Something that has bothered me about Hacker News for years at this point is its complete disdain and disregard for an independent, reputable press.
Journalism isn’t a perfect industry by any means, but it hasn’t been responsible for the wholesale discount sale of America's manufacturing sector, nor has it pushed for the erosion of societal attention and trustworthiness like Social Media, nor has it been at the forefront of abusing gig work to the extremes of major players in the Sharing Economy — yet any center-left, traditional media outlet is met with ad-hominem attacks, logical fallacies, etc. If anything, that industry has been picked clean like vultures by the financial and thought leaders in this industry.
I don't fully understand the dynamic between the west-coast hate for the east-coast press but it seems inconsequential to me because while the truth has costs, weaponized lies can hurt much more.
If you have Trump, Elon and the New York Times in one post you gonna get some hop-ons that normally do not get engaged the same way with other posts, I guess?
In a weird bit of circularity, the article you link to references the conspiracy theory you're trying to push:
> In the weeks since the election, allies of Trump have included the Center for Tech and Civic Life's grants in their voter fraud conspiracy theories. They have challenged the legality and neutrality of the grants, claiming that the funding was aimed at boosting Democratic turnout.
That one is tricky - if the sitting president violates the terms of service of the platform, the account should be suspended the same way any other account.
The fact it's a personal account of a government official should have no influence on the decision.
In fact, I'd hold such accounts to a higher standard than the general population ones, perhaps enforcing rules in accordance to the account's impact on the overall population of the platform.
A lot of people got away with a lot more than they should be allowed to. When you have millions of followers (and not only in Twitter terminology) you need to be extremely careful with what you say, in special about others, as what one sees as criticism can be seen as a call to arms by others.
We need to be careful in shaping public discourse.
It's the NY Times. The "journalists" are a couple of their cookie-cutter live-in-a-bubble West Coast employees. One gets the feeling they aspire to eventually write their own "Burn Book" (by Kara Swisher).
NYT is riding on reputation fumes. Its BuzzFeed-y model makes TMZ more reputable. TMZ knows what it is. On the other hand the NYT pretends it still practices journalism.
> cookie-cutter live-in-a-bubble West Coast employees
We should refrain from such labelling. We should engage in dialog, not label people and immediately reject whatever they have to say. This is not how democracy should work.
> the NYT pretends it still practices journalism.
I'm not sure why Fox News still has "News" in their name. Or why they ever had it.
Fox News has a clear separation of hard news and opinion. While it hosts both type of content both online and on air, every show or article clearly falls into one of those buckets and they don’t hide it.
Every NYT news article reeks of influence from its decidedly liberal editorial board. Can’t really blame them either as the balkanization of media means that’s exactly what their readers want anyway.
Fox News argued in court that they are not news and that it's unreasonable for anyone to construe them as a news outlet. So much for your "clear separation" of hard news and opinion - Fox News argued, in a court of law, that it's all opinion.
Speculative. It's also perjury if they were lying. Are you implying Fox News has no regard for the law whatsoever? And if that were true then why would anyone watch them?
Besides, reality aligns with their assertion that they're not a news organization.
Well... It's not impossible for them to report news in an accurate and unbiased form, so there is the possibility they could eventually be a news organisation.
News outlets should be held to a higher standard than that. Sadly, I don't see anything that can force that but the withdrawal of the legal protections the press has when it doesn't meet those standards.
In theory, they should be policing each other. The reality is, the standard for textbook definition journalism has all but disappeared. All the heavyweights (e.g., NYT, Fox, CNN, etc.) are overly biased, shameless, etc.
What used to be journalism (in the USA) is now mostly TMZ meets BuzzFeed.
> What used to be journalism (in the USA) is now mostly TMZ meets BuzzFeed.
You can't have a news organisation competing for the same attention with organisations focusing on entertainment (or hate-fuelled engagement farming) dressed up as news. This seems like a failure of the market to self-regulate.
>We should refrain from such labelling. We should engage in dialog, not label people and immediately reject whatever they have to say. This is not how democracy should work.
Sure, how about they start first? E.g. by not labelling Musk or having knee-jerk partisan reactions?
"But their labelling is just objective accurate depiction of things"
Labeling? Or an accurate description? They all think alike, and they surrounded themselves with the same. That's why we get the non-journalism we get. It's so bad they don't know how bad they are.
As for Democracy, a healthy and proper Democracy requires a healthy and free-thinking Fouth Estate.
We. Don't. Have. That.
These cookie-cutter, bubble people fond of parroting narratives, yet self-proclaim as "journalists", are the root of the problem.
In short, I was being kind.
As for "news", Fox is not alone. Across the board, grade school level op-ed is passed off as journalism. They focus attention on irrelevant things that happen that don't qualify as news, yet there there are (sucking up eyeballs). Fox is not the only who practices this.
Fwiw, my filter for "fake news" is not truth or not-truth, but also relevance and importance. When a prestigious news outlet is channeling TMZ, the question then becomes, what are they NOT reporting?
Exactly. They take issue with someone publicly making their position clear when it conflicts with their own, but were perfectly fine with private support.
Journalism isn’t a perfect industry by any means, but it hasn’t been responsible for the wholesale discount sale of America's manufacturing sector, nor has it pushed for the erosion of societal attention and trustworthiness like Social Media, nor has it been at the forefront of abusing gig work to the extremes of major players in the Sharing Economy — yet any center-left, traditional media outlet is met with ad-hominem attacks, logical fallacies, etc. If anything, that industry has been picked clean like vultures by the financial and thought leaders in this industry.
I don't fully understand the dynamic between the west-coast hate for the east-coast press but it seems inconsequential to me because while the truth has costs, weaponized lies can hurt much more.