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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

Somebody illustrious and learned once said something to the effect that “if somebody tells you it's raining outside, and somebody else tells you the sun is shining, your job as a journalist isn't to report that some people say one thing whereas others say something else, your job as a journalist is to go look out the window and report what the weather is actually doing”.

What we have now is (mostly) talk-shows roughly passed off as genuine journalism, but really it's pretty obvious that it's the lowest common denominator kind of gossip-spreading.

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If you look at 24 hour cable news, I'm sure that's what you see. It's entertainment passed on as journalism. There's still good journalism going on if you know where to look. The New York Times, the Washington Post, for example, are incredibly informative and useful sources for news.

Neither the NYT or Washington Post questioned the Bush admin and intelligence communities claims about why the USA was going to war with Iraq even though it was public knowledge that the 9/11 attackers were all Saudis and it had nothing to do with 9/11. But the media helped them spin the Iraq war as part of the war on terrorism, even though Iraq was not exporting terrorism to the West, not until after they destabilized the region by taking out Saddam.

Instead, the NYT wrote an article about how dangerous Saddam's WMDs were and how he was supporting terrorism, even though it had nothing to do with 9/11. Nowadays they defend themselves by saying "everyone agreed at the time". It's not true.

Mainstream media is a rubber stamp for corporate and state interests, just propaganda. They rubber stamped Bush's war's just like they rubber stamped Obamas, they will probably rubber stamp Trump's too. Yes, they also contain true information, but they are still just corporate/state propaganda.

If they aren't willing to fact-check the govt for an issue as serious as going to war, especially with all the red-flags that were out there, like the fact that Colin Powell, a year prior to holding up anthrax in congress as "proof" that Iraq had WMDs, was giving speeches a year earlier claiming there was no evidence Saddam was making WMDs. Like the fact the Bush admin certainty about WMD was far greater than the actual intel communities claims. No one fact-checked them.

Your talking point is old enough to have finished high school by now, maybe it’s time to come up with a second example?

And, by the way, the NYT fired the reporter and an editor over that mistake, wrote numerous articles on how it happened, and instituted new rules to prevent similar things happening in the future.

I heard another version of this the other day, a great line that's apparently some newspaper's motto: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out first."

There's a great story behind that, of course:

https://medium.com/@Susys/lets-change-this-journalism-motto-...

>What we have now is (mostly) talk-shows roughly passed off as genuine journalism, but really it's pretty obvious that it's the lowest common denominator kind of gossip-spreading.

And the problem is compounded in that the internet, for all of its glories, has also taught folks that their opinions/beliefs/dogma are just as valuable as actual facts.

I don't know what, how, or why. But the only two things different now to, say, the 80's in terms of bullshit journalism is its ability to reach people directly in a 'one-on-one' setting and its ability to be echoed with no challenge in online forums and the like.

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