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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

Most everyone understands that this is a distraction. Why journalists are caught line, hook, sinker over and over like this is beyond me.

The question is what are they distracting from?

US military going into mexico to be police? lol what?

Russia sanctions because he failed to end the war in ukraine?

Cuts to npr and pbs? inspector generals?

united nations probably going under?

None of these seem right, i must be missing the very controversial thing.

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I can assure you journalists don't believe this either. Journalism, left leaning or right leaning or centerist, isn't about reporting things that matter It's about making money. What's going to be the most profitable to them in the short term and what's going to be more profitable to them in the long term.

None of those other things you listed will make them money. Just like the fact they are failing to report that fully documented immigrants are being picked up by immigration thrown into detention centers and being coerced into signing voluntary deportation papers.

I read a story by a largely liberal news outlet about Democrat Congress people going to review one of these immigration detention centers. They were reviewing it because of the poor conditions but even in that article they mentioned that these were undocumented immigrants that were going to be deported because they lacked proper documentation. I'm sure some are but the fact of the matter is there is a huge number of correctly documented immigrants that have also been swept up thrown into these detention centers and no one is talking about it. It doesn't make for good news, it doesn't make for profitable news.

If journalists are not taken in by Trump's behavior, why do they report on it as if they approached it naively, and believed every word told them? Why does the reporting visibly assume good faith on Trump's part?

The answer is simple and I explain why in my first paragraph. They're not interested in the news that informs people they are interested in what is going to sell and what is going to keep eyeballs looking at what they have to offer. They are no different than the top only fans creators that are doing stuff just for attention.

Journalists are covering those topics, though. In fact, if you click on the author's name, you can see that she also writes about the hard-hitting subjects you'd prefer, for the same publication.

Consider it this way: lots of developers work on games. They're not getting "caught line, hook, sinker over and over" because there are more important things to be working on, for someone's definition of 'more important'.

There are articles on The Guardian for each of those topics. They published this article because it's a quick and easy one to write, and they knew we would talk about it.

Flooding the zone is a strategy.

There always being 1000 things to be outraged about makes the opposition more scattered. It's harder to form a cohesive response because each individual can only effectively react to a limited number of things at any given time.

This also points to one of the benefits of the right wing's media machine. The right also has many things to be outraged about at any given moment - Trump's movement is largely based on grievances. But the media machine is very effective at focusing the flock's ire in a small number of manageable directions. Those targets can shift day to day, even hour to hour, but the well coordinated machine keeps the flock from fracturing.

Alas, despite the claims of the right, there is no left wing media machine to compete with the right's.

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