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Comment by Tr3nton | Hacker News Reader

This is great news. Hopefully the regular CNN will fold soon as well. Their target audience is Boomers, and their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda ("Fiery but mostly peaceful protests"), then sell them SSRIs. They are a sick organization.

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What you've said, while completely accurate, is not unique to CNN and they weren't the first organization (or even media organization, or even television media organization) to do it. So focusing your anger on them seems odd and misplaced.

I wholeheartedly agree about it not being unique to CNN. However, I don't think there's anything odd or misplaced about focusing on CNN, since the entire context is very specifically that of CNN+. I've seen many a similar comment here on HN about the toxicity of Fox News (which is just as bad) that made no mention of other new services like CNN and MSNBC. Your political leaning might influence which batch of toxicity you describe more, but they're all a part of the same putrid stew.

> Your political leaning might influence which batch of toxicity you describe more

And that's bad, and we should try to combat it whenever possible without devolving into whataboutism.

>their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda

You've just described all news media.

not nytimes. One of the very few places not relying on outrage revenue.

NYT has its own issues, but you’ll only hear about them from real Americans in Ohio.

NYT only does those kinds of stories when they want to tug at your heartstrings. I always find it amusing whenever there is an article and they have real people standing in these very carefully posed photographs with excessive HDR effects.

I don’t think the NY Times gets a pass here. Look at some of the reporting they do on tech and startups in particular.

Organisations relying on subscription revenue aren’t under quite the same degree of pressure but engagement is still important to them and journalists that can deliver it will be rewarded.

You mean the '1619' project NYT, peddling a fake history of your country by a faux historian as The Truth™, making the author the de-facto editor in chief of what used to be one of the cornerstones of solid journalism? The gray old lady is surely turning in her grave for the imposter which claims her name can not be her.

The '1619 Project' is peddled clearly as an essay project -- quite clearly differentiated from a pure news orientation. The essays were pretty light fare and nothing like overly sympathetic eyewitness reporting from the deck of a slave ship. Perhaps the NYT thinks that the country that unwaveringly holds itself out as the greatest country in the history of history (and the bastion and promise of liberty and democracy, still) can look inward and assess the legacy of slavery and the impacts felt today. One essay touched on whether race had a bearing on why the U.S. never adopted universal healthcare, which at least seems to be a worthwhile question.

American introspection is a notoriously unwelcome commodity by a people much more at home shouting 'USA USA USA!', often as a means to drown out any opposing speech.

There is a big difference between "introspection" and "revisionism". The '1619 Project' clearly falls in the latter category and as such deserves to be denounced for the fraud it is, as does its author. As to it being published as an "essay project", the NYT themselves presented it as [The 1619 project is] a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American Slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.

The gray old lady would never have published this. The current incarnation of the NYT is related to its predecessor in name only.

The stories are in the NY Times Magazine and not the mainline NY Times and are a 'reframing' of historical event viewed in the context of slavery. I get that this is a sensitive topic and often is interpreted as an attempt to make Americans feel guilty about their nation's past. How Germany approaches study of their Nazi history in schools is surprisingly less problematic, apparently because of this history's unequivocal evil.

Still, you suggest that the NY Times is revising history and you call it a 'fraud'. I suppose you wouldn't mind offering some examples of the misstatements made in the 1619 Project stories.

So Fox News' business model :)

"professional" Journalism by 2022 has deteriorated to some variation of rat poison. Rat poison pellets are 99.9% good food, but some organizations have gotten the recipe completely backwards and are more like 99.9% poison, CNN being one of those organizations if you ask me.

Replace SSRIs with Gold and Reverse Mortgages and then you've got the comparison correct. :)

In addition to what others have said, it's bizarre to me that the first thing you list that you dislike is "their target audience is boomers". I know there's an anti-baby-boomer meme that's popular on other parts of the internet, but it doesn't belong here.

>t's bizarre to me that the first thing you list that you dislike is "their target audience is boomers"

It's like fighting rage culture of the news with more rage.

I never stated I disliked Boomers, I stated that Boomers are CNN's target audience. Though given the tone of the rest of my comment I can see how some malice could be construed.

> Their target audience is Boomers, and their business model is to enrage their viewers with sensationalism or outright propaganda

You just described Fox News.

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