Thing is, when the New York Times was "the newspaper of record", everyone read it. When they only print what will pass muster with the howling mob, for fear of losing their jobs if they offend, then only the howling mob will read it. But the howling mob doesn't have enough members to support the New York Times.
That is, catering to the most vocal segment of the Right Thinkers is a ticket to an ever-shrinking readership, because 1) everyone who isn't a card-carrying member of the Right Thinkers leaves, and 2) the Right Thinkers shrinks as the majority repeatedly throws out people for not being right thinking enough.
There's a flip side to that though which is that the other side of the aisle is also a howling mob. The discourse across the board has become so radically polarized that it's impossible to reconcile the competing world views. In the mean time, there's apparently a belief in the news room that centrists are rare enough that they need not be catered to.
Centrists would be somewhat rare it it hadn't become a slur for both extremes to label anyone that's not an extremist.
Moderates are far more common than centrists. But these day's you're either completely toxic and insane or you get ridiculed as a centrist for not caring enough.
These days, to be a "centrist" is to try to take a position between "I think all human beings should be treated equally and granted basic rights and dignity" and "I think only white, cisgender, straight, abled, Christian men of upper middle class or better should be given full rights. Everyone else is a second-class citizen or worse."
This is, in significant part, due to the enforced two-party system in the US ("enforced" by our first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all election system), which ensures that when a party takes any particular ideology or position into itself, as the Republican party has taken this white supremacy into itself, it is impossible to support anything the party champions without also de facto supporting its most extreme positions.
Get rid of the literal Nazis on the right, make "people should be allowed to live their lives without fear of constant oppression for harmless aspects of themselves" a completely apolitical opinion, and then maybe "centrist" can become a term that's not worthy of derision again.
Agreed on all points. Appeals to centrism are a negotiation tactic; not with the one considered too extreme who should be more moderate, but to the third party who is watching who is sympathetic to the one calling for moderation. It benefits the status quo, and therefore is innately conservative.
No, centrism is to also find areas of consensus and pursue them, however imperfect. For instance, criminal justice reform has made some progress recently. Gradual decriminalization of some recreational drugs as well.
I don’t disagree. I view the two as mutually compatible rather than exclusive. Incrementalism is working within the Overton window to affect change within the system. Progress happens in fits and starts as well as by design and committee.
This is exactly what I was talking about. You make a bunch of assumptions about peoples' political opinions that are incorrectly portraying them as centrists and supporters of nazis if they don't adopt your world view. "Us or them" is killing America. Lack of nuance and intelligent discourse is destroying us.
There's more to the extreme left than "Everyone deserves to be treated equally and with dignity."
Politics in the US lacks nuance. You can be politically moderate and lean towards the left. It isn't simply conservative wolves in centrist clothing.
I can vehemently disagree about many things that extreme leftists do and still vote for one over Donald Trump. But that doesn't mean voting for Donald Trump automatically makes someone a Nazi either.
But that doesn't mean voting for Donald Trump automatically makes someone a Nazi either.
Doesn't it make them a Nazi enabler, though? Is that really much better than carrying the card and wearing the pin?
The Soviets had a couple of good terms that can be recycled to describe Trump Voters Who Aren't Nazis: one was "fellow travelers," and the other was... probably a bit too inflammatory to post here.
Calling Trump a nazi seems incredibly disrespectful to people and their family who actually lost their lives to real nazis.
Are you aware that you don't actually know what Trump supporters think? That your opinion is based on heuristics running on top of the absolutely tiny sample of the real world that you've been exposed to, much of it likely incredibly biased if not outright untrue?
Are you aware that you don't actually know what Trump supporters think?
I grew up with them. Trust me, I know what they think.
This period of history may or may not be what Joe Strummer prepared us for, but it certainly looks like the one Hannah Arendt, Milton Mayer, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn prepared us for.
Did you grow up with 49% of the voters in this country, or are you generalizing them based on caricatured versions of your anecdotal experience?
I haven't and don't plan on voting for Trump. However, you can't generalize a group of people consisting of approximately 60 million very easily. Even if you can't fathom why they would support him, there's a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies within that massive group.
There are also many different political issues that have significant impacts on peoples' lives. Not everyone gets the same information about these issues. Even if they did, not everyone interprets and values them in the same exact way. I would bet most people voting for or against Trump are trying to do what they think will make the US a safe, fair, happy place to live. The problem is that many political issues are incredibly complex and most of them don't have clear cut solutions. Even in cases where they do, people still can't agree on the best course of action.
Some people like to hand wave the complexity away by taking the stance that "one party just wants freedom and equal rights for everyone and the other wants the opposite".
> "Doesn't it make them a Nazi enabler, though? Is that really much better than carrying the card and wearing the pin?"
I'm going to recommend you watch something to better understand what that word means. It's a documentary [1] called Night and Fog, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048434/ . Every few years or so I watch it again, just as a reminder.
I'm very familiar with the Nacht und Nebel directive, but not with that particular film. In fact, "Night and Fog" was the first image that came to mind when I saw a protester being kidnapped and shoved into an unmarked vehicle recently. [1] I can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that it might be a good time to get off the fence and pick a side.
I've also found some post-war narratives out of Germany to be downright bone-chilling, such as 'The Lives of Others.' Definitely recommend that one if you haven't seen it. Are there any specific points raised by 'Night and Fog' that you have in mind?
I mean, Donald Trump literally reversed transgender health protections this week. If you're voting for a Republican, you're voting for the party of Donald Trump and efforts like that which take away the rights of certain classes of citizens.
You can't vote for a party and try to avoid taking the whole package deal. You get what you voted for.
But that logic means that if I vote for a Democrat, I'm also taking the whole package deal. And, bluntly, there aren't very many people that actually support all of that package deal.
Yes, that's right. I don't agree with the full package deal, but I think it's far better than the alternative
Again: You get what you vote for. Using 'I disagree with what my party is doing, but I'm voting for them anyways' as an attempt to avoid criticism doesn't work. That's the nature of US politics. If you vote for one party despite them doing some heinous things, then you tacitly support what they're doing. If you don't like it, then either don't vote or vote for the opposite party.
And if I also disagree with some of what the other party is doing, then what? "Don't vote" seems to be the only option you have left. And I strongly disagree that that's the best option.
Then you compromise and pick the party that you think best accomplishes what you want.
But part of that compromise is that you accept the party is going to also do things you don't like. Which is something you can't escape criticism for. Voting is approval for that party. You're choosing to value what Party B does over Party A, which means you weigh the negatives of Party B as being less of a problem than the positives.
That doesn't mean you get to avoid those negatives when someone else calls you out on who you decided to throw your lot in with.
Instead, do as all thinking humans: vote for the third party that most appeals to you. I've been swapping between the Greens and the Libertarians... this year looks Green so far.
Even the guy who started this site had something to say about shitting on orthodoxy:
>What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
There really isn't more to the "extreme left" than equality and dignity.
The problem is that even suggesting that equality and dignity are valid as bedrock communal values in business, politics, law, and economics is considered an aggressively extremist ultra-left position in the US - and not a sane and mature common sense centre-left view, as it is in parts of Europe.
There's a reason for this, and it's to do with the real bedrock values of US culture.
Bottom line is the Left in the US operates the same way as the rest of US culture does.
And the underlying problem is understanding why, not complaining about superficial dynamics that are actually consistent with the way the culture operates as a whole.
You put "extreme left" in quotes as if there isn't such a thing and its simply a way to malign mainstream liberals. Once again this is the kind of tribalism I'm talking about. All or nothing. Purity tests.
There are leftists in the US to whom equality and dignity are the foundations of their belief system. However, that doesn't represent the whole of leftism in the US and it certainly doesn't represent the foundation of actual leftist extremism in America.
To clarify, I don't think most people that fall on the left half of the political spectrum in the United States are extremists. I think that due to their fanaticism and tendency to be more vocal, the extremists have a voice disproportionate to their actual size.
That doesn't mean they don't matter. It just means they don't represent as many people on the left as one would perceive them to based on social media and mainstream media.
I'm not a leftist extremist. I'm a socially liberal moderate that likes the general idea of free market competition but understands that completely unregulated markets are probably just as toxic and doomed to fail as attempts to form completely planned economies. Prudent regulation can minimize predatory and exploitative behavior.
I think there is a balance to be struck between people having individual freedoms and the ability of the government to take measures to prevent groups of people from making it impossible for marginalized groups of people to live enjoyable lives in the US.
My search for that balance is founded on a desire for equality and dignity. For example, I don't think a city or state full of racists/homophobes should be able to use States' rights protections to establish bubbles where its impossible for certain minorities to comfortably exist.
However, I believe that we are often really quick to take knee jerk reactions and pass legislation that may have unintended consequences when it comes to preserving everyone's freedom, equality, and dignity.
You may choose to ignore them, but there are vocal voices in the progressive movement that are racist and sexist and are more interested in establishing a society that revolves around revenge against white people. Some of them are nobodies, but some of them are influential people in places of power in various industries.
Leftist extremism exists. There are people advocating for violence against white people and men in general on Twitter for a daily basis. Reporting these people usually gets ignored.
I'm opposed to leftist extremism and conservative extremism. People that advocate for violence and who advocate for a new type of inequality are assholes, regardless of how many of their unrelated political opinions I might share with them.
I do, however, believe that the US has more work to do in regards to how it treats many different minority groups. I also believe that white privilege exists. I don't think every white person faces a life-changing situation where they benefit from it, but it happens. In my case I'm not sure how much of an impact it had, but it probably had an impact.
What is North Korea? Cuba? Soviet Union? Doesn't sound like equality and dignity to me.
What you're not getting is that equality and dignity aren't even compatible if you try to push equality to extremes. Dignity means giving people freedom to make their own choices and live as they wish; the opposite of dignity is enslaving them. But as soon as people can make different choices they'll start achieving different outcomes - inequality. Not to mention the need to forcefully people who step out of their assigned 'equal' band of achievement - there's nothing dignified about crabs in a bucket.
NK and Cuba and USSR stamped out inequality pretty well, and they gave up on dignity to accomplish that.
Let’s see, a state that no longer exists and two of the worst examples of left based ideology nation states.
You sound like a rational person. If I give you three examples of current capitalist ideology authoritarian states (one more example than you gave), reason would dictate that you will of course instantly become a leftest because you are a rational person and by your own self-described logic, the correct ideology is determined by which ideological system has a higher count of authoritarian states.
I'm not asking a rhetorical question, genuinely interested in how you see this. It doesn't seem like to me like he falls in any of the categories you listed. Same with Lee Fang, the interviewer who got attacked for publishing Max's remarks.
The charitable interpretation of the centrists position is trying to straddle the line between "I believe the government should be responsible for intervening in order to secure equal outcomes for all people" and "I believe individuals should be responsible for their owns lives and own outcomes." Or something along those lines. Centrists are not centrists because they embrace some negative, immoral 'other side', but because they recognize the other side has it's own values that are good and worth preserving. Many centrists likely see themselves as trying to strike a balance between these values.
People also seem to be unaware that howling mobs move on...you just have to wait them out. Stand firm and they'll quickly find another target to bully.
Case in point: remember last year when the governor and the AG (I think?) of Virginia were caught in blackface 30 years ago and the lieutenant governor was revealed to have raped a woman in college 20 years ago? And they all refused to resign? Everyone forgot about that a month later.
Which is why a system based on policing corruption through public outrage is doomed to fail. You need to have a system that has actual mechanisms--investigations, prosecutions, and convictions--to keep a lid on corruption. Public shaming doesn't work because the public has only so much attention span, and there is soooo much corruption.
In this case two of them hadn’t committed crimes and the third had a statute of limitations that had passed so there wasn’t really corruption involved, just a refusal to listen to protests.
Like I said, mechanisms, not animus. Get laws on the books (or into the constitution of your state if necessary) that provide avenues for removal. Spell out standards of behavior and consequences for violating them and enforce those standards. The mob is not the solution.
The only thing I admire about Trump is his megalomania and ignorance makes him impervious to politically correct McCarthyites. The Twitter mobs will move on, just wait a little while.
And yet, his so called mob has done... nothing here.
Which, I know, is very frustrating to those who are salivating at the thought of seeing them provoked. The unanswered cries of "where's the 2FA crowd now?!" have, admittedly, been very satisfying to watch.
I for one am glad that most the 2A crowd, on both sides of the aisle, don't seem to presently think shooting people is be a good idea. As for people not in that crowd who seem to think otherwise (or at least criticize the 2A crowd not thinking otherwise)... well I'm glad they don't own guns. If you don't actually think otherwise, it seems very perverse to criticize them for their restraint.
You can't do this here, regardless of how strongly you disagree. Perhaps you don't owe the other side better (perhaps you do), but you definitely owe this community better if you're posting here.
Same with Canadian PM Trudeau. Out came multiple videos of him in blackface. The media dropped it in a few weeks.
Unfortunately, the media only drops these things when it's a politician they like. Anyone right of Obama gets hounded with scandals, real or imagined, as often as possible, forever.
I'm not sure this is true. My experience is that either the mob is destroyed by force, or they manage to convert enough out of fear that they end up controlling the institution they were attacking.
Do you have any evidence to support your theory? The NYT recently hit 6 million subscribers (print and digital) which is a record high.
Margins on digital products are lower than on print products but that's not unique to the Times and it's largely outside of their control. Ad margins have collapsed since their astronomical highs of the 90s and early 2000s because of the divorce of classifieds and news, rather than a collapse in total circulation.
I find the proposition of lionizing someone because they fight the “groupthink”, however you define that, quite an odd thing to do. Thinking like that will occasionally result in you supporting absolute cranks, because the heuristic you’re using is unrelated to actual correctness or other useful characteristics.
Seek out people who seek to be right and back up their arguments consistently with logic and data, not people who are disliked by people you dislike.
Yeah I didn't say any of that in my comment. Thank you for inferring that and downvoting it.
You made the assumption that the people that dislike him are people I dislike. And I doubt you read the article.
Basically if I don't write a full paragraph describing in essay like detail, I have to deal with people like you sitting there inferring way too much from a single statement. Awesome.
I wouldn't support somebody who is a crank. this guy isn't a crank he just points out the fact that a bunch of journalists have abandoned their professionalism in favor of in group approval. He's done it for years starting with the weapons of mass destruction argument for invading Iraq. Not that you are aware of that at all. Let's be honest you don't like this article do you?
If you’re going to be outraged that someone inferred something about your post, you can’t turn around and make a series of wild assumptions about my actions and beliefs; it’s inconsistent.
> And I doubt you read the article
> Let’s be honest you don’t like this article do you?
Correct the inference, don’t turn around and attack me for it.
Hey, please don't take the thread further into flamewar. ashtonkem's comment may have been a bit patronizing but it didn't deserve escalation into personal attack.
I think this piece rambles on against the far-left a bit to much to be useful.
The political dialogue is currently in territory that is Important. Normal families are under significant financial pressures, the legitimacy of major institutions (police, presidential elections, government solvency) is open to questioning. Global conditions are tense, let alone America's internal problems.
This is a time for sober discussion of the issues, not calling people "great reality-show villain" or "Twitter Robespierres".
There is a real problem that the atmosphere on the left is stifling alternative ideas for one, ironically experimental, orthodoxy. That needs to be discussed. Lots of other issues also need to be discussed.
And answering the headline; I fully expect all the narratives in all major US press outlets to be proven false at some point in the future. What passes for 'good journalism' these days is being vaguely correct about what the issues are. I wouldn't be surprised if not a single quote from a political figure has been presented in context in the last 2 years. I refuse to believe anything in the media about who said what without cross-referencing against a primary source. It is impossible to have an honest political discussion in that environment.
> I think this piece rambles on against the far-left a bit to much to be useful.
The NYT is far-left? Self-censorship in there is one of the core topics of the article. And many other mainstream left (and some not even political) journals are mentioned. It doesn't feel like you've read the article in any depth if that's your takeaway.
NYT cannot be far-left, being a huge capitalist institution. It just an oxymoron. It clearly is a far-democratic, whatever the DP agency is, at a particular moment.
This honestly just reads to me like more media-class self absorption. How you manage to use the phrase “Twitter Robspierre” and then pivot to defending Cotton’s editorial on populist grounds is beyond me. I’m sure the guy managing the Olive Garden in Upper Arlington, Ohio is up at night worrying that the Times Op-Ed page is going to be taken over by the reincarnation of Danton.
Might as well listen to Rush Limbaugh - you'll get the same arguments, and the same lack of substance, as this article, but with far more entertainment.
In any case, the point he was trying to make is all well and good - the media should ask the tough questions and sometimes society impacts the flow of free thought. But it seems to Mr Taibbi only the left has this problem.
And you believe your response has substance to it? Where's your argument? Anything going through your head other than "Uoogh, he same as other guy I don't like!"
Taibi has fought against the right wing for decades. some of us are old enough to remember when he was a voice of reason trying to counter the New York times supporting the invasion of Iraq on a phony weapons of mass destruction theory.
This article is nothing like Rush Limbaugh and there's tons of substance and supporting links behind it. Just because he's attacking his own side doesn't mean he's wrong.
Do you think the data scientist who tweeted work by a black statistician about violent riots hurting election chances for the Democratic party deserve to be fired? If you do then you won't like this article, because you are part of the problem.
If someone can be legally fired for any reason, that is the problem. Deserving or not is entirely subjective, and opinions will always differ. Making them consequential, like EOs are part of the problem. It's just about abuse of power because they can spite you. There's a disturbing faith in authority presently.
That media reports on these events or provide opinion pieces is not core to the accountability issues.
So what - I hear this all the time. This particular article represents numerous opportunities to criticize the same issues on the other side of the isle, like how if you criticize Trump you are fired (See Shepherd Smith). The War in Iraq was not a conservative/liberal issue - and even so, is not evidence of this man's infallibility. If you wish to promote your journalists to demigod level, go ahead, I won't. But it seems that the right prefers to do this - because they need pseudo-intellectuals to help them sound smarter.
> This article is nothing like Rush Limbaugh and there's tons of substance and supporting links behind it. Just because he's attacking his own side doesn't mean he's wrong.
No, there isn't. He conflates statistics ("somewhat support != support, so no, a majority did not support Cotton's statement.) Second, he used the Daily Mail as the source for one of his claims, that only uses other right wing sights as the source for his claims. That isn't credible. You're fooling yourself. This man was an investigative journalist? Sure...maybe 10 years ago.
> Do you think the data scientist who tweeted work by a black statistician about violent riots hurting election chances for the Democratic party deserve to be fired? If you do then you won't like this article, because you are part of the problem.
Do you think that the countless number of career diplomats who dared speak up against Trump deserved to be fired? Do I think the inspector generals deserved to be fired? There are endless examples - you tell me, what's more dangerous, the private press having bias like they always did in OPINION sections and private companies protecting their PR, or a president stifling out any insight over government power?
Yea, you tell me what is more of a threat. I'll wait.
And - surprisingly enough, the "persecuted" conservatives on here are downvoting a differing opinion.
That's all this is - they just don't like the other opinions. Go back to reading the Daily Mail and that confirmation bias loop while accusing the left of the same thing. pathetic.
You're confusing substance with allegiance. Your arguments are ad-hominems. Which means they're not actually disproving anything or attempting to, but trying to discredit people by their allegiances. That's what this downvoting is for. And the persecution comment sounds like a sort of activist or provocation on your part.
I'm speaking not as a conservative at all, but someone who values reason and calm argumentation.
Political flamewar and/or personal attack will get you banned on HN. This thread has mostly managed to stay on the ok side, and has plenty of commenters representing views that I presume you would be sympathetic to. Please be like them and stick to the site guidelines, and don't contribute to wrecking the container as you have here.
"The War in Iraq was not a conservative/liberal issue"
It was. You must be young. The NYT was a big reason that the center left went along with it. I have never forgiven them for that.
You are assuming that I support Trump, or that the author does. I don't, and he doesn't. You are engaging in what-aboutism.
Two things can be true at the same time. Sorry if I'm not as tribal as you are. Feel free to go find that on Twitter with the rest of the dopamine addicts.
BTW, along with most people who read, I already know about the diplomats and Trump's misdeeds and hate them as much as you do. The fact that you assumed I didn't is the problem. "DefundThePolice" will get him reelected. If you don't know that, you either don't live in the US or have never been outside of a coastal city.
> You are assuming that I support Trump, or that the author does. I don't, and he doesn't. You are engaging in what-aboutism.
Seeing the person you're responding to's attitude fills me with a sort of depressing frustration. As a center-left person myself, I engage with people and I'm always up against the wall of what-aboutism. If I criticize Trump those folks start a rant about Obama or Biden. If I criticize the topic we're talking about here, I'm reminded about how mean the GOP is.
For years I've been trying to wrap my head around this.
HN doesn't like political conversation, I get it. But a HN-friendly topic would be, is technology itself to blame for this insane bifurcation of conversation, from topic-by-topic or subject-oriented reasoning and debate, to this head-scratching angry tribalism? Or is it just human nature somehow (whatever that means)?
Crossing into personal attack is not ok in HN arguments. I had to warn you elsewhere in this thread also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512934. Please stick to the rules when posting here from now on.
The Chait article[0] Taibbi cites may be a slightly more effective version of a similar argument, not least because he goes to a good deal of trouble to emphasize how much worse the problem is on the political right.
Nobody is arguing that the right wing media is not a giant echo chamber. Of course it is. Watching Sean Hannity speak would be amusing if not for the fact that you know there's a bunch of people in their living rooms taking him seriously.
But we on the left need to recognize how crazy this s* is getting.
If anyone questions the insane dogma that has taken over the newsrooms pushed by the far left, then they are labeled a right-winger or worse. Never mind the fact that it causes the left to lose elections when we let our fringe elements take over.
there are tens of thousands of people at any given moment talking about how crazy the right wing is, especially Fox news and Breitbart. But where are you when the New York times is completely going off the rails? You're just defending them as your tribal instincts take over.
Also let's be honest here:
Kneeling before people you've never met to atone for the sins of of other human beings who happen to share your skin color might be something that's normal to you. It is utterly alien to the vast majority of the American public. Defunding police might have nuance to it but it is lost to the American public. If we want to win this next presidential election and Congress in the Senate, we need to be aware of the fact that these ideas are insane to most of America. I can't think of anything that will push a Midwestern voter to pull the lever for Trump faster than watching Minneapolis disband its police department as a councilwoman interviewed on CNN states that calling the police on an intruder is an act of privilege.
If Trump wins in 2020 this will be why. I don't want him to win in 2020. Do you?
This is kind of true. For decades I was an ardent leftist. These days I just can't stomach what they're doing. It's a measure of how far they've fallen that Donald Trump doesn't seem that bad (by comparison).
> These days I just can't stomach what they're doing. It's a measure of how far they've fallen that Donald Trump doesn't seem that bad (by comparison).
What do you think the Left is doing that makes Trump seem not so bad?
The right is calling the press “enemies of the people”, and threatening legal action against media companies for publishing poll results they don’t like, as well as physically attacking journalists doing their job. I don’t know how you read “defending freedom of speech” into any of that.
Yes, it's been highly disorienting and depressing for me. I suppose I always imagined that the right would come around to some of the left's better ideas, but I never expected that the left would pick up some the right's worst ideas.
I agree that the purity tests of the left are extremely concerning, but they don’t control policy yet. The idea that the person who is wielding power badly could be not as bad as some people arguing over an OpEd seems a bit facile to me.
> Kneeling before people you've never met to atone for the sins of of other human beings who happen to share your skin color might be something that's normal to you. It is utterly alien to the vast majority of the American public.
Kneeling together in humility with other people is a weekly occurrence, if you’re Catholic.
I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. I don't know the reasoning in Catholicism, but was told to kneel in church as a show of humility and submission to God. I was also told that this was reserved only for God.
I'm no longer religious. I couldn't tolerate the bigotry towards gay people. But the idea of kneeling for a human being repulses me.
If the act of kneeing at all is a problem for you, then I don’t know what to tell you. But kneeling to others, and kneeling with others—joining in with others who are kneeling—are very different actions. I’d suggest you not conflating the two.
> If anyone questions the insane dogma that has taken over the newsrooms pushed by the far left
So...out of curiosity, just what do you see as being this "insane dogma" "pushed by the far left"?
Because so far as I can tell, America still doesn't have anything that could reasonably be called a "far left" that's being taken seriously by any mainstream media.
The most extreme positions I've heard recently that have gained any media traction are along the lines of "we should overhaul our police so that they don't regularly kill, brutalize, and otherwise traumatize innocent civilians".
African Americans can be racist. What they lack is the might and power of the US justice system, politicians, and the media behind them. That power turns white racism into a much more powerful force than African Americans that hate white people.
Racism without an overwhelming power differential is just angst. Typically people that feel oppressed hate the group they’re being oppressed by. I’m sure you would too.
The media doesn't ever report the numbers on police violence. They report the emotion.
Including both armed and unarmed people, just over 1000 people were killed by US police in 2019.
What percentage of those were black?
Approximately 24 percent. Did you know that? Did it surprise you? I assumed it was 75 percent. 24 percent is very bad, since black Americans are 13 percent of the population. However, it also indicates that race is one of, not the only, independent variable driving this. The media is deliberately not reporting these numbers. Simultaneously, they trot out chart after chart of covid19 infection statistics.
When I saw the data, I was very angry that my own perception was so skewed due to biased, incomplete reporting in the media.
I was also going through the numbers recently and it does appear that there is no place for contrast in the media, both within the phenomenon of police killings itself as you point out, as well as how it relates to other unfortunate and troubling causes of death.
For example ; ~ 250k people a year die from medical errors in the US [0]. From this one could argue that doctors are far more dangerous than cops, possibly on a per encounter basis as well. Certainly something should be done about this. I don't know if a mega riot will do it though.
Also, just what proportion of those police related deaths were actually justified by any standard ? Like how many of those people actually pointed a gun at the cops before ending up as a stat ? Regardless of race. That would be interesting to know. Obviously some heads have to roll when something like that happens, but maybe we should still keep the baby.
I'm usually not quick to side with the cops on any given day, but I like to side with the actual facts on any given day. Policing is a hard, dangerous and ungrateful job. Certainly it has its ( grave ) problems, but just doing away with the whole thing based on relatively few ( albeit horrible ) incidents, is not a rational reaction to this real issue.
The US seems to have fallen into a game-theoretic local minimum where each party lets their crazy cousin go throw dumb rocks at the opposition because it seems to be the optimal way to drum up fanatic support for their side, all the while whistling as if in ignorance of what's going on. At least that's how it seemed to start, now it's just devolved to outright scat slinging that's co-opted our system of government into a soap opera. It would almost be funny if the poo slingers weren't the very people that make and enforce the laws that we all have to live by.
Our political parties need to clean their damn houses. It's not the right's job to deal with the radical left, and it's not the left's job to deal with the radical right. Both sides need to take out their trash so we can actually get something done.
We need a way to argue against a steelman opposing argument instead of always a strawman. We need to be capable of updating our opinions without risking career suicide. We need something that allows us to deal with the meta problems like fallacies and trolls and half-refutations paraded around as victories. We need to be able to hold arguments with depth and nuance.
Correct. And they definitely do not. The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. They are just another flavor of The Party of oligarchy and cronyism in control of this country. There are some significant differences in the platforms, but it’s mostly around wedge issues by design.
Hard to parse what you mean here. The link is indirectly about the Overton window in US politics wherein views and policies considered centrist or center-left at most in other Western democracies appear "extreme left" in the context of US politics. Conversely, mainstream right-wing views in the US appear extremely right-wing in the context of other Western democracies. The linked page attempts to demonstrate through comparison to other Western democracies that the views or proposed policies of "left" or "extreme left" US politicians are contextually leftist, not objectively.
(edit: I get that "objectively" is probably not the correct word to use there, but I hope you get my meaning; it would be nice if someone could suggest a better one. Probably better to just have written "the views or proposed policies of 'left' or 'extreme left' US politicians are only contextually leftist").
My own theory (without any real evidence) is that the oligarchs use race to divide the white working class from the non-white working class. A specific example is the video on systemic racism going around. It correctly points out redlining (a truly horrific practice), but also talks about black students having to attend underfunded schools. I attended predominantly black, underfunded, public schools my entire childhood. By this logic, I was at the same schools and was a "victim" of systemic racism. Which immediately implies that it was actually systemic classism at play against the working poor, rather than being purely race-based.
If a party chose to ignore the corporate overlords and focus on issues that working class people of all ethnicities cared about, they would get a lot of votes, and very few super PAC donations.
Many philosophers and others have written about how the powerful divide the lower classes in this way. I don't have any explicit citations offhand, but your observations have merit amongst those who study these issues.
Using race to divide labor is a time-proven capitalist tactic. Go back to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, where the system was made explicit after the mixed-race uprising again the oligarchs of the time.
"The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class. The ruling class responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705."
Fascinating. I grew up in rural Virginia. A little Known fact is that the vast majority of white settlers there were indentured and/or bonded, often convicts. The first Africans in 1619 were indentured as well. Horrifically, in the 1650s when the first African slaves were brought over, the elites pushed further changes in social norms that resulted in a significant worsening of treatment of the African indentured servants who had long since become free landowners and farmers. A formerly indentured, free black man had a prosperous farm a few miles from where I grew up. The courthouse there dates to the 1600s, and the records are there that show jealous white neighbors gradually stealing his land with impunity, starting at the time that slaves started becoming common. It is chilling looking at those documents standing in that building.
Same in Brazil... I like two say there is no left and right, there are two right-wing parties, each one defending its slice of the status quo (left is pro-privileges of public servants here, which are already majority in top earners)
Not at all, and I don't think right-wing people are bad; they just think the status quo is optimum, is a global maxima.
For example, the 'vanilla' right in Brazil in XIX century managed to delay the end of slavery by 6 decades. They thought the country would collapse without slave labor to sustain the agribusiness at the time. Were they inherently bad? Of course not; they thought they couldn't do any better (and of course their opinion was tainted by the fact they owned plantations. It is only human to like the status quo when you are benefited by it. And they were plain wrong, after all. Agribusiness only grew stronger after abolition.)
I classify most 'lefties' here as disguised right-wing people because they also think the public sector is perfect as it is, among other things I don't agree with.
The society needs left/progressive views to go forward, as it needs righties to pay the current bills. But there are much more productive ways to be a lefty. I respect the Green Party here, as well as politicians that have been proposing UBI for 20 years or more, way before it was on vogue.
> they just think the status quo is optimum, is a global maxima.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of right wing thought, either in general or specifically in Brazil.
In general the conservative view is to improve the status quo without throwing away the good things that have been achieved. It’s an understanding that it’s much easier to destroy things (even if unintentionally) then it is to build them.
I’ll agree the left sometimes good at identifying problems, but the proposed cures are often worse than the disease, as seen with the recent abolish/defund the police idea that had quickly gained traction in the left.
To give a more concrete example: Brazil is under a right wing government after 16 years of left wing ones. The current administration seems to want to reduce the size of the public sector, which has massively increased in the last decades, and decentralize government structure (one of its campaign slogans was “less Brasilia, more Brazil”, referring to a reduction of the influence of the federal government in state or city issues).
So one can argue that this is a right wing administration that wants to change the status quo built along the current past decades.
On the other hand, a left wing administration would probably try to increase the size of the public sector even more, or at least increase the benefits public workers have over private sector ones, so you could say they wouldn’t be happy with the status quo either.
In either case, no side would seem to ever consider the status quo as a global maxima. Therefore I don’t think this definition is valid or useful to define what is right or left wing.
In fact, you said it yourself, when you mentioned that everyone likes the status quo when it benefits them. It seems to me every one would be happy with at least some aspect of the status quo, and unhappy with others. Is everyone simultaneously right and left wing? If so, isn’t that classification somewhat useless?
I think the status quo issue is more about corporatism than it is about left and right. For example, I know people who describe themselves as right wing/conservatives, but they are public sector workers, and therefore angry at any mention of possible reductions of their privileges.
I will also dispute that progressive views are what makes society go forward. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. You don’t have to look much further than the issues of cancel culture, online shaming and censorship against people who fail to use the right words or publicly defend the right causes, which are undoubtedly a result of modern left/progressive thought. I think we’re definitely going backwards in this case.
Anyway, sorry if this was too much rambling, it’s a bit late here. Good night :)
It's not possible to maintain a farce anymore like they could in the days when the only media that needed influencing was TV, radio, and newspapers.
Since the internet is a great equalizer in terms of reaching a large audience for relatively little money, political parties in the US have gotten more much factional internally in my lifetime.
The internet has opened the disfunction of every institution and and elites (i say this word in the positive light, the George Washington/MLK/Rosa Parks meaning, not the karl rove/donna brazile kind of way, ie leaders with great responsibility, at a significany personal risk )
Institutions used to control the message fairly effectively, now they cant due to citizen journalism.
Its not republicans or démocrats. Its literally every institution of centralized power.
Thats why opinion polls rate so low for everything, congress, NYT, Fox & all networks, FBI, DoJ, etc.
The people at the top of these institutions have looted americans for their own benefit, and never really had the people as their top of mind concern.
(R)s and (D)s wont reform themselves, any more than institutions will let go of power.
You need to take power forecefully from them, unless you want someone to literally set them on fire.
The naïveté here is assuming the people responsible for all this, don't know it.
Let me give you an example that's closer to home: you know how Facebook hires a bunch of people and pays them to collect more and more and more data on everyone? Do you think a single person within Facebook doesn't know it? They all know it and they all like their paycheque more than they like having a conscience. They buried that conscience long ago, in the name of 'providing for my family' or some other straw-man. Some never had much of a conscience to begin with.
That's most people, most of the time. They want what they want for them first, everybody else is everybody else's problem.
It's really that simple.
There are many ways this attitude is being enabled but really, being a selfish monkey comes natural to most people, it's overcoming that selfishness in the name of something bigger that takes a great deal of work. If that work goes unappreciated, what you get is a fake democracy or a real tyranny - all other options require citizens that aren't infantile, self-centered brats.
The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it :)
> The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it :
If you have a social problem, then you employ postmodernism in the form of critical theory, then you now have two problems.
Critical theory does not employ the scientific method and therefore does not provide a reliable means for falsifying claims. We should dismiss the entire field and only retain the parts of it, if any, that can be subjected to rigorous hypothesis testing.
A theory is usually attended by a reproducible proof. As a "theory" what is the proof of "critical theory"?
Scientific method is employed to solve particular problems.
Which problems should we be solving? You cannot use the scientific method to answer that question. The best you can try and do is use empirical evidence and science to strengthen your position, in an attempt to convince others and/or yourself.
This is not an original thought - it's a shame that it isn't more well known.
> Which problems should we be solving? You cannot use the scientific method to answer that question. The best you can try and do is use empirical evidence and science to strengthen your position, in an attempt to convince others and/or yourself.
Demonstrably false. This belief is poisonous and should be avoided in all cases. (ask yourself how you decide whether to fix your plumbing or to buy a new couch, for instance, on a limited budget.)
We evaluate the problems that we should be solving through a cost-benefit analysis. We can estimate the expected value of various options on a decision tree and estimate the cost of various problems to society. We can ask constituents to estimate the dollar value of the harm they face from the continued existence of various problems. We can also ask them to estimate how much they would be willing to pay from their income, to solve a given problem. This gives a subjective estimate based on individual preferences. We can include weighted objective measures whenever possible.
The explanatory power of various models can be tested and argued for/against in rational good-faith debate. For any equally favoured models that suggest a particular allocation of resources, we can perform competing tests e.g. a county can adopt one policy for a given time, while another county adopts a different policy. After the testing duration, outcomes are evaluated and the best policy adopted by all.
Where there is an inability to evaluate models comprehensively and it is still difficult to form conclusions as to what problems should be addressed, we can ask interested/affected parties to take part in a prediction market, in which they can place bets on likely outcomes of various policies. We adopt the policy and solve the problem for which the majority of bets indicate a high probability of success. The winners of these bets keep their winnings.
This is a rudimentary form of how the scientific method is applied to social problems. This kind of analysis is the most rational and effective tool when running one's own life, household, company, university, government, planet.
> The best you can try and do is use empirical evidence and science to strengthen your position, in an attempt to convince others and/or yourself.
1000 x NO! Please do not ingest such a poisonous idea. We use the data we observe to determine the beliefs we should hold; we do not use beliefs we hold to tell us what data to observe.
First, this is conservative propaganda masquerading as intellectual analysis, and I'm surprised it's made it this far on HN.
Where this prescription falls short of the cure: the most extreme are also the most vocal, and are the ones creating change. Regardless of which side we're on, we're letting them speak for us and pull as hard as they can in the direction we want the needle to move.
As a moderate liberal, if someone I know says they're allowing their child to choose their gender or that they want to shut down police departments, I try to keep an open mind, but don't really feel the same way they do.
I imagine moderate conservatives probably grin and bear a lot of racism, misogyny, and toxic nationalism by the same token.
This is a strategy to move politics acceptable lines: present extremely radical thinkers in the media, as editorialist, then the originally radical ones will seems moderate.
To be fair, the conservative started this, at least in France. Now the liberals adopted this around 2017, helping first the regular right then the "center right" getting elected when the regular right got caught red-handed stealing money (i'm simplifying here).
The communists use it now, it is only fair. And i hope anarchists will start too. That's why i'm sneering at "defund the police": it is not extreme enough. "Abolish the police" should have been the initial demands, with defunding an acceptable compromise. But anarchists are not organized enough to make good media strategies.
If you gleaned that this was purely a "right wing" problem, try again. This issue is shared by both sides of the political spectrum and multiple different news organizations.
If you move yourself to the south pole, everyone is northerner. I don't think that there are many people in the world that could pass all the litmus tests that qualify you as not being right wing according to twitter.
> There have always been boundaries around acceptable discourse, and the media has always been involved, in a complex and often unacknowledged way, in both enforcing and contesting them. In 1986, the media historian Daniel Hallin argued that journalists treat ideas as belonging to three spheres, each of which is governed by different rules of coverage. There’s the “sphere of consensus,” in which agreement is assumed. There’s the “sphere of deviance,” in which a view is considered universally repugnant, and it need not be entertained. And then, in the middle, is the “sphere of legitimate controversy,” wherein journalists are expected to cover all sides, and op-ed pages to represent all points of view.
But I think Klein is failing to engage with the core issue, that many of the positions now outside the bounds of acceptable discourse in newspapers are held by a majority of Americans and considered reasonable by a supermajority. If newspapers systematically refuse to represent views that most people hold, how can we trust their objectivity?
It gets even worse. If you ignore the problem by not talking about it and only fringes discuss it - people will go to the fringes to hear what they have to say. And you may get big surprises at the voting booth.
Reddit expunged the Donald. Now it is its own cesspool. And it is growing..
November is going to be interesting. Most mainstream pols seem to just be useless now, when any opinion right of the orthodoxy places you somewhere next to Mengele.
Fail to take a knee?? Clearly a Nazi. It is nothing new, normal Soviet propaganda.
Well not all extremist views are the same. White nationalism and UBI may both be fringe views (maybe the latter isn’t but let’s assume so). I think it’s fine to not mainstream extremist views that call for extermination or discrimination of certain sections of society even if the views have a chance to affect the polls. These fringe views have existed throughout the life of the US and it’s only when they get mainstream attention that they get energized. Every so often they flare up into the mainstream but then get killed by the rottenness of the people that espouse them.
The news is not objective. There is no such thing as a “view from nowhere.” Editors make decisions daily about what even is news, and that is a subjective process.
The opinion pages are not objective. The news should be objective. If they aren’t objective then they should be clear about this otherwise people believe it as objective. That’s the whole point of news.
It is not possible for the news to be objective. Even the decision of what is news is a subjective process. If the news appears objective, that only means you share the perspective of the people reporting on and editing it.
That is a lazy argument. It’s possible for the news to strive to be objective.
Back when we had competition between independent news organizations in the US, the news was closer to being objective. Publications that frequently retracted major stories, or ran articles with flawed logic and sloppy conclusions lost market share.
These days, there’s basically no competition, and the major news outlets just spew transparent propaganda.
Don't put words in my mouth: I'm not pretending bias doesn't exist.
And WTF is "unadopted bias"? Searches with Bing and DuckDuckGo come up absolutely empty and an analysis of the language is befuddling. Did you just make it up, b/c literally nobody and nothing on the Innertubes speaks of "unadopted bias" except you?
From that I presume you not a native English speaker and I've possibly been trolled by a bot or an "idibot". That's a word I made up: it's a portmanteau of "idiot" and "robot" and means a robot with a low IQ. Two can play this game.
Please do not put words in my mouth: I'm not pretending that bias doesn't exist.
What is "unadopted bias"? Searches with Bing and DuckDuckGo come up absolutely empty and I find the usage befuddling. I can find literally nobody and nothing on the Internet who/which speaks of "unadopted bias"?
Most of white American would’ve supported siccing the police and military on the civil rights movement in the 60s. That doesn’t mean that newspapers should’ve advocated they do so. The same holds true here.
The newspapers in the 60’s didn’t pretend that 100% of the population was behind the civil rights movement. When racist politicians spoke, they got their platform. People could read, and decide for themselves.
If an elected official wants to publish a racist diatribe, the press should circulate it as widely as possible. Informed voters make for a stronger democracy.
Burying the editorial because it would offend their readers just improves the racist’s chances of being reelected.
Ah yes, giving bigotry a prominent position and mass circulation is what protects and furthers democracy. History certainly agrees with your sentiment.
Since the US has outlived the russian, german, french, japanese, and british empires, USSR and select other totalitarian states while not stopped being democracy I would say that US society commitment to the principles of marketplace of ideas had indeed protected and furthered the US democracy. All while being a lot more bigoted society.
Well, there were a bunch of white nationalists in Germany doing all sorts of terrible stuff, and the news decided to filter the message to match their sponsors’ ideology (by adding fake stories about eating babies, and suppressing stories about death camps).
It was US state policy to reject Jewish refugees while our wealthy industrialists conspired to profit from the Nazi regime. The German American Bund had branches across the US and Hitler‘s writing was featured in the New York Times:
Think about LGBT rights. There was plenty of opposition to gay marriage, it was covered broadly and people had platforms. Slowly over time, opinions changed. Why? Because LGBT rights were publicly and transparently argued in the media. People heard opposing viewpoints.
Would it have been better if back in the 1950's gay marriage was verboten? No one can talk about it?
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you please re-read them and stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? We've had to ask you this many times already.
This thread is managing to stay barely on the ok side, with many comments from many sides of the issue, including your own side. These other users are managing to stay within the guidelines, and there's no reason why you can't also. Please do so.
Is there a study or data that you could link to showing that frequently spreading white nationalist propaganda as widely and frequently as possible makes for better voters?
Part of the evolution of norms is a change in what’s acceptable and what isn’t. The N word was considered acceptable in print but isn’t anymore, even if the argument is being made by publicly racist politician. We agree as a society on what is considered offensive and not and that changes with time. Deplatforming people who refuse to adhere to that change is part of the evolution of society.
The racist politician will ultimately find a racist platform which would gladly accept their views. This would make it pretty clear to the public that the politician is racist, wouldn’t it?
Please tell me what the majority of americans support that is unacceptable to talk about? I'm guessing your idea of the super-majority is at best questionably a super-majority.
That sounds like uncritical support for manufacturing consent, to me.
I mean it's not like taibbi is speaking up for child molesters. He turned out to be factually right about a lot of this stuff, but it was completely unacceptable to say so.
Your characterization of the linked article could not be more wrong. They write about acknowledging the disorder of sexual attraction to prepubescents (=pedophilia) to prevent child abuse.
Last sentence:
> Acknowledging that pedophiles have a mental disorder, and removing the obstacles to their coming forward and seeking help, is not only the right thing to do, but it would also advance efforts to protect children from harm.
They even explicitly recognized your mistake in the article, which is the tendency to conflate the disorder and the crime.
I think they really undercut their argument with "not a crime" in the title. They may be technically correct for non-offenders, but it's incredibly naive to think such a phrase in the title won't get a lot of scorn and suspicion, even if their hearts are in the right place.
It's not only "technically correct" but correct in every possible interpretation I can imagine.
Do you know an interpretation in which the headline is wrong?
A mental disorder is not a crime.
Sure the title might be confusing for those who haven't thought about the difference between thought and deed, but that does not mean that readers should just not tell the truth about the articles conclusion. (..as our parents article description was clearly wrong.)
I've yet to see an intellectually honest criticism of this article.
Is espousing sympathy for pedophiles better or worse than the guy who was (probably) fired for tweeting that non violent protests work better than violent protests.
Their argument focusses on how to prevent child abuse best.
There is really nothing controversial in there.
Imagine the hypocrisy where people woult opt to create a system that might end up enabeling child abuse just so that they can continue to celebrate their moral panic.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
It would be hard to argue that a view is universally repugnant when it is espoused by an elected official and there is at least a significant minority of voters polling in support of the view. Given those criteria, we should argue that outright racist or sexist views are both unacceptable and not universally repugnant. I'm still supportive of editors who refuse to publish in those cases.
So I'm just quibbling with the word "universally" here. I would rather editorial pages be forthright about where their window of acceptability lies for them. I would especially advocate aversion to doublespeak, especially in journalistic contexts. Propaganda, even well meaning propaganda, is another enterprise.
I wonder how much division in the country plays into this. I keep hearing references to there being at least two countries within the US. Is this maybe the outcome of using the sphere model from the Vox article higher up and applying it only within the "blue country"?
I mean, I agree, but why be inaccurate with this statement?
> significant minority of voters polling in support of the view
We know that it’s a majority from the article:
> A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.”
Is it because of the same fear that the article is describing in the press?
I wrote "at least a significant minority", which includes majority views.
I was casting a wider net since I think minority views should be discussed, if for no other reason than they should be understood. Disagreeing with someone without even understanding their views is ignorant. Part of the benefit of current protests is catching people up on facts who were previously disengaged.
At this point objective truth is buried deep inside the media’s “sphere of deviance” that the media has decided on.
The article cites award-winning journalists being fired for running opinion pieces that a 58-80% of the population agree with (but that the fired editor disagrees with!), or for publishing error-free factual pieces.
It’s not just the press. When people point out the facts don’t support the conclusion or the math doesn’t add up in a COVID story, there’s a 50-50 chance it gets downvoted to oblivion.
Entirely removed from the merits and demerits of Taibbi's treatment of the topic at hand, I shudder at your unqualified praise of the man. Without so much as a single source to buttress your point or to qualify how you arrived at that conclusion.
Thats like saying Judge Richard Posner is one of the best jurists in the country without adding anything else.[1]
Have you even read any of the other articles he has written? He really is one of the best journalists of this current era, he is truth-seeking instead of motivated by dogma.
You expect people to somehow know and lionize these left-wing hacks as if their eminence should be self-evident and known to all, despite their bent (which is revealed in the 2nd paragraph where the author calls a sitting President a 'clown').
That's the problem with unself-aware people like you, who expect everyone to read the same people you do. Left-leaning people have been accused of living in their own self-made bubbles of comfy self-reinforcing left-leaning talking points.
Thats how you get to a point where a presidential candidate feels comfortable & self-assured in calling those who won't vote for her "a basket of deplorables" or a current 2020 presidential candidate saying "if you have a problem figuring out if you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black" to black voters[2].
You're not helping with this thinking of yours or your entitlement in feeling that a journalist of your liking will be liked by all or considered even-keeled by all.
You almost never judge based on one piece of writing.
You judge based on the oeuvre of their lifetime work.[1]
People like him are particularly adept at changing their tone based on which way the political winds blew at that particular time.
The whole of the Left is filled with such noxious people who wouldn't think twice before throwing one of their own under the bus, if it suits their cause.
That's how they've abandoned Noam Chomsky who was once the Left's darling and could do no harm. They're a sickly bunch and a death cult and cannot be trusted with anything resembling power.
Is it wrong though? I've been reading HN for years and a lot of that New Yorker article rings true to me. There are some exaggerations, and I didn't read all of it because it's too damn long, but from what I see it's mostly accurate.
Nah you don’t read more than me. It’s funny that someone who claims to read so much can’t get through an article because it’s “too long”. I’m pretty sure you don’t read very much.
Oh, but I do read more than you, and in more languages. People who are smug like you and think people reading too little are "the problem with our country" read very little themselves. They tend to assume the world is as small as they are, and overplay their meager achievements like reading through a New Yorker article.
The problem isn’t people reading too little. It’s that people such as yourself only read a fraction of an informative article and stop because it’s “too long”. They read the headline and skim the article and get whatever their limited comprehension gets from it, and then proclaims they know what the article is saying when they don’t. Pretty much sums exactly what you were saying. I can only imagine the high level of misinformation you must have in your brain by never finishing so many “long” articles in so many different languages. What a mess!
Whoa, both of you—no petty spats on HN, please, no matter how much you read.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else was or how provocatively they behaved, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.
Whoa, both of you—no petty spats on HN, please, no matter how much you read.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else was or how provocatively they behaved, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.
To restate a popular maxim, the lesson to take from this is that the media depiction on almost everything is egregiously bad, not just those things where you personally know better.
The question then is why do we expend so much time and money engaging with and propagating discourse which we know is so fundamentally misrepresenting reality?
There is nothing egregious about the article and if anything, paints dang and the other moderator in a better light than I had observed myself from their actions. Case in point flagging this article as a dupe to a flagged article despite its active commenting.
Great article but it's so depressing that it starts with disinformation by claiming Trump said it is a great day for Floyd due to unemployment numbers (actually discussed completely separately in that speech). He said it's a great day due to increasing equality. [0]
Twisting someone's words to make them look worse in a piece that rightly blames others for doing so is just sad. So I am asking again - Why do even the sensible ones do this? Why can't we have some honesty and objectivity?
The article does have an ambiguous "and" in the relevant sentence but it's a bit of a far stretch to get from that to the paraphrase you provide.
Here is the literal quote from the article: "Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war."
I'd believe it if there weren't so many inaccurate reports claiming exactly that. His wording:
>"..ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers.."
very much sounds like he thinks the same, and a majority of the readership familiar with the story are going to read it that way even if you can be extremely charitable and say that this isn't what he meant.
I know he is familiar with the reporting on this, so if he didn't mean it I doubt he'd be so ambigous in that statement.
I think you're missing the point. It's an opinion piece (aka editorial, or blog post in this case) and not a news article. Of course, you can disagree with his interpretation.
There is a very long history of mainstream media taking a Trump quote, not just out of context, but actively rewriting it to mean the exact opposite of what he is saying.
From Charlottesville to this, you can safely bet that anything reconciliatory that Trump says will be twisted into something divisive through intentionally misreporting what was said.
This is the actual quote. The fact is that he made this remark during a press conference which also discussed jobs numbers;
“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender, or creed," Trump said. "They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement. They have to receive it. We all saw what happened last week. We can't let that happen. Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, 'This is a great day that's happening for our country.' It's a great day for him. It's a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great day in terms of equality. It's really what our Constitution requires and it's what our country is all about."
When I read this quote I hear Trump praising the protests and supporting the cause of equal treatment under the law and ending police brutality. The mass media reported the statement as, among other things, “revolting”. [1]
The best account of the current trajectory of the media landscape I have found is in what was meant to be a sci-fi story called American Goldmine by Paolo Bacigalupi published here ;
Taibbi at this point should start a new news co. He, and to some degree, Glenn Greenwald, have been the only two members of the press who seem to be unable to see the emperor’s new clothes in the parades of the last several years.
We've passed the point where people are willing to buy more tranches of gaslighting masquerading as journalism from existing and entrenched players, who have been part of the problem as far as the memory goes.
> Says the Potomac River "has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants."
Help me understand what is wrong with that statement.
If he fishes there regularly and sees (what he believes) are immigrants dumping trash, then isn't that statement true? How do you what he saw? This seems like splitting hairs.
You yourself said "what he believes". Not "what he knows". That's not an insignificant detail. That seems like slander, really. Also, without proof, how can anybody say whether it even did or didn't happen? There are so many credible sources with proof of large companies polluting water, why not use that as an example?
I get what you are saying and agree there is a difference between knowing something and believing something.
However, when someone believes something is true, that can mean multiple things, I take it to mean they think there is a high probability of something being true. He’s basically guessing. That means the only thing we have to go off of is Tucker’s word because he was there. And, as I ballpark estimated above, he’s generally correct when he says something according to the fact checking website, so I think he’s got credibility.
Also, Tucker talks about fly fishing every so often on the show, it’s a passion of his, so it’s very possible he has seen people, who he thinks are immigrants, dumping stuff.
Again, this feels like we are splitting hairs. He's pretty consistent about his view regarding immigrants (depends on situation). You may disagree with him, but that doesn't mean he is wrong.
The fact that politifact didn't report on everything else he said doesn't imply his other statements weren't lies or more importantly represented useful truths rather than propaganda and misinformation.
Are we reading the same results? The top result[1] says they show very little bias. It also days right-leaning sources say politifact is biased, but if these sources are being fact checked in a way they don't like, of course they would claim politifact is biased.
Tucker Carlson drops hints that he can’t see the emperor’s clothes, but he nevertheless describes their beauty in exquisite detail almost every other night. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Tucker is partisan, and hence corrupted, so regardless of how wrong or right he is on any given issue he isn't someone who could step into the role of a widely-trusted journalist. Taibbi could.
Have you seen the news show "Rising"? They have been staking out this space for about a year now. Taibbi and Greenwald appear there regularly. This show is probably the most interesting new development in American political media. The hosts have jokingly described their philosophy as "let's hate each other less and elites more", and present as a mostly-friendly pair of left and right populists.
They were on Joe Rogan recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA9Tpf5Uuxs), so their audience will probably spike. I find that even when I don't agree with them, their smartness is usually a breath of fresh air from the fetid stupidities of the mainstream (both left and right) media. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts, and whether they will continue to be able to work together. Regardless of whether one agrees, they're managing to host a freer discussion for the time being.
I can't take Taibbi and Greenwald's antagonism against "elites" seriously when they take every chance possible to defend the actions of a billionaire President and his billionaire-stuff Cabinet.
That's so far from accurate that I'm not sure how you got there. Both are squarely on the left and abhor Trump. Chomsky calls Greenwald his close friend, for example, and Taibbi wrote a book called "Insane Clown President" and was one of the strongest journalistic critics of the financial system.
Taibbi is not alone in this, but he's prolific, consistent and the best. If he was anything less, traditional media relentlessly would tell us about his "fake news."
It says something about our moment in history that it would take a maverick and upstart working at the edges of institutions to say something true about the great issues of our time.
Which has been marked as [flagged] and has fewer comments than this one. IMO, the dupe flag should be removed from this one, or merge the two and boost them back up.
83 points and dozens of comments is well over the threshold for considering a repost a dupe (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), whether or not it was flagged, and generally speaking that threshold should be tightened if an article was flagged, not loosened. Otherwise flagging doesn't mean very much.
I made the call to take the flags off this one and merge the comments from the previous thread in here, because the discussion has been managing to stay (barely) on the ok side, and the article seems to me to be about an interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you don’t mind some feedback for the way posts are marked, read on. :)
There is no doubt that the post is technically a dupe.
I realize now (from your comment) that a post can be flagged either for its content or the content of the conversation. I was only thinking of the former, and under that system it would make a lot more sense for things to get marked consistently (ie if a link is flagged, it is flagged if it gets reposted). That allows us to understand better what things are allowed here and what are not. A dupe flag tells me that there is nothing wrong with the link or the type of content it contains (or the conversation that took place under it, for that matter.) If somebody had not posted the link to the original, I would have never known that the article had been removed for its content (again or the conversation). I would have thought I simply missed the discussion.
In fact, that’s precisely what happened to me. Since I was enjoying it, I clicked through to the older post, only to get whiplash as I discovered that it was a conversation that was apparently not allowed here.
I hope that explains why I felt so frustrated and misled by the [dupe] flag, and that it t is a help to you in your moderation work.
Edited to add: To be clear, my point was not to allow the conversation to continue (though I’m glad you did). My point was that the second removal should get marked the same way so it’s clear what is going on.
He touches on the symptoms but barely figures out the disease.
The problem is that elites and institutions have been stripped naked.
When the printing press was invented, no one could have foreseen that the tsunami of information could have undermined the catholic institutions to such an extent, that it would lead to a devastating conflict ( 30 years war) fought over the pretext of very minor religios diffferences.
But to anyone paying attention, the underlying current was there: the general populace had been profoundly dissilutioned by the elites, with the information tide leaving the elites stripped naked at the beach.
Fast forward to the 1980s and the internet.
The tsunami of information has come again, and left every institution and elite exposed.
From the top down, presidents ("wmd's in Iraq", hillary's "deplorables" and "tell 1 thing to bankers and something else to public" ), senators ("pocahontas" story), reporters ("under enemy fire while reporting", sex scandals) or NYTs "Fake but real" headline apology, institutions (FBIs "collusion"), academia like medicine (lancet "covid report"), or economics "2008 no one could have foreseen coming", all the way down to mayors and councilmen.
We see failures and lack of respect in every corner of elites.
The tide has left the lies and manipulation of every institution naked.
We must hope that more people like taibbi realize this, and move quickly to descentralize power from old institutions because the other solution is to burn everything down and that usually turns out much worse.
Looking back reading Manufacturing Consent at a young age was one of the most important things I did. It sets you up for a liberating life of zero expectations for media.
It was amusing to see Chinese tabs pull a tar-baby on Trump a few weeks ago, with regard to the trade treaty. When communists have tabloid journalism and hedge funds, it gets difficult to tell them apart from the capitalists. At least "having too few political parties" still seems a reasonable tell for repressive states.
(to be fair, ad-supported journalism has had a much longer run than I'd thought it would)
Of the points the author is bringing up, all of them sound like comments that had they been made on here would be flagged and downvoted for 'flame bait' because they are purposefully incendiary.
I don't disagree. Some of the reactions have been over the top but everyone is pretty wound up right now.
I don't think the editor of nyt opinion should be fired for running the Tom Cotton piece, but some real reflection of intent and purpose needed to be checked. Same with the reporter in Oakland.
Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market. Few people would consume it (or even be capable of doing so), even fewer are ready to pay the real price of it.
So they did the next best thing: they changed to please the market in a way that makes money. Grabbing a lot of attention, as cheaply as possible, so that you can sell it to the highest bidder.
You think it is self destroying, but only if you see it as from the point of view of a body that should inform people. But as a group that needs to survive, it's a working strategy. Certainly easier to implement than finding a novel way to survive doing the right thing.
Infortunaly, this will lead to suffering for the entire society. But that's the way our economical system work. It assumes that the markets balances things out. Unfortunatly, the common good is not something most individuals prioritize, or even conceptualize, when buying things. Often, they actually can't, because their survival depend on more pressing day-to-day matters.
> But as a group that needs to survive, it's a working strategy.
It's not working though. A lot of people canceled their NY Times subscriptions after the "Send in the troops" op-ed. Massively pissing off your customer base like that is not a winning move.
Individually, each entity composing the group we call "press", may find itself in geopardy.
But as a whole, it's working.
They are just copying each others, because they can see what works and what doesn't. But because everything has a context, and luck is involved, they will be many dying anyway.
The newsroom revolted against the editor that published the "Send in the troops" article and got him fired. So for this anecdote it was the right strategy, it just didn't happen soon enough.
I am not American and don't live there but have American friends. Most of them anecdotally were happy about the op-ed you mention - they probably aren't members of your political tribe. But then they don't subscribe to the NYT anyway.
My point is that the GP is right, this is survival. They tried to be neutral by publishing an op-ed the other side probably liked. Didn't work and therefore it pushes them more into one camp to survive.
Just a guess based on anecdotal information.
Your American friends were happy about a racist senator saying they should send in the military to kill peaceful protesters?
People protesting police violence?
> Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
Is ending centuries of systemic racism and extra-judicial killings at the hands of police worth some insured property damage? Tom Cotton doesn't think so.
The problem here is that the protestors are against what they perceive as excessive use of force. Sending in the national guard would escalate the situation further. One of the reasons these protests persist is that they elicit from the police much of the behavior they detest. The protests are self-fueling.
If a group of supposedly "peaceful, law-abiding protesters" is going to make the revolting moral equivalence of corrupt cops to properly behaved cops, they shouldn't complain when they themselves are considered equivalent to the worst among their group.
Scanning the google results for “nyt subscribers” I see them reporting 5 million in Feb and 4.7 million in Aug 2019, so it looks to me like subscriptions have been accelerating in recent months.
Can you please share the information you have regarding mass subscription cancellations due to this op-ed? I would like to see it.
I think the problem is deeper than just the press. These identity flame wars are sponsored by almost all big (non-news) corporations.
The reason is clear. While there is distraction, the real issues are unaddressed and they can keep putting their hands in your pocket when you aren't looking.
Also, excessive pseudo-socialism is a great tool to drive down wages and have the whole world compete against each other. Locust capitalism.
True, subscription is the main revenue source, not ads in this new media environment. So the way to optimize is to find a most passionate tribe and serve their point of view.
This is why NYT is going to stop growing if Trump loses in November. With no need to resist there is no need to subscribe
Are they? Centrists aren't a particularly passionate tribe, and the NYT's is about as mainstream media as it gets. They're going to have an absolute field day leading up to and including November, no matter who wins or loses, playing up, well, everything.
NYT's most passionate tribe is not the Left, they're not left enough for them. But they're not playing to a tribe, but the passion itself. Seattle is no longer front page news for the NYTs because articles talking about hippies sitting around in drum circles not beating people up, or being beat up by police, is boring.
I’m a NYT subscriber - NYT is downright obsessed with Trump, and the all consuming anguish from the Democrats. I’m not saying right or wrong, I’m just saying that reading their opinion section - where editorial bias can _really_ come into play - you may find most opinions revolve around Trump and his policies.
It is so ingrained into the newspaper that they cover Trump negatively even when he does something agreeable just because what he stands for.
I’m not an American, so no horse in the game - but this is obsessive.
I am a subscriber to the NYT as well and lean center right politically. The NYT is without question the best newspaper in the country, and worth reading despite their editorial slant. Ignore the front page and the op-ed section and their coverage is wider, deeper And better written than any other US newspaper. (The Washington Post is good for politics, but mostly cause it’s the local paper in a one company town.)
But TFA isn’t about bias so much as the the left leaning press eating itself with doctrinaire purges.
The press as a high minded arbiter of truth is a relatively new concept; historically journalism has been bitterly partisan and often misleading at best. Arguably the current trend is a return to historical norms, not an aberration to be feared.
Don't worry about nazis, stalinism, maoism, crusades, jihads, huns, the rape of Nanking, or chattel slavery[1] -- that's just the bitter partisanship of our past. Not an abberation to be feared!
> So they did the next best thing: they changed to please the market in a way that makes money. Grabbing a lot of attention, as cheaply as possible, so that you can sell it to the highest bidder.
Accurate. Agreed. And a completely fair business decision. We all have bill to pay.
Unfortunately, they (wrongly) continue to sell this new version of their craft (?) as journalism. The masses buy in - confirmation bias is a powerful force - and we are today exactly where we should be: Truth is fluid. Editorial is journalism. Everyone - blue, red or orange - gets hammer their facts into their echo chamber. Etc.
It's important to realize that there is no democracy or democratic process without a health and proper Fouth Estate.
Btw, Tali Sharot's "The Influential Mind" is a great read on the subject on influence.
> Unfortunately, they (wrongly) continue to sell this new version of their craft (?) as journalism. The masses buy in - confirmation bias is a powerful force - and we are today exactly where we should be: Truth is fluid.
How is the general public supposed to learn what is happening though? If the entire MSM had adopted this new business model, and with the whole fake news thing that's been drilled into people's heads for so long, along with the narrative that anyone that disagrees with trustworthy organizations is a conspiracy theorist...is there a path out that consists of anything other than a major player committing financial suicide by breaking ranks, or them all deciding to come clean simultaneously?
Bloggers might be the one bright spot, but what percentage of the population reads blogs, and if they started to get too popular they may be framed as conspiracy theorists before long too. Not a good situation, unless you're China or Russia.
There are an increasing number of streaming independent journalists (at least that’s what they claim) that support themselves through patreon. These small ops can often go into excruciating detail on their pet subject matter and follow the story rather than construct a narrative. They often tend to go back and correct themselves when new information is discovered - something MSM is loathe to do (where’s the corrections on collaboration/cooperation now that we know the basis for all the noise was campaign financed muck?)
> How is the general public supposed to learn what is happening though?
That's a good question. In theory I'd like to suggest they think. That is, develop critical thinking skills and some basic analysis skills. Yes, it's a big ask. But it would be useful across the board. Basics such as: confirmation bias, correlation vs cause, conflict of interest, and such. These skills are not as common as they should be.
That aside, broadcasters and publishers should be required to label news as news and editorial as editorial. Anecdotally, many people don't understand the difference, or why it matters. It's difficult to have discussions when "the facts" most people cite are based on editorial opinion. Sadly, hammer that option often enough and loud enough and it becomes "true."
Even so, it's a massive problem. There's still too much wiggle room for senders to "baffle them with bullshit." (See below.)
Editorial: My definition of news is: facts that are not only true but are also relevant and important. Anything - true or not - that doesn't meet this standard - again, to me - is fake news. In other words, when important and relevant stories are buried with trite fodder, the fodder is fake news. Just because something happened, just because some is true doesn't make it news. The sun coming up again is not news.
The most common way the free market fails to do the "right" thing is by ignoring externalities.
By optimising for user engagement, media is ignoring the effect it has over society at large.
This is actually an argument for government sponsored news outlets implemented in a politically neutral manner; i.e. the television shouldn't just be a mouthpiece for the state/the ruling party.
For an example of state-financed but politically independent organisation, one can look at the civil servants system in the UK.
Case in point, the BBC does a lot of good reporting in general, but they're rarely critical of the government.
It may not even be possible for them to cover politics in a "neutral" way, because anything but the party line on a political issue is heresy to the partisans. If you gave people the hard truths on partisan issues you'd have both sides trying to shut you down because everything you said would be contradicting one side or the other.
The ABC are not neutral. They lean centre left. Our current government is conservative, of course they are critical of it.
This is the same ABC that reports on the BLM protests in Australia, is happy to parrot the 434 Aboriginals have died in custody since 1991, but fails to include the facts[1]:
58% of deaths were due to natural causes
32% of deaths were due to hanging
5% of deaths were due to drugs/alcohol
4% were due to external trauma
In total, 9 Aboriginals have died in custody from unlawful acts from custodial staff. 10s of thousands of people are violating social distancing orders, because 9 people have been killed unlawfully since 1991. The ABC AREN'T REPORTING THAT. Instead, they have activist after activist deriding the system that is killing black men.
It's all bullshit.
In 2019, the Australian Institute of Criminology did a study on deaths in custody, and its conclusion was:
Indigenous people are now less likely than non-Indigenous people to die in custody, largely due to a decrease in the death rate of Indigenous prisoners from 1999–2000 to 2005–06.[1]
So don't go around telling people the ABC isn't biased.
EDIT: To be clear, this doesn't mean there aren't things we should be doing better, given that Aboriginals make up 28% of the prison population, its just that the current narrative openly being pushed by the ABC and others is pure, unadulterated bullshit.
That is how public media works in many parts of Europe. It is not an oxymoron, but a great idea when done right and it has been working well for decades. Think of it like constitutionalism for media. If the politicians suddenly start changing this constitution it is a clear red flag to voters as it's considered off-limits, so they mostly don't touch it.
Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market.
I suspect that's correct. It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why". This is a consequence of pay per click, probably.
The left and the right now both have a checklist of mandatory positions required to avoid punishment. Those positions are in many cases contrary to fact. That's not good. Denial has become a core part of American politics.
I'm 48. My family had a newspaper subscription (in my case, the Miami Herald). I've been a consumer of news all my life, mostly print media. (My family rarely watched local news except for when a hurricane was headed our way, but would often watch programs like 60 minutes.)
When was the news ever "Who, What, When, Where, Why?"
It's always had a slant as long as I remember. Here's "the most trusted man in America" calling ror the U.S. to get out of Vietnam:
The news has always chosen what and what not to report. Just deciding what is and isn't newsworthy is a political decision. Heck, my conservative friend used to read the Wall Street Journal. I'm talking when we were kids (10-12) I'd argue with him about whether Reagan was a good president. I thought even then he had a highly colored view of reality and I'm sure he thought the same of me.
BTW, I don't think the problem is the press. I think it's a lack of open-mindedness, critical thinking, and healthy skepticism. We get what we deserve by not educating our kids better about how to consume information and consider view points outside their own worldview.
But he was "the most trusted man in America". People across the political spectrum trusted him to reliably and accurately report what's what. There are figures like that today - Joe Rogan comes to mind - but I don't think anyone could become so trusted while adhering to the speech codes outlined in the article.
I'm a Mexican living in mexico. When I was a kid? My dad was subscribed to Time Magazine. In my opinion it was quite informative and nin-skewed.
Nowadays I follow American news channels for entertainment (both CNN and Fox Bews are soooooo skewed). I usually go to CBSN or AlJazeera for 'boring' unskewed news.
For what it's worth Al-Jazeera is owned by Qatar and this has been known to color their reporting. One site I use to check myself on the bias of news outlets is below - the example in this case being Al-Jazeera.
> What is that if not a partisan political opinion?
What was partisan about what he said? He made no mention of US political parties. He simply said that the war was failing and it needed to end. May I suggest you are projecting your partisanship onto this?
Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other. Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
Saying that the USA should get out of Vietnam is an opinion. You do not have to explicitly mention a party to express a partisan position. “Real” journalism reports the facts of what’s going on and lets people make their own decisions. They can interview people and report the opinions that other people hold, but they should try to avoid inserting their own biases. Walter Cronkite leveraged his position to express his personal opinion to the nation- that’s political.
You don’t have to give time to things that are objectively untrue, but a fair journalist should acknowledge when other opinions exist.
Saying, “I think we should get out of Vietnam. People are dying, we’re spending too much money, and we’re probably going to lose” is bad journalism. Saying, “According to a recent poll, fewer than 40% of Americans support the war in Vietnam. Commonly cited reasons for the lack of support are the death toll, the economic cost, and that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Most supporters of the war say we should continue fighting otherwise all the soldiers that have given their lives will have died in vain” is good journalism.
And yes, a journalist covering the creationism vs. evolution debate should research and interview people from both sides. If you don’t then you’re writing an opinion piece and not doing journalism.
I of course agree completely that a journalist should be open minded, aware of their own bias, conduct thorough research, interview knowledgeable people, and all of that. At the end of this process they are ideally quite an expert in whatever they are writing about.
But I'm not sure I see why journalists should try to be strictly objective. A journalist is in a unique position to identify the BS, provide analysis and context, and help the reader understand what to make of the competing narratives.
If you’ve ever read a journalist’s take on a subject that you’re an expert in, you’ll realize that they do not become experts after researching a story, nor are they any better at identifying BS than other people.
Some journalists that specialize in a particular field become experts, but it takes time to learn. Journalists don’t have some secret way to learn faster than other people.
Journalists do get training in interviewing experts and writing. That’s what they should stick to. Just like we really shouldn’t pay attention to a celebrity’s opinion of an issue that they don’t have special training in, we really shouldn’t be paying attention to a journalist’s personal opinion- we should rely on them to talk to experts and convey information, but their ability to form an opinion isn’t any better than yours.
I think you may have a bias against journalists =p.
It’s true that they may not be experts in everything that they report on, even if it’s their niche. Eg I think Kara Swisher does a reasonably good job of representing technology related things but there’s things she says that are not really true.
However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics. They are closest to the sources. And thus they become pretty good at identifying BS in those narrow fields at the very least. Given that, I certainly value their “take” on what the current events portray.
>However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics.
They are only "good" at this because so many of them worked on campaigns and there's a revolving door between that campaign work and the politics desk at media organizations. That isn't a badge of honor, or a signal that they know what they're talking about. It's a mark of partisanship, and they try their best to cloak it when they do their reporting ... but then they go back to the campaign when their guy is running.
> I think you may have a bias against journalists =p.
He may not, but having been through the grinder (on both sides), I do. I'm not even talking about the Ben Rhodes' quotes about them being young idiots.
> However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics. They are closest to the sources. And thus they become pretty good at identifying BS in those narrow fields at the very least. Given that, I certainly value their “take” on what the current events portray.
And yes, a journalist covering the creationism vs. evolution debate should research and interview people from both sides.
Well this is Hacker News, if you phrase it as a question about are we living in a simulation they will take it seriously, but of course a simulation would imply someone or something running it...
>Saying that the USA should get out of Vietnam is an opinion. You do not have to explicitly mention a party to express a partisan position.
The Vietnam War was started by a Democratic administration and continued by a Republican one, through several Congressional midterm elections. It was a bipartisan effort, so I don't see how having an opinion on it, for or against, can count as partisan in the sense of advocating for one political party over the other.
My point is that there was never an "objective" news that didn't fall somewhere on the left/right spectrum and which colored how that source presented the news.
> Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other.
I agree. But don't you think that reporters at The Atlantic and at the National Review both think they are doing that? Or NPR vs Fox News? And yet they present very different views of the news.
> Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
It’s okay to take positions on factual matters even if a political party also happens to take that same position. If one party believes the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the other party disagrees, it’s not exactly “partisan” (at least not in the pejorative sense) to take a side on that matter.
If that is the standard, political parties will just start claiming that all their opinions are factual (as happens in practice, coincidentally).
If we had an algorithm to sort fact from fiction then that would be fine, but we don't. Our method for sorting fact and fiction is to ask an expert. Experts are not reliable in political situations because there are experts who are willing to believe anything for money.
Particularly for economic questions where it is likely that the experts have a financial stake in one political outcome.
It's not only money. People are ready to believe (or to claim they believe) in things they think will make the world a better place (for some definition of better). This where the real partisanship lies. Tell a white lie, turn a blind eye, jump to conclusion, ... are all easy things to do if they justify moving the needle towards a world you truly think it's better.
People of course have wildly different standards w.r.t what "better" means.
And once shaped, the goal is hard to change. It takes more than facts or logical arguments to change one's idea if what the ideal world looks like. It's part of your identity, it's intertwined with your community.
> Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
If a scientific finding in evolutionary biology which undermines some previously fundamental aspect of genetics or the timeline of natural selection (a finding which Creationists would exult in promoting and probably exaggerate for their own biases) is not given its due time in the trade journals then yes, we'd have a serious problem. While I realize this may not quite be what you meant, because Creationism simply isn't scientific, evolutionary biology as a matter of being a human endeavor is certainly subject to bias in publication.
It feels strange to question what's partisan about cronkite's statement on an article highlighting instances where positions didn't pass a party's smell test.
Ideally a concept like "getting out of the war" could be a non partisan concept. Back then perhaps, but in 2020 definitely, there's no room for that. Maybe because of the internet, maybe because of cable news, I dunno, but even a single stated position plops you on the right or left in America. Sure it's not ideal but it's reality.
If only Republicans knew how many American communists were pro-armed-populace. If only it were possible to be conservative and reconcile your preference for self sufficiency and blue collar values with the ideals of people living on a commune, or the Green and Sustainability movements. But no, Climate Change is Fake News and Guns Are Bad. Full stop.
It may not always matter or be distinguishable, but don't lose sight of the fact that there is a difference between having opinions, and having partisan opinions.
I think one of the things ailing us is that cynical partisans have been quite successful at pulling ever-growing amounts of our lives into this gravity well. Dry, straight, factual news has its place--but it also leaves a narrative-vacuum that partisans will happily fill.
> Here's "the most trusted man in America" calling ror the U.S. to get out of Vietnam
That was an op-ed piece. It's fine for media to do op-ed if it's identified as not news; the most trusted papers have done it forever. Real journalists (tm) can absolutely do neutral, fact-checked, 5-W, reporting on one story and then express an opinion in a different column:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Watergate was a long, difficult, expensive and risky investigation for the journalists and newspaper involved. They did it because, in their opinion, Nixon was doing something wrong. Without opinions, what would motivate real journalism?
The problem with journalism today is not opinion, but that we’ve allowed “newsish” to pose as real news, to the extent that people can’t tell the difference. And on top of that I don’t think people are generally equipped well to recognize opinion as such.
It doesn't help that there's not really any competition with news any more. Nearly every small news outlet is owned in some way by a larger one and those are in turn owned by an even larger one. Everything is fed top down, so even small local stations end up showing the same news as large ones. The main problem is news isn't news any more. It's entertainment, it exists to tell a story, not explain current events in an objective way.
It's been going on longer than the internet era. My dad jokingly blames entertainment tonight for starting the entertainment news trend, and while I don't think that's likely the reason, it does show an apt comparison. News has definitely become more like entertainment tonight, for nearly as long as entertainment tonight has existed.
It's a problem when every news broadcaster reminds me of fox news from the 90's and they're now actually considered a proper news outlet.
Now for people that have noticed a distinct decline in news quality over the last ten years specifically, this may have something to do with it.
Both the government and news companies have it in their best interests to keep major news organizations as shallow entertainment willing to spout whatever the message of the day is.
It's not much better than if the news was state run media, it's just hidden a lot better and government and private interests share the same goal.
It's rather depressing. I think it feels like living in the 60s, everyone knows that nuclear war will be a disaster and everyone expects it to happen tomorrow. At least I have a first class ticket on the Titanic.
It’s not a question of changing habits it’s the content syndication model that broke down. It used to be if a reporter spent months researching something other news organizations would often pay to publish the same content. As better content directly had higher value, the risk vs reward equation changed.
> It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why"
No news outlet has ever really done that (and why is usually a matter of subjective ascription, rather than fact, anyway.)
The illusion of unbiased news comes from a time when the major national media were a small set of corporations with largely similar institutional biases, and when advertising was less targeted so number of eyeballs was more important than a narrow, focussed audience, passionate, demographic, favoring a blander presentation and more effort to avoid offending any large group, rather than trying to appeal very strongly to a narrow, specific group.
I’ve always thought the Christian Science Monitor struck a good balance. It’s almost bland these days compared to the hyper charged headlines and slants you see in other papers.
For whatever it's worth: I'm a mostly conservative person who dislikes Trump (that seems to me that should be a tautology, even if it seems to others it's an oxymoron). I've been looking for tolerable media - something that doesn't give Trump a pass. I've found National Review to be an interesting read because the writers there seem to frequently disagree with each other. To my knowledge, none of them have been punished for these disagreements.
> But that's the way our economical system work. It assumes that the markets balances things out. Unfortunatly, the common good is not something most individuals prioritize, or even conceptualize, when buying things.
I mean, those kinds of market failures are exactly what large parts of "the left" are frequently highlighting.
I don't know, I think you'll wind up with a bunch of journalists charging independently to produce media, such as the author of the piece does or something like the kickstarters that produce long form docs.
Your comments are only tangentially related and I suspect you did not read the article.
It is not about the economics of the American Press, it's about the lynchmobs that have formed around thoughtcrime and the sometimes public hounding of people who don't push the proper narrative.
There might be economic factors intertwined with the push for more groupthink, but I think there is a link missing in the chain of logic from this article's subject matter and your reply.
You can’t reduce the cost of “real journalism” by much. It takes lots of time and manual effort to find and vet sources, dual-source all facts, piece together the puzzle from sets of verified facts without making non-factual leaps.
Then you have to actually write in such a way that the reader/viewer gets only a series of facts, and any inferences or opinion they draw should be their own.
To echo your point, there was an Aspen festival panel a few years ago where a network news rep/owner was refreshingly honest.
He said everyone thinks they want the news to be deeply insightful and informative, but the people who would consume that product tend to go out nights and do interesting things like attend ballets or go to museums, or go to things like the aspen festival. Or at least they are just reading a few articles online.
They make news for the sort of people who just binge television news constantly. These people don't have a custom rss feed to make that efficient, and that is a special type of person.
"We run the market test against PBS every night."
If PBS started hitting numbers, every other station would jump to that model immediately.
Interestingly, this market force seems to lead to media very similar to that of the USSR. The only thing currently missing (everybody agreeing with each other and adhering to a specific non-value-based narrative is there) is the media speaking on behalf of the people.
>So they did the next best thing: they changed to please the market
Slow down. This is the hackernews equivalent to "yada yada yadaing" over the real stuff. You say points big and silly you can't backup. I work at a business news organization, and know someone who just left WSJ. Now, think again how you'd tell them face to face they're niche? You're gonna tell them how the media business works? Like what are you going to say?Are you claiming FB is a new organization? In fact, are you really saying anything at all?
Those issues are important, but what I find most concerning about your reply is "the way our economical system work".
You're either not in management, are an incredibly crappy manager, or don't know anything about it. You do it for the money like some lame reach for that Tesla R&R refrain to argue for lower intellectual (ethics/morals) standards ... that's the beginning of the end for organizations ... what you fail to get is that other organizations who are not so easily sold your sale of good will be still doing the news and fighting the good fight.
Those who understand money the best and make the most over the long term know best money is NOT the measure of all things.
> Often, they actually can't, because their survival depend on more pressing day-to-day matters.
I agree with you entirely except for this. For the poor, yes. But there are plenty of people the more pressing day-to-day matters is not survival but how to hoard even more wealth and advantage than they already have. Like sending their children to private schools despite that only exacerbating the already gross iniquities of life for poor children vs elite children. Or figuring out how to upgrade to an even nicer house or which gentrifying neighborhood will yield them the best returns in 10-20 years once it is fully taken over.
I agree with some of this, but I just personally can't bring myself to care about the firings of the editors responsible for "Send in the troops" and "Buildings matter, too".
A lot of my friends unsubscribed from the NY Times for publishing Tom Cotton's pro-fascism op-ed. The NY Times had to respond to this. They are a business and their income matters. It's not so much an issue of freedom of thought in the newsroom, it's that they literally can't afford to continue publishing such pieces as it's causing them to massively bleed revenue. In other words, blame their customers. And frankly I'm perfectly happy if the NY Times never publishes a pro-fascism op-ed ever again. I'm glad the pressure worked.
As for "Buildings matter, too", what a colossal fuck-up that was. If you're that tone-deaf, you legitimately are a liability, and shouldn't be in charge. The same issues were seen here too with revolts from the customer base, not just the newsroom.
I’m interested that this is getting downvoted. It seems perfectly fair comment to me. Newspapers can not afford to massively alienate their readership, and both of these cases clearly did just that. That calls into question the editors’ fitness for their jobs.
It just doesn't really address the substance of the issue. It may well be true that the NYT has no financial choice but pander to the readers who consider non-controversial majority views to be fascist. That doesn't change the problematic effects of such viewpoint narrowing.
> According to a recent poll, 58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities' calling in the military to "address protests and demonstrations" that are in "response to the death of George Floyd."
As evidence that the view espoused in Cotton's op-ed are the majority's view. Do you have a source saying that that is false?
I didn't downvote, but similar pushes for message purity are happening in center-right media, just focused on complete political support for Trump. I think it is ill advised to silence critics. My instincts are to apply the same principles to political movements that we apply to political leadership. There always needs to be a place to voice dissent not because dissent is always beneficial, but because the lack of civilly expressed dissent results in much worse outcomes.
Both the right and the left are recoiling from dialog. I struggle to see a beneficial future emerging from an utter lack of consensus seeking and civility. If the editorial boards are not responsible for their contributions to these trends, then their readerships certainly are.
I haven't downvoted anybody, but reading the comment possibly because of the typical "I disagree therefore he's a fascist, and I'm withdrawing my support from the publication because counter narratives should be banned".
Very typical of the attitude that the article in the OP is describing.
Are you concerned about the increasing cultural divisions in the U.S.? Seems like the NYT giving up the pretense of being a general purpose news organization is a loss for those hoping for cultural reconciliation at some point.
I think it's fairly clear that there will not be a cultural reconciliation, at least not in the sense of an acceptance of mutual differences. What even is the "cultural right" anymore? It has devolved into a movement defined by opposition to the left's social initiatives.
I don’t agree. The defining difference between the left and right to me is the propensity to advocate for change.
The cultural left is a hodgepodge if smaller issues under one larger umbrella. You’ve got people who care about racism, climate change, money in politics, access to abortion, etc. All of whom are trying to change society in some way to deal with big problems we have. As a result, it’s incredibly messy. The groups don’t always overlap well nor fall in line.
On the other hand, the cultural right is more or less defined by an unwillingness to change society. They like it as it is, and are generally afraid of change. They’re scared even more by the sight of the lefts constant infighting and imagine that it would be chaos if they got their way. Plus abortion and gun control alone keep many of them in check.
They’re generally not defined by a vision for a better America, just a whiter one that doesn’t really change from what we’ve got.
The right is the ones advocating for changes with respect to immigration, access to abortion, affirmative action, the tax code, the power of public service unions, and a whole host of other issues. The left is defending the status quo more than many seem to appreciate. More, the left seems to be more picky about morality issues, even, though the set of morals aren't sexual or religious (for instance), they are environmental and multicultural (for instance).
The GP is a response to a comment about social/cultural issues. For the two cultural issues you mention, immigration and access to abortion, the stance of the right wing is specifically to roll back what the left wing regards as progress. The right wing's stance on other social/cultural issues tends to follow this trend, such as with LGBT and healthcare topics. The stance holds that recently decided social questions were decided wrongly and should be reversed, and that recent legislation is defective and should be repealed. The modern cultural right can't even manage to be tech-optimistic, because technology companies are regarded as being on the wrong side of the culture war and must therefore be opposed and degraded.
Restricting access to abortion, promotion of alternatives to public schooling, and elaborating on religious freedoms especially where they run against social initiatives of the left.
I'm simply refuting GP. The left's social agenda isn't defined by opposition to the right - apart from abortion. For the most part, the right wants things to stay the way they are.
Do you really want to "culturally reconcile" with people who want to send the army to quell peaceful protests?
That is not a view that you can build a democracy on. To have democracy, you have to exclude certain ideologies and ideas. This has always been the case and will always remain the case. Some ideologies are antithetical to democracy, and that article espoused one of them.
So I don’t really disagree with the content of your comment, but I still take some sort of issue with the use of fascism lately. I see where the connection is made, but I still think that is a long way off from what was advocated. Even by definition of fascism and what it actually stands for. Having had family members “forcibly disappeared” during Franco’s dictatorship I feel this word is being used ... I’m not even sure, incorrectly? Wrong? Sure the US does something similar but I think that’s where the similarities end. I’m curious more than anything else, honestly, what to you makes that fascist? Maybe I’m wrong and I will gladly admit if I am but the parallels between complete national mobilization and removal of person for the whole doesn’t seem like what he advocated.
We're on the road to fascism. If you wait until it's "solidly fascist" then it's too late to stop it via peaceful means. So yes, it's not yet nearly as bad as it has been in other countries throughout history. But we're potentially on a trajectory towards that right now, and it needs to be stopped. Calling it what it is is a necessary first step.
Calling for the military to come in and violently crush protests (as Trump and Cotton have done) is for sure a move out of the fascist playbook.
I am not certain why NYT published those articles but I am glad they did. I see it as exposing the dirt and muck-raking. I think it's up to NYT readers to separate what is a real ideological call to arms and what is giving bastards like Tom Cotton a chance to discredit themselves infront of the whole country.
Not my favorite new institution mostly because their reporting has become too linear and predictable. The articles added a nice twist that increased my trust in NYT.
CydeWeys says*>"As for "Buildings matter, too", what a colossal fuck-up that was. If you're that tone-deaf, you legitimately are a liability, and shouldn't be in charge."<
Not if "Buildings" is also metonymic and stands for "civilization".
The New York Times likely declines to publish viewpoints on a daily basis, including from all sorts of prominent people like senators. That's not suppression.
The problem is that Tom Cotton represents a huge chunk of the American population. Those people don't just go away because NYT, FB, Twitter, etc. all collectively deny them a voice. Instead, they quietly vote in Donald Trump. To the extent that these people might be a problem, sweeping them under the rug doesn't help the problem.
If your goal is to reinforce the idea that you're right, and allow yourself to pretend that other people don't exist, then this is probably a good strategy. If you want to actually make a real change in the lives of people, you're going to need the help of the deplorables. Telling them to go fuck themselves is probably not a great strategy.
> It's not so much an issue of freedom of thought in the newsroom, it's that they literally can't afford to continue publishing such pieces as it's causing them to massively bleed revenue.
Do you have a million friends to support this data point?
I agree with everything you said. The point that my friends unsubscribed, and they took an action because they were losing business due to people leaving them for that article comes across a little naive to me, in an otherwise well thought out response.
This is the most important story in the last 4 years. The press has gone wild. They think they have a moral duty to bring down Trump instead of reporting the news. Because of this they distort headlines and flat out lie in many instances.
I no longer trust the media. I hate Trump as well, but you don’t do it through lies and distortion. You do it by presenting the truth. Reporters have crossed the line in the last several years and it shows. They are the worst propaganda machine in decades since the 80s and it truly is destroying itself, like Taibbi says.
Trump is merely the momentary target of the process. The process is dying organizations always go hard left on the way out. Something to do with ease of entryism when no one else wants in, or if there's no monetary or social reward left in an industry there's always the left wing rewards of boastful humility and self congratulatory echo chambers.
Trump is part of a long-term movement to dismantle the press.
Remember when Dan Rather was fired? It was over a story that had been carefully researched, both with written evidence, and with multiple recorded interviews with corroborating eye witnesses.
The excuse for firing him was that out of the 1000’s of documents they’d gathered, a few were forgeries. The reality was that he criticized W within a few years of 9/11, and the press decided that was off limits. We ended up fighting a useless war because no one was allowed to question the executive branch. That led to untold human suffering, and eventually the rise of ISIS, etc.
Anyway, by converting to a propaganda engine dedicated to ousting Trump, the liberal press is actually helping dismantle our democracy. They may as well be endorsing him for a third term in office.
Whatever your opinion, there will be many others who deeply and vehemently disagree with you and do so with passionate, fiery, certain-to-be-correct righteous indignation.
Carry your true opinions in your head and share them with no one.
Yet laying out your thoughts, your reasons for them, and your evidence and having someone else rummage through them is often the best way to deepen your views and come to a more accurate, nuanced understanding of the world. I'm afraid if our exteriors are not accurate reflections of the truths we believe in, our worldview may cease to develop and remain too simplistic.
It’s all well and good until your colleagues start shaming you on Twitter that you failed to denounce xyz. And that’s one of the better situation, too.
So, is this a real thing that happens? Just curious.
If someone shamed me for something like this, I would tell them to get a fucking life and to mind their own business. Maybe that's why I don't get pestered... I'm pretty blunt about not putting up with bullshit. I agree with the article, these left ideologies are absurd. Coming from an independent moderate. Obligatory wake up sheeple etc etc.
> So, is this a real thing that happens? Just curious.
It's a reference to a FB employee who got fired recently for doing exactly that. Publicly shaming a colleague who had elected not to become politically involved.
> "Carry your true opinions in your head and share them with no one."
While I don't disagree, I would add that all of us need to share our true opinions at least in one place: the voting booth. We are led by those whom we choose and we must start choosing more wisely if we want a better future.
Kids in the US would get in all kinds of trouble for not respecting the Pledge of Allegiance back in the... 90s, not the 70s.
It's only been in the past decade that anything that's not complete and vehement agreement with the "support the troops" mantra has been tolerated by the mainstream.
It's things like these that make me very skeptical of the intentions of the article. The idea of the American public being tolerant of ideas outside the norm is a new conservative narrative that has no correspondence with reality.
People were __pissed off__ when the Simpsons began to air. Openly admitting to doing drugs was (and still is, to a much lesser degree) a way to be fired an ostracised in many middle class circles.
Did they purge Tankies, Maoists, Trotskyist etc from universities? Because when O went to Uni half of social science department was some sort of -ist in the 90s
See how fast you get fired if you don’t take a knee when department head tells you to for BLM.
McCarthy certainly did, I don't know if you're being facetious but that's exactly what happened. These sectors of the left didn't come to dominate some sectors of academia; they were driven out of everywhere else and that's the only area where their radical ideas were tolerated.
Meanwhile the rest of society has been tolerating everything else in mainstream public institutions: the racist and regressive corporate bosses, the Evangelicals who considered anything that's not in agreement with their doctrine to be an affront to God, the gun nuts who consider walking around in public with an assault weapon to be a perfectly valid expression, and on it goes.
American society is dramatically more tolerant of these extremist right wing positions, and that Overton window shift has always existed in the US.
It is only because of the inflammatory discourse of Trump and his allies that people have decided that the fringe left is dramatically less dangerous and tolerant than these literal fascists.
I recognized how overcome I was feeling by it all and switched off a while ago, and life has felt a lot easier since. I've a couple of subscriptions for print media and now defer checking the news, avoiding Twitter etc. and just catching up with the weekly editions over the weekend. HN is the only site I really look at daily due to its mix of interesting content, suppression of political battles and quality of moderation. Even then I'll often Pocket articles and defer them until later.
Recognize that you're being manipulated, that you've no influence over any of it and step away. I promise, after the initial come-down effect it entails, you'll feel a lot better for it.
I would mostly agree with this. Be kind to others, do something useful for the world, don't be a jerk, but otherwise, debating opinions is generally a waste of time.
What happens though when one group says (as they recently have) that silence is insufficient, not just on agreeing with not being a racist, but the wisdom of their proposed solution to the problem? I've seen the claim that silence is violence... what do we do then?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadThat is, catering to the most vocal segment of the Right Thinkers is a ticket to an ever-shrinking readership, because 1) everyone who isn't a card-carrying member of the Right Thinkers leaves, and 2) the Right Thinkers shrinks as the majority repeatedly throws out people for not being right thinking enough.
Moderates are far more common than centrists. But these day's you're either completely toxic and insane or you get ridiculed as a centrist for not caring enough.
This is, in significant part, due to the enforced two-party system in the US ("enforced" by our first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all election system), which ensures that when a party takes any particular ideology or position into itself, as the Republican party has taken this white supremacy into itself, it is impossible to support anything the party champions without also de facto supporting its most extreme positions.
Get rid of the literal Nazis on the right, make "people should be allowed to live their lives without fear of constant oppression for harmless aspects of themselves" a completely apolitical opinion, and then maybe "centrist" can become a term that's not worthy of derision again.
There's more to the extreme left than "Everyone deserves to be treated equally and with dignity."
Politics in the US lacks nuance. You can be politically moderate and lean towards the left. It isn't simply conservative wolves in centrist clothing.
I can vehemently disagree about many things that extreme leftists do and still vote for one over Donald Trump. But that doesn't mean voting for Donald Trump automatically makes someone a Nazi either.
Doesn't it make them a Nazi enabler, though? Is that really much better than carrying the card and wearing the pin?
The Soviets had a couple of good terms that can be recycled to describe Trump Voters Who Aren't Nazis: one was "fellow travelers," and the other was... probably a bit too inflammatory to post here.
Calling Trump a nazi seems incredibly disrespectful to people and their family who actually lost their lives to real nazis.
Are you aware that you don't actually know what Trump supporters think? That your opinion is based on heuristics running on top of the absolutely tiny sample of the real world that you've been exposed to, much of it likely incredibly biased if not outright untrue?
I grew up with them. Trust me, I know what they think.
This period of history may or may not be what Joe Strummer prepared us for, but it certainly looks like the one Hannah Arendt, Milton Mayer, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn prepared us for.
I haven't and don't plan on voting for Trump. However, you can't generalize a group of people consisting of approximately 60 million very easily. Even if you can't fathom why they would support him, there's a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies within that massive group.
There are also many different political issues that have significant impacts on peoples' lives. Not everyone gets the same information about these issues. Even if they did, not everyone interprets and values them in the same exact way. I would bet most people voting for or against Trump are trying to do what they think will make the US a safe, fair, happy place to live. The problem is that many political issues are incredibly complex and most of them don't have clear cut solutions. Even in cases where they do, people still can't agree on the best course of action.
Some people like to hand wave the complexity away by taking the stance that "one party just wants freedom and equal rights for everyone and the other wants the opposite".
I'm going to recommend you watch something to better understand what that word means. It's a documentary [1] called Night and Fog, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048434/ . Every few years or so I watch it again, just as a reminder.
1. https://documentarylovers.com/film/night-and-fog/
I've also found some post-war narratives out of Germany to be downright bone-chilling, such as 'The Lives of Others.' Definitely recommend that one if you haven't seen it. Are there any specific points raised by 'Night and Fog' that you have in mind?
1: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-06/video-un...
You can't vote for a party and try to avoid taking the whole package deal. You get what you voted for.
Again: You get what you vote for. Using 'I disagree with what my party is doing, but I'm voting for them anyways' as an attempt to avoid criticism doesn't work. That's the nature of US politics. If you vote for one party despite them doing some heinous things, then you tacitly support what they're doing. If you don't like it, then either don't vote or vote for the opposite party.
But part of that compromise is that you accept the party is going to also do things you don't like. Which is something you can't escape criticism for. Voting is approval for that party. You're choosing to value what Party B does over Party A, which means you weigh the negatives of Party B as being less of a problem than the positives.
That doesn't mean you get to avoid those negatives when someone else calls you out on who you decided to throw your lot in with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
The problem is that even suggesting that equality and dignity are valid as bedrock communal values in business, politics, law, and economics is considered an aggressively extremist ultra-left position in the US - and not a sane and mature common sense centre-left view, as it is in parts of Europe.
There's a reason for this, and it's to do with the real bedrock values of US culture.
Bottom line is the Left in the US operates the same way as the rest of US culture does.
And the underlying problem is understanding why, not complaining about superficial dynamics that are actually consistent with the way the culture operates as a whole.
There are leftists in the US to whom equality and dignity are the foundations of their belief system. However, that doesn't represent the whole of leftism in the US and it certainly doesn't represent the foundation of actual leftist extremism in America.
To clarify, I don't think most people that fall on the left half of the political spectrum in the United States are extremists. I think that due to their fanaticism and tendency to be more vocal, the extremists have a voice disproportionate to their actual size.
That doesn't mean they don't matter. It just means they don't represent as many people on the left as one would perceive them to based on social media and mainstream media.
I'm not a leftist extremist. I'm a socially liberal moderate that likes the general idea of free market competition but understands that completely unregulated markets are probably just as toxic and doomed to fail as attempts to form completely planned economies. Prudent regulation can minimize predatory and exploitative behavior.
I think there is a balance to be struck between people having individual freedoms and the ability of the government to take measures to prevent groups of people from making it impossible for marginalized groups of people to live enjoyable lives in the US.
My search for that balance is founded on a desire for equality and dignity. For example, I don't think a city or state full of racists/homophobes should be able to use States' rights protections to establish bubbles where its impossible for certain minorities to comfortably exist.
However, I believe that we are often really quick to take knee jerk reactions and pass legislation that may have unintended consequences when it comes to preserving everyone's freedom, equality, and dignity.
You may choose to ignore them, but there are vocal voices in the progressive movement that are racist and sexist and are more interested in establishing a society that revolves around revenge against white people. Some of them are nobodies, but some of them are influential people in places of power in various industries.
Leftist extremism exists. There are people advocating for violence against white people and men in general on Twitter for a daily basis. Reporting these people usually gets ignored.
I'm opposed to leftist extremism and conservative extremism. People that advocate for violence and who advocate for a new type of inequality are assholes, regardless of how many of their unrelated political opinions I might share with them.
I do, however, believe that the US has more work to do in regards to how it treats many different minority groups. I also believe that white privilege exists. I don't think every white person faces a life-changing situation where they benefit from it, but it happens. In my case I'm not sure how much of an impact it had, but it probably had an impact.
What you're not getting is that equality and dignity aren't even compatible if you try to push equality to extremes. Dignity means giving people freedom to make their own choices and live as they wish; the opposite of dignity is enslaving them. But as soon as people can make different choices they'll start achieving different outcomes - inequality. Not to mention the need to forcefully people who step out of their assigned 'equal' band of achievement - there's nothing dignified about crabs in a bucket.
NK and Cuba and USSR stamped out inequality pretty well, and they gave up on dignity to accomplish that.
You sound like a rational person. If I give you three examples of current capitalist ideology authoritarian states (one more example than you gave), reason would dictate that you will of course instantly become a leftest because you are a rational person and by your own self-described logic, the correct ideology is determined by which ideological system has a higher count of authoritarian states.
Far-left: 100% Far-right: 100%
I'm not asking a rhetorical question, genuinely interested in how you see this. It doesn't seem like to me like he falls in any of the categories you listed. Same with Lee Fang, the interviewer who got attacked for publishing Max's remarks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Which is why a system based on policing corruption through public outrage is doomed to fail. You need to have a system that has actual mechanisms--investigations, prosecutions, and convictions--to keep a lid on corruption. Public shaming doesn't work because the public has only so much attention span, and there is soooo much corruption.
Which, I know, is very frustrating to those who are salivating at the thought of seeing them provoked. The unanswered cries of "where's the 2FA crowd now?!" have, admittedly, been very satisfying to watch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unfortunately, the media only drops these things when it's a politician they like. Anyone right of Obama gets hounded with scandals, real or imagined, as often as possible, forever.
I'm not sure this is true. My experience is that either the mob is destroyed by force, or they manage to convert enough out of fear that they end up controlling the institution they were attacking.
Margins on digital products are lower than on print products but that's not unique to the Times and it's largely outside of their control. Ad margins have collapsed since their astronomical highs of the 90s and early 2000s because of the divorce of classifieds and news, rather than a collapse in total circulation.
Seek out people who seek to be right and back up their arguments consistently with logic and data, not people who are disliked by people you dislike.
You made the assumption that the people that dislike him are people I dislike. And I doubt you read the article.
Basically if I don't write a full paragraph describing in essay like detail, I have to deal with people like you sitting there inferring way too much from a single statement. Awesome.
I wouldn't support somebody who is a crank. this guy isn't a crank he just points out the fact that a bunch of journalists have abandoned their professionalism in favor of in group approval. He's done it for years starting with the weapons of mass destruction argument for invading Iraq. Not that you are aware of that at all. Let's be honest you don't like this article do you?
> And I doubt you read the article
> Let’s be honest you don’t like this article do you?
Correct the inference, don’t turn around and attack me for it.
We've had to ask you about this kind of thing before, unfortunately. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? This thread, for example, is managing to stay barely on the ok side, and the last thing we need is more of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23510456.
The political dialogue is currently in territory that is Important. Normal families are under significant financial pressures, the legitimacy of major institutions (police, presidential elections, government solvency) is open to questioning. Global conditions are tense, let alone America's internal problems.
This is a time for sober discussion of the issues, not calling people "great reality-show villain" or "Twitter Robespierres".
There is a real problem that the atmosphere on the left is stifling alternative ideas for one, ironically experimental, orthodoxy. That needs to be discussed. Lots of other issues also need to be discussed.
And answering the headline; I fully expect all the narratives in all major US press outlets to be proven false at some point in the future. What passes for 'good journalism' these days is being vaguely correct about what the issues are. I wouldn't be surprised if not a single quote from a political figure has been presented in context in the last 2 years. I refuse to believe anything in the media about who said what without cross-referencing against a primary source. It is impossible to have an honest political discussion in that environment.
The NYT is far-left? Self-censorship in there is one of the core topics of the article. And many other mainstream left (and some not even political) journals are mentioned. It doesn't feel like you've read the article in any depth if that's your takeaway.
In any case, the point he was trying to make is all well and good - the media should ask the tough questions and sometimes society impacts the flow of free thought. But it seems to Mr Taibbi only the left has this problem.
This article is nothing like Rush Limbaugh and there's tons of substance and supporting links behind it. Just because he's attacking his own side doesn't mean he's wrong.
Do you think the data scientist who tweeted work by a black statistician about violent riots hurting election chances for the Democratic party deserve to be fired? If you do then you won't like this article, because you are part of the problem.
That media reports on these events or provide opinion pieces is not core to the accountability issues.
> This article is nothing like Rush Limbaugh and there's tons of substance and supporting links behind it. Just because he's attacking his own side doesn't mean he's wrong.
No, there isn't. He conflates statistics ("somewhat support != support, so no, a majority did not support Cotton's statement.) Second, he used the Daily Mail as the source for one of his claims, that only uses other right wing sights as the source for his claims. That isn't credible. You're fooling yourself. This man was an investigative journalist? Sure...maybe 10 years ago.
> Do you think the data scientist who tweeted work by a black statistician about violent riots hurting election chances for the Democratic party deserve to be fired? If you do then you won't like this article, because you are part of the problem.
Do you think that the countless number of career diplomats who dared speak up against Trump deserved to be fired? Do I think the inspector generals deserved to be fired? There are endless examples - you tell me, what's more dangerous, the private press having bias like they always did in OPINION sections and private companies protecting their PR, or a president stifling out any insight over government power?
Yea, you tell me what is more of a threat. I'll wait.
That's all this is - they just don't like the other opinions. Go back to reading the Daily Mail and that confirmation bias loop while accusing the left of the same thing. pathetic.
I'm speaking not as a conservative at all, but someone who values reason and calm argumentation.
Activism and agitation belong elsewhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It was. You must be young. The NYT was a big reason that the center left went along with it. I have never forgiven them for that.
You are assuming that I support Trump, or that the author does. I don't, and he doesn't. You are engaging in what-aboutism.
Two things can be true at the same time. Sorry if I'm not as tribal as you are. Feel free to go find that on Twitter with the rest of the dopamine addicts.
BTW, along with most people who read, I already know about the diplomats and Trump's misdeeds and hate them as much as you do. The fact that you assumed I didn't is the problem. "DefundThePolice" will get him reelected. If you don't know that, you either don't live in the US or have never been outside of a coastal city.
Seeing the person you're responding to's attitude fills me with a sort of depressing frustration. As a center-left person myself, I engage with people and I'm always up against the wall of what-aboutism. If I criticize Trump those folks start a rant about Obama or Biden. If I criticize the topic we're talking about here, I'm reminded about how mean the GOP is.
For years I've been trying to wrap my head around this.
HN doesn't like political conversation, I get it. But a HN-friendly topic would be, is technology itself to blame for this insane bifurcation of conversation, from topic-by-topic or subject-oriented reasoning and debate, to this head-scratching angry tribalism? Or is it just human nature somehow (whatever that means)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-...
But we on the left need to recognize how crazy this s* is getting.
If anyone questions the insane dogma that has taken over the newsrooms pushed by the far left, then they are labeled a right-winger or worse. Never mind the fact that it causes the left to lose elections when we let our fringe elements take over.
there are tens of thousands of people at any given moment talking about how crazy the right wing is, especially Fox news and Breitbart. But where are you when the New York times is completely going off the rails? You're just defending them as your tribal instincts take over.
Also let's be honest here:
Kneeling before people you've never met to atone for the sins of of other human beings who happen to share your skin color might be something that's normal to you. It is utterly alien to the vast majority of the American public. Defunding police might have nuance to it but it is lost to the American public. If we want to win this next presidential election and Congress in the Senate, we need to be aware of the fact that these ideas are insane to most of America. I can't think of anything that will push a Midwestern voter to pull the lever for Trump faster than watching Minneapolis disband its police department as a councilwoman interviewed on CNN states that calling the police on an intruder is an act of privilege.
If Trump wins in 2020 this will be why. I don't want him to win in 2020. Do you?
What do you think the Left is doing that makes Trump seem not so bad?
You have seriously no idea of what fascim is.
Kneeling together in humility with other people is a weekly occurrence, if you’re Catholic.
I'm no longer religious. I couldn't tolerate the bigotry towards gay people. But the idea of kneeling for a human being repulses me.
So...out of curiosity, just what do you see as being this "insane dogma" "pushed by the far left"?
Because so far as I can tell, America still doesn't have anything that could reasonably be called a "far left" that's being taken seriously by any mainstream media.
The most extreme positions I've heard recently that have gained any media traction are along the lines of "we should overhaul our police so that they don't regularly kill, brutalize, and otherwise traumatize innocent civilians".
Racism without an overwhelming power differential is just angst. Typically people that feel oppressed hate the group they’re being oppressed by. I’m sure you would too.
The media doesn't ever report the numbers on police violence. They report the emotion.
Including both armed and unarmed people, just over 1000 people were killed by US police in 2019.
What percentage of those were black?
Approximately 24 percent. Did you know that? Did it surprise you? I assumed it was 75 percent. 24 percent is very bad, since black Americans are 13 percent of the population. However, it also indicates that race is one of, not the only, independent variable driving this. The media is deliberately not reporting these numbers. Simultaneously, they trot out chart after chart of covid19 infection statistics.
When I saw the data, I was very angry that my own perception was so skewed due to biased, incomplete reporting in the media.
Source:
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
He is libertarian if that matters.
For example ; ~ 250k people a year die from medical errors in the US [0]. From this one could argue that doctors are far more dangerous than cops, possibly on a per encounter basis as well. Certainly something should be done about this. I don't know if a mega riot will do it though.
Also, just what proportion of those police related deaths were actually justified by any standard ? Like how many of those people actually pointed a gun at the cops before ending up as a stat ? Regardless of race. That would be interesting to know. Obviously some heads have to roll when something like that happens, but maybe we should still keep the baby.
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
I'm usually not quick to side with the cops on any given day, but I like to side with the actual facts on any given day. Policing is a hard, dangerous and ungrateful job. Certainly it has its ( grave ) problems, but just doing away with the whole thing based on relatively few ( albeit horrible ) incidents, is not a rational reaction to this real issue.
Our political parties need to clean their damn houses. It's not the right's job to deal with the radical left, and it's not the left's job to deal with the radical right. Both sides need to take out their trash so we can actually get something done.
We need a way to argue against a steelman opposing argument instead of always a strawman. We need to be capable of updating our opinions without risking career suicide. We need something that allows us to deal with the meta problems like fallacies and trolls and half-refutations paraded around as victories. We need to be able to hold arguments with depth and nuance.
Centre-right to right: https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
(edit: I get that "objectively" is probably not the correct word to use there, but I hope you get my meaning; it would be nice if someone could suggest a better one. Probably better to just have written "the views or proposed policies of 'left' or 'extreme left' US politicians are only contextually leftist").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
My own theory (without any real evidence) is that the oligarchs use race to divide the white working class from the non-white working class. A specific example is the video on systemic racism going around. It correctly points out redlining (a truly horrific practice), but also talks about black students having to attend underfunded schools. I attended predominantly black, underfunded, public schools my entire childhood. By this logic, I was at the same schools and was a "victim" of systemic racism. Which immediately implies that it was actually systemic classism at play against the working poor, rather than being purely race-based.
If a party chose to ignore the corporate overlords and focus on issues that working class people of all ethnicities cared about, they would get a lot of votes, and very few super PAC donations.
Many philosophers and others have written about how the powerful divide the lower classes in this way. I don't have any explicit citations offhand, but your observations have merit amongst those who study these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion
Fascinating. I grew up in rural Virginia. A little Known fact is that the vast majority of white settlers there were indentured and/or bonded, often convicts. The first Africans in 1619 were indentured as well. Horrifically, in the 1650s when the first African slaves were brought over, the elites pushed further changes in social norms that resulted in a significant worsening of treatment of the African indentured servants who had long since become free landowners and farmers. A formerly indentured, free black man had a prosperous farm a few miles from where I grew up. The courthouse there dates to the 1600s, and the records are there that show jealous white neighbors gradually stealing his land with impunity, starting at the time that slaves started becoming common. It is chilling looking at those documents standing in that building.
For example, the 'vanilla' right in Brazil in XIX century managed to delay the end of slavery by 6 decades. They thought the country would collapse without slave labor to sustain the agribusiness at the time. Were they inherently bad? Of course not; they thought they couldn't do any better (and of course their opinion was tainted by the fact they owned plantations. It is only human to like the status quo when you are benefited by it. And they were plain wrong, after all. Agribusiness only grew stronger after abolition.)
I classify most 'lefties' here as disguised right-wing people because they also think the public sector is perfect as it is, among other things I don't agree with.
The society needs left/progressive views to go forward, as it needs righties to pay the current bills. But there are much more productive ways to be a lefty. I respect the Green Party here, as well as politicians that have been proposing UBI for 20 years or more, way before it was on vogue.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of right wing thought, either in general or specifically in Brazil.
In general the conservative view is to improve the status quo without throwing away the good things that have been achieved. It’s an understanding that it’s much easier to destroy things (even if unintentionally) then it is to build them.
I’ll agree the left sometimes good at identifying problems, but the proposed cures are often worse than the disease, as seen with the recent abolish/defund the police idea that had quickly gained traction in the left.
To give a more concrete example: Brazil is under a right wing government after 16 years of left wing ones. The current administration seems to want to reduce the size of the public sector, which has massively increased in the last decades, and decentralize government structure (one of its campaign slogans was “less Brasilia, more Brazil”, referring to a reduction of the influence of the federal government in state or city issues).
So one can argue that this is a right wing administration that wants to change the status quo built along the current past decades.
On the other hand, a left wing administration would probably try to increase the size of the public sector even more, or at least increase the benefits public workers have over private sector ones, so you could say they wouldn’t be happy with the status quo either.
In either case, no side would seem to ever consider the status quo as a global maxima. Therefore I don’t think this definition is valid or useful to define what is right or left wing.
In fact, you said it yourself, when you mentioned that everyone likes the status quo when it benefits them. It seems to me every one would be happy with at least some aspect of the status quo, and unhappy with others. Is everyone simultaneously right and left wing? If so, isn’t that classification somewhat useless?
I think the status quo issue is more about corporatism than it is about left and right. For example, I know people who describe themselves as right wing/conservatives, but they are public sector workers, and therefore angry at any mention of possible reductions of their privileges.
I will also dispute that progressive views are what makes society go forward. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. You don’t have to look much further than the issues of cancel culture, online shaming and censorship against people who fail to use the right words or publicly defend the right causes, which are undoubtedly a result of modern left/progressive thought. I think we’re definitely going backwards in this case.
Anyway, sorry if this was too much rambling, it’s a bit late here. Good night :)
It's not possible to maintain a farce anymore like they could in the days when the only media that needed influencing was TV, radio, and newspapers.
Since the internet is a great equalizer in terms of reaching a large audience for relatively little money, political parties in the US have gotten more much factional internally in my lifetime.
The internet has opened the disfunction of every institution and and elites (i say this word in the positive light, the George Washington/MLK/Rosa Parks meaning, not the karl rove/donna brazile kind of way, ie leaders with great responsibility, at a significany personal risk )
Institutions used to control the message fairly effectively, now they cant due to citizen journalism.
Its not republicans or démocrats. Its literally every institution of centralized power.
Thats why opinion polls rate so low for everything, congress, NYT, Fox & all networks, FBI, DoJ, etc.
The people at the top of these institutions have looted americans for their own benefit, and never really had the people as their top of mind concern.
(R)s and (D)s wont reform themselves, any more than institutions will let go of power.
You need to take power forecefully from them, unless you want someone to literally set them on fire.
Let me give you an example that's closer to home: you know how Facebook hires a bunch of people and pays them to collect more and more and more data on everyone? Do you think a single person within Facebook doesn't know it? They all know it and they all like their paycheque more than they like having a conscience. They buried that conscience long ago, in the name of 'providing for my family' or some other straw-man. Some never had much of a conscience to begin with.
That's most people, most of the time. They want what they want for them first, everybody else is everybody else's problem.
It's really that simple.
There are many ways this attitude is being enabled but really, being a selfish monkey comes natural to most people, it's overcoming that selfishness in the name of something bigger that takes a great deal of work. If that work goes unappreciated, what you get is a fake democracy or a real tyranny - all other options require citizens that aren't infantile, self-centered brats.
The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
If you have a social problem, then you employ postmodernism in the form of critical theory, then you now have two problems.
Critical theory does not employ the scientific method and therefore does not provide a reliable means for falsifying claims. We should dismiss the entire field and only retain the parts of it, if any, that can be subjected to rigorous hypothesis testing.
A theory is usually attended by a reproducible proof. As a "theory" what is the proof of "critical theory"?
No. Postmodernism got us into this mess. Consider, for instance, the ascendancy and prevalence of "Grievance Studies", grounded, as it is, in critical theory: https://medium.com/@heyingh/grievance-studies-goes-after-the...
Which problems should we be solving? You cannot use the scientific method to answer that question. The best you can try and do is use empirical evidence and science to strengthen your position, in an attempt to convince others and/or yourself.
This is not an original thought - it's a shame that it isn't more well known.
Demonstrably false. This belief is poisonous and should be avoided in all cases. (ask yourself how you decide whether to fix your plumbing or to buy a new couch, for instance, on a limited budget.)
We evaluate the problems that we should be solving through a cost-benefit analysis. We can estimate the expected value of various options on a decision tree and estimate the cost of various problems to society. We can ask constituents to estimate the dollar value of the harm they face from the continued existence of various problems. We can also ask them to estimate how much they would be willing to pay from their income, to solve a given problem. This gives a subjective estimate based on individual preferences. We can include weighted objective measures whenever possible.
The explanatory power of various models can be tested and argued for/against in rational good-faith debate. For any equally favoured models that suggest a particular allocation of resources, we can perform competing tests e.g. a county can adopt one policy for a given time, while another county adopts a different policy. After the testing duration, outcomes are evaluated and the best policy adopted by all.
Where there is an inability to evaluate models comprehensively and it is still difficult to form conclusions as to what problems should be addressed, we can ask interested/affected parties to take part in a prediction market, in which they can place bets on likely outcomes of various policies. We adopt the policy and solve the problem for which the majority of bets indicate a high probability of success. The winners of these bets keep their winnings.
This is a rudimentary form of how the scientific method is applied to social problems. This kind of analysis is the most rational and effective tool when running one's own life, household, company, university, government, planet.
> The best you can try and do is use empirical evidence and science to strengthen your position, in an attempt to convince others and/or yourself.
1000 x NO! Please do not ingest such a poisonous idea. We use the data we observe to determine the beliefs we should hold; we do not use beliefs we hold to tell us what data to observe.
Where this prescription falls short of the cure: the most extreme are also the most vocal, and are the ones creating change. Regardless of which side we're on, we're letting them speak for us and pull as hard as they can in the direction we want the needle to move.
As a moderate liberal, if someone I know says they're allowing their child to choose their gender or that they want to shut down police departments, I try to keep an open mind, but don't really feel the same way they do.
I imagine moderate conservatives probably grin and bear a lot of racism, misogyny, and toxic nationalism by the same token.
To be fair, the conservative started this, at least in France. Now the liberals adopted this around 2017, helping first the regular right then the "center right" getting elected when the regular right got caught red-handed stealing money (i'm simplifying here).
The communists use it now, it is only fair. And i hope anarchists will start too. That's why i'm sneering at "defund the police": it is not extreme enough. "Abolish the police" should have been the initial demands, with defunding an acceptable compromise. But anarchists are not organized enough to make good media strategies.
If you gleaned that this was purely a "right wing" problem, try again. This issue is shared by both sides of the political spectrum and multiple different news organizations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> There have always been boundaries around acceptable discourse, and the media has always been involved, in a complex and often unacknowledged way, in both enforcing and contesting them. In 1986, the media historian Daniel Hallin argued that journalists treat ideas as belonging to three spheres, each of which is governed by different rules of coverage. There’s the “sphere of consensus,” in which agreement is assumed. There’s the “sphere of deviance,” in which a view is considered universally repugnant, and it need not be entertained. And then, in the middle, is the “sphere of legitimate controversy,” wherein journalists are expected to cover all sides, and op-ed pages to represent all points of view.
November is going to be interesting. Most mainstream pols seem to just be useless now, when any opinion right of the orthodoxy places you somewhere next to Mengele.
Fail to take a knee?? Clearly a Nazi. It is nothing new, normal Soviet propaganda.
Back when we had competition between independent news organizations in the US, the news was closer to being objective. Publications that frequently retracted major stories, or ran articles with flawed logic and sloppy conclusions lost market share.
These days, there’s basically no competition, and the major news outlets just spew transparent propaganda.
But a reporter should resist the desire to editorialize and instead emphasize the 5W's: who, what, where, when, why (and how):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws
If reporters did so, much contention would disssipate and we'd get more information (news) and less opinion - IMO a good thing.
In particular, who, what, why is extremely sensitive to unadopted bias.
And WTF is "unadopted bias"? Searches with Bing and DuckDuckGo come up absolutely empty and an analysis of the language is befuddling. Did you just make it up, b/c literally nobody and nothing on the Innertubes speaks of "unadopted bias" except you?
From that I presume you not a native English speaker and I've possibly been trolled by a bot or an "idibot". That's a word I made up: it's a portmanteau of "idiot" and "robot" and means a robot with a low IQ. Two can play this game.
[+10 for use of term "portmanteau"]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What is "unadopted bias"? Searches with Bing and DuckDuckGo come up absolutely empty and I find the usage befuddling. I can find literally nobody and nothing on the Internet who/which speaks of "unadopted bias"?
[Is that better, Ycombinator mods?]
If only subjectivity is true, society must fragment. Everyone forms a different view -- unity is lost
Ethics are not equivalent to populism.
If an elected official wants to publish a racist diatribe, the press should circulate it as widely as possible. Informed voters make for a stronger democracy.
Burying the editorial because it would offend their readers just improves the racist’s chances of being reelected.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_...
How did history judge that again?
https://www.nytimes.com/1941/06/22/archives/the-art-of-propa...
If you’re going to invoke Godwin’s Law type arguments, you at least have to know the actual history.
Think about LGBT rights. There was plenty of opposition to gay marriage, it was covered broadly and people had platforms. Slowly over time, opinions changed. Why? Because LGBT rights were publicly and transparently argued in the media. People heard opposing viewpoints.
Would it have been better if back in the 1950's gay marriage was verboten? No one can talk about it?
This thread is managing to stay barely on the ok side, with many comments from many sides of the issue, including your own side. These other users are managing to stay within the guidelines, and there's no reason why you can't also. Please do so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is different than giving all white nationalists a platform to spread their garbage.
The racist politician will ultimately find a racist platform which would gladly accept their views. This would make it pretty clear to the public that the politician is racist, wouldn’t it?
I mean it's not like taibbi is speaking up for child molesters. He turned out to be factually right about a lot of this stuff, but it was completely unacceptable to say so.
Unlike, say, the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/opinion/pedophilia-a-diso...
Last sentence:
> Acknowledging that pedophiles have a mental disorder, and removing the obstacles to their coming forward and seeking help, is not only the right thing to do, but it would also advance efforts to protect children from harm.
They even explicitly recognized your mistake in the article, which is the tendency to conflate the disorder and the crime.
Do you know an interpretation in which the headline is wrong?
A mental disorder is not a crime.
Sure the title might be confusing for those who haven't thought about the difference between thought and deed, but that does not mean that readers should just not tell the truth about the articles conclusion. (..as our parents article description was clearly wrong.)
I've yet to see an intellectually honest criticism of this article.
Their argument focusses on how to prevent child abuse best.
There is really nothing controversial in there.
Imagine the hypocrisy where people woult opt to create a system that might end up enabeling child abuse just so that they can continue to celebrate their moral panic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So I'm just quibbling with the word "universally" here. I would rather editorial pages be forthright about where their window of acceptability lies for them. I would especially advocate aversion to doublespeak, especially in journalistic contexts. Propaganda, even well meaning propaganda, is another enterprise.
> significant minority of voters polling in support of the view
We know that it’s a majority from the article:
> A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.”
Is it because of the same fear that the article is describing in the press?
I was casting a wider net since I think minority views should be discussed, if for no other reason than they should be understood. Disagreeing with someone without even understanding their views is ignorant. Part of the benefit of current protests is catching people up on facts who were previously disengaged.
I think you’ll find classifying what counts as “outright racist or sexist views” constitutes a legitimate controversy.
The article cites award-winning journalists being fired for running opinion pieces that a 58-80% of the population agree with (but that the fired editor disagrees with!), or for publishing error-free factual pieces.
It’s not just the press. When people point out the facts don’t support the conclusion or the math doesn’t add up in a COVID story, there’s a 50-50 chance it gets downvoted to oblivion.
Thats like saying Judge Richard Posner is one of the best jurists in the country without adding anything else.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner
You expect people to somehow know and lionize these left-wing hacks as if their eminence should be self-evident and known to all, despite their bent (which is revealed in the 2nd paragraph where the author calls a sitting President a 'clown').
That's the problem with unself-aware people like you, who expect everyone to read the same people you do. Left-leaning people have been accused of living in their own self-made bubbles of comfy self-reinforcing left-leaning talking points.
Thats how you get to a point where a presidential candidate feels comfortable & self-assured in calling those who won't vote for her "a basket of deplorables" or a current 2020 presidential candidate saying "if you have a problem figuring out if you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black" to black voters[2].
You're not helping with this thinking of yours or your entitlement in feeling that a journalist of your liking will be liked by all or considered even-keeled by all.
[1] Basket of deplorables
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables
[2] Biden tells voters 'you ain't black' if you're still deciding between him and Trump – video
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/may/22/joe-bi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lmdnm2vgmI
https://i.imgur.com/nvFiIJi.png
Our of curiosity, are you equally offended when the press calls the sitting presidents of other countries nasty names?
If not, why not?
This “left-wing hack” just excoriated the entire media and left-wing movement for essentially being fascists. Did you even bother reading the article?
You judge based on the oeuvre of their lifetime work.[1]
People like him are particularly adept at changing their tone based on which way the political winds blew at that particular time.
The whole of the Left is filled with such noxious people who wouldn't think twice before throwing one of their own under the bus, if it suits their cause.
That's how they've abandoned Noam Chomsky who was once the Left's darling and could do no harm. They're a sickly bunch and a death cult and cannot be trusted with anything resembling power.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi#The_eXile
[2] Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy
How elites on both sides of the political spectrum have undermined our social, political, and environmental commons.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-neoli...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
PS: you're proving the New Yorker article accurate, by the way.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else was or how provocatively they behaved, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else was or how provocatively they behaved, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.
The question then is why do we expend so much time and money engaging with and propagating discourse which we know is so fundamentally misrepresenting reality?
Twisting someone's words to make them look worse in a piece that rightly blames others for doing so is just sad. So I am asking again - Why do even the sensible ones do this? Why can't we have some honesty and objectivity?
0. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-press-conf...
Here is the literal quote from the article: "Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war."
>"..ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers.."
very much sounds like he thinks the same, and a majority of the readership familiar with the story are going to read it that way even if you can be extremely charitable and say that this isn't what he meant.
I know he is familiar with the reporting on this, so if he didn't mean it I doubt he'd be so ambigous in that statement.
From Charlottesville to this, you can safely bet that anything reconciliatory that Trump says will be twisted into something divisive through intentionally misreporting what was said.
This is the actual quote. The fact is that he made this remark during a press conference which also discussed jobs numbers;
“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender, or creed," Trump said. "They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement. They have to receive it. We all saw what happened last week. We can't let that happen. Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, 'This is a great day that's happening for our country.' It's a great day for him. It's a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great day in terms of equality. It's really what our Constitution requires and it's what our country is all about."
When I read this quote I hear Trump praising the protests and supporting the cause of equal treatment under the law and ending police brutality. The mass media reported the statement as, among other things, “revolting”. [1]
[1] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/202...
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc1909.htm
It's exactly where this is going. Honestly worth the short read. Scary stuff. The 1984 of mainstream media, and it's ( also ) right around the corner.
That ship sailed a long time ago.
Just for the record, I subscribe to The Intercept and am a fan of Glenn Greenwald.
I think you're missing something.
If he fishes there regularly and sees (what he believes) are immigrants dumping trash, then isn't that statement true? How do you what he saw? This seems like splitting hairs.
However, when someone believes something is true, that can mean multiple things, I take it to mean they think there is a high probability of something being true. He’s basically guessing. That means the only thing we have to go off of is Tucker’s word because he was there. And, as I ballpark estimated above, he’s generally correct when he says something according to the fact checking website, so I think he’s got credibility.
Also, Tucker talks about fly fishing every so often on the show, it’s a passion of his, so it’s very possible he has seen people, who he thinks are immigrants, dumping stuff.
Again, this feels like we are splitting hairs. He's pretty consistent about his view regarding immigrants (depends on situation). You may disagree with him, but that doesn't mean he is wrong.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+politifact+biased&t=opera&ia=we...
There's even a site dedicated to revealing Politifact's bias:
https://www.politifactbias.com/p/about-politifact-bias.html
[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/politifact/
I will say that he isn't afraid of calling out the BS on the right.
They were on Joe Rogan recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA9Tpf5Uuxs), so their audience will probably spike. I find that even when I don't agree with them, their smartness is usually a breath of fresh air from the fetid stupidities of the mainstream (both left and right) media. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts, and whether they will continue to be able to work together. Regardless of whether one agrees, they're managing to host a freer discussion for the time being.
Looking at everything from an identity lens is a disease that has corrupted discourse in this country.
This concept has been lost on many.
It says something about our moment in history that it would take a maverick and upstart working at the edges of institutions to say something true about the great issues of our time.
I made the call to take the flags off this one and merge the comments from the previous thread in here, because the discussion has been managing to stay (barely) on the ok side, and the article seems to me to be about an interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you don’t mind some feedback for the way posts are marked, read on. :)
There is no doubt that the post is technically a dupe.
I realize now (from your comment) that a post can be flagged either for its content or the content of the conversation. I was only thinking of the former, and under that system it would make a lot more sense for things to get marked consistently (ie if a link is flagged, it is flagged if it gets reposted). That allows us to understand better what things are allowed here and what are not. A dupe flag tells me that there is nothing wrong with the link or the type of content it contains (or the conversation that took place under it, for that matter.) If somebody had not posted the link to the original, I would have never known that the article had been removed for its content (again or the conversation). I would have thought I simply missed the discussion.
In fact, that’s precisely what happened to me. Since I was enjoying it, I clicked through to the older post, only to get whiplash as I discovered that it was a conversation that was apparently not allowed here.
I hope that explains why I felt so frustrated and misled by the [dupe] flag, and that it t is a help to you in your moderation work.
Edited to add: To be clear, my point was not to allow the conversation to continue (though I’m glad you did). My point was that the second removal should get marked the same way so it’s clear what is going on.
The problem is that elites and institutions have been stripped naked.
When the printing press was invented, no one could have foreseen that the tsunami of information could have undermined the catholic institutions to such an extent, that it would lead to a devastating conflict ( 30 years war) fought over the pretext of very minor religios diffferences.
But to anyone paying attention, the underlying current was there: the general populace had been profoundly dissilutioned by the elites, with the information tide leaving the elites stripped naked at the beach.
Fast forward to the 1980s and the internet.
The tsunami of information has come again, and left every institution and elite exposed.
From the top down, presidents ("wmd's in Iraq", hillary's "deplorables" and "tell 1 thing to bankers and something else to public" ), senators ("pocahontas" story), reporters ("under enemy fire while reporting", sex scandals) or NYTs "Fake but real" headline apology, institutions (FBIs "collusion"), academia like medicine (lancet "covid report"), or economics "2008 no one could have foreseen coming", all the way down to mayors and councilmen.
We see failures and lack of respect in every corner of elites.
The tide has left the lies and manipulation of every institution naked.
We must hope that more people like taibbi realize this, and move quickly to descentralize power from old institutions because the other solution is to burn everything down and that usually turns out much worse.
A. Because it's neither rare nor well done.
It was amusing to see Chinese tabs pull a tar-baby on Trump a few weeks ago, with regard to the trade treaty. When communists have tabloid journalism and hedge funds, it gets difficult to tell them apart from the capitalists. At least "having too few political parties" still seems a reasonable tell for repressive states.
(to be fair, ad-supported journalism has had a much longer run than I'd thought it would)
Edit: older than I'd thought:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/chinese-a...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-trade-trump/tru...
I add to that, that without that deviation from reality, a candidate like Trump would have never gotten his nomination, even less the presidency.
I don't disagree. Some of the reactions have been over the top but everyone is pretty wound up right now.
I don't think the editor of nyt opinion should be fired for running the Tom Cotton piece, but some real reflection of intent and purpose needed to be checked. Same with the reporter in Oakland.
I think they are optimizing for survival.
Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market. Few people would consume it (or even be capable of doing so), even fewer are ready to pay the real price of it.
So they did the next best thing: they changed to please the market in a way that makes money. Grabbing a lot of attention, as cheaply as possible, so that you can sell it to the highest bidder.
You think it is self destroying, but only if you see it as from the point of view of a body that should inform people. But as a group that needs to survive, it's a working strategy. Certainly easier to implement than finding a novel way to survive doing the right thing.
Infortunaly, this will lead to suffering for the entire society. But that's the way our economical system work. It assumes that the markets balances things out. Unfortunatly, the common good is not something most individuals prioritize, or even conceptualize, when buying things. Often, they actually can't, because their survival depend on more pressing day-to-day matters.
It's not working though. A lot of people canceled their NY Times subscriptions after the "Send in the troops" op-ed. Massively pissing off your customer base like that is not a winning move.
But as a whole, it's working.
They are just copying each others, because they can see what works and what doesn't. But because everything has a context, and luck is involved, they will be many dying anyway.
The whole thing is absolutely bizarre
Seems like a fireable offense to print something you didn’t read, when it is quite literally your job to.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/busi...
Notice how they didn't say HOW the OPINION piece didn't meet their standard.
David Dorn, a black ex-police officer, and 14 other people died due to the unhandled looting.
If they would have sent National Guard in to protect storefronts those deaths would have never happened.
Those peaceful protesters deserve protection from the looters as well btw.
I don't care if they want it or not, if they don't, they don't know what's good for them.
If a group of supposedly "peaceful, law-abiding protesters" is going to make the revolting moral equivalence of corrupt cops to properly behaved cops, they shouldn't complain when they themselves are considered equivalent to the worst among their group.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...
Scanning the google results for “nyt subscribers” I see them reporting 5 million in Feb and 4.7 million in Aug 2019, so it looks to me like subscriptions have been accelerating in recent months.
Can you please share the information you have regarding mass subscription cancellations due to this op-ed? I would like to see it.
The reason is clear. While there is distraction, the real issues are unaddressed and they can keep putting their hands in your pocket when you aren't looking.
Also, excessive pseudo-socialism is a great tool to drive down wages and have the whole world compete against each other. Locust capitalism.
This is why NYT is going to stop growing if Trump loses in November. With no need to resist there is no need to subscribe
NYT's most passionate tribe is not the Left, they're not left enough for them. But they're not playing to a tribe, but the passion itself. Seattle is no longer front page news for the NYTs because articles talking about hippies sitting around in drum circles not beating people up, or being beat up by police, is boring.
I’m not an American, so no horse in the game - but this is obsessive.
But TFA isn’t about bias so much as the the left leaning press eating itself with doctrinaire purges.
1) You believe that the press did a good job during this unusual period.
2) You consider some of the sins of the past to be the fault of partisan press, at least in part.
[1] https://www.wsmv.com/video/tn-legislator-makes-controversial...
Accurate. Agreed. And a completely fair business decision. We all have bill to pay.
Unfortunately, they (wrongly) continue to sell this new version of their craft (?) as journalism. The masses buy in - confirmation bias is a powerful force - and we are today exactly where we should be: Truth is fluid. Editorial is journalism. Everyone - blue, red or orange - gets hammer their facts into their echo chamber. Etc.
It's important to realize that there is no democracy or democratic process without a health and proper Fouth Estate.
Btw, Tali Sharot's "The Influential Mind" is a great read on the subject on influence.
https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other...
Edit: their to there. with to without.
How is the general public supposed to learn what is happening though? If the entire MSM had adopted this new business model, and with the whole fake news thing that's been drilled into people's heads for so long, along with the narrative that anyone that disagrees with trustworthy organizations is a conspiracy theorist...is there a path out that consists of anything other than a major player committing financial suicide by breaking ranks, or them all deciding to come clean simultaneously?
Bloggers might be the one bright spot, but what percentage of the population reads blogs, and if they started to get too popular they may be framed as conspiracy theorists before long too. Not a good situation, unless you're China or Russia.
If you happen to see this late reply and have any recommendations of such people, I'd appreciate any suggestions you could make.
That's a good question. In theory I'd like to suggest they think. That is, develop critical thinking skills and some basic analysis skills. Yes, it's a big ask. But it would be useful across the board. Basics such as: confirmation bias, correlation vs cause, conflict of interest, and such. These skills are not as common as they should be.
That aside, broadcasters and publishers should be required to label news as news and editorial as editorial. Anecdotally, many people don't understand the difference, or why it matters. It's difficult to have discussions when "the facts" most people cite are based on editorial opinion. Sadly, hammer that option often enough and loud enough and it becomes "true."
Even so, it's a massive problem. There's still too much wiggle room for senders to "baffle them with bullshit." (See below.)
Editorial: My definition of news is: facts that are not only true but are also relevant and important. Anything - true or not - that doesn't meet this standard - again, to me - is fake news. In other words, when important and relevant stories are buried with trite fodder, the fodder is fake news. Just because something happened, just because some is true doesn't make it news. The sun coming up again is not news.
By optimising for user engagement, media is ignoring the effect it has over society at large.
This is actually an argument for government sponsored news outlets implemented in a politically neutral manner; i.e. the television shouldn't just be a mouthpiece for the state/the ruling party.
For an example of state-financed but politically independent organisation, one can look at the civil servants system in the UK.
It may not even be possible for them to cover politics in a "neutral" way, because anything but the party line on a political issue is heresy to the partisans. If you gave people the hard truths on partisan issues you'd have both sides trying to shut you down because everything you said would be contradicting one side or the other.
Case in point about the difficulty in covering politics in a manner most would consider neutral.
This is the same ABC that reports on the BLM protests in Australia, is happy to parrot the 434 Aboriginals have died in custody since 1991, but fails to include the facts[1]:
58% of deaths were due to natural causes
32% of deaths were due to hanging
5% of deaths were due to drugs/alcohol
4% were due to external trauma
In total, 9 Aboriginals have died in custody from unlawful acts from custodial staff. 10s of thousands of people are violating social distancing orders, because 9 people have been killed unlawfully since 1991. The ABC AREN'T REPORTING THAT. Instead, they have activist after activist deriding the system that is killing black men.
It's all bullshit.
In 2019, the Australian Institute of Criminology did a study on deaths in custody, and its conclusion was:
Indigenous people are now less likely than non-Indigenous people to die in custody, largely due to a decrease in the death rate of Indigenous prisoners from 1999–2000 to 2005–06.[1]
So don't go around telling people the ABC isn't biased.
[1] https://aic.gov.au/publications/sb/sb17
EDIT: To be clear, this doesn't mean there aren't things we should be doing better, given that Aboriginals make up 28% of the prison population, its just that the current narrative openly being pushed by the ABC and others is pure, unadulterated bullshit.
Or both. Both American parties are full of contradictions.
The very definition of an oxymoron.
I suspect that's correct. It's hard now to find any news outlet now that sticks to "Who, What, When, Where, Why". This is a consequence of pay per click, probably.
The left and the right now both have a checklist of mandatory positions required to avoid punishment. Those positions are in many cases contrary to fact. That's not good. Denial has become a core part of American politics.
When was the news ever "Who, What, When, Where, Why?"
It's always had a slant as long as I remember. Here's "the most trusted man in America" calling ror the U.S. to get out of Vietnam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2RjahTi3M
What is that if not a partisan political opinion?
The news has always chosen what and what not to report. Just deciding what is and isn't newsworthy is a political decision. Heck, my conservative friend used to read the Wall Street Journal. I'm talking when we were kids (10-12) I'd argue with him about whether Reagan was a good president. I thought even then he had a highly colored view of reality and I'm sure he thought the same of me.
BTW, I don't think the problem is the press. I think it's a lack of open-mindedness, critical thinking, and healthy skepticism. We get what we deserve by not educating our kids better about how to consume information and consider view points outside their own worldview.
Nowadays I follow American news channels for entertainment (both CNN and Fox Bews are soooooo skewed). I usually go to CBSN or AlJazeera for 'boring' unskewed news.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/
What was partisan about what he said? He made no mention of US political parties. He simply said that the war was failing and it needed to end. May I suggest you are projecting your partisanship onto this?
Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other. Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
You don’t have to give time to things that are objectively untrue, but a fair journalist should acknowledge when other opinions exist.
Saying, “I think we should get out of Vietnam. People are dying, we’re spending too much money, and we’re probably going to lose” is bad journalism. Saying, “According to a recent poll, fewer than 40% of Americans support the war in Vietnam. Commonly cited reasons for the lack of support are the death toll, the economic cost, and that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Most supporters of the war say we should continue fighting otherwise all the soldiers that have given their lives will have died in vain” is good journalism.
And yes, a journalist covering the creationism vs. evolution debate should research and interview people from both sides. If you don’t then you’re writing an opinion piece and not doing journalism.
But I'm not sure I see why journalists should try to be strictly objective. A journalist is in a unique position to identify the BS, provide analysis and context, and help the reader understand what to make of the competing narratives.
I really enjoyed, and highly recommend, a recent podcast on this subject: http://www.sceneonradio.org/s4-e11-more-truth/
Some journalists that specialize in a particular field become experts, but it takes time to learn. Journalists don’t have some secret way to learn faster than other people.
Journalists do get training in interviewing experts and writing. That’s what they should stick to. Just like we really shouldn’t pay attention to a celebrity’s opinion of an issue that they don’t have special training in, we really shouldn’t be paying attention to a journalist’s personal opinion- we should rely on them to talk to experts and convey information, but their ability to form an opinion isn’t any better than yours.
It’s true that they may not be experts in everything that they report on, even if it’s their niche. Eg I think Kara Swisher does a reasonably good job of representing technology related things but there’s things she says that are not really true.
However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics. They are closest to the sources. And thus they become pretty good at identifying BS in those narrow fields at the very least. Given that, I certainly value their “take” on what the current events portray.
They are only "good" at this because so many of them worked on campaigns and there's a revolving door between that campaign work and the politics desk at media organizations. That isn't a badge of honor, or a signal that they know what they're talking about. It's a mark of partisanship, and they try their best to cloak it when they do their reporting ... but then they go back to the campaign when their guy is running.
He may not, but having been through the grinder (on both sides), I do. I'm not even talking about the Ben Rhodes' quotes about them being young idiots.
> However the one thing journalists do cover well and have good expertise in is current event and politics. They are closest to the sources. And thus they become pretty good at identifying BS in those narrow fields at the very least. Given that, I certainly value their “take” on what the current events portray.
Funny. Meet Gell-Mann Amnesia:
Well this is Hacker News, if you phrase it as a question about are we living in a simulation they will take it seriously, but of course a simulation would imply someone or something running it...
The Vietnam War was started by a Democratic administration and continued by a Republican one, through several Congressional midterm elections. It was a bipartisan effort, so I don't see how having an opinion on it, for or against, can count as partisan in the sense of advocating for one political party over the other.
My point is that there was never an "objective" news that didn't fall somewhere on the left/right spectrum and which colored how that source presented the news.
> Objective journalism is not about giving both sides an equal voice. It is OK to use rationale and logic to support one side over the other.
I agree. But don't you think that reporters at The Atlantic and at the National Review both think they are doing that? Or NPR vs Fox News? And yet they present very different views of the news.
> Should all journalism about evolution also include equal time for creationism?
You won't find me arguing for that.
If we had an algorithm to sort fact from fiction then that would be fine, but we don't. Our method for sorting fact and fiction is to ask an expert. Experts are not reliable in political situations because there are experts who are willing to believe anything for money.
Particularly for economic questions where it is likely that the experts have a financial stake in one political outcome.
People of course have wildly different standards w.r.t what "better" means.
And once shaped, the goal is hard to change. It takes more than facts or logical arguments to change one's idea if what the ideal world looks like. It's part of your identity, it's intertwined with your community.
If a scientific finding in evolutionary biology which undermines some previously fundamental aspect of genetics or the timeline of natural selection (a finding which Creationists would exult in promoting and probably exaggerate for their own biases) is not given its due time in the trade journals then yes, we'd have a serious problem. While I realize this may not quite be what you meant, because Creationism simply isn't scientific, evolutionary biology as a matter of being a human endeavor is certainly subject to bias in publication.
Ideally a concept like "getting out of the war" could be a non partisan concept. Back then perhaps, but in 2020 definitely, there's no room for that. Maybe because of the internet, maybe because of cable news, I dunno, but even a single stated position plops you on the right or left in America. Sure it's not ideal but it's reality.
If only Republicans knew how many American communists were pro-armed-populace. If only it were possible to be conservative and reconcile your preference for self sufficiency and blue collar values with the ideals of people living on a commune, or the Green and Sustainability movements. But no, Climate Change is Fake News and Guns Are Bad. Full stop.
I think one of the things ailing us is that cynical partisans have been quite successful at pulling ever-growing amounts of our lives into this gravity well. Dry, straight, factual news has its place--but it also leaves a narrative-vacuum that partisans will happily fill.
That was an op-ed piece. It's fine for media to do op-ed if it's identified as not news; the most trusted papers have done it forever. Real journalists (tm) can absolutely do neutral, fact-checked, 5-W, reporting on one story and then express an opinion in a different column:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The problem with journalism today is not opinion, but that we’ve allowed “newsish” to pose as real news, to the extent that people can’t tell the difference. And on top of that I don’t think people are generally equipped well to recognize opinion as such.
It's been going on longer than the internet era. My dad jokingly blames entertainment tonight for starting the entertainment news trend, and while I don't think that's likely the reason, it does show an apt comparison. News has definitely become more like entertainment tonight, for nearly as long as entertainment tonight has existed.
It's a problem when every news broadcaster reminds me of fox news from the 90's and they're now actually considered a proper news outlet.
Now for people that have noticed a distinct decline in news quality over the last ten years specifically, this may have something to do with it.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
In 2012 restrictions were lifted by the government banning government disseminated news, essentially propaganda to the American public.
Since then, there's been a big push, by both sides of the media, to tell their approved stories. These companies lobby the shit out of the government.
https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-media-companies-...
Both the government and news companies have it in their best interests to keep major news organizations as shallow entertainment willing to spout whatever the message of the day is.
It's not much better than if the news was state run media, it's just hidden a lot better and government and private interests share the same goal.
The internet effectively broke this model.
No news outlet has ever really done that (and why is usually a matter of subjective ascription, rather than fact, anyway.)
The illusion of unbiased news comes from a time when the major national media were a small set of corporations with largely similar institutional biases, and when advertising was less targeted so number of eyeballs was more important than a narrow, focussed audience, passionate, demographic, favoring a blander presentation and more effort to avoid offending any large group, rather than trying to appeal very strongly to a narrow, specific group.
I blocked CNN from my phone because checking it repeatedly all day gave me high blood pressure.
I mean, those kinds of market failures are exactly what large parts of "the left" are frequently highlighting.
It is not about the economics of the American Press, it's about the lynchmobs that have formed around thoughtcrime and the sometimes public hounding of people who don't push the proper narrative.
There might be economic factors intertwined with the push for more groupthink, but I think there is a link missing in the chain of logic from this article's subject matter and your reply.
Reducing the cost could be one way to compete with "non-serious news".
Then you have to actually write in such a way that the reader/viewer gets only a series of facts, and any inferences or opinion they draw should be their own.
That ain’t cheap.
He said everyone thinks they want the news to be deeply insightful and informative, but the people who would consume that product tend to go out nights and do interesting things like attend ballets or go to museums, or go to things like the aspen festival. Or at least they are just reading a few articles online.
They make news for the sort of people who just binge television news constantly. These people don't have a custom rss feed to make that efficient, and that is a special type of person.
"We run the market test against PBS every night."
If PBS started hitting numbers, every other station would jump to that model immediately.
If only subjectivity is true, society must fragment. Everyone forms a different view -- unity is lost
Do people just want to pay and read opinion. Or do they seek a reality truth
The second goal will succeed no matter what newspapers do
Slow down. This is the hackernews equivalent to "yada yada yadaing" over the real stuff. You say points big and silly you can't backup. I work at a business news organization, and know someone who just left WSJ. Now, think again how you'd tell them face to face they're niche? You're gonna tell them how the media business works? Like what are you going to say?Are you claiming FB is a new organization? In fact, are you really saying anything at all?
Those issues are important, but what I find most concerning about your reply is "the way our economical system work".
You're either not in management, are an incredibly crappy manager, or don't know anything about it. You do it for the money like some lame reach for that Tesla R&R refrain to argue for lower intellectual (ethics/morals) standards ... that's the beginning of the end for organizations ... what you fail to get is that other organizations who are not so easily sold your sale of good will be still doing the news and fighting the good fight.
Those who understand money the best and make the most over the long term know best money is NOT the measure of all things.
I agree with you entirely except for this. For the poor, yes. But there are plenty of people the more pressing day-to-day matters is not survival but how to hoard even more wealth and advantage than they already have. Like sending their children to private schools despite that only exacerbating the already gross iniquities of life for poor children vs elite children. Or figuring out how to upgrade to an even nicer house or which gentrifying neighborhood will yield them the best returns in 10-20 years once it is fully taken over.
A lot of my friends unsubscribed from the NY Times for publishing Tom Cotton's pro-fascism op-ed. The NY Times had to respond to this. They are a business and their income matters. It's not so much an issue of freedom of thought in the newsroom, it's that they literally can't afford to continue publishing such pieces as it's causing them to massively bleed revenue. In other words, blame their customers. And frankly I'm perfectly happy if the NY Times never publishes a pro-fascism op-ed ever again. I'm glad the pressure worked.
As for "Buildings matter, too", what a colossal fuck-up that was. If you're that tone-deaf, you legitimately are a liability, and shouldn't be in charge. The same issues were seen here too with revolts from the customer base, not just the newsroom.
> According to a recent poll, 58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities' calling in the military to "address protests and demonstrations" that are in "response to the death of George Floyd."
As evidence that the view espoused in Cotton's op-ed are the majority's view. Do you have a source saying that that is false?
Both the right and the left are recoiling from dialog. I struggle to see a beneficial future emerging from an utter lack of consensus seeking and civility. If the editorial boards are not responsible for their contributions to these trends, then their readerships certainly are.
That is, we are.
Trump is threatening to regulate social media to be allegedly more fair.
Very typical of the attitude that the article in the OP is describing.
The cultural left is a hodgepodge if smaller issues under one larger umbrella. You’ve got people who care about racism, climate change, money in politics, access to abortion, etc. All of whom are trying to change society in some way to deal with big problems we have. As a result, it’s incredibly messy. The groups don’t always overlap well nor fall in line.
On the other hand, the cultural right is more or less defined by an unwillingness to change society. They like it as it is, and are generally afraid of change. They’re scared even more by the sight of the lefts constant infighting and imagine that it would be chaos if they got their way. Plus abortion and gun control alone keep many of them in check.
They’re generally not defined by a vision for a better America, just a whiter one that doesn’t really change from what we’ve got.
That is not a view that you can build a democracy on. To have democracy, you have to exclude certain ideologies and ideas. This has always been the case and will always remain the case. Some ideologies are antithetical to democracy, and that article espoused one of them.
Calling for the military to come in and violently crush protests (as Trump and Cotton have done) is for sure a move out of the fascist playbook.
Not my favorite new institution mostly because their reporting has become too linear and predictable. The articles added a nice twist that increased my trust in NYT.
Not if "Buildings" is also metonymic and stands for "civilization".
If your goal is to reinforce the idea that you're right, and allow yourself to pretend that other people don't exist, then this is probably a good strategy. If you want to actually make a real change in the lives of people, you're going to need the help of the deplorables. Telling them to go fuck themselves is probably not a great strategy.
Do you have a million friends to support this data point?
I agree with everything you said. The point that my friends unsubscribed, and they took an action because they were losing business due to people leaving them for that article comes across a little naive to me, in an otherwise well thought out response.
I no longer trust the media. I hate Trump as well, but you don’t do it through lies and distortion. You do it by presenting the truth. Reporters have crossed the line in the last several years and it shows. They are the worst propaganda machine in decades since the 80s and it truly is destroying itself, like Taibbi says.
Remember when Dan Rather was fired? It was over a story that had been carefully researched, both with written evidence, and with multiple recorded interviews with corroborating eye witnesses.
The excuse for firing him was that out of the 1000’s of documents they’d gathered, a few were forgeries. The reality was that he criticized W within a few years of 9/11, and the press decided that was off limits. We ended up fighting a useless war because no one was allowed to question the executive branch. That led to untold human suffering, and eventually the rise of ISIS, etc.
Anyway, by converting to a propaganda engine dedicated to ousting Trump, the liberal press is actually helping dismantle our democracy. They may as well be endorsing him for a third term in office.
Whatever your opinion, there will be many others who deeply and vehemently disagree with you and do so with passionate, fiery, certain-to-be-correct righteous indignation.
Carry your true opinions in your head and share them with no one.
Maybe a necessary defense, but still, saddening.
If someone shamed me for something like this, I would tell them to get a fucking life and to mind their own business. Maybe that's why I don't get pestered... I'm pretty blunt about not putting up with bullshit. I agree with the article, these left ideologies are absurd. Coming from an independent moderate. Obligatory wake up sheeple etc etc.
It's a reference to a FB employee who got fired recently for doing exactly that. Publicly shaming a colleague who had elected not to become politically involved.
While I don't disagree, I would add that all of us need to share our true opinions at least in one place: the voting booth. We are led by those whom we choose and we must start choosing more wisely if we want a better future.
Having grown up during perestroika. I remember saluting the red banner and blood soaked monster Lenin portet while reading Archipelago Gulag at home.
Never though US will get here
Kids in the US would get in all kinds of trouble for not respecting the Pledge of Allegiance back in the... 90s, not the 70s.
It's only been in the past decade that anything that's not complete and vehement agreement with the "support the troops" mantra has been tolerated by the mainstream.
It's things like these that make me very skeptical of the intentions of the article. The idea of the American public being tolerant of ideas outside the norm is a new conservative narrative that has no correspondence with reality.
People were __pissed off__ when the Simpsons began to air. Openly admitting to doing drugs was (and still is, to a much lesser degree) a way to be fired an ostracised in many middle class circles.
I am really not seeing anything new.
See how fast you get fired if you don’t take a knee when department head tells you to for BLM.
Meanwhile the rest of society has been tolerating everything else in mainstream public institutions: the racist and regressive corporate bosses, the Evangelicals who considered anything that's not in agreement with their doctrine to be an affront to God, the gun nuts who consider walking around in public with an assault weapon to be a perfectly valid expression, and on it goes.
American society is dramatically more tolerant of these extremist right wing positions, and that Overton window shift has always existed in the US.
It is only because of the inflammatory discourse of Trump and his allies that people have decided that the fringe left is dramatically less dangerous and tolerant than these literal fascists.
I recognized how overcome I was feeling by it all and switched off a while ago, and life has felt a lot easier since. I've a couple of subscriptions for print media and now defer checking the news, avoiding Twitter etc. and just catching up with the weekly editions over the weekend. HN is the only site I really look at daily due to its mix of interesting content, suppression of political battles and quality of moderation. Even then I'll often Pocket articles and defer them until later.
Recognize that you're being manipulated, that you've no influence over any of it and step away. I promise, after the initial come-down effect it entails, you'll feel a lot better for it.
What happens though when one group says (as they recently have) that silence is insufficient, not just on agreeing with not being a racist, but the wisdom of their proposed solution to the problem? I've seen the claim that silence is violence... what do we do then?