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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

It is 100% Orwellian doublespeak. It should be a five alarm fire, but cowed media outlets are incapable of calling it out for some reason. Probably because they are terrified of the consequences. Preemptive surrender. Dark times ahead.

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The outcome of "calling it out" for 8 years straight is a comeback with popular vote win. So I think it's reasonable to change a strategy that has failed so miserably for so long.

Indeed. The problem is that the voting base has been carefully groomed for many years to distrust independent journalism, and "calling out" anything is just perceived as partisan and not to be trusted.

>So I think it's reasonable to change a strategy that has failed so miserably

I'm not sure how a strategy of "ignore it and don't mention it" is going to perform better than "call it out"...

A working theory would be that people do not believe that there can be bad consequences until they get burned more, so things will need to get worse for a specific set of people. It's the strategy of falling to the bottom of the pool so you can push on the floor to kick yourself back up. But if you've got other ideas go for it.

The only strategy that works apparently is to let them screw up the country so badly people believe it.

I wonder what will happen then. In Russia it doesn't matter what anyone believes. But maybe the US population is different?

America has a long history of not holding its political leaders accountable when they screw up massively. Gaslighting, obstruction, projection are pretty powerful tools.

That's not how I would describe the overall behavior of the media for the last 8 years.

Though obviously a large amount of people don't believe anything except what they want to hear.

I have no idea what you're saying here. For years I've been seeing people posting links to articles with either the headline or some paragraph marked up to spell out what it's trying to say. Articles using passive voice and avoiding the conclusion were common for a very long time now - as much as I appreciate listing facts rather than freaking out about results in articles, often they just fail to call a spade a spade.

From the transparency of the comments, it's clear many people are in denial about this. The media enjoy the circus, even if it's on fire.

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