Why American news coverage of the government shutdown is a failure of democracy | Hacker News Reader

Why American news coverage of the government shutdown is a failure of democracy

america.aljazeera.com

48 pointswmacmil28 comments

This does not belong on HN

As it states in the welcoming:

Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads.

It later defines deeply interesting as 'stuff that teaches you about the world.' I would by no means consider this a crap, or superficial article. I likewise believe it adequately fulfills the 'teaches you about the world' statement. Please explain my fallacy.

As far as I can tell as a non-American, Americans are getting the news coverage they want. Even ardent Democrats seem to be extremely reluctant to face the fact that this is not a matter of a major political divide, but a bunch of fundamentalists extremist holding the government hostage.

There are no two equal sides to this story.

I love articles about the structure of systems of people. Tells me what might work in technology teams (or not). And I'm not afraid of controversial or political pieces, as long as the HN community can comet civilly on them.

But I had to flag this.

Why? Not because I disagree with the author, although I do. It's because the author has no understanding of how the American system of governance works or is so blinded by this latest manufactured political crisis that they're incapable of it.

Legislatures win out over executives, whether it's their special law or not. In the states we've had this discussion at the founding, and the reasoning then still holds. And laws passed by one Congress do not have to be funded or encouraged by another. If so, what would be the purpose of electing new people?

More to the point, it assumes that agreement is somehow more important than representation. That's a dark and dangerous alley to go down, one I hope to never visit in my lifetime.

Or, more correctly, you attribute to the author a lack of understanding of how the American system works, because you disagree with him. Meanwhile ignoring that the author, while writing this article for Al Jazeera, was a senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post and a White House Watch columnist for the Washington Post.

That's a fair comeback, and I believe I was honest enough to give full disclosure.

I think the real question is how would I feel if the roles had been reversed. I think exactly the same though one can never be sure.

Back in the 90s, I made the personal decision to hold the legislature, specifically the HOR, responsible fort he spending incurred to run this country. That's my understanding of the way the system was set up, and, more importantly, that's how it appears to operate in practice.

So I have online commentary going back over a decade holding this same opinion. That's about as much bona fides as a person can provide.

Congress is perfectly free to pass laws overturning previous laws, get them through the Senate and have the President sign them into law. That's how the system works.

Congress should not be free to demand arbitrary changes to laws as a condition of funding unrelated activities or as a condition of not blowing up the world's financial system (the debt ceiling, in two weeks).

Do you really see these two options as equivalent?

So your premise is that once a law becomes signed, all future Congresses either must support it financially or repeal it?

Do you have any idea how legislation is made and enforced? I'd argue north of 80% of laws currently int he books aren't being adequately applied or enforced, all because of political considerations, either by Congress or the President. That's the way it should be,at least with Congress, because you can't do everything. With the president, it's a different story, as his job is specifically to carry out the law, not interpret it. But even then, the legal system is such a clusterfuck that we've had to create these special "signing statements" where the executive tries his best to explain why he's constrained to do inertial things one way or the other.

We passed the point of expecting all laws to magically become reality a long time ago. Like over 200 years or more.

The author is an american journalist, reviously worked for Washington Post and currently writes for Huffington Post.

I don't get why they keep calling shutdown while it's a default.

It isn't a default, the USG is still paying its bills. What it is doing however at the moment is cutting hours (and hence wages) that it is not currently authorised to give. In other words, Congress normally gives the government the authority to spend money; in this case the authority is not being given.

I have several problems with this article. First, I don't see why it is on Hacker News. Second, the article seems to argue that the media should not be objective, but should take sides. One doesn't have to be a reader of "The Nation" and "National Review", as I am, to know that there is a full range of ideological media out there taking all sides of every issue. Finally, it is ironic to be lectured by an Arab news organization criticizing our democracy.

Attacking the organization that posted the opinion piece for being Arabic while ignoring the author is an experienced american journalist? I'm pretty sure there are a couple of logical fallacies there...

-- Dan Froomkin @froomkin

Dan Froomkin is launching the Center for Accountability Journalism, at FearlessMedia.org. He has worked as senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post, as White House Watch columnist for the Washington Post; and as editor of the Washington Post website. Email him at froomkin@gmail.com.

EDIT: Arab, not Arabic. I apologize for the confusion.

Minor (and off-topic) nitpick: An organization, a person, etc. is Arab, not Arabic. But Arab people often speak Arabic, which means the language.

Thanks for the correction! I'm not a native speaker, and there is no such difference in my language.

Counter-nitpick: A newspaper can be Arabic in that it's chiefly in Arabic; i.e. Arabic is also an adjective for describing things relating to the language. "Arab" is an ethnicity and an adjectival and demonym for a region. Arabic publications may or may not be Arab, and vice-versa. But a newspaper can certainly be Arabic.

Some of the confusion might be that we rarely use "English" to describe things that are in English when it might be ambiguous whether we mean the language or the place/people. So we say "English-language newspaper" to mean something different than "a newspaper published in England". But with Arab/Arabic, we have two words, so it's not a problem.

Of course, Al Jazeera is also Arab (in the region sense, not necessarily the ethnic sense-- different ambiguity); I'm just saying that to the extent that it's in Arabic, it can be called Arabic.

I should note that I'm not actually an expert in any of the relevant fields here and I'd love to hear someone take that apart.

As the OP, I believe this post is consistent with the hacker news guidelines. As it states in the welcoming:

Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads.

It later defines deeply interesting as 'stuff that teaches you about the world.' I would by no means consider this a crap, or superficial article. I don't consider your comment necessarily rude or dumb; however, I do consider it misinformed.

The article does not posit the media should be subjective: it is rather objective in stating that the media is failing to state the reality of the situation. Another key example of comparative value is global warming.

The global warming debate taking place in the media is almost universally framed as a democrats vs. republicans, liberal conservative debate. It is not. The politicians getting quoted on mainstream news sources are not the experts qualified to be making statements regarding the human induced global warming debate. They are not actively publishing, and doubtfully reading the scientific literature published in dozens, if not hundreds of journals which nearly unanimously acknowledge that there is a high probability of humans having a noticeable impact on climate change. Yet, the scientists denying human induced global warming nearly all have either direct ties with or strong affiliations of companies and people whose interest is to fight global warming for economic gain.

This article essentially mirrors that same argument except replacing scientists, you may essentially think of the objective viewpoint having to do with constitution and law, not political divides.

> Finally, it is ironic to be lectured by an Arab news organization criticizing our democracy.

No it isn't. US media doesn't own an exclusive right to comment on affairs of other nation states. Given the status of US economy in the world, what happens in US affects other nations more than what happens there affects US. They have every reason to report this. And journalism is more than just dumping facts. Though, a journalist's idealogical bias should affect the correctness of the article, his experienced analysis is usually necessary for most readers to understand the gist of the situation who are most likely to be unaware of the law/politics/technology behind the incident.

Al Jazeera has actually been doing a pretty good job of covering this mess. Better than MSNBC in my opinion.

I agree that this doesn't belong on HN. However, you're wrong about AlJazeera, they're actually a pretty good news company (and there are not that many great ones left). They also have a big contingent of quality english-speaking journalists.

I read AlJazeera from time to time and find it mostly contains Arab propaganda. I have no idea what nationality Dan Froomkin is. The Arab network, AlJazeera, has editorial discretion to publish pieces. And in so doing, sends a message to its readers. Since the majority of Arab countries are autocratic, it is ironic to have the Arab media criticize America's democracy by selecting such articles to publish.

I have a childhood friend who works on the news desk for the AlJazeera 24 hour news. He edits the footage shown across the world. He is allowed to decide what is shown and has told me he has less restrictions than working for many American news companies (which he has done in the past)

Get your facts straight and open your eyes.

>I read AlJazeera from time to time and find it mostly contains Arab propaganda

Do you say this because they disagree with your American imperialist views?

Wow. As an atheist who believes a lot of evil in the world comes from the big religions (mainly Islam and Christianity), I'm pretty much allergic to "Arab propaganda" as you call it. For the most part, AlJazeera has better journalistic standards than most American news outlets. They're an international news organization, actually. And anyone should have the right to criticize a democracy as long as they have a valid point. By the way, whatever happens in the US has a nasty tendency to affect everyone globally sooner or later.

Speaking of propaganda, I would rather watch Al-Jazeera over any USA news channel any day of the week.

> I have no idea what nationality Dan Froomkin is

Looks like he's American raised in Washingotn DC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Froomkin

And your point is?

Do you object to so called democracies criticising Arab states? Are you suggesting that only a democracies can can have a say, and Arabs should just shut up and do as told?

Hmmmm, no wonder they have problem with the West.

No, and no. Unlike most Arab countries, we have freedom of speech.

[I was just about to write something defending one of the last remaining journalistic institutions of the world (Al Jazeera) but then thought about the drone murders, the NSA totalitarian surveillance of the world and the US military industrial complex, and that "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth." so I thought better of it...]

I agree with you 100%, how dare they criticize the US media, the US is the only true democracy of the world!

[Next time I will skip the first and this paragraph, its becoming too dangerous, I have a growing fear of the US and its brainwashed citizens]

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