281–290 of 527 posts
The "record number" seems to be (as the article says) mostly related to the rioting--reporters getting arrested as part of the rioting response. Doesn't seem like an institutional crisis at all.
Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?
A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right.
I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary.
This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.
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Because we have looked at the statistics.
PNAS has also looked at the statistics: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877 Police brutality is definitely a problem in the United States, but it appears to be entirely colorblind.
From that retraction:
> Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.
edit: It's also, IMO, misleading to claim "PNAS has also looked at the statistics" based on their publication of a submitted article. It passed peer-review and they saw fit to publish it; it doesn't mean the National Academy of Sciences feels it's the last or only word on the subject.
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 think its more likely that some HN users have gone so far to the left that any comment they don't support can only be from the right.
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> Jimenez could be seen holding his CNN badge while reporting, identifying himself as a reporter, and telling the officers the crew would move wherever officers needed them to. An officer gripped his arm as Jimenez talked, then put him in handcuffs. > Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/…
> Police told the crew they were being detained because they were told to move and didn't, one member of the CNN crew relayed to the network. Right, they were violating an order to disperse or a curfew. Again, being a journalist doesn't bestow some special rights that lets you ignore the police when they issue an order to disperse or set a curfew. When people are looting and burning stuff down, the law has provisions…
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Being anti-"journalist" isn't the same as being pro-authoritarian. 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 acros…
Being in favour of, or okay with, journalists being arrested for doing journalism is _intensely_ authoritarian, whether you agree with them or not. Especially if you disagree with them, really.
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So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?
I don't know how to answer your dilemma that all of us face. But to add some nuance... it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods. An individual reporter may stretch the truth more than we're comfortable with, but as a whole, the big news outlets are more likely to make mistakes than commit outright lies that they know are false. Most of the bias is in deci…
Have you been not consuming news for the last 5 years?
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Wasn't there a video of clearly identified Australian press in Washington DC getting assaulted by the police? If that's normal...
If you disobey lawful orders from police this is exactly what will happen to you. I don't understand why so many people are surprised by this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum
It's not that people are surprised. Is that they're starting to say "this isn't okay."
Having accepted abuse in the past does not mean it's some big crazy idea when people start to stop accepting it.
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> On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth. This is not what I see happening. Instead what happens is people see news they disagree with and deem it biased. So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.
So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?
There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial.
For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there.
> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?
Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble.
Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE.
I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance.
But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.
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Living near Portland I would say that anyone that puts "PRESS" on their shirt with tape defines themselves as a journalist...or even just someone holding a phone or camera. Same as those medics with a red cross out of tape. There have also been many examples of those 2 groups of people engaging in the violence that seem to think of themselves as immune to police orders because of it. Unfortunately the videos and pict…
I’ve personally seen this repeatedly, and people have their heads so far in the ideological sand that they downvote you for some reason. It’s true, “independent journalists” wearing PRESS are basically an in-joke in the PNW. If there is one thing they are great at, it’s propaganda. They somehow managed to convince the rest of the country that they’re the good guys and the good guys are violent racists. Nothing could…