Obama’s Efforts to Control Media Are ‘Most Aggressive’ Since Nixon, Report Says | Hacker News Reader

Obama’s Efforts to Control Media Are ‘Most Aggressive’ Since Nixon, Report Says

wired.com

60 pointsmankypro19 comments

If this was a Republican in office right now the hipster socialist crowd would be going ape shit over it. Instead, crickets....

I expect a higher level of debate here than the CNN message boards. I'm disappointed that my expectations were not met.

It's an accurate observation that (a) everyone who knows anything about US politics already knows, but (b) this is a very international community in which as much as 50% of the viewers of this thread might not be in the (a) group. So I'm not really sure why you think it's not a valid observation to post here. If you don't think this article is appropriate for HN, that's fine (and I'm with you on that). Once it is here and once you click through to read the comments, it's not really fair to ding someone for commenting on it IMO.

What 'debate' on HN do you expect about such an article?

> What 'debate' on HN do you expect about such an article?

Something better than "the hipster socialist crowd", which adds nothing to the discussion but makes it harder for that discussion to be useful.

1. It's conjecture, not an accurate observation. 2. It's unnecessarily inflammatory.

The actual socialist/anarchist crowd are going ape shit over it. (For example, Democracy Now! and NSFWCorp, two superb news organizations, are incredibly critical of the Obama administration over this, and many other issues that Obama has been far-right on)

"Weird twitter" is the closest thing I know to "hipster socialist"s, and most that I follow are very critical of the president.

Can you name a "hipster socialist" group that isn't critical of Obama? There are hundreds of Democratic-party affiliated organizations that haven't said a peep about this, but that's because they toe the party line.

NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times.

not being an apologist, but i'm curious as to what the alternative would be.

if i believed that more open information was the solution to factual journalism, then i'd have more sympathy for this report.

the truth, however, is that journalists spin context of information (with graphs, info charts, interactive elements, and polls) to sell ads and get more eyeballs.

while i agree that obama has been extremely heavy-handed with retaliation on whistleblowers, the report ignores the bias that also exists within media outlets to add their own context to sell more, rile up a base, or attract more advertising investment.

>if i believed that more open information was the solution to factual journalism, then i'd have more sympathy for this report.

Translation from Newspeak: access to the facts would prevent their dissemination.

To be fair, the report ignored pretty much everything that it was not reporting on.

So transparency is bad because the media can spin the info, and therefore governments should keep that info secret, instead of actually providing the facts?

"Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations"

Correlation not equal cause.

I'm not quite sure that I understand your comment's tie-in with the quote. Can you elaborate?

I think he means that because more people have broken espionage laws under Obama's watch, doesn't mean it was Obama's fault.

He's in politics. They're all shades of the same color.

Except for Ron Paul ;)

Actually he's retired now so the statement stands without exception.

And Bernie Sanders.

I remember when.

There were stories on HN....

they were about tech.

-haiku

Keep downvoting me.

I honor the memory.

I remember when.

-haiku

reminiscing is

technologists wearing

rose colored glasses

- bad haiku

Reply on news.ycombinator.com