Live data from Hacker News

Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

cjr.org

161–170 of 195 posts

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#161

A lot of people here are arguing that mainstream media had it coming for them because of bias, arrogance, pushing an agenda, etc. But I want to ask all of you: what replaces it as arbiter of truth? For all of the media's problems and imperfections, they have acted as a quasi-independent institution holding other powerful institutions and individuals in society in check. They have focused popular attention where it wa…

In the US, the judicial branch is the arbiter of truth. And yet, even judges write opinions.

The world is a messy place and it is only hubris that makes us think we can organize it neatly.

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#162
post #16

>As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know, and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good. And that is all true, for what it’s worth. But this is about power. We need to take some back, lest the rich and powerful run away from one of the last forces restraining them. It's interesting that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm no…

It's interesting that you read that article and came up with the idea that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm not sure why I should assume some random HNer -- who can read that article and come up with the phrase "they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts" when that wasn't what I read at all -- has any sort of reading comprehension. If anything, TFA is proof tha…

no offense, but you come across as a dick. I mean that in a constructive way.

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if Hitler had been the winner?

Well what if East India Company did not come to India, what if Turks did not invade India it would go on. Anyway Churchill's polices led to famine, which could have been avoided. His attitude towards India can be considered as racist.

Most things in life are not simplistic black/white decisions, whereby bad outcomes occurred because the people themselves were bad.

Doing anything results in trade-offs. Some trade-offs are worse than others, and some have horrible consequences, like deaths of many, but writing off the decision as a racist one implies malicious intent, which ignores the potentially real decisions that were being made.

For others reading this thread, parents seems to be referring to the Bengal Famine of 1943. Wiki has a decent summary, but it again demonstrates the circumstances and trade-offs that were made. Was it a good outcome? Famine and death certainly isn't. But was it done maliciously out of "racism"? Some scholars claim so, but often these are the same scholars who see everything through a lens of racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#1942%E2%...

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#164
post #16

>As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know, and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good. And that is all true, for what it’s worth. But this is about power. We need to take some back, lest the rich and powerful run away from one of the last forces restraining them. It's interesting that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm no…

It's interesting that you read that article and came up with the idea that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm not sure why I should assume some random HNer -- who can read that article and come up with the phrase "they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts" when that wasn't what I read at all -- has any sort of reading comprehension. If anything, TFA is proof tha…

>I'm not sure why I should assume some random HNer [...] has any sort of reading comprehension

Don't, I never asked you to.

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you read that article and came up with the idea that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm not sure why I should assume some random HNer -- who can read that article and come up with the phrase "they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts" when that wasn't what I read at all -- has any sort of reading comprehension. If anything, TFA is proof tha…

no offense, but you come across as a dick. I mean that in a constructive way.

no offense, but fuck you for being offended about something I said to someone else and not actually adding to the conversation. It is entirely possible that I was wrong, but I don't think so. And you didn't bother to do so either.

EDIT: Y'all forgot to downvote my post where I said "you're an awful person because you're arguing against something that isn't there"[0] and not just the one where I said "fuck you for having nothing to say" to someone else.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144124

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145319

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#166
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you read that article and came up with the idea that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm not sure why I should assume some random HNer -- who can read that article and come up with the phrase "they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts" when that wasn't what I read at all -- has any sort of reading comprehension. If anything, TFA is proof tha…

>I'm not sure why I should assume some random HNer [...] has any sort of reading comprehension Don't, I never asked you to.

I didn't, and I spelled out why.

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if Hitler had been the winner?

Well what if East India Company did not come to India, what if Turks did not invade India it would go on. Anyway Churchill's polices led to famine, which could have been avoided. His attitude towards India can be considered as racist.

> Well what if East India Company did not come to India, what if Turks did not invade India it would go on.

The East India company came to India 262 years before Churchill was born. But if we want to talk about that, why not also talk about the Mughals, Muslims who invaded India and are the source for many aspects of Indian culture. (I have an Arabic last name because of the Mughals.) Like other Muslim empires, the Mughals were prolific slavers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India (“Slavery in India escalated during the Muslim domination of northern India after the 11th-century, after Muslim rulers re-introduced slavery to the Indian subcontinent.”).

If we start wiping out parts of our history that are unpleasant we won’t have anything left.

> Anyway Churchill's polices led to famine, which could have been avoided.

No, the famine was caused by environmental disasters. Nobody thinks it “could have been avoided.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53405121 (“‘We can't blame him for creating the famine in any way,’ says Ms. Khan. ‘What we can say is that he didn't alleviate it when he had the ability to do so, and we can blame him for prioritising white lives and European lives over South Asian lives.’”).

Churchill made a decision to prioritize resources for the war effort. By 1943 the UK was devastated. It lost 1% of its population in World War II. Those resources could have saved many lives in Bengal. But how friendly do you think Nazi Germany would have been to Indians had Britain not won the war? You can’t judge Churchill purely by the consequences of his actions without also addressing what could have happened had Churchill acted differently.

> His attitude towards India can be considered as racist.

Churchill once said “Indians are the beastliest people in the world after Germans.” But Ghandi was racist towards Africans (although his views evolved somewhat as he got older): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882. Everyone was racist back then, and in most of the world, people are still very racist. Churchill was no more racist towards India, than Indians in my parents generation are racist towards Africa or China. (And in Bangladesh, toward Jews.) And frankly, outside maybe the educated class in India and Bangladesh, most people are still that racist today.

It doesn’t make any sense to judge people by the standards of society decades later. If we did that we would have nobody left to admire. Churchill isn’t famous for his racism. He is famous for holding off Nazi Germany for years while American sat in the sidelines. He deserves to be held in esteem for that virtue, even if we recognize the faults he shared with other people of his era.

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very opinionated. But it's interesting because Matt Taibbi is not a Republican, in the same way that Reason (not Democrats) is interesting when it criticizes Republicans. Well, except Reason is a platform with a right-libertarian that is generally supportive of similar things to the Republican Party and favorable to Republicans, whereas Taibbi, however leftist his editorial position might be, is generally not…

> but with a few negative references to “Corporate America” or some Republican (usually, Donald Trump) to mark it as a Genuine Left-Wing Critique Didn't Taibbi first break out with his coverage of the Great Financial Crisis, and specifically his vigorous criticism of the big banks' role? IIRC, he even coined the term "vampire squid" to refer to Goldman. His leftism is a lot more than superficial references to corpora…

Yes and Assange was at some point standing up to authoritarian governments not working for them.

Times change, people change.

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#169
post #16

>As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know, and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good. And that is all true, for what it’s worth. But this is about power. We need to take some back, lest the rich and powerful run away from one of the last forces restraining them. It's interesting that they seem to consider themselves the only ones with pure hearts. I'm no…

Yeah it's a cute story but it's off the mark because more often than not nowadays the mainstream journalists ARE the rich and powerful. If you want to see journalists actually performing the role of being checks on power, go to the third world. Bankrolled journalism isn't true journalism.

> more often than not nowadays the mainstream journalists ARE the rich and powerful.

Really? Very few, if any. People like Tucker Carlson have wealthy contracts but they don’t even consider themselves journalists, but entertainers (in his case he’s not part of the news division, for example).

Re: Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power

#170
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary part of journalism is when it’s about activism vs. the truth. Activists can lie if the truth isn’t important. Lying for ratings, though, is also very bad. Activists lying for both activist causes and ratings is extremely bad.

The same is true for science. Just recently there was an article that claimed that global warming is responsible for the corona pandemic. What a load of bullshit, and the "scientists" probably knew it very well. Virologists are getting sponsored by the pharma industry, climate researchers are green warriors (while at the same time being funded by insurance companies), social scientists going completely off the rails…

Have you got a link to that article?

And I wonder how much “good” scientists lend their support to not-so-great scientific claims out of fear that refuting them might damage the public’s trust in “science” as a whole.

Post reply on HN