Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

This is too funny -- pompous BBC with their "other people spread fake news" shtick.

All media outlets are guilty of bending the truth, often outright inventing stories to fit their preferred narratives. This is not "new", this has just been pearl-clutching since they've realised they no longer can control the narrative in society. Go look up how the majority of western media outlets were pushing "just the flu" about coronavirus as late as early March. (This is BOTH on the left and right, nobody is innocent in this).

If you want to see the real history of fake news, or "founder" as it may be, read up on Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

*Edit -- look, I don't take the downvotes personally, I get that this is a huge cognitive short-circuit for many folks who read this site -- a large part of your learning comes from reading and understanding from so-called authoritative sources. It is certainly very difficult to realise (in the most unpleasant way possible, ie your candidate lost an election, or your countrymen successfully voted against the EU, or that masks-dont-work-oh-wait-they-actually-do) that the sources you've learned some positive things in your life from have biases, are fallible, and with the rise of "measuring engagement", are all in huge race to the bottom for immense pandering and therefore carefully crafted narratives.

Feeling discombobulated is fine, but let's not lie to ourselves that any of that is "news" or "fair and balanced".

Wishing all of you a good day.

Uh, no. No major media I consumed in the US was pushing "just a flu".

https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange/status/12426745374913208...

This link is kind of ironic.

And the top (for me) response:

they left off the word VACCINE. it is just the FLU VACCINE causing a hyper-immune reaction, a cytokeine storm that is triggered by pansy corona causing a body to attack itself; no one is dying from corona::

This world is lost.

'Fake news', 'yellow journalism', and 'public relations' are all just euphemisms for propaganda. At best they describe particular forms of propaganda.

Dear fellow HN'ers, please don't downvote a comment as a reflex if you disagree with it and consider engaging a point on its merits. Hiding viewpoints you disagree with creates an echo chamber.

Please don't try to influence people how to vote with replies to the comment.

Outside of that, do you disagree with the rest of their statement?

I agree with your comment, but unfortunately HN guidelines suggest that we shouldn't discuss comment voting (outside of, perhaps, a larger meta-HN discussion). So I don't expect your comment to last long either. For what it's worth, I upvoted the originally-referenced comment.

The comment is getting downvoted because it claims the BBC spreads fake news but then gives no evidence for it, instead pointing to Hearst publications from more than a hundred years ago.

Hiding poorly argued viewpoints creates an echo chamber of well-reasoned arguments, which converges on the truth. Do you consider arithmetic textbooks an echo chamber for endlessly parroting that 2+2=4?

I think there's more nuance to that. Not all truths are as easily proven as 2+2=4. Usually an echo chamber is only considered as such when the people parroting a "fact" do so with confidence that far exceeds any proof that they can provide. The mask issue GP brings up is a great example. Before the COVID-19 outbreak most people generally regarded the practice of wearing face masks in Asia with scorn. If you asked them about it they would invariably bring up the same fact that "virii are too small and will pass through the mask". However, very few would be able to cite sources, and even fewer then would have an accurate enough understanding of how virii spread to know that most of the time the virus is a part of a much larger particle[1][2] that masks are effective at preventing to some extant[3].

It's not surprising that most people wouldn't have a perfect understanding of epidemiology, but it does become suspicious when a large group of people all become overconfidently wrong in exactly the same way. This is what I would consider to be an echo chamber.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... This source confirms that coronavirus spreads via droplet.

[2] https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/drugresist/WH... This source defines "droplet as being particles greater than μm in diameter on page 44.

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/#!po=35... This article measures a protection factor of ~4 for a surgical mask when measuring with a detector that detects particles ranging from 0.02 to 1㎛.

It's funny that you accuse mainstream media of bending the truth while linking to Wikipedia, a website actually known for its top editors having an political agenda.

Show me a mainstream news outlet that doesn’t have a political agenda ;)

It's too much. This comment is right on the money and graying out by the second. I think it's because both sets of morons think it goes against them.

A job well done, too bad at this rate nobody will see it.

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