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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

One huge peave of mine reflects a general level of ignorance about CIA by both media and commentators; they aren't CIA 'Agents' they are CIA 'officers.' It might sound like a nitpick, but if the news media repeatedly gets such a fundamental detail wrong, how can they be even remotely viewed as credible in the bigger issues? It would be like a reporter referring to RAM as ROM; hard to to have any faith that they even have ever spoken to a CIA officer let alone have the basic knowledge necessary to write national and international media reports on the subject.

In case anyone is curious an 'agent' is a foreign national recruited by a CIA officer to spy. A CIA officer is the one that runs the agents. The FBI has special agents, but not officers.

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If the story was "ROM chips made by child slaves", but they were really RAM chips, then like this story, it'd be rather immaterial to the subject.

Perhaps they are not using the word "agent" as a CIA job title, but rather in the actual meaning of the word:

  An agent is one who acts for, or in the 
  place of, another, by authority from him; 
  one entrusted with the business of another.

The media uses the word "agent" to refer only to those who work in intelligence and defense agencies, so your explanation doesn't seem sufficient. And even if you are right - the word "agent" has a clear and different meaning in the context of intelligence, so at best this is a really bad choice of words.

It's an innaccurate choice of words and reflective of media ignorance on the subject. The media doesn't use the term "police agent" to describe cops nor do they call State Department consular officers "consular agents." The media, if they are interested in accuracy ought to start by getting the simple stuff correct. If someone is giving a talk at a conference about RAM and they keep saying ROM, perhaps you'd doubt their understanding of the subject. That's my point, the media loses credibility when they maintain use of innaccurate terminology yet they want to be perceived as an expert on the subject.

I believe that you are correct about the terminology - the way the CIA operates is detailed in books like Robert Baer's See No Evil.

However, I'm not sure that this kind of nitpicking actually matters - from what we now know people employed by the CIA tortured people and it doesn't really matter whether the correct term for these people within the CIA is "officers" or "agents" - everyone else is going to call them "torturers".

[NB I actually up-voted you because I didn't think you deserved to be down-voted. The agent/officer distinction is really important for how spies actually work (and the CIA is not alone in this) but it's distracting from the main point here].

> It might sound like a nitpick, but if the news media repeatedly gets such a fundamental detail wrong, how can they be even remotely viewed as credible in the bigger issues?

Well you probably have noticed that news articles tend to sound believable when they're about any subject matter except the one you have first-hand experience with. Hacker News is a good illustration of this phenomenon, since it seems that for every other article there's a person here who is, or knows someone who is involved in the situation described, and comments to correct many misconceptions in said article.

So no, it doesn't seem like a nitpick - it seems only rational to assume that most of the time news sites have no fucking clue what they're writing about. That, or they're deliberately lying to spin something.

How exactly is that a fundamental detail?

BTW the word is "peeve."

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