Hacker News Reader

Comment by pconf | Hacker News Reader

Also impresses me by how many posts here believe the media coverage of Assange. Just goes to show, Americans are the most naive consumers of commercial news on the planet, by a considerable margin.

All I want to know is where I can send a check.

Long live government transparency.

View on HN

I think it's very wrong for banks to disallow money transfers to WikiLeaks, and I think Americans are often naive but "Americans are the most naive consumers of commercial news on the planet" is highly exaggerated.

I can see how someone who has not spent significant time living outside of the US could be of this opinion, but every US resident I know who has lived outside of the country for any significant period of time is also of this opinion. You don't need to spend much time reading European or Asian newspapers, listening to or watching BBC, DW, then be insulted by FOX and Clearchannel to see exactly what the issue is.

I'm not an American. I've only been living in the US for the a few years.

Of course there's some poor reporting in the US, like anywhere else. I don't know of any European/Asian newspaper that does a better job than the NY Times or WaPo (or for that matter any good regional US paper), for all their faults, and those who are comparable are usually less widely read than the American ones.

Have you seen anything like Fox News anywhere else?

Brazilian mainstream media is also very partisan-biased, though they won't ever admit it and always strive to come out as politically neutral.

While there's a left-centrist party in office, not one positive news is to be shown in mass media vehicles, even when the president receives an international award, the people are kept in the dark about it and you have to follow alternative news to be informed. This discrepancy has even been reported in international news before.

I think Fox News takes it beyond partisan-bias and into extreme propaganda territory.

See for example this:

Universal Health Care is the Jihadists' secret weapon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMu6wCqdeyQ

Not carrying guns suggests Norway is not a democracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EX3km583Dw

For News successfully argues in court that it is allowed to lie in its news: http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html

I think TV journalism isn't American media's stronger suite, but you could fairly say that globally Fox News is the rule rather than the exception.

Government-bias may well be more common than not, or than commercial advertiser-biased. The difference between those countries and the US is consumer education. At least outside of the US the viewers / listeners / readers know they're not getting an unbiased perspective.

Here's their bitcoin address: 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v

The problem with sending money via bitcoin at the moment is that it will likely be worth significantly less tomorrow than it is today, and less still the day after.

It would be nice to have a bitcoin alternative that was actually a viable currency; as of now I know of no such thing.

They just have to exchange them back into dollars today then. Why wait till tomorrow?

Do you have a citation for that? I've never visited the Wikileaks site, and now it seems to be down. Edit: oops, never mind, it is at wikileaks.org, not .com - found the BitCoin reference.

Could not make sense of their IRC thing, though. Why not generate a new BitCoin address directly on the page?

hah, might be the only real use for bitcoins so far!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com