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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed there's a bias and I promise you, it's not in favor of Iran (particularly Iran)

Any news has a usage for whatever political agenda there is in the US administration.

If country X is going to help the administration, the bad news will fade out, when country x is suppose to be shown in bad light, all the dirt will come back to the surface non stop on every possible news channel.

My wife is Iranian and she says that something people in Iran fail to understand about the US is that the US media is not controlled by the US government. I’ve wondered if it stems from the fact that Iran media is strictly controlled by the Iran government to the point where they are indistinguishable. I can assure you in the US this is not the case.

> Any news has a usage for whatever political agenda there is in the US administration.

If the previous administration was not sufficient proof to you that this is clearly wrong, then what proof could dissuade you?

What if your belief is that “the US administration” is an inertial beaucracy that carries on regardless of who gets elected?

Obama ran on ending wars in Iraq and afghanistan, and then he got in and those options disappeared. Trump did similarly.

So what would it look like if the US had been run for decades primarily by unelected agencies, and the us media served them, not whoever happened to get elected?

> Obama ran on ending wars in Iraq and afghanistan

He mostly ran on ending Iraq, he called Afghanistan 'the good war'.

The reality is that these politicians could do far more but they just don't care enough about it.

For Trump for example the America First people in the administration were pushing that, but those people were kicked out and Trump in order to get along with the party just let them do their thing in Afganistan.

Obama was the same, in order to get out of Iraq he authorized the surge in Afghanistan.

The 'deep state' you are talking about exists, but they are supported by lots of people in congress and lobbies and the president, whatever he ran on has to negotiate with those interests to get anything done.

Just because the leash is longer does not suddenly mean there is no leash.

It isn't controlled overtly but influence is still exerted. This was readily apparent when W shunned any organization that dared question the justification for invading Iraq. News of domestic relevance gets buried all the time by upper management who want to curry favor and stay in good graces with authorities.

Actually your wife is wrong. The American media is controlled but in smart and efficient way, the average Iranian knows this well unless they're the Pro America Iranian who only represents small percentage of the Iranians (and they are seen as traitors even from many opposition parties). The funny thing, the difference between the major American media regarding Iran, is that some want to starve the people until they can make a coup, the other opinion is that Iran should be nuked tomorrow. And People has the nerve to call this "freedom of speech"

>about the US is that the US media is not controlled by the US government.

There is a very infamous book, Manufacturing Consent, that explains this isn't true. Sure the president isn't calling up the CEO of CNN and telling him what to air, but when push comes to shove the media companies will all get in line.

I understand that way of thinking - my take is that Manufacturing Consent is mostly right but practically boils down to “American’s want American media organizations to have a pro-America bias”.

That fact that international media is easily accessible is a good counter-balance to this problem. In addition, you are starting to see the desires of the public changing - e.g. you much more frequently read/hear anti-American articles/opinions from the American progressive news media.

> US media is not controlled by the US government

This might be true, but specially about countries that don't have a media presence the main source of news about that country is white house press releases. The same goes for news about civil wars and such.

The way Syria war was reported, outside of a few good journalists who did amazing reports, was basically just standard US government play book.

The reality is journalist are lazy, and its easy to just pick up the narrative pushed by the US government and the associated standard think thanks.

Right but this is a matter of prioritization of resources more than some nefarious plot by the US government to control the US media.

The only difference is that in the U.S. it's the media that controls the government and not the other way around. There is still a hegemony between the media and the government, quite similar to an authoritarian one.

The only time in history the media didn't control the government was Trump's presidency.

Non hegemony between media and government isn't stable. Free press in democratic countries practically means control of the media over the government.

There isn't a single politician who got elected without extensive media coverage. There exist very few politicians that can withstand hostile media coverage, and that hostility can be completely debased from reality and it wouldn't matter.

> Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi - one man - and it was a prominent story for years

If your country dismembers a Washington Post reporter inside a consulate in Turkey, and Turkey releases audio of the murder, you're probably going to wind up with some press coverage of this in the United States, at least in the Washington Post.

The idea that the US media is biased toward Iran is kind of bonkers. The US media may be biased about the importance of US issues in US/Iran relations. Iran is less threatening to the US than it may be for other countries.

> Why doesn't that get the attention of eg Tiananmen Square?

Tianamen Square would have been forgotten if immediately followed by a global pandemic. With respect to Riyadh vs. Tehran, the former has political relevance in America. Horrible things happening in Iran isn’t domestically relevant in the same way since there aren’t any pro-Tehran public figures who would face pressure from that news.

> genocided thousands of civilians by shooting them in the streets during the protests right before the pandemic,

I'm going to ignore the word "genocide" here, because I'm assuming you're just using this to mean that they were killings that you really disapprove of. But are you saying that Iran murdered thousands of protestors without providing a link? And is everybody else just going with that?

There are biases depending on the 'side' of US political spectrum a given medium happens to be supporting. In this case, the best you can do is to account for inherent bias and ingest the information accordingly.

This is patently false. Iran has been called part of the Axis of Evil since Reagan era. Iran has been reported on as evil for decades. This current set of protests have gotten a lot of media attention.

The reason why Khashoggi gets so much attention is because reporters love nothing more than to report about themselves. There are plenty of other people who were killed by Saudi Arabia that got buried because the media doesn't care.

He was a journalist, but he was also working for the Washington Post in particular, and he was an US resident, and the details of this murder where particularly gruesome. No need for the jab about the media here.

The jab about the media is absolutely warranted. How many women are found dismembered in the US almost every day? There was just a case last week in NYC. The media doesn't pick it up, but with Khashhoggi they did, because they care the most about journalists.

I'm not saying that it wasn't horrific what happened to him, but the question was why was there so much focus on his case, and the reason is because the media loves to report on themselves over anything else.

When a foreign government is suspected of dismembering a US resident it has more geo-political implications. Despite the fact that every grusome crime deserves equal treatment from the justice system.

The reason that is true about Saudi Arabia is because nothing else that Saudi Arabia does gets any reaction except tacit approval from the US, and they paid absolutely no price for Kashoggi, either.

Right now, the US is screaming about the veil right after recriminalizing abortion. Meanwhile:

Saudi woman given 34-year prison sentence for using Twitter

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/16/saudi-woman-gi...

Saudi woman jailed for 45 years over social media use, says group

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/30/saudi-woman-gi...

Saudi Arabia is imprisoning women while the rest of the world is not paying attention

https://theconversation.com/saudi-arabia-is-imprisoning-wome...

These stories get a little attention from the press ostensibly because they're about speech, but knowing modern journalism it's really because they are about Twitter. Women getting executed for infidelity? Not news.

Was the woman dismembered in NYC allegedly killed by foreign state officials after being lured somewhere?

I agree with your broader point that reports generally like to report on themselves when possible, but pretending the Khashoggi assassination (because that's what it was) isn't particularly newsworthy is kind of silly.

Also cousin of Dodi Fayed and second cousin to Adnan Kashoggi.

The exact opposite is true.

Iran gets the short end of the stick in the media. Just look at how the nuclear treaty was covered. Its was tragic.

Or how Iran involvement in Syrian civil war and ISIS war got covered. Depending on US media you would think ISIS and Iran worked together when in effect Iran was fighting ISIS when the US was still mostly ignoring it or was broadly supportive of the trends they represented.

In favor of Iran? Did you forget that right before the pandemic Trump assassinated a military general?

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