Live data from Hacker News

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

freedom.press

521–527 of 527 posts

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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except those aren't example of manipulative language as they're factual descriptions of the claims. If I say the sky is made of honey without any evidence to back my claim and you report on my statement describing it as having no evidence, you've done nothing wrong. Your description of my statement is not using superfluous adjectives. Anyone making a claim of fact needs to be prepared to back it up. Far too many peop…

The real world doesn’t work like that and facts and opinions are almost always a mixed bucket. What you consider evidence or fact is not what someone else does. Implicitly there is a possibility any claim is wrong with a normal title, but some titles and articles bias the user. If you titled an article “Giantrobot claims those aren’t examples of manipulative language” that’s fine but if the same article was titled “W…

First, bias happens. A journalist should aim to be objective but they are not saints of objectivity. Second, it's not unreasonable to editorialize a little bit when discussing statements that appear to a reasonable person to be made in bad faith or are self serving. If I routinely made claims of fact about the honey-like nature of the heavens despite frequent demonstrations of my claims' absurdity and falseness, it would not at all be unreasonable or "biased" to point out a priori that I still had not produced any evidence of my claims. It's certainly not unreasonable if I run late night TV commercials asking for money from pensioners to launch a mission to collect sky honey.

As for evidence of an event occurring, you'll also notice journalists go out of their way to second source statements of facts. They want first-hand accounts from named sources in order to put an identity and reputation up for scrutiny. Ideally they also want a second named source but failing that they will often accept unnamed sources (to whom the journalist knows the identity but does not publicly reveal it). This is a common practice specifically because journalists are rarely in the room when and where events occur.

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

#522
post #455
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, 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 contex…

Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy". Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there. I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they c…

> Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy".

NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet.

The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom issues that don’t get airtime in other outlets, it’s not just “all left all the time”. Maybe give it a listen sometime and see what a true counterpart on the other side would sound like - it’s always enlightening to hear what other people hear. And bear in mind - that's what it sounds like for me to listen to Fox, too.

That’s a big part of the problem with the right-wing media bubble at the moment, you think the counterpart to Fox News is NYT but that’s a false equivalency. NYT is ultimately a middle of the road outlet, you’re just so far out of the mainstream that it looks left. I frequently consider NYT articles to be taking too much of a pro-right or pro-corporate stance on an issue (especially Maggie Haberman, she’s just awful).

At the end of the day the US has two right wing parties - one center-right and one far-right, and that's how our news media is structured too. We have two pro-corporate parties, and that's how our news media is structured too. MSNBC is owned by General Electric, with major interests in defense contracting. Washington Post is owned by Bezos. Fox is essentially a media arm of the Republican party. CNN are just sort of chaos monkeys chasing share prices. There is very little "independent media" in the US.

And no, I don’t take Democracy Now too seriously either.

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

#523
post #522
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy". Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there. I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they c…

> Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy". NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet. The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom i…

If all you see is the right wing in the US, I don't think it's me who needs recalibration.

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Strength in numbers is a compensation for insecurity. "strength in numbers". ≠ "economies of scale" The former is about relative group size, mutual defense within the group, and reducing the risks of aggression against outgroups. The latter is about increasing the effectiveness of coordinated activity more generally (which, yes, can include defense and aggression), especially those activities that persuade people.…

Originality imposes no attempt at either agreement or disagreement. Suggesting that a person must either agree or disagree (forced dichotomy fallacy) to achieve any desirable outcome misses the point. It is a solution not wanted.

I can't really tell what you're saying here, except that you disagree for some reason.

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, if they just repeat the claim verbatim, and it's about a complex topic (such as election interference or vote rigging), how is the reader supposed to actually make a decision on the topic, without doing weeks of investigation on their own? Shouldn't it be the media's job to analyze the claims and then inform the reader if they're valid or not?

Aren't you then arguing that is explicitly the media's job to manufacture consent among the public, according to the interests of their shareholders? If so, I would agree that that is frequently the role of a journalist.

No, that is not what I am arguing. I'm saying that part of reporting claims by public figures is also providing the context of the claims made, so that the reader can make decisions with more information than just the claim (since the claim itself usually does not have enough information to make a decision).

Also, just an FYI, your comment didn't feel like it was written in good faith when I first read it. I had to actively suppress my bad faith detector to write my reply. Just feedback for future comments.

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

#526
post #523
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy". NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet. The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom i…

If all you see is the right wing in the US, I don't think it's me who needs recalibration.

You think it's shocking that the country where the #1 cause of bankruptcy is an (often trivial) interaction with the free-market medical system, with the world's highest per-capita prison population, is right wing?

Ok then.

If you don't think the US is a right-wing country, you do need recalibration lol. And that's really both parties for the most part - the voice for, say, medicare for all, or for abolishing penal slavery, are basically nonexistent and non-mainstream.

In international terms, the US effectively has a far-right party and a centrist party, with a handful of leftists lumped into the centrist party where they're effectively sidelined in terms of policy.

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

#527
post #526
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you see is the right wing in the US, I don't think it's me who needs recalibration.

You think it's shocking that the country where the #1 cause of bankruptcy is an (often trivial) interaction with the free-market medical system, with the world's highest per-capita prison population, is right wing? Ok then. If you don't think the US is a right-wing country, you do need recalibration lol. And that's really both parties for the most part - the voice for, say, medicare for all, or for abolishing penal s…

The same country with ridiculous public spending on medical care under the disguise of a free market medical system? Literally 1.2 trillion dollars of federal spending on healthcare in 2019.

The same system that centrally plans and limits care provider production. You don't have market health care or socialised heath care. You have a solution that somehow combines the worst of both.

Then you look at the global dosage of other countries. Its the US socially right of China? Japan? Any part of Asia? If your calibration is literally the left half of the spectrum I guess you'd see the US as the farthest right of the world.

Post reply on HN