

Not all the news publications have the same ideals or strategies or tendency to bend the truth the same way, but all news (so far as I can tell) is impacted by the same negative incentive: advertising.

If your business model generates revenue through advertising, you are incentivized to attract attention, as we all know very well. News is no different; news publications are incentivized to write outrage-generating content to get you to look for ad revenue, whether it's CNN or Breitbart or ONN or Fox or NYT, it doesn't matter.

CNN isn't the same as Fox on this level, for sure, so it's not completely equivalent, but that's mostly because the ideology is different. But outrage on the left sells, outrage on the right sells. Those publications are different because the outrage they sell is targeted at different audiences.

Why would a "right-wing" ideology's outrage be one a bigger level than a left-wing outrage?

You are making a false equivalence. Fox publishes outright nonsense like "Texas has 0 deaths from Covid now, showing mask mandates are unnecessary" (asterisk: for one fluke day in the metrics, so we're not technically lying, even though we know members of Congress will cite while paraphrasing into huge lies).

Ok I'm responding a few days late here, sorry about that.

I'm not making a false equivalence. My comment is pointing out the perverse incentive present in all news, regardless of political slant.

There is an audience for right-wing ideology outrage; there is another one for left-wing ideology outrage. The news sources are capitalizing on that.

> "How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?" The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.

That's not a very convincing statement. Do you have anything to back that up?

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