CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC • Hacker News Board

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#261

Post by claytongulick » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #253

claytongulick wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the link and the concrete reference, I hadn't seen that before. I think the article and the video summaries I've seen of that interview are a little deceptively edited, but the idea appears to be the same. Apparently, it's illegal to knowingly broadcast false information [1] within certain guidelines, and that can indeed cause a license revocation: "The FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about…

> What do you suggest as a solution? Should false information be ok to broadcast with a ... license? This seems like begging the question. The issue here obviously isn't truth vs untruth, it is fealty to the regime vs opposition to the regime. All the evidence points in this direction, and there isn't a better case yet made in the opposite. Witness the example cited above: right-wing talk radio, famous for spreading…

There's definitely a "both sides" argument here, but honestly that's boring and doesn't really move a conversation forward.

The problem isn't simple, and there don't seem to be obvious answers - civilizations have been struggling with it since recorded history.

I assume you're not trying to make the point that exceeding authority is a characteristic limited to the current administration are you?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

We've been asking this since at least 1st century Rome.

I think it's more important to evaluate systems, institutions and their effectiveness than specific politicians.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#262

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 5:00 AM UTC

claytongulick wrote: post #261

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you suggest as a solution? Should false information be ok to broadcast with a ... license? This seems like begging the question. The issue here obviously isn't truth vs untruth, it is fealty to the regime vs opposition to the regime. All the evidence points in this direction, and there isn't a better case yet made in the opposite. Witness the example cited above: right-wing talk radio, famous for spreading…

There's definitely a "both sides" argument here, but honestly that's boring and doesn't really move a conversation forward. The problem isn't simple, and there don't seem to be obvious answers - civilizations have been struggling with it since recorded history. I assume you're not trying to make the point that exceeding authority is a characteristic limited to the current administration are you? Quis custodiet ipsos…

Are you sure you replied to the right post? Mine was about how this action was clearly done on the basis of opposition to the current regime.

Neither the conversation nor the country can really move forward without that shared understanding of where we're at now.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#263

Post by fahhem » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #246

dsl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear is the enforcement mechanism because it can't be challenged in court. It is long past time for everyone in tech to take a long hard look at the current situation and stop doing anything that financially benefits Musk, Ellison, or Thiel.

It kind of explains quite a lot of behavior of the Russian government like low level aggression in the west, interesting ways of killing people and the like. Maybe also the Epstein files - he was in touch with Moscow a lot, and the behavior of Trump who seems pretty scared by that stuff.

Yep, Epstein was definitely a spy for the Kremlin, and not an 'ally' that was involved in the Iran-Contra affair that Epstein was a part of.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#264

Post by aftbit » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

xracy wrote: post #226

aftbit wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's the straw-man version of the argument. During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line. Satire, comedy, and truly live questions (like the weak version of the lab leak hypothesis, that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab into human population) were censored alongside the obviously false, harmful, and misleading takes abo…

Weird, cause I remember there being a very lengthy and involved debate about COVID. I remember hearing a ton of dissent and disagreement with the government positions... almost like... they weren't being censored. There are hundreds of thousands of discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, and there were hundreds of those discussions at the time. There was also plenty of conflicting advice given, including "injectin…

Certainly at the beginning, the tools weren't 100% in place, at least in the west. Famously, China silenced one of the very first COVID reporters and forced him to recant, before he himself died from the virus.[1]

As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".

I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#265

Post by aftbit » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #231

mrandish wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to 'censor' some COVID-19 content during the pandemic: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... > "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted v…

"Pressured." They merely suggested that it was better for the country and for business, and most of the companies agreed. There were no threats of fines or lawsuits, and none were levied.

This is exactly how the current CBS censorship works. The FCC said they "may" revise a rule, so CBS complied in advance by removing the political speech that the admin wanted to avoid.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#266

Post by benzible » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #250

benzible wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I said. I said it isn't cowardice you can blame on the network instead of the FCC, which is what the parent comment did by saying the fault lies "more with CBS." CBS deserves blame. The administration wielding the threat deserves more. Resistance requires an active, costly choice. The entire structure of public companies, fiduciary duty, short-term shareholder pressure, regulatory dependency, incentiv…

> That's not what I said. I said it isn't cowardice you can blame on the network instead of the FCC, which is what the parent comment did by saying the fault lies "more with CBS." CBS deserves blame. The administration wielding the threat deserves more. That's fair, this lines up with where I am mostly coming from - we shouldn't absolve blame from one group by focusing it on another. But your second paragraph then go…

We mostly agree. I'm really just making the point that focusing blame on the capitulators lets the people wielding state power off the hook. I suppose you could take the position that the industrialists who capitulated to the Nazis (I mean, those who didn't actively support them to begin with) were more at fault than the Nazis. Personally, I don't believe that.

And to be clear, I'm not saying fiduciary duty requires capitulation. CEOs can absolutely make the case that resistance serves long-term shareholder interests, and the evidence backs them up. Costco is thriving after, and arguably because, they held firm on DEI. Target capitulated and lost $12.5 billion in market value and its CEO resigned. I started shopping at Costco for this reason and haven't been in a Target since Trump took office, after shopping their regularly. What I am saying is that the short-term incentive structure of public companies makes capitulation easier, which is exactly why the coercion works so well and why it's the bigger problem. The system erects hurdles to doing what's right, and often what's even in a company's own long-term interest.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#267

Post by jajuuka » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #256

jajuuka wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you actually read the case the evidence is clear that the government was giving direction to social media sites. Which is what the comment I was replying to was about. Read the dissenting opinion. I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct, and not actually examining the case itself.

"actually read the case" includes reading the judgement ("the conclusion"), which overrules your personal judgement (and mine, whatever it might've been). > Read the dissenting opinion Dissenting opinions are often irrelevant, equivalent to a loser shouting into the void because they lost. By definition, dissenting opinions are incorrect, because to be correct, they would need to be shared by the majority, in which c…

I'm not sure why you're absolving yourself of free will. When courts ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just, were they correct? What if a court today ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just. Would the judges who support abolition be "losers shouting into the void"? It seems like your position falls apart pretty quickly to anyone with basic morals.

Courts and judges are not perfect. Are you just clinging to that belief to justify a predetermined opinion?

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#268

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

jajuuka wrote: post #267

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"actually read the case" includes reading the judgement ("the conclusion"), which overrules your personal judgement (and mine, whatever it might've been). > Read the dissenting opinion Dissenting opinions are often irrelevant, equivalent to a loser shouting into the void because they lost. By definition, dissenting opinions are incorrect, because to be correct, they would need to be shared by the majority, in which c…

I'm not sure why you're absolving yourself of free will. When courts ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just, were they correct? What if a court today ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just. Would the judges who support abolition be "losers shouting into the void"? It seems like your position falls apart pretty quickly to anyone with basic morals. Courts and judges are not perfect. Are you just clinging…

> What if a court today ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just

What if it ruled the opposite (the status quo), and you used your same argument to say that the courts are wrong and that chattel slavery actually is legal and just?

What makes you, 1 random person out of billions, more correct than the courts, just because you might personally feel chattel slavery is legal and just?

> Courts and judges are not perfect.

If courts and judges are not perfect, then that means that you and your dissenting opinions are even less perfect. Even if we were to accept mob rule, the people don't share your dissenting opinion, so your proposal seems to be that a randomly-small minority of random people unaccountably decide matters of law based on whatever criteria they feel at the time -- a worse option than courts in every way.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#269

Post by croes » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

QuercusMax wrote: post #252

croes wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are plenty of people with jobs and families that depend on that jobs. Where all the people of France that didn't choose to fight to their death collaborators? Where all the people in the concentartion camps collaborators. Do you blame them or the real perpetrator? I find it strange to put the blame on the middleman instead on the source of all that.

Corporations are made of people in the same way that Soylent Green is made of people. Your argument is incoherent. There's a difference between not fighting and obeying in advance.

So if a corporation makes bad decisions and goes bankrupt the people in the corporation aren’t affected?

Without people there is no corporation.

And I‘m pretty sure the people in corporations are still alive so your Soylent Green example is nonsense.

> There's a difference between not fighting and obeying in advance.

Sometimes not. If you know in advance what will happen, not fighting can be the better option. At least for the moment.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#270

Post by claytongulick » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 12:11 AM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #262

claytongulick wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a "both sides" argument here, but honestly that's boring and doesn't really move a conversation forward. The problem isn't simple, and there don't seem to be obvious answers - civilizations have been struggling with it since recorded history. I assume you're not trying to make the point that exceeding authority is a characteristic limited to the current administration are you? Quis custodiet ipsos…

Are you sure you replied to the right post? Mine was about how this action was clearly done on the basis of opposition to the current regime. Neither the conversation nor the country can really move forward without that shared understanding of where we're at now.

Yep, agreed.

If you aren't able to see how the issue is much broader than any specific politician, it's difficult to move a conversation forward.

You may want to take a serious and critical look at how these problems have been a part of all politics throughout history.

If your viewpoint is that the current team is the bad guy, but some other team is the good guy, it just means that their propaganda has been effective with you.