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Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

freedom.press

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Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#401

Post by pessimizer »

tristor wrote: post #190
user764743 wrote: post #144

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 don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats. Many many many people have watched with their own eyes, live on video, what's been going on through the course of this year. We've seen CNN and ABC reporters shot with rubber bullets and accosted on l…

> I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats.

This itself is an authoritarian tendency that is increasingly alarming me lately (a feeling that started after 9/11.) I think we're going to see "journalist" becoming a licensed profession within the next 20 years, which is a commonality amongst all authoritarian dictatorships. When people start talking about who is or isn't a journalist, and identifying ideological opponents as not journalists, the only outcome is a media that is defined as legitimate by how loyal it is.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#402

Post by dang »

sneak wrote: post #389
dang wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a true statement about HN. Less than 10% of the community is in SV—it's all over the world and has tons of different "very specific parts of wider society". That's one reason why people argue so much about this stuff. If you think the HN community is SV-friendly or even startup-friendly, it may surprise you that many people in those communities feel like it's exactly the other way around.

> That's not a true statement about HN. I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at…

There's a fallacy in your question if you think that any of us who work on HN determine anything about what comments show up here. That's a function of the community and is way beyond our control. Literally anyone can make an account and comment.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#403

Post by znpy »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #391
znpy wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I admittedly haven't read the article yet (...), but does it take into account that we've had a lot more unrest than usual this year? If you have more unrest than usual (and it shouldn't be usual at all to have unrest) it's even more important to have more journalists circulating freely and writing/publishing freely: that's how you get to see and understand what's actually going on. If you don't have journalists do…

No one is arguing that journalists are unimportant, only that an increase in journalist arrests could be a really scary thing like authoritarianism or it could be that they just had a lot more contact with crankier cops.

Oh yeah I agree with that, I was just arguing that especially because the US had more unrest it makes even more problematic that journalists got arrested.

That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#404

Post by [deleted] »

moojd wrote: post #182
ojnabieoot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of unthinking, reflexive cynical glibness encourages the public indifference that allows things like this to happen: > The numbers are staggering. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019. This is in fact new.

Even as someone who is generally sympathetic to reports like this I don't think 2019 is a useful comparison. What are the numbers compared to other years with mass protests and/or riots (ex. 2016)? Is this a number that scales with the number and size of large events or was 2020 truly an outlier regardless?

[deleted]

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#405

Post by jjeaff »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #186
boopmaster wrote: post #128

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…

Why would you assume that cops are racist? Especially when a lot of them are black themselves?

I took it to mean that the "cop's boys club" is racist, not all cops.

But if you want to see real world examples of racism in policing, talk to a handful of Black men and ask about their experiences dealing with the cops. You will very likely hear many stories that you have never heard of happening to white people.

And the individual cops don't have to be racist for the -system- of policing to be racist.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#406

Post by j_walter »

SauciestGNU wrote: post #394
j_walter wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need some evidence of what is actually happening, then I recommend following Andy Ngo on Twitter. It's certainly only one view point of the protests that are going on, but its a side you won't see covered anywhere else.

Any credible sources? Andy Ngo is a propagandist for atomwaffen and heavily edits what he releases to strip it of context and present a narrative that is often directly contrary to the truth.

How do you define credible? Someone that releases information that you agree with? His videos are often releases of what Antifa publishes and rarely of his own recording (mostly because he has been violently attacked in the past by them). Stop excluding sources because you don't like the information...take in as much data as possible and make your own conclusion. When protestors are going into residential neighborhoods and causing conflict with people that are minding their own business...or throwing fireworks or other projectiles at the police...you can't say that's not happening and is contrary to the truth.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#407

Post by pjc50 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #361
sneak wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tough reality check for a lot of people who grow up in the US, thinking it's a free country with equal protection of the law, when they realize that there are at least two tiers of protected overclasses (wealthy landowners, and the police) to which only subsets of the law applies in practice (to say nothing of the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers…

These are pretty outrageous claims you're making, and you'll notice that the people making such claims never have evidence to back it up. Your viewpoints are grounded in thousands of other people in the same echo chamber as you repeating the same claims as a cultural weapon to gain political power, but there's never anything backing it up. I don't care how many people you've convinced to hold these beliefs, it doesn'…

> You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing

You've never seen the Rodney King video?

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#408

Post by sneak »

dang wrote: post #402
sneak wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not a true statement about HN. I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at…

There's a fallacy in your question if you think that any of us who work on HN determine anything about what comments show up here. That's a function of the community and is way beyond our control. Literally anyone can make an account and comment.

I think I edited to add my last paragraph right as you were commenting. You're right, of course.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#409

Post by dang »

Mandatum wrote: post #396
dang wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... . Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mos…

Is there a way to get timestamp data from these threads? I'd be interested in analysing some of these and sharing some results and examples of this at work.

All the comments are timestamped. The HN API has all that, and you can probably also look at other sources, e.g. Google BigQuery's copy of the public HN dataset.

Re: Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year

#410

Post by 80386 »

pc86 wrote: post #275
three_seagrass wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalist is not loosely defined. FTA: >While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work. Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time hig…

If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist. If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist. If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist. There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they pr…

> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.

But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.

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