201–210 of 527 posts
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> Just because someone is a journalist does not give them a pass from breaking the law. I’m entirely on the side of real journalism so it was interacting to see some people that thought a press badge meant they didn’t need to also follow police orders.
Not following police order is grounds for arrest, not for getting a riot shield bashed into one's face.
Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?
I see a lot of “libertarians” on HN and SV in general. Edit: Ok now I am getting downvoted because I called them libertarians when they’re libertarians.
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tech people aren't immune to the hyper divisiveness taking place around the world. Once "your team" decides it no longer wants to respect freedom of the press or election results then you must follow suit. Gotta make sure your team wins, right?
Some people don’t play on a team.
Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?
99% of institutional journalists are sockpuppets for prog neoliberal authoritarianism. I can think of a single-digit number of well-known journalists who I actually respect and generally expect to provide useful/unbiased information. This isn't a left/right authoritarian/libertarian thing - anti-corpo-journalist sentiment is pretty widely shared across the spectrum.
This is because Black Lives Matter™, and because black lives matter. This isn’t a hyper escalation against freedom of the press, per se, it’s an escalation of police on citizen violence that came about when police felt threatened when folks got a little extra vocal about how the racist cops boys club has little to no accountability when harming citizens they’re supposed to protect. I think this narrowly focuses on tr…
And from a more firsthand perspective, I can say that in my hometown of the Seattle metro I never had witnessed the same level of chaos. Armed demonstrators cordoned off a several blocks of the city and declared it off limits to police, and successfully did so for almost a month. Thus is something I have never witnessed before. Nor have I ever witnessed widespread looting outside of Seattle. I live in Bellevue and stores across the street from single family homes were being looted. I saw people walking out of Bellevue Square mall with stolen stuff in broad daylight as though it was completely normal. Neither of these were things I witnessed during the Michael Brown protests or other demonstrations against police conduct.
Both the data and my lived experiences indicate a correlation between more extreme behavior among protestors and more arrests. If we could point to demonstrable differences in the criteria police use for arrests you may have a point. But presently I see little reason to conclude that the disparity in arrests in 2020 are due to policing changes rather than the behavior of demonstrators.
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I live in Portland and watched many of these press people via Twitter. The reality is that many of these “press” are activists who document their activism and the activism of their comrades. They call themselves press, but they are press+activist. As a result they are often in the crowd of people throwing stuff at police, while screaming “hey you fucking fascist, aren’t you embarassed to be an authoritarian?” I am no…
Well I think you almost nailed the point - when the police declare a riot, and start rounding everyone up who doesn't disperse, the media gets rolled up with that as well many times - especially if you are livestreaming via a gopro and not with a NBC news truck (though we saw journalists with institutional backing get hit with rubber bullets this year as well)
These journalists are (1) harder to identify, (2) have a different relationship to the news in that they aren't traveling to cover a news event, they are local citizens concerned about an outcome and documenting an event that often, then are emotionally strongly connected to, and (3) there is no governing body or corporate rules or sponsors that make their actions understandable and predictable.
Citizen journalism gives me more valuable insight into what is happening on the streets, though it takes more work on my part to sort through and develop my own narrative. I mostly discount the narrative journalists apply and try to figure out the facts from the material presented (except when I am consuming opinion pieces, where my explicit goal is to evaluate someone's narrative and viewpoint). I think this model holds some promise, though I am concerned that the sheer volume of material makes this untenable except the privileged few who have the time or mental space to through it all. Also, traditional media sources are just buying up these videos and accounts rather than sending their own crews, so we are already seeing this stuff applied nationwide, regardless whether someone views it on twitter or reads about it on a news website.
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>When the only way to get society to fix something is by having an audience, that's really bad too. That's just politics, i.e. how the world has always worked? Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that.
Right, exactly. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so we need to make sure that wheel squeaks are representative of society's ills. When something bad happens to non-journalists, journalists need to squeak just as loud as if it were happening to themselves. Providing the same treatment to the media as everyone else is one way to encourage it.
Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?
HN is pretty conservative on average.
I've been reading HN since the late 2000s and only noticed this post-election. It always seemed as if HN was incredibly liberal. Now there are conservative-leaning voices and opinions cropping up everywhere that are being upvoted as top comments.
I'm seeing a markedly conservative shift in tone.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it feels new.