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Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why they all try to protect it so much. Snowden's identity is already public so sharing the files can't hurt him. Just redact personal info and put it all out there.

A journalist's only responsibilities are tell the truth to their readers, don't report allegations as facts and don't expose a persons identity without consent if they're not already famous.

They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.

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I think it's quite obvious that journalism is mostly PR for the current things in politics by now. It probably died around 2020 at the latest.

More like died around 1920, if it was ever alive.

The big difference between the past and now is that today a journalist can presumably get at the "alternative facts" if they try because the internet makes secrecy much leakier much faster and makes circumstantial details more accessible. Contrast with 50yr ago Walter Kronkite had no idea how sketchy the whole Gulf of Tonkin stuff was and even if he did it's not like his employer had people doing OSint to verify things so all he could do was recite is like truth and off to war we went.

I can give you an exact date: 16 October 2017.

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

Was that the first time a journalist was assassinated?

No. Would you like to answer your own question?

This article (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/02/why-ame...) is basically canonical for things wrong with the media and it was written in 96.

I deeply hate Noam Chomsky for his hypocrisy, but his 80's analysis that the press as a business can't do its job is profoundly right. It got much worse since then.

> They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise

Free journalism in a democracy is inherently political, which means there is always an ethical balance between the duty to inform and potential harm.

For example: the name of a secret foreign agent

It is a fact. It is news. It has potential harm. What are the pros and cons of publishing it?

> They should never care about national security because that's an instant ethical compromise, letting the government dictate what you can say.

There's a difference between caring about NS, and letting the government dictate how to do so.

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