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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's obvious manuvering like this that's to blame:

>Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.

So basically, "we're saying something that will turn our audience against him, but as an aside we mentioned that a couple organizations you've probably never heard of spoke out against something we're not going to explain, and that on balance means we're defending him."

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I was gonna say, it honestly feels like there's evidence in this article that would go great lengths to explain the real problem. I feel there is a huge disconnect between journalists and the public, and I think that having journalists be on Twitter helped make people aware of that disconnect.

Unfortunately, it has only grown.

I also thought it was eye-widening where they described access journalism as a happy and productive equilibrium involving the tolerance of "some hypocrisy on both sides."

I also think a flipped version of this is also valid:

Assange clearly was selective about release of information and timed his releases to affect political outcomes, which discredited him in my eyes and many others.

But that just adds to the pile doesn't it? It shows that trustworthy agenda-free journalism is exceedingly rare even in the "alternative" media and activist journalism world.

If you have an audience that trusts you, you have power. Power corrupts.

I don't think there ever was an age in which journalism was significantly more trustworthy than today. I think we just had fewer options and less opportunity to look behind the curtain.

>Assange clearly was selective about release of information and timed his releases to affect political outcomes, which discredited him in my eyes

The Guardian also timed the release of the Snowden leaks, what do you think about that? They were very careful about how they did it, and dripped it out to keep it in the headlines because they, as a newspaper, knew how the headlines worked. They were also selective.

Also, what are you challenging when you say he is "discredited" in your eyes? Surely not the veracity of the information, which isn't impacted by the timing of its release.

it is impossible to have journalism without an agenda.

> Assange clearly was selective about release of information

So did the rest of the American media, starting with the Biden laptop fiasco. I don't see anyone from news orgs being under arrest and not charged for the past 10 years.

Good grief yes. If that was a sincere paragraph in that article, than I have to admit that there is no hope there, because any kind of self-reflection and soul searching is basically pointless with that kind of revelation. This weird patina of technically true sentences structured in a way that is intended to mislead or lead onto a specific thought pattern is just sad for anyone paying attention.

This weird variation of navel gazing is very weird though. Is the author seriously suggest they should stop doing that? At that point, even the remnants of their current credibility will perish with the first source they burn since no one sensible will be stupid enough to disclose anything of value.

If it is not sincere, then I am in full agreement with you. It is a poster child why Americans lost faith in news.

This is an essay [1] and the paragraphs you’ve quoted are exploring the question set up in the preceeding paragraph:

> The classic statement of the problem [that objectivity journalism is a problematic concept] is Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” published a hundred and one years ago. Lippmann’s critique remains relevant today—the Columbia Journalism School mounted a four-day conference on “Public Opinion” last fall, and people found that there was still plenty to talk about. Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay

I think listeners or news consumers need to work harder. Every day somebody comes to me outraged with some news that they've inadvertently filled in the gaps on.

On some other post about misinformation someone claimed to combat it people needed even more information.

Most people have limited amounts of time and with their free time I'm sure they want to spend the least amount getting to the bottom of a story on the news.

I don't think we necessarily need more information or time. People need to read more slowly. Think about the words that are being used. What is actually being said?

People skim, fill in the blanks, and fulminate on twitter.

If you're presented with a view from a bias source it doesn't mean it's invalid. That's a big problem today on forums where someone thinks "Pfizer benefits from vaccine therefore they ..."

But they have time to rage about it online

yea that sentence has steven segal level self - awareness.

How could you rewrite that paragraph without bias? That seems an impossible task to me because there is no objectively truthful way to describe someone accused of a political crime.

This is not intended as a shot, but you just did by saying classifying Assange as 'someone accused of political crime'. I guess my general point is that it obviously can be done, but pre-ordained agenda seems to be clogging basic language faculties of people who live by the printed word.

>This is not intended as a shot, but you just did by saying classifying Assange as 'someone accused of political crime'.

I'm confused what you mean here and whether you are saying I used biased or unbiased phrasing. If you are saying it was biased, why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not? If what I said was biased, how would you describe the fact that he has been accused of crimes?

I'm not asking rhetorical questions here. I'm challenging people to write an unbiased version of that original paragraph. I don't think it can be done. We can't address "Americans Lost Faith in the News" without being honest that this ideal of a universally agreed upon unbiased reporting of facts isn't truly possible.

I apologize. I am mid other things and I clearly typed too fast without considering clarity.

What I meant is that the sentence you wrote was sufficiently neutral in tone along the lines of 'this guy accused of a political crime.'

<< why was my comment neutral when the original "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal." was not?

I think the issue is with the context. Would you be willing to rewrite the paragraph written by article's author, because you may be right in a sense that it is hard to judge it based on that one sentence fragment alone? My initial response is that the article pushes a clear agenda vis-a-vis Assange even though it seems to have a tenuous connection to the point author seems to be trying to make. So initial difference is there ( possibly criminal vs guy accused of crime reads very differently ) and it is hard to argue in good faith for an entity with a lot of editors no one thought that may read a tad biased.

All that said, my own personal bias may be showing here, but then I am not sure Assange was obligated to keep that information secret -- whatever else you may think about qualitative goodness/badness of that action. Naturally that leaves 'hacking' angle, but I will admit I did not follow story closely enough to offer a useful analysis.

edit: "Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information"

I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.

> Would you be willing to rewrite the paragraph written by article's author, because you may be right in a sense that it is hard to judge it based on that one sentence fragment alone?

No, because I don't think I can do better than the original author.

>I am starting to think you may be right in general. This paragraph cannot be rewritten in an impartial manner, because it is at its core very partial. It is arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind.

I don't think the paragraph is necessarily "arguing with anti-Assange bias in mind". It is remarking on a world which has an anti-Assange bias because many powerful people in the world, namely the US government, view Assange negatively. How do you report on that without either repeating or refuting that bias in the world?

Maybe a less controversial figure is a better example of this. The FBI monitored MLK Jr. That is just a fact. How do you remark on that fact neutrally? The FBI as an institution has some inherent level of trust. Reporting simply that they monitored MLK implies to a certain extent that he was implicated in some wrongdoing. Do you therefore try to qualify that? Do you say the monitoring was "inappropriate"? Is that too strong? Doesn't that imply that the FBI is racist or corrupt? Do you say it was "potentially inappropriate"? But doesn't that imply you think it might be appropriate?

I don't think the objective reporting of facts is nearly as easy as people seem to imply in conversations about media and in many cases it is impossible.

MLK is actually not a bad choice for comparison ( sufficient time has passed, some records were unsealed and so on ). I think that 'FBI monitored MLK' is perfectly sufficient and captures everything without adding negative or positive sentiment to it. Now, had the article try to add 'inappropriate', the right move would be substantiate that claim with some sort of proof that it was indeed inappropriate ( at least in the eye of the writer ). That does not appear to happen in the article on HN today. We have an assertion without any way to determine whether or not writer is just making stuff up.

Maybe, Pratchett's work was onto something when he indicated that in Discworld universe poetic license was somewhat limited[1]:

“Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.”

So in the case of Assange, the writer should have added a short narrative indicating his particular perception of the issue ("Assange is possibly a criminal") absent a completely generic and neutral in tone ( Assange did something US governemnt did not like ).

[1]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/586782-poetic-simile-was-st...

In short, I don't think it is impossible. There is no willingness to agree on some basic standards.

Assange's alleged crimes are not political.

Nothing could be more political than an accusation of aiding a soldier in avoiding detection while exfiltrating video evidence of a war atrocity.

To pick just one incident: He's alleged to have selectively released information specifically to damage the Clinton campaign, and at a time where a Trump scandal was at the top of the news. That's not really even very arguable. To believe that Wikileaks release was non-political just strains reason. Clearly the Podesta emails were released for political purposes.

You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime. Certainly the Podesta hack itself was a crime, but it's plausible that Assange merely got the emails after the fact and published them because they were newsworthy. That's... pretty arguable, but it's at least an argument.

Broadly... I just don't see the bias here. Assange is credibly accused of political crimes. Stating so isn't "bias", it's just describing a reasonably held opinion. That it isn't your opinion isn't the point.

> To pick just one incident: He's alleged to have selectively released information specifically to damage the Clinton campaign, and at a time where a Trump scandal was at the top of the news.

Maybe pick an incident that he's charged with?

> You have an easier time arguing that it's not a crime.

Especially since nobody has claimed that this is a crime, and he's never been charged with it. You're spreading misinformation in order to justify the prosecution of a journalist.

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