Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?

A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.

View on HN

It would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.

I assumed it would the the Ministry of Trump. He likes putting his name on things.

You're probably right.

That was already taken by the DHS and then dismantled in 2022.

Ministry of Truth & Love.

Is a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?

Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press

Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.

What free press? The mass media is controlled by a handful of billionaires who kowtow to the government in order to earn more billions.

PBS/NPR?

The billionaire media owners won't allow that to continue. Defunded.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi...

And let us say out loud after all the whining about cancel culture it was Republicans, as expected, who are actually going after the first amendment.

They're Republicans. Every accusation is either a confession in disguise, a plan already in progress, or a fond wish.

During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.

Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.

> All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.

There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pentagon-chie...

Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.

Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.

Are you sure that these people were "gloating" about private companies moderating arbitrarily? In the US, this is simply an obvious consequence of the first amendment, as many people have indeed pointed out.

The same people may personally hold wildly different beliefs as to whether this legal situation is desirable or not.

And in European countries, where there is no first amendment preventing the government from interfering with social media moderation policies, the situation is often different, and courts have required social media companies to publish speech which they had intended to moderate; see for example:

https://www.tribunaux-rechtbanken.be/sites/default/files/med...

No it wasn't that they were moderating arbitrarily, it's that they were censoring opinions and discussions that were deemed verboten and the gloatees agreed with shutting it down. They of course changed their tune about it when something did not go their way.

arbitrary, adjective:

2 a: not restrained or limited in the exercise of power : ruling by absolute authority

  b: marked by or resulting from the unrestrained and often tyrannical exercise of power

I know. That's not what they were gloating about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com