The American Press Is Destroying Itself | Hacker News Reader

The American Press Is Destroying Itself

taibbi.substack.com

489 pointscjbest566 comments

I don't think they are.

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.

> 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.

From the same organisation that published an op-ed from the Taliban.

The whole thing is absolutely bizarre

The other half cancelled their subscription because they fired the editor, so they lose-lose really.

They fired the editor because he admitted he himself “did not read the piece”.

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...

I bet he didn't read the piece, if he had he would have known it would have pissed off their base.

Notice how they didn't say HOW the OPINION piece didn't meet their standard.

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.

They reported at the beginning of May that subscriptions are at a high:

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 op-ed was published on June 3rd.

I’m asking if you could please share links to the information you saw about about the widespread subscription cancellations that you referred to.

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.

What is "excessive pseudo socialism" and "Locust capitalism?"

Also, I see your account was created an hour ago.

Locust capitalism might be related to this: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

As for the pseudo-socialism part, I have no idea what it could mean either.

> pseudo socialism

Example: The US healthcare system. The financing is through socialist policies (Medicare, state assistance, regulatory requirements/incentives for employer-provided insurance), but the system itself if thoroughly corrupt and inefficient.

Example: "Affordable housing" subsidies/requirements. Instead of actually addressing high housing costs in general, set aside an inadequate amount of substandard housing with burdensome hoops to jump through to get it and call that a solution when it isn't.

Example: Environmental rules that apply to where a product is manufactured but not where it's sold, so that instead of eliminating pollution, manufacturing jobs move to countries that allow pollution.

The half measures are the worst of both worlds. You get the inefficiency, incompetence and unaccountability of central planning and the externalities, corruption and high prices of market failures.

Thats not pseudo socialism

Thats just socialism.

The definition of socialism is social ownership of the methods implemented. In all cases above, the public at large owns the cost (and benefits) of the methods implemented: Medicare, Medicaid, affordable housing etc. We all pay for them, full stop.

Just because some of the programs have worse outcomes than elsewhere in the world, doesnt make them "less" socialist policies.

For the US healthcare system you can add poor people without insurance using emergency rooms as their primary point of care. Emergency rooms are required to treat them, they can't pay, so those costs get shifted to other people. Worse, the care they receive is usually the bare minimum and there's a good chance they end up back there. Overall a horrifically inefficient way to socialize medical costs.

In the same way that decaf is coffee without the caffeine, (and phone-sex is sex without sex), pseudo socialism is socialism without genuine socialists. In the USA -- and increasingly in Europe -- we've seen the socialists' ranks get eroded by our societies' blind pursuit of ever-greater profits at the expense of the common good. This has resulted in the subordination of most aspects of life -- including most aspects of political life -- to the central mechanics of the market. Politicians cannot win elections without capital, which subordinates them to the capitalists. This is why they routinely support corrosive policies (like hobbling healthcare, turning a blind eye to the opioid crisis for decades, decreasing taxes, regulatory capture, etc) and oppose policies meant to better the public uniformly (like free healthcare, free education, net-neutrality, higher and transparent taxation, independent and effective regulatory bodies, etc). In short, they are obligated to support policies that will generate profits for their wealthy patrons, at the expense of everyone else.

Socialism is meant to be a counter-force to unrestricted capitalism. America lacks this counter-force. Instead, America has a (so called) Left that is afraid of being branded "socialist". Because they cannot embrace genuine socialist policies for fear of upsetting their very wealthy and powerful patrons, they are trying to win votes by appealing to people's pathological tendency to form rival tribal groups. This is quite the irony, considering that socialism's original rallying cry was the (inherently trans-tribal, trans-national)"Workers of the World, UNITE".

True socialism looks for opportunity in horizontal social partitions (the social classes), whereas nationalism looks for opportunity in vertical social partitions (ethno-linguistic and religious segregations). This is why nationalism is the capitalist class's preferred evil -- it directs the dissatisfaction and anger of the lower classes against each other, away from the wealthy. Both the American Left and American Right are focusing on the vertical (tribal) partitions -- it's just that the Left is very polite and composed about it.

This is what (I believe) the GP tried to imply with the term "pseudo socialism".

If you're going to down-vote me, could you at least offer an explanation as to why? As it stands, there's an infinity of possible objections you can have with my comment. It would help to know what they are, so that I can at least _try_ to integrate them into my thoughts and perspective.

"Locust capitalism" seems to be a verbatim translation of German "Heuschreckenkapitalismus", which is a phrase commonly in use to describe hedge funds and other large conglomerates buying other companies without regard for social issues like workers' jobs.

Or they got as far as they could with sex appeal and moved on to the next best rationality bypass mechanism, tribalism.

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.

Maybe because Trump lowered taxes on people in red states by raising taxes on New Yorkers.

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.

The current trend may not be an aberration, but it should be feared.

It should only be feared if:

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.

Journalists of the past basically started the Spanish–American War

For sure. I wouldn’t want to go back to that specific period of journalism.

And journalism has exacerbated every single Middle Eastern or African war/armed-conflict in my lifetime.

Hence point #1; I think that the press has done a better job at pretend objectivity during my lifetime than it has at actually being objective.

> 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.

https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other...

Edit: their to there. with to without.

> 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?)

True, it's good that these people exist and that they have a means (for now at least) of earning an income from it.

If you happen to see this late reply and have any recommendations of such people, I'd appreciate any suggestions you could make.

> 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.

Agree with all your points...yours is a very rare stance around these parts, it's nice to see.

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.

You're always beholden to the paymaster.

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.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has been rightly critical of our government, and has been hit with pay cut after pay cut.

> rightly

Case in point about the difficulty in covering politics in a manner most would consider neutral.

One could argue that a journalist's duty is to be critical of the government, regardless of the specifics. The ABC might still be considered neutral.

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.

[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.

> be contradicting one side or the other.

Or both. Both American parties are full of contradictions.

> state-financed but politically independent

The very definition of an oxymoron.

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:

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.

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.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/

You may find The Economist to be, if not less skewed, at least skewed in a manner which doesn’t line up as much with USA concepts of partisanship.

> 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.

I really enjoyed, and highly recommend, a recent podcast on this subject: http://www.sceneonradio.org/s4-e11-more-truth/

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.

Funny. Meet Gell-Mann Amnesia:

  - https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

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...

Wait, there are people who think we are probably not living in a simulation? Next thing you know, someone will try to claim that free will is real.

>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.

Okay, elide "partisan" from my comment.

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.

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.

I didn’t mention opinions which are claimed to be factual matters. I mentioned factual matters. The fact that people can lie isn’t exactly new.

You are right, all media coverage is filtered. But that filter used to be considered something to be minimized, balanced out and carefully managed

> 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

He's basically saying "We lost". Which was objectively true.

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.

You're right. The problem are the number of people who have post modernism at the core of their thinking - the idea that there is no objective truth.

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.

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.

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.

The internet effectively broke this model.

> 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.

My local Annapolis newspaper, the Capital Gazette, does a pretty good job on that.

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.

You should check out The Dispatch (https://www.thedispatch.com) if you haven’t already. Co-founded by Jonah Goldberg, formerly of NR.

Reuters is the best I’ve seen at “just the facts”. Very little sensationalism.

I blocked CNN from my phone because checking it repeatedly all day gave me high blood pressure.

Seems like optimizing for short term gains over long term sustainability. A mistake lots of businesses make.

> 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.

How can we make serious news less expensive (to produce)?

Reducing the cost could be one way to compete with "non-serious news".

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.

That ain’t cheap.

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.

I suppose the cause is society and news believing their opinion is truth. Rather than there being a truth worth seeking

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

>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.

For those in the comments that haven't read the article, I highly recommend you check it out. While the comments are talking about the survival of news media and "tone-deaf" titles, the bulk of the article is about the Overton window[1] shifting to the point where rigerous journalism questioning outrages of the time is becoming untenable, weakening the news overall. It's a very good read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window?wprov=sfla1

I would advise care when reading it. It’s not immediately clear but it uses very hand picked facts to paint a very different picture of what’s actually going on. I call these kinds of articles disinformation-lite; not outright lies but selectively picking events to portray a hypothetical scenario that doesn’t really hold true.

I’ll cite a specific example to make this case. See this paragraph:

> Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.

What Cotton actually said:

> One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.

(Emphasis mine)

It’s very clear to anyone reading Cottons article that the call is to deploy troops to subdue he largely peaceful protests, which are painted as overwhelmingly violent in the beginning of the article. The author of the current article is simply using selective words to further his argument.

The other arguments are similar in nature. So while it appears to be a good read, it actually is not.

Do you have any examples of high-quality qualitative reporting? I can somewhat see your point but it seems endemic and hardly specific to this post, to Matt Taibbi, or journalism/punditry in any given time and place.

I’m a bit confused, since the section you emphasized appears to prove Taibbi’s point: Cotton called for force against “lawbreakers”, not “protestors”. You can argue that the troops would in practice end up attacking both groups, but that’s a separate question from “did Cotton suggest deploying troops to attack protestors?”

If Cotton explicitly stated that all protestors were in violation of the law, then I stand corrected, but otherwise I’m not convinced this is as cut and dry as you make it seem.

I want to take this opportunity to make an important point: I could easily have accused you of disinformation for promoting what appears to me to be an illegitimate “spin” on Cotton’s column. But I didn’t because I know you’re just trying to call it like you see it. What I want you to understand is that this is what everyone is doing, Matt Taibbi included. We’re all trying to interpret things as best as we can. Sometimes those interpretations don’t line up, but that doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with you is purposefully spreading disinformation. (Maybe some are, but I believe most people are trying to be accurate.)

I think your confusion is warranted. Context is important. I wanted to cite more from Cottons op ed but was afraid it would be too much words. This is the beginning of his essay:

> This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.

> New York City suffered the worst of the riots Monday night, as Mayor Bill de Blasio stood by while Midtown Manhattan descended into lawlessness. Bands of looters roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses. Some even drove exotic cars; the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.

It’s immediately clear that it’s not a nuanced argument he seeks to make, in his view protestors and rioters are one and the same. If his desire was to use the military on only the rioters he could have mentioned that distinction. However, that would reduce the thrust of the argument: why deploy overwhelming military forces when the rioters are a minority? If they’re a minority can they not be controlled with existing law enforcement ? Instead of weakening the case he chooses to ignore the distinction, which is deliberate and insincere.

Cottons op ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...

He doesn’t even mention protests or protestors in those quotes, so why do you believe he’s equating rioters and protestors?

It seems like you’re reading the words “riots” and “rioters” and assuming that they must be Cotton’s terms for “protests” and “protestors”, but why make that assumption?

The vast majority of politicians have been very careful to differentiate between peaceful protestors and rioters/looters specifically because they know people will have the same exact discussion we are having now. Competent politicians are very careful about their choice of language. They weren't born yesterday and neither was Tom Cotton.

He does make it explicit that rioter =/= protestor:

> Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. 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.

You: It’s immediately clear that it’s not a nuanced argument he seeks to make, in his view protestors and rioters are one and the same.

Tom Cotton: 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.

You're doing exactly what Cotton warns against just a paragraph later from the part you quote. I'm actually baffled.

If we can't agree on things said in a single straight forward op ed, how are we (humanity) ever going to have any real conversation? Is this the Great Filter of Fermi's Paradox?

I stand by exactly what I said. Context is important and words in isolation mean nothing, and that paragraph was explicitly designed to protect the outcome of what he’s really calling for.

Consider another example. Tough on crime laws were not explicitly designed to incarcerate large number of POCs by the the letter. But the difference in how different communities are policed meant that POCs communities often ended up being targeted more anyways. Lawmakers who created such laws would say “ Its meant to target hardened drug criminals, just the bad apples” but in practice it doesn’t really matter.

In this case, the op ed explicitly paints an incredibly biased picture of the situation on the ground and uses that to justify a heavy handed response. There is absolutely no way for a militarized response to differentiate between peaceful and non peaceful responses and Cotton knows that. When the military is involved, it means one thing only: curfews, rigidly enforced. All protests shut down regardless of their nature. One line saying “ please not the peaceful protestors” means absolutely nothing.

> If we can't agree on things said in a single straight forward op ed, how are we (humanity) ever going to have any real conversation? Is this the Great Filter of Fermi's Paradox?

I’m not sure what that is so I can’t address that directly. It’s not a black and white argument as you seem to imply though. Context is extremely important and words in isolation mean absolutely nothing.

He explicitly claims that rioters sometimes outnumber both the national guard and police. I think it’s unlikely that such a statement makes sense without drawing no distinction between protesters and rioters. Saying that the ‘peaceful’ shouldn’t be confused with the ‘roving bands’ seems more rhetorical, or even aspirational, given that he’s not really trying to distinguish himself (and this is clear throughout the piece).

> Cotton called for force against “lawbreakers”, not “protestors”

I don't care. I live in one of these so-called riot zones and my company's office was looted. I do not want active duty soldiers pointing weapons of war around my neighborhood for any reason. Especially with how municipal police forces have dealt with (and escalated) these situations. I'll not have my home treated like a failed state or enemy war zone.

How many leaders of the regions affected by the looting rallied to this call? None. How many military leaders did Cotton call upon to support his case? None. How many of those affected by the lawbreaking does Cotton represent? A vanishing fraction.

Taibbi thinks hes being clever splitting hairs but he's missed the whole point. Cotton's repugnant article was an obvious partisan hack job, a towing of the Trump line, dogwhistles included. In the NY Times' own words, the article lacked basic fact checking and did not meet the paper's editorial standards- Bennet very obviously fucked up in the loudest possible way.

> I do not want active duty soldiers pointing weapons of war around my neighborhood for any reason... I'll not have my home treated like a failed state or enemy war zone.

These are excellent concerns, and I fully agree with you on those. But we can debate about them (at what point is it necessary to intervene to stop violent protests? With which means, what would be an acceptable use of force?). You can express your disagreement in full and mark your distance from Cotton's opinion.

Instead misrepresenting what Cotton wrote, accusing him of inciting murder and forcing the editor to resign are not legitimate objections. Seems simple enough?

If members of my community are being killed with abandon across the country by the police and it provokes largely peaceful protests against that, then an action which seeks to misrepresent the situation and argue for the use of militarized forces against such protests is de facto calling for an increase in killing of the more people from my community.

Nobody is misrepresenting what Cotton wrote. Everyone who is following the situation closely rather than just reading the words knows what consequences could be to the proposed actions and are justifiably horrified by it.

> If members of my community are being killed with abandon across the country by the police

Frankly, I don't even think that this is true. I think the US police is just hyper-violent, mostly for cultural reasons (both on the side of the police and on the side of the criminals). The 2.3 million inmates in US prisons are the demonstration of a deeply flawed culture in that respect. And the fact that blacks are disproportionately engaging in criminal behaviour (for whatever reason) makes them more vulnerable to police violence. But just framing this as a racism issue is misguided. There, I said it.

That's quite clearly not what he said unless you believe protestors to be lawbreakers.

He took significant pains to separate out protestors from those who were rioting and looting and includes a defense of protesting as a right in the article.

He did not take significant pains to separate them, that is the whole point. Please cite sections of his essay that support your hypothesis.

> 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.

He couches all of his points in a painful separation/distinction. It's one of the main points of his op ed.

Is your brand of rhetoric here the reason why everyone feels like they have to belabor their points by "refreshing" a distinction every two paragraphs lest you forget? It's a weird amnesia, and I want to you consider the possibility that you want him to equate rioting with peaceful protesting because without that, you don't have much of a point.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine your thought process is to read something like the quote someone brought in the sibling comment of mine. And you go "ah, a-ha ok so he did make a distinction". And then a few paragraphs later you switch 100% back into "but he probably didn't mean it right here! gotcha. ;D"

How else am I to interpret any of your comments in this thread?

It’s fine to be wrong. I missed that paragraph in his essay.

But there is a reason why that paragraph was missed, and Ive tried to portray the reason why that might be in my other comments.

I’m not trying to change your mind. I’m trying to address the reasons why his op ed was deemed to be so revolting. A lot of the comments seem to confess a kind of willful blindness to the awfulness involved in that essay and I’m trying to make a good faith argument to explain why that perspective is justified.

I've read all your comments and like others, find your thought process confusing.

You started by saying, "I would advise care when reading it". Now you're saying you somehow "missed that paragraph in his essay". So you've been attacking Cotton without having actually read what he wrote despite telling others to read it carefully, but that's OK because "it's fine to be wrong". In fact you seem to be suggesting you ignored it deliberately: "there is a reason why that paragraph was missed"

In one comment you said, "Nobody is misrepresenting what Cotton wrote". Yes they are: that's what this entire subthread is about. You have been constantly mis-representing what he wrote and people keep pointing that out by quoting the article.

I suspect the core problem is revealed by this comment:

"Context is extremely important and words in isolation mean absolutely nothing ... that paragraph was explicitly designed to protect the outcome of what he’s really calling for."

Words in isolation mean absolutely nothing? Context matters sure, but not to the extent that actual words mean nothing at all. Your position here is that what people say they believe doesn't actually matter in the slightest, and should be ignored in favour of vaguely defined "context". Who defines this context? I guess you do. In fact in this world view Cotton can say something as clearly as possible and it should still be ignored, because what he "really" means is - obviously - the exact opposite.

But you're also trying to have it both ways:

"This is a US Senator whose essay was reviewed by his editorial staff before being sent to the times. He is saying exactly what he meant to say"

So now I think we're all hopelessly confused. Which is it? Is Cotton saying "exactly what he meant to say" or is he saying the opposite of what he meant?

Finally, you state "I’m trying to address the reasons why his op ed was deemed to be so revolting". I'm afraid you aren't succeeding. I can't figure out if it was revolting because of the words he wrote, or the words he didn't write, or if those words are meaningless and it's all about "context", in which case it appears no op-ed written by him could have ever passed muster regardless of what it said. This looks a lot like a slippery argument that Sen Cotton simply shouldn't be allowed to speak at all.

If only you spent the amount of effort analyzing his essay rather than my comments.

> Words in isolation mean absolutely nothing? Context matters sure, but not to the extent that actual words mean nothing at all. Your position here is that what people say they believe doesn't actually matter in the slightest, and should be ignored in favour of vaguely defined "context". Who defines this context? I guess you do. In fact in this world view Cotton can say something as clearly as possible and it should still be ignored, because what he "really" means is - obviously - the exact opposite.

I’ve provided enough reasoning about why context is important in my other comments and I’ve sure you’ve read that since you’ve been reading all of them. Context is important to understand what the outcome of a policy results in. It is not an academic debate as people on this forum seem to think. You can be a racist without saying explicitly racist stuff; adding a disclaimer that one is not racist doesn’t really change anything.

> So now I think we're all hopelessly confused. Which is it? Is Cotton saying "exactly what he meant to say" or is he saying the opposite of what he meant?

That was in response to 2 different things. He said exactly what he meant wrt giving no quarter (isolated tweet, different from essay) while paying lip service to the distinction between peaceful protestors and rioters in the essay. Which is why, again, context matters.

> Finally, you state "I’m trying to address the reasons why his op ed was deemed to be so revolting". I'm afraid you aren't succeeding. I can't figure out if it was revolting because of the words he wrote, or the words he didn't write, or if those words are meaningless and it's all about "context", in which case it appears no op-ed written by him could have ever passed muster regardless of what it said. This looks a lot like a slippery argument that Sen Cotton simply shouldn't be allowed to speak at all.

It’s possible, yes. I am human and I make mistakes. Not perfect. But the amount of length that people like you go to try and discredit others rather than take a moment to understand another perspective is staggering, while simultaneously claiming to “fail to see why his essay was controversial”. It points to not a failure to understand but an unwillingness to.

Something that Cotton also said recently on Twitter: "No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters."

Literally, "no quarter" means that combatants are to be killed rather than taken prisoner. Figuratively, it means to give one's full effort to achieve an overwhelming victory. Especially with the inclusion of anarchists, it's hard to reconcile that with the idea that he really wants to cast this as a matter of law enforcement. His is, to put it bluntly, a fascist sentiment.

I know some people feel like the f-word is overused, but it's pretty well accepted that one of the elements that separates a genuinely fascist movement from mere authoritarianism is the normalization of extrajudicial violence against political opponents. Not to put too fine a point on it: historically, anarchists were often specifically targeted for such fascist violence.

I can't tell you that Tom Cotton is a fascist in his heart, but he is very definitely speaking their language.

I can agree that anarchist can be a belief system or lifestyle that can be practiced without breaking the law. Anarchism as a belief, anarchist as a noun.

Insurrection, rioting and looting are actions that are breaking the law. How long should this behavior be tolerated? Perhaps it's just a phase the people need to go through in order to release pent up energy. The concern is, though, that each time a city is burned and looted and people are beaten and killed and the rest of the country sees no consequence to the rioters, looters and insurrectionists, it lowers the barrier to partaking.

By reporting only the mayhem, the press becomes the gateway drug to anarchy.

"No quarter" also means [0]:

>no pity or mercy —used to say that an enemy, opponent, etc., is treated in a very harsh way

It's plausible that he meant this in the way you describe, but I think it's more likely he was using fancy language to emphasise that the city and police shouldn't tolerate things like the CHAZ or rioting and looting. Essentially, he's trying to criticize the local governments for tolerating these things and not putting a stop to it. (Easy way to try to score political points.)

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/no%20quarter

Cotton isn’t some rando posting a comment on Facebook. This is a US Senator whose essay was reviewed by his editorial staff before being sent to the times. He is saying exactly what he meant to say. If he meant something different there were other ways to express it.

"No quarter" wasn't in the essay. It was a tweet. Does "his editorial staff" review everything he tweets?

And should everything anyone says be given the worst possible interpretation, or should we, as in the Hacker News guidelines, "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

> Does "his editorial staff" review everything he tweets?

Most Senior Government officials do, yes.

And Occam’s razor applies: I would argue that using an alternate interpretation of what he said rather than the well known one is going absolutely against the spirit of that hacker news guideline.

Between the colloquial meaning listed in dictionaries, and the technical meaning found in military law books, which is "the well known one"?

>It’s very clear to anyone reading Cottons article that the call is to deploy troops to subdue he largely peaceful protests

Is it? Because to me he very clearly and explicitly talks about people that are breaking the law - rioters and looters.

The opinion piece by Cotton literally says this:

>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.

>But the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.

How can you read these lines and say that it is very clear to anyone that he meant deploying troops against peaceful protesters?

How can you ignore the fact that the vast majority of protestors have been peaceful and that using the military to subdue the rioters means that they will crack down mostly on the protestors?

Here is a link to the op-ed for anyone following along who wants to read it: https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1375.

It is true that it does start of by talking about violence, rioters, and harm that's come to the police. But after that he explicitly says that these should not be confused by the protesters:

The majority of the op-ed is a fairly straightforward argument for deploying federal resources to help police, how that might be done, and why it needs to be done.

This is the most controversial paragraph it would appear (following the above paragraph).

> One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what's necessary to uphold the rule of law.

The op-ed doesn't seem particularly controversial to me. Whether or not a given city takes the action outlines in it -- yes, sure, that might be controversial. But this seems like the basic argument that is made by people in support of sending in troops to supplant police. I struggle to see why the views of a good chunk of the population should not have a public platform to be presented & discussed.

Using selective words to further his argument is Taibbi’s shtick as that’s “old journalism “.

He’s railing against, ultimately, the evolution of information distribution.

He’s calling the media industry recent exclusion of one journalist the end times?

Go start a YouTube channel. Someone THAT good shouldn’t need a day job.

A hundred years ago most people were self employed.

This weird bubble of human history where we all got talked into working for “financially viable” tribes is deflating.

Taibbi is ultimately sticking with what he knows, being all alarmist the world is changing and not buying into what he thinks is important anymore. He doesn’t have the same monopoly on visibility.

It's been a lot more than one journalist.

That's true, and I usually like Taibbi, but I think he's misreading the issue.

The real overton window has moved a little bit, but a lot of this is really about Twitter. Many institutions, including universities and publishers, act like Twitter outrage represents their real readers and communities.

This isn't true. Twitter is a thick bubble that gives the loudest voice to the angriest, most passionate outrage-mongers. Sometimes they use it for good causes, other times they're way outside the mainstream. They also firmly believe, in a way that's constantly contradicted by polling, surveys, and talking to people in real life, that they're not only right but the majority.

I can't say for sure that it's getting worse, but it feels like.

The problem is that an angry Twitter mob can get people fired from all kinds of institutions/companies. While Twitter and universities might not be the mainstream thought, they can still ruin your life.

> the bulk of the article is about the Overton window[1] shifting to the point where rigerous journalism questioning outrages of the time is becoming untenable,

That’s not an Overton Window shift, even if it was happening (which it is not); an Overton Window shift would change what the outrages are; making questioning popular outrages less tenable would be a narrowing of the window rather than a shift. But there is widespread and viable news media coverage questioning the outrages of the day, more than any time previously I would venture. It's just that the media is more focussed on catering to various isolated demographic and ideological markets (some more for advertising sales reasons, some more for political propaganda reasons, but the net effect is the same), and so in any particular outlet there is probably less tolerance for stories questioning the outrages of that outlets target audience. But, while the Overton Window may have shifted and/or narrowed/widened over time, this isn't a sign of it so much as the increasingly narrow audience focus of much of the media.

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.

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.

> And they all refused to resign?

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.

Easy to be impervious to one mob when you have an equal but opposite mob to support you.

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.

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.

But they tend to burn down whatever they are around before moving on.

>you just have to wait them out.

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.

Counterpoint, from Ezra Klein of Vox (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/10/21284651/new-york-times-tom-co...):

> 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.

I understand your point: any writer has a point of view and it may ooze out in his choice of words.

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.

We would still get bias. Pretending it does not exist is worst then actually visibly admitting it.

In particular, who, what, why is extremely sensitive to unadopted bias.

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.

[+10 for use of term "portmanteau"]

This comment breaks the site guidelines egregiously. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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"?

[Is that better, Ycombinator mods?]

I suppose the cause is society and news believing their opinion is truth. Rather than there being a truth worth seeking

If only subjectivity is true, society must fragment. Everyone forms a different view -- unity is lost

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.

Ethics are not equivalent to populism.

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.

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.

The article gives several examples.

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.

I mean it's not like taibbi is speaking up for child molesters

Unlike, say, the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/opinion/pedophilia-a-diso...

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.

This is not about "sympathy".

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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just making an observation on what is and is not permitted to be published in the NY Times is all

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"?

It's unlikely. As the article describes, many of the views considered unacceptable are popular even among Democrats.

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.

I understand now, but I think the natural reading of that phrase is that it refers to a minority of some sort.

> Given those criteria, we should argue that outright racist or sexist views are both unacceptable and not universally repugnant

I think you’ll find classifying what counts as “outright racist or sexist views” constitutes a legitimate controversy.

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.

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.

This is a process I’ve never heard described before, but sounds interesting. Do you have any examples or further reading?

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.

The content of 'Buildings Matter Too' article is worth reading, if you haven't seen it you definitely should. To me the editor resigning is not good.

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/floyd-protest-center-cit...

The content had nothing to do with the editor resigning. It was entirely about the headline.

Is this really so hard for feeble-minded drones to understand? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

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.

That ship sailed a long time ago.

Why not Tucker Carlson?

Just for the record, I subscribe to The Intercept and am a fan of Glenn Greenwald.

Morally flexible.

on what?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=tucker-c...

Alright, so he was wrong 8 times out of ~10,000 statements in the last 4 years? Or, am I missing something?

> 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."

I think you're missing something.

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.

I think you're missing his nearly nightly racist, xenophobic dog-whistles.

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.

Politifact is left-leaning and not usable as a bias check unless you are satisfied with that:

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

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.

[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/politifact/

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.

That's a fair point.

I will say that he isn't afraid of calling out the BS on the right.

But he always pulls his punches when it comes to the right. His book, "Ship of Fools," is the perfect example. He's insincere.

He did this a few years ago, basically in parallel to the Intercept. It didn't work out, and he went back to Rolling Stone afterwards https://theintercept.com/2014/10/30/inside-story-matt-taibbi...

Timing is everything, now's the time.

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.

It’s their policies and actions that matter.

Looking at everything from an identity lens is a disease that has corrupted discourse in this country.

Yep actions > words > identity

This concept has been lost on many.

"Elitism" isn't really about material wealth but a set of viewpoints and loyalties.

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.

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.

Q. Why do they call it a medium?

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...

China has been communist only in-name for the past 35 years.

I’m getting to the point of just switching off.

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.

Maybe a necessary defense, but still, saddening.

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.

Failed to take a knee or prostate yourself in front of whatever? Fired, cancelled etc

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

Seriously?

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.

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’m getting to the point of just switching off.

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?

>I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.

Because the dominant media narrative has a fetishized view of violence, racism and victimhood. Combine this with their overarching savior complex. If they were genuinely concerned, they wouldn't silence this man. Logical consistency has no place in this emotionally charged environment. The loudest voices don't care about their hypocrisy. They want to score political points at any cost. Divisive identity politics, feel-good-guilt-projection, blame games, no price is too high when it comes to partisan politics.

I expect this to continue and intensify as we approach the November elections.

Ending centuries of systemic racism in the US is a divisive topic right now.

I don't think I see the logical consistency you're talking about. In one case, there is a black man killing another black man. To me it seems highly unlikely that race was a motivating factor. In the other case, there is a white man killing a black man. Without further knowledge if the situation, we can't say whether race was involved here either - but in so many recent cases we have seen that race is near the root of such killings. Arbery is such an example, where the killers made racial slurs at him indicating their views towards black people.

I don't think your quote is logically consistent; the man is talking about actions taking place in a vacuum where race isn't a factor, which doesn't apply to the current environment.

Woberto says>"there is a black man killing another black man. To me it seems highly unlikely that race was a motivating factor. <

I dunno! Maybe that black man is statistics-savvy and reads the FBI's UCR [Uniform Crime Report} statistics each year:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

(see the upper-left corner of the spreadsheet)

So he knows that a black man is ~10 times more likely than a white man to kill him. When he encounters a white man in an alleyway at night he might give that white man a "pass" but if, under the same circumstances, he meets a black man...well, what are the odds?

So possibly, even in the case of black on black murder, race can matter very much. Especially if blacks are more highly educated (and read crime statistics or grok them). BTW white men read the same stats.

>In one case, there is a black man killing another black man. To me it seems highly unlikely that race was a motivating factor.

At the end of the day, you can't say that conclusively. However this kind of event is outside of the fetishsized view of racial oppression. In my view, this is a trope trotted out to wear compassion on a shirtsleeve. I see it as a reflection of their vanity.

If you want to throw in the institutional angle, perhaps you could conclude that perpetrators of these crimes are less likely to be prosecuted.

https://www.wbez.org/stories/chicagos-dismal-murder-solve-ra...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3202470

>If they were genuinely concerned, they wouldn't silence this man.

I stand by this statement. It doesn't matter if race is a motivating factor in this context. There's no reason to silence this man's views.

Canceling the journalist who reported it with cries of 'racist', because it doesn't fit the preconceived narrative is prejudicial. First they fetishsize to better self-aggrandize. Next they dispose of observations which do not fit their hypothesis. This man's concerns, the murder statistics and how that will impact real people, none of that matters. They're eager to skip all of that and jump to the conclusion where they prove their hypothesis. Throw in a few extra leaps to conflate the whole thing with an imagined moral high ground and partisan politics.

Hope this helps to clarify the lack of logical consistency I see here. Thanks.

If this is your introduction to Matt Taibbi, it's worth knowing he has a dog in the race when it comes to "cancel culture": https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-wh....

Have you always followed russian tabloids, or is this more of recent phenomenon?

First, they came for the journalists and nobody knows what happened next.

What I find most reprehensible about this whole situation is that more and more members of the left regulate political discourse, no make that any discourse, by defining any opposing view as illegitimate, bigoted, and now violence.

As in, they are taking the position that their moral superiority is without question and anyone who does not ascribe to this has no rights and we are nearing the point of the same having no protection from retribution of any sort.

I seriously doubt people understand what is happening to their rights because if this type of moral superiority takes hold you will be on the receiving end more often than not. Welcome to 1984.

Or it's in response to and a reversal of the moral superiorirty Christians and conservatives have held over this country for several hundred years. Maybe it's an overcorection, but that's how these things always work.

Except it fails. Look at how and why Trump was elected. All the polls showed Clinton being elected, because everyone was afraid to espouse their opinions. And yet they voted the way they wanted and NO ONE KNEW because true conversation was squashed. And this will keep happening over and over again until the fascist left finally understands that real conversation is what educated people, not cancelling anyone who dares to question their moral authority.

To be fair the whole election hanged on a stadium full of people flipping. If Trump wins in November (like Johnson this year) it will be a better sign that people are pissed off at idpol.

> To be fair the whole election hanged on a stadium full of people flipping.

That seems to be a surprisingly common occurrence.

Say what you want, but religions have largely been successful in society/nation building.

Marxism has wrecked most things in its path before, and it looks to be doing so again.

In Chinese, the name for this kind of person is baizuo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizuo

It is a very derogatory term, though to be fair, it is also used as a foil against criticism of internal Chinese policies.

Yes, but it’s beyond overused at this point. It’s similar to SJW with some additional shades of meaning since it’s describing foreign politics.

I’m not following this logic. People are expressing themselves and others are responding as they see fit: agreement, condemnation, silence, etc. It sounds like a marketplace of ideas in a free society. No one is having their basic human rights taken away from them because someone else called them a bigot.

If you’re uncomfortable with someone’s ideas making them a pariah, you’re describing a basic social dilemma that many can sympathize with, but not an Orwellian future being pushed upon us by the political left.

>People are expressing themselves and others are responding as they see fit: agreement, condemnation, silence, etc. It sounds like a marketplace of ideas in a free society.

So to you, a marketplace of ideas is one side dictates what is allowed to be said, and anyone who deviates from this deserves to be a pariah? What about that is free or a marketplace of ideas?

>No one is having their basic human rights taken away from them because someone else called them a bigot.

You are literally calling for the removal of basic human rights when you say that silencing people is a reasonable response to them saying something you don't like. Do you even realize what you're suggesting?

>I’m not following this logic.

Not surprising. The operative word is free. People are allowed to hold opinions they want, not ones you or your group approve of. You are completely within your rights to dislike any thoughts and speech you see fit. But that is where your free speech rights end - you're not allowed to use those rights to limit the rights of others. That is cowardly anti-intellectualism and it's a hallmark of internet 'liberalism'.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This thread is managing to stay barely on the ok side, and your comment here crosses noticeably closer to flamewar hell. Please step the other way instead. You'll make a better argument that way, have a greater chance of persuading others or at least connecting with them, and maybe even feel better too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My ideal view of the marketplace of ideas is that it engenders discussion about those ideas, responses to them, and ultimately deepens the view to a more nuanced, accurate place. One problem, undoubtedly, is that discussing anything through some means of communication is difficult, especially when we prefer short form communications to long form ones. So instead of discussing, we tend to think in terms dog whistles & a few short words are connected to an argument that we've heard from the other side and that is where things start to go downhill. People do not seem to be engaging the actual arguments in this marketplace of ideas, but rather with the people presenting the argument & what they think those arguments are.

Well, unless you consider the violence coming with the Antifa driven riots. There have been many cases where dissenting voices, including journalists, have been physically attacked in the last couple of weeks.

The same could be said of mobs in universities, cancel culture, etc.

There are plenty of examples on both sides of politics right now of peoples' basic human rights being violated.

Moral superiority is straight from the playbook of the right. Look at the justifications for opposing abortions and supporting xenophobia: doing right by God. Many conservatives in the U.S. operate with their views supposedly ordained by their deity and backed up by 2000 year old verse, and it doesn't get any more morally superior than that.

All these high-minded ideals you're appealing to sound wonderful. Who would be opposed to individual rights? The idea of suppressing opposing viewpoints seems insane. And nobody likes people who act like they're morally superior.

But hang on. What rights, and which viewpoints, and what are people acting morally superior about? Your appeal to those ideals is not as universally applicable as you make it sound. I mean, this is pretty self-evident - one can easily pick examples of completely reprehensible beliefs that almost no one would tolerate.

Let's make this concrete. Someone who supports a policy of the government killing all American Jews could make an impassioned argument about the injustice done when a tyrannical moral orthodoxy imposes its views on a free man and vilifies him for daring to think differently, and about the tragedy of the fact that in its zeal to stamp out the dissenter it would betray its own cherished value of free thought. But it wouldn't be a very convincing argument.

And similarly the left is increasingly unconvinced by people who say that their reasonable disagreements are being demonized and complain that the usual framework of liberal democracy should protect them from that kind of treatment. When someone - anyone - finds a position monstrous enough, they're no longer going to be willing to tolerate it. That's what's happening. The human costs of our current status quo are so emotionally and ethically explosive that people come to see these issues as non-negotiable. Your appeal to those norms of civil disagreement and compromise is just not convincing if you're no longer willing to accept the consequences of playing by those rules.

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was separated from New York Magazine. He quickly found a platform in other magazine. While I disagree with Andrew a lot, I dont think he should have been censored.

Where are you seeing that Sullivan has left New York Magazine?

(Sullivan should shut up about this particular controversy; he has not covered himself in glory on this issue in the past, and has no extra credibility here to burn).

Sullivan is on some kind of weird double secret probation and quite unhappy about it.

I do not understand the comment about his not having credibility to burn. Opinion columnists aren't jockeying to run for class president. They're supposed to take various opinions in order for ideas to be more fully fleshed out.

If the only purpose of the opinion section is to say things that reflect well on you or cover you in glory, we can pretty much skip the entire exercise and just lay-off all these people right now.

It's odd, and I don't direct this at you, but for some crazy reason people think that they should like all of the opinions that various press outlets run. I wonder if they have any idea the various opinions places like the NYTs have allowed folks to express, and quite rightly, too. When I have to like or agree with an opinion columnist, I'm missing something about where the value in the transaction is. I already know what I like and believe in. I don't need to read it over and over again.

He can say whatever he wants, of course, but should not be surprised when he takes comparatively more flak for venturing forth on issues involving race. New York Magazine is a business, and can make their own decisions about whether that flak is worth absorbing. Certainly, his ideas on these topics don't seem to be worth much on their own merits.

It's always amazing how you (and all others parroting this line) can freely switch back and forth between "he who has the gold makes the rules and that's okay" and "corporations need to support this cause I support", depending on exactly who is getting hurt in each situation.

Come on - you must realize that you don't actually believe your argument as a principle, you're just using it as an excuse because you want Sullivan silenced.

If you'll forgive me from going meta, and this is not related to Thomas's comment at all, I was interested in all of the controversial opinions that have appeared in op-eds over the years, so I did some online searching. I had remembered that the NYT gave space to Castro, to Putin, to Mao (I think), even to some asshole who wanted pederastry to be legal.

Good luck finding that. It's as if controversial opinion columns didn't exist before 2018. I couldn't even find an article with a list.

Our panopticon falters. Help me Landru! (Obligatory ST TOS reference, The Return Of The Archons)

No, I believe the argument as a principle. The alternative, that certain people somehow have a right to employment at private companies, doesn't make any sense.

Labor has market power as well, if it chooses to employ it. Somehow, I don't think a guild of columnists is going to amass to protect Sullivan, though.

As an aside: do you think it has ever once been persuasive to write something like "you must realize you don't mean what you say, but rather this other thing I'm convinced you think"?

I love Taibbi. He is fearless and pays the price for pointing out groupthink.

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.

On a side note, does anyone subscribe to any good news/information site? I would like to subscribe to something good and know I'm supporting it.

The Economist has high quality news. It has a slight free market/neoliberal bias on economic issues, but for politics it's just the facts.

Wikipedia is actually a decent free news source too, since articles about current events get updated and reviewed frequently.

Thanks! I actually already donate to Wikipedia but I don't use it as news. Do you specifically mean Wikinews [1]?

[1] https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

I've never been to wikinews before, but it looks like exactly what I was talking about. They have a prioritized list of articles that need to be reviewed for bias and accuracy, so that's really good.

The Economist is completely biased, they just have a way to write that somehow tones it down.

You could probably write a National-Socialist or Marxist-Leninist publication in the style of the Economist.

My impression of the economist is that they are unashamed and forward with their perspective. You read it and you get "this is a neoliberal perspective and these are the arguments of of neoliberales." So yes, they write from a very clear perspective, but it doesn't feel like bias creeping in. Instead it feels like "this is what this situation looks like from this perspective." Bias is trickiest when it's hard to tell where someone is coming from, and with them I never have a problem.

http://foreignaffairs.com/

I've recently discovered The Hill (https://thehill.com/). It's very refreshing. No sensationalized language in titles and I haven't been able to detect a bias for the left or right. They seem to present information pretty objectively.

> I haven't been able to detect a bias for the left or right

Allsides.com is an interesting attempt to evaluate media sources for bias, and agrees with you. Through some fairly detailed surveys they "found that The Hill maintains a Center bias, though on the border of Lean Left." https://www.allsides.com/news-source/hill-media-bias

The Hill is a right-wing site cosplaying as a left-wing media source.

Highly recommend the Financial Times, a British newspaper owned by a Japanese corporation, has very robust world reporting. Letters to the editor section that sometimes reads like a Davos guest list.

Parallels to McCarthyism anyone?

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.

Extremely well said.

That’s assuming both political parties actually want “something done”.

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.

> The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond.

Centre-right to right: https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020

Everything looks "center-right to right" when you're on the extreme left.

So there's no such thing as the center-left?

Of course there is, you see it in many european countries

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").

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

I share your opinion.

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.

> My own theory (without any real evidence)

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.

Civil Rights era leaders were killed for attempting to unite black and white labor. Your theory has evidence, as far as I'm concerned.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion

"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)

This seems to imply left = good, right = bad, so when a leftist party does something bad it’s reframed as right wing.

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 :)

You overestimate how powerful American political parties are. The leadership ride waves. They don't make them.

That’s a fairly new phenomenon; parties used to be extremely powerful.

The internet has killed that notion, I think.

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.

Its not this simple.

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 :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

> 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"?

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...

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.

Well said. infogulch for senate!..?

This is another clear example of 20th century scale.

They made everything "so big", that they have to fill the pipeline with inferior products/drivel just to keep it at capacity.

21st century scale doesn't suffer from the same weakness, but that should come as no surprise.

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.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-...

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?

Harsh enforcement of a numbing philosophical and social conformity, for starters (e.g., cancel culture).

If you hate the cancel culture on the left, your mind is going to be blown when you find out what the right has been doing.

The right defending freedom of speech and the left pushing fascist ideals is pretty mind blowing.

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".

Just want to point out:

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/

If you want studies in media about police and raise e, Radley Balko has multiple articles with exactly that.

He is libertarian if that matters.

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.

[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.

Expression and suppression of ideas have been happening ever since the onset of language in human, as far as I can tell. Any explanation that is time dependent, i.e this is happening because of so and so happening currently seems a bit inadequate to me. Any type of "look how crazy the other side is" rhetoric also feels like cliche to me because who am I do decide what's insane and what not?

As for the core of the problem itself, I have no idea what the core of the problem is. Vaguely, it seems that people take a side of issue that's phrased to have two side and they duke it out with the other side. It seem to be part of underlying mechanism of how humans behave because I see similar ideas played out in sports and such.

Maybe the problem isn't any one specific idea but rather how ideas get parsed by our brain. Or maybe I am the one complicating things and it's a simpler idea. But this whole business of right or wrong ideas, sides, values etc seems exhaustive. I'll just wait for someone else to figure it out for me.

I would highly recommend his 2019 book Hate Inc.

Taibbi is one of the best journalists in America. Very thankful to have people like him doing this.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner

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 just proved my point.

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

> the author calls a sitting President a 'clown'

Our of curiosity, are you equally offended when the press calls the sitting presidents of other countries nasty names?

If not, why not?

Lol your response is utterly nonsensical.

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 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.

[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...

A further discussion of some of the details. If true Taibbi's piece loses some of its sting: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/has-the-american-left...

I don't agree with all the opinions in this article. But it would be good to understand better what the actual facts are. Too tired to dig further myself, and that's the problem, isn't it? But maybe someone else can already set things straight?

American Television has been been held hostage since the 70s by the "American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property," it's not like this is new or unique to leftists.

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

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.

The territory can be Important and the dialog toxic at the same time

> 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 wouldn't be a problem if Section 230 was repealed

https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/internet-speech/comm...

I understand how dangerous it is to have news organizations operating in bad faith. Even if I recognize it and avoid their venue, my neighbors may not. In 2020, these online platforms can reach a billion+ people. Misleading statements, or flat-out lies can create a mob very quickly.

I'd still rather have the ability to dissent online, rather than losing the platforms that may be held liable for what I post.

Section 230 is a good thing. Removing it would (in my opinion) only lead to de-platforming people the state disagrees with.

"Think of the children!"

I have read many of Taibbi's past articles with enthusiasm and he makes some interesting arguments in the present article, but to be clear, he has an axe to grind on this very issue. He himself was essentially cancelled for some pretty indefensible and egregious "journalism" early in his career.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-wh...

Furthermore, hes engaged here in some light cherry-picking. For instance, Taibbi references a called-out UCLA professor, who is white, and whose primary offense seems to not be reading MLK's treatise but using the n-word in the process- that seems like a detail worth mentioning?

I read this yesterday, superb analysis.

I pay $5/month to Taibbi to get email updates. This one had a note that it could be shared.

Press is now just a business to make money and to occasionally push agendas on the owners’ wishes.

In addition to the lies I listed in my other comment, Taibbi also lies about what he calls the "now-discredited Steele dossier" in this piece.

Here are the facts: not a single significant conclusion in the Steele dossier has ever been discredited or proven false to date. Not one.

Anyone who read Taibbi during the W Administration, and who reads him again now, can readily discern that someone got to him. It's not the same guy. He's flown off the handle and spouts readily-falsifiable information at a truly alarming rate. You can Google for 30 seconds and find lie after lie. It's the same with Glenn Greenwald, who Taibbi is now allied with.

You can Google for 30 seconds and find a source that supports anything you want to believe.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but simply saying you can find contradictory information on Google isn't sufficient.

I’m not sure how it could be “proven” false. This is always the problem with accusations of conspiracy. A particular man is accused of being involved in a conspiracy. There is no way to prove you weren’t at a secret meeting in a secret location at some time. You can’t prove non existence of a pee tape. There always could be a pee tape.

You could provide evidence that the information was fabricated, but it probably wasn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely accurate. The FBI doesn’t seem to think it is that credible, but I’m really not sure how much that is worth.

people seem to just get that way as they approach/enter their 50s, nobody has to get to them.

> It's the same with Glenn Greenwald, who Taibbi is now allied with.

Greenwald equated Michael Flynn's plea deal with the plight of poor folks being forced into bad deals by disinterested public defenders/overextended court systems on a recent episode of The Intercepted podcast. I no longer recognize the person I used to look forward to seeing as a guest on Democracy Now.

Much has been made in the media that he plead guilty so therefore there could be no possibility that his prosecution was unfair, unreasonable or political. But we know that many people plead guilty for reasons other than guilt. Facing a biased judge and prosecutors out for blood is certainly one of them. Fighting in such a case, even if you're right, is very risky.

You may gain a sense of schadenfreude that even one of the formerly powerful could be forced into that same grim calculus faced by a poor person railroaded by the system. But this is not justice in either case.

No, factual assertions are discredited by not being able to come up with proof. If I say that Mister Rogers raped a goat in a field in Pennsylvania in 1988, and am unable to come up with any proof, my assertion is discredited.

“substantiated”, “unsubstantiated”, and “discredited” are three different positions, not two.

It was discredited, Steele's own source reported to the FBI that the stuff in the report was full of hearsay, rumor, misstatements, and exaggeration: 'the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that he/she had not seen Steele's reports until they became public that month, and that he/she made statements indicating that Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source's statements in multiple sections of the reporting. 336 For example, the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that, while Report 80 stated that Trump's alleged sexual activities at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow had been "confirmed" by a senior, western staff member at the hotel, the Primary Sub-source explained that he/she reported to Steele that Trump's alleged unorthodox sexual activity at the Ritz Carlton hotel was "rumor and speculation" and that he/she had not been able to confirm the story....In addition, the FBI interviews with the Primary Sub-source revealed that Steele did not have good insight into how many degrees of separation existed between the Primary Sub-source's sub-sources and the persons quoted in the reporting, and that it could have been multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay. For example, the Primary Sub-source stated to WFO Agent 1 that, in contrast to the impression left from the election reports, his/her sub-sources did not have direct access to the persons they were reporting on. Instead, the Primary Sub-source told WFO Agent 1 that their information was "from someone else who may have had access." The Primary Sub-source also informed WFO Agent 1 that Steele tasked him/her after the 2016 U.S. elections to find corroboration for the election reporting and that the Primary Sub-source could find none. According to WFO Agent 1, during an interview in May 2017, the Primary Sub-source said the corroboration was "zero."'

This is all in the Horowitz Report.

There is zero reason to believe anything in the Steel Dossier.

Absolutely none of those items are primary conclusions from Steele. Nobody cares about "how many degrees of separation existed" between sources. That's just a bunch of Republican misdirection. This is really the best you can do? What about the actual relevant points in his report? Is there a reason you didn't even mention any of them?

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.

And the previous duplicate of this was flagged presumably for that exact reason.

No shit. The American right showed the way. The left is finally optimizing to match the working model.

This was amazing. The fourth estate, news media is so important...

> The American left has lost its mind

That quote stands out. For all the talk about demanding inclusiveness, American leftwings seem to be quite an exclusive group. They demand some conflicting moral standards and drown out debate by shouting down different opinions.

It's quite disconcerting to see this jump over to Europe and spread in the fashion it has. Identity and group belonging are becoming more important than reason.

I think the real idea is that America is destroying itself. Not just on the surface, but it's like looking at a democratic will to self-un-democratize.

It's a little rich seeing Matt Taibbi, of all people, raising the alarm about "moral manias".

Considering Taibbi's journalistic history and remarks in the past, it is incredibly hypocritical to say the least. He's directly contributed to the reason why American Press is the way it is today so I can't tell if he honestly thinks he's somehow above it all or not.

Conversely, we could say that if even Taibbi is worried about moral outrages, things have gotten really bad.

We could, or we could just say that Taibbi has very little credibility when it comes to declaring moral panics. Reasonable people can, I guess, disagree on this.

What are you referring to?

Matt Taibbi's hyperbolic demagoguery is so notorious CJR actually published a piece asking people to stop dunking on him so much.

From an outsider's (not living in the US) perspective, the adherence to identity politics there has really gone to the extremes. It is a paradox in itself: if every group emphasizes its uniqueness, its needs to be viewed, heard and treated differently from the status quo, then how would it be possible to arrive at an endgame of "everybody being treated equally"?

From an European perspective, identity politics is quite puzzling. In France for example, there is simply no item called "ethnicity" in the population census. As long as you're "French", you're supposed to enjoy the same rights and have the same duties, and should be able to communicate with each other based on a fundamental set of values and cultural understanding. The idea of "skin color" is very much de-emphasized instead of strengthened, which IMO makes sense if you want to reach a true state of "equality for all". In a sense it is similar to the idea of "let us ignore the 'sex' of a person when evaluating their abilities and agreeing on their duties, just treat all sexes as the same and equal, instead of arguing about which sex should enjoy more privileges on which fronts".

Of course, I understand that everything has historical and societal roots. The US society has always been divided along ethnic lines. After all, the vast amount of African Americans' sole purpose of existence, until less than 2 centuries ago, was to be slaves to a superior master class, not to mention the various comparisons between the US and Rome, even up to the present. Even after the liberation, the social-economic organizational structure hasn't really changed. Of course, this is not to say that similar problems don't exist in Europe. France also had a long history of colonization, and the group identity of Northern Africans is always a tricky issue in their society. However, in general, and especially in Northern European countries which didn't get to partake in much colonization, for example, most migrants are relatively recent economic migrants. This makes it much harder for a historically discriminatory social-economic structure to form against them, and makes it quite easier for the society to de-emphasize the skin color and regard everybody equally as much as possible. Of course, there is still a long way to go before any form of racism truly doesn't exist even in those countries, that's for sure. I just feel that the current situation in the US is incredibly polarized, nobody is listening to what the others are talking about, and only insists on pushing their own narratives, which is just not conducive to eventually solving the problems. No matter whether you're on the left or on the right, a dogmatic adherence to ideology and the need to bash anybody who in your eyes dares to think slightly differently is an extremely dangerous thing to do.

As humans, we love to create and live in a humanistic world. The newspaper stances, which this article criticizes were trying to be human (for well-being of human in their best judgement, and with open motivation) at different points in time.

This article has serve as great whataboutism if you don't the humanistic philosophy, while you are pursuing the truth.

Former hero of mainstream journalism no longer fits in with mainstream journalism so of course it’s destroying itself.

Perhaps Matt Taibbi is used to being a visibly elite journalist who isn’t on board with a new status quo that won’t benefit him the same.

People are sick of yesterday’s politics and looking to remake things. The media is always going on about it’s important role in our political system. It needs a good kick in the ass.

Post post modernism has us deconstructing post modernism. No more believing we’re just detached observers living on rails. We aren’t feeling obligated to saying grandpa and grandma and are searching for a new normal from bottom up, as too many are facing existential entropy given the status quo.

Taibbi is ‘fraid that what was familiar is no more. Good. That means journalism is being disrupted in a real way. It’s not if it’s just feeling normal to the old experts.

Our social institutions may really be changing.

Tying all reporting of facts to a need to push virtuous political narratives is braindead.

By the way, Taibbi is doing fine, financially. So I hardly think this is a grudge article.

> By the way, Taibbi is doing fine, financially. So I hardly think this is a grudge article.

Just because he's doing fine financially doesn't mean he hasn't lost status, and he’s well into the financial range where more or less of that unlessnit radically changes station is essentially meaningless, but status and acclaim often remain quite meaningful.

Who's "we" in this case? Not everyone is on board with the new left who condemn at whim well meaning people who don't follow the temperamental and shallow whims of "wokeness." Free speech and thought are oppressed and people who don't follow the line have their names plastered online and their jobs taken away. Taking offense has somehow become a form of coherent argument. Social media has become a tool to foremost ridicule and destroy people's reputation.

Not everyone on the "left" is on board with this. There's still a large number of us who respect reason, intelligence, civil discourse, liberty. We just don't appear to have a candidate who represents us, or a late night talk show that represents us, because our stances are not principally rooted as being in opposition to other entities. There are a few journalists and voices that still speak and write foremost with respect to reason and in accordance to reality, but the current social and political climate is so inflammatory that this becomes difficult.

People like us exist, our existence is just not expressed majorly in media or social media.

This all might be true, but is ad hominem... what facts did Taibbi get wrong or shade unfairly in his piece?

Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505400

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.

Yes, or at least be honest that the reason this was removed is because it is flagged, not because it was a dupe.

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 turn the flags off on 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).

Thank you for doing so.

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 New Yorker depiction of this very site (or was it the Atlantic) was particularly egregious.

The New Yorker article:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

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.

“I didn’t read all of it because it’s too damn long” is precisely the problem with our country today.

Your country maybe. I don't live in your country. And I read plenty, I bet more than you and in more languages than you.

PS: you're proving the New Yorker article accurate, by the way.

I think you’re proving the article perfectly. I read the entire thing. And you don’t read more than me.

Oh, I'm pretty sure I do read more than you. I also don't assume we live in the same country. Keep your condescending attitude to yourself.

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!

Ok, you win. You read more than I do and my reading is "the problem" with your country. Here, have a cookie.

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.

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?

That article doesn't seem to me particularly wrong, and in fact many parts of it ring true...

Care to cite some specific parts of it you have issues with? I remember reading that and thinking it was a good article.

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.

Really? I thought it was pretty astute.

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.

> It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind

I add to that, that without that deviation from reality, a candidate like Trump would have never gotten his nomination, even less the presidency.

Is the left losing their minds of their own accord? Or are people becoming more reactionary due to the unprecedented level of insanity that the right has displayed and wielded with actual political power of late? Calls for liberals to be be rational when a trump administration rules the country is a bit odd, since reasoned debate does no good there, or with the current GOP senate. what is left? throw a fit is about all that is left.

Honestly I think this is it.

Being told to chill out on your own camp when you have deranged lunatics running the show who, by all accounts, are an order of magnitude more dangerous, leads to anything but chilling out.

The aggresiveness and disdain for dialogue of the fringe extremists running the executive in the US is basically leading to a more militant left wing, tired of being demanded nuance in the face of truly abhorrent adversaries.

Unfortunately, throw a fit is the tip of the iceberg. You see, instead of watching the news, I've been speaking with people, and not online. Some people are starving. Some people are afraid of starving shortly. Some people are being evicted. Some people are about to be evicted. There is currently an international once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) plague. Some people didn't receive their stimulus checks. Some people didn't get unemployment when they got fired. Some people live in states where max unemployment is $365/week, but like ~$60/week if you were minimum wage. This some people number is approaching a critical mass.

Then cops are killing people.

Are people meant to keep their minds? If ethical behavior is material, then are we not incentivizing unethical behavior by not providing the means to basic material when it is well within our own means to do so? And what king-of-kings thrives clad in white, righteous anger against the unethical? If we chastise those in pain, we will all know despair.

> I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?...

I mean, Lacy does have a point that this kind of question in the context of the protests is nothing more than distracting.

The protests are about systematic discrimination of black people. No one questioned that black people can also be perpetrators - it's just irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Would nazis running concentration camps be absolved by finding that "well but some inmates commit violence too"?

Do you feel like there are many parallels between being a Jew in 1939 Germany and being a black person in 2020 USA?

That's not how analogies work, so this is completely missing the point.

For example, if you say the Colosseum is to Rome what a roller coaster is to an amusement part, you are not saying that the Colosseum is similar to a roller coaster. No, what you're comparing is the Colosseum's relationship to Rome and the rollercoaster's relationship to the amusement park.

xg15's analogy isn't meant to equate Black people in America in 2020 to Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps. Rather, it's meant to compare the irrelevance of intra-Jewish violence in the face of Nazi violence to the irrelevance of intra-Black violence in the face of police violence.

Always surprising to me how the basic structure of analogy is so commonly misunderstood.

> Always surprising to me how the basic structure of analogy is so commonly misunderstood.

It's what happens when people don't have a rebuttal to the point being raised. It's generally a good sign that they're no longer engaging in good faith.

The analogy might be stronger if intra Jewish violence killed 10x more than nazis.

That's completely irrelevant to the analogy, and you are making the same exact mistake as flyinglizard: treating an analogy as a simple comparison instead of as… an analogy.

For example, let's try another analogy: If a plane crashes and kills a bunch of people, we investigate the cause of the accident and demand to know what happens. We don't decline to investigate, fail to assign blame, or neglect to comfort the families because "well, people kill people more than planes kill people."

Note that this analogy holds even though homicides account for 1600x as many deaths annually than plane crashes… because that's irrelevant to what's actually being compared in the analogy.

Yes, if planes were killing more people than people, we probably wouldn’t investigate them as thoroughly. But people would probably stop flying, so kind of an unstable reality.

This was no analogy, as my point illustrated - not any more than name dropping any atrocious historical event into the discussion for rhetorical shock value.

The article discussed here specifically builds a significant part of its argument on the way violence inside black communities is silenced because it does not fit the current narrative. The article does not talk about police brutality itself, but about the way reality is bent and picked to fit a minority viewpoint.

No, it was one, csallen explained that quite well. I was trying to illustrate the point using an event were we should be all in agreement systematic discrimination and oppression happened. In that context, it's irrelevant how the oppressed behave.

Max from Oakland didn't think it was irrelevant to the topic at hand. Shouldn't he be heard? He belongs to the population being discriminated against. To me that makes his perspective relevant, and I can't see by what logic it wouldn't be, except conformity enforcement, which is scary and not likely to end well.

Bringing up concentration camps in that way is just a way of assuming your conclusion.

Writing about the protests, my mom recently told me 'It is a sad fact that most of the crime is black on black' among other things that are SO frustrating that I gave up on trying to reply back.

Like to me that statement is a non sequitur, and says either:

that the cause of increased violence is systemic adverse conditions and outright theft of wealth/quality of life over 400 years making communities tough to succeed in (doubt my Mom understands this)

or that if this is not true, that POC are somehow more violent as a race. Some Stoddard, Günther eugenics BS.

All my parents thoughts about the protests have these racist undertones and I don't know how to open my parents to education and understanding - and it's also scary with the election they would never vote Trump but his Reagan esque re-launch next week seems like this is his new strategy.

Just googling now I found this PDF, maybe I try sending that https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wien...

Surprised you're being downvoted.

Let your mom know that the majority of violence against most races comes from other members of the same race, especially in highly segregated societies. For example, 84% of White victims are killed by Whites, and 93% of African American victims killed by African Americans.

Try listening to your parents instead of educating at them.

definitely good advice

I also strongly believe that the cause is the former - centuries of institutionalized persecution, a vicious cycle of poverty, etc. Why not respond with that? I can understand it being frustrating but we can't just shut off discussion of uncomfortable truths.

I have encountered many situations in my own life where liberal-minded people will outright deny claims like that. Unfortunately those are the statistics; denying facts helps no one. There is an explanation for those numbers - that is what the response should be.

> The protests are about systematic discrimination of black people. No one questioned that black people can also be perpetrators - it's just irrelevant to the topic at hand.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

There is something to be said for asking someone to start by getting their own house in order.

Thank god this rubbish isn't how the legal system functions in any civilized country.

Who is talking about the legal system? This is the political system.

The political system doesn't work like this either. All governments and political bodies are capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously. As far as I'm aware, none will deny you your rights or restitution just because "hey look, some people who look like you have done bad things, too."

> All governments and political bodies are capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously.

If that were true there would be equally prominent protests and proposed legislation on both issues simultaneously.

> As far as I'm aware, none will deny you your rights or restitution just because "hey look you've done bad things, too."

You're talking about the legal system again.

In what way does being capable of considering multiple issues simultaneously require protest for all of these issues, or equal prominence for all of these issues? I have no idea what point you're trying to make, really.

> In what way does being capable of considering multiple issues simultaneously require protest for all of these issues, or equal prominence for all of these issues?

Because that's what considering means. It takes more than just declaring that something is under consideration while not really paying attention to it or doing anything about it.

We don't actually consider all issues at once equally. That's why it makes sense to question their relative importance.

You're assuming that care for every issue is expressed in the same way, and also that whether or not something makes front page news or gets people riled up is a fair measure of how much they care, as opposed to a measure of simply how flashy or exciting that issue is.

> that whether or not something makes front page news or gets people riled up is a fair measure of how much they care

That seems like a pretty good metric for whether the political system is grappling with something.

What metric are you proposing as an alternative? Does it show a different result?

The political system is always grappling with lots of things simultaneously. Some of those things will always be getting more publicity and arousing more anger than others at any point in time, but so what? That doesn't necessarily mean anyone's moving the needle on those issues to a higher degree than on other issues.

I'd put it like this: The insitutionalized legal and political system can address lots of things simultaneously. The public attention (news cycle etc) has strong limits how many topics it can consider simultaneously. The focus of public attention is also important because it influences the political system (democracy and all).

Currently the focus is on systemic racism and police violence. Trying to move focus to violence between blacks would absolutely take resources away from fighting racism (which is often the intention of those bringing up the topic).

What are the numbers? Ten times as many black people die from black-on-black homocide as police killings?

Even if it were just twice as many- I think it would be reasonable to wonder, if you were being utilitarian, what approach would save the most lives.

An uncharitable reading of your comment might interpret that fighting racism is so relatively important it's worth sacrifing some net black lives for it.

Is there any evidence that reducing the public's focus on fighting racism will increase its focus on fighting black-on-black crime, reducing poverty, reforming prisons, etc.?

I doubt it. Some issues are great for publicity, and others are much more difficult to get into the hyper-competitive limelight. In fact, I'd bet that there are spillover effects where attention and donations to other pro-Black causes increases while BLM is in the spotlight.

Maybe. I think one problem is the idea of racism itself, which has at least three meanings:

intent (i.e. if you want to genocide [race], you're a racist),

facts/beliefs (you could imagine someone with no hatred or ill-intent who believed things about e.g. population statistics- you might call those beliefs racist even if there was no 'racist intent' behind them)

And outcomes (something ends up disproportionately impacting one racial group, not necessarily with any racial animus involved at any point. You might call this structual racism).

If we had different words for these three things, I think it would make it a lot easier for people to agree to get stuff done. As it is, they all get mixed up- and an approach that assumes racism no.1 won't help 2 or 3, or might exarcerbate things. If I had to guess, I'd say a lot more of what's going on is 3 than 1, but I could be wrong.

(And calling 3 'structural racism' probably won't do the job, because it's that's too easily conflatable with 1, so a lot of people won't support it.)

I don't know. I'm personally interested to see what'll happen if more police precints get abandoned/burned down, and people set up more anarchist/warlord-controlled areas across the U.S.

I'm not sure I understand your comment correctly.

Are you saying that black communities should be reasonably crime-free before they can expect institutions not to systematically discriminate them and enact retributionless, extralegal violence upon them?

What I'm saying is that when black people kill more than ten times more black people than cops kill black people, somebody is not wrong to ask why the focus should only be on the cops.

Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.

There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever. It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.

> Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.

You could say that about both groups. There is a cultural tradition in the relevant communities of not talking to the police, which causes disproportionately many of those murderers to get away with it, and the murder solve rate in the US isn't all that high to begin with.

You tend to get more murders in proportion to how much the perpetrators expect to get away with it, so the numbers are telling a story there.

> There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever.

Apparently not to a sufficient extent to actually address the problem. If you don't want people to keep pointing to it then get there to not be something to point to.

> It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.

The officers in question are facing homicide charges, as it should be.

You're just begging the question in limiting it to government authorities. If Black Lives Matter then shouldn't all of them?

> There is a cultural tradition in the relevant communities of not talking to the police,

A direct consequence of the long history of police racism, abuse,and complicity of the police in abuse originating outside of the police.

So fixing the police is key to both sides of the problem.

Again, the focus isn't only on cops. There's plenty of time, effort, money, etc. spent on minimizing "normal" violence and crime. Society is quite capable of doing more than one thing at once, even if the media likes to focus.

You can't realistically claim that the focus isn't on the police right now.

And they're not even wrong. Policing in the US is in serious need of reform.

But you're doing the thing you're saying you're not doing. If we can do both things at once, then why shouldn't we do both things at once? Why are we dismissing people who want to do the other thing?

As far as I'm aware, none of the efforts to curb normal violence and crime ("Problem A") have declined. The only thing that's changed is that more people are joining the chorus to fix policing ("Problem B").

Nobody is going to dismiss you for wanting to fix Problem A. But that's a very different thing than intruding on conversations about Problem B to tell people to focus on Problem A instead.

The Black Lives Matter movement is explicitly about dealing with systemic racism and state violence against Black people. If you want to contribute to solving other issues (and there are many other issues), go for it, but I don't see what that has to do with Black Lives Matter.

And 40% of police officers inflict domestic violence on their families, yet we give them weapons, a license to use violence to back up their authority, and release them into the streets, where they can do... Pretty much anything they want, without legal or social consequences.

Without consequences is the important bit here.

AnthonyMouse says >"when black people kill more than ten times more black people than cops kill black people "<

It is worse than that: black people murder more than ten times more black people than all white people murder black people:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Again, how is that relevant? Are you saying that black people somehow deserve no protection by police because "they should get their house in order" first? (Whatever that should mean)

You bring up a good point: far more black people are killed by other black people than are killed by cops (white or black). But we don't hear about it, demonstrations are rare and news is non-existent.

It would be a significant improvement if black people quit killing their own. And it would save far, far more lives than were all police to never kill another black person. But it is completely the responsibility of blacks to quit killing other blacks.

“Black people” aren't an organization.

Police are (well, police departments are organizations), and those organizations act on behalf of the public.

Systemic police abuse for which there is no effective public accountability and systemic correction isn't the private acts of individual wrongdoers, it's violence by and with the at least tacit support of the public. That's why the focus exists: responsible citizenship.

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?

0. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-press-conf...

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]

[1] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/202...

The truth doesn't matter all that matters is defeating Trump, even if it has to be done by outright lies.

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 ;

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.

This looks a lot like a racist piece to me.

And it is destroying the country. The death of Floyd was no doubt a hideous crime, which should be punished harshly but the narrative of systemic and widespread police racism is unsupported by data and incredibly, irresponsibly manufactured by the media. We are close to a civil war, in the middle of a pandemic, we are all out of our minds with rage and indignation and, for the most part things were better than ever, including the level of police brutality. I beg all of you, do not let yourself be manipulated, no matter how righteous it might feel. Check the actual facts. More whites are killed by police than blacks, in absolute terms as well as per crime committed [1]. Sam Harris discusses all of this in his latest podcast, just hear him out [2]. America is not perfect, for sure, there is still racism, for sure, and the police could do far better, for sure, but we are burning the country down in a middle of a plague, when we should be working together to solve all of this. And its largely the fault of the media.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

[2] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saWJ...

Moderators, it is disingenuous to mark this as [dupe] when in fact what you’ve done is [flag] silence the article—something that ironically enough proves its point.

That was just standard moderation, which is a large part of what makes HN the way it is. If we did otherwise, HN would quickly become a completely different forum.

That said, it's also standard to turn off flags sometimes, for example if an article is particulary interesting and able to support a substantive HN thread. I did that in this case.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512983, and if you still have a question that I haven't answered, let me know.

I knew to take the entire article with a grain of salt with the first sentence:

"Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country."

Yes, there are astonishingly brash, illegal actions being taken by police departments. Yes, we're still in the middle of a pandemic.

But that statement is absurd, and childish.

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.

What i found today in Academia, News and even Tech companies that question the left has resulted in banning but never in a civil discussion. Movements like Antifa, BLM won't sit and have a talk because in principle they believe that speech and civil discussion hasnt led to any advancements in their political requests. While some of them apply to past times, today is important to have discussion and freedom of speech A good case is Cadence Owens, she is person that represents the right and when invited to Joe Rogan it was a joke that all her claims were not backed up with science, other example was Milo too. They were put in front of a very smart person and lose credibility on the spot. Is important to keep freedom of speech in all areas and with both left and right

"The American press is destroying itself."

...says Matt Taibbi, who has actually been destroying himself and his reputation continuously for about 10 years now.

In this piece, Taibbi straight-up lies about the fascist op-ed from Tom Cotton in the NYT. I guess he thinks we're all too stupid to notice when he completely skips over everything that made Cotton's piece so offensive, including Sen. Cotton calling for "no quarter" against protestors, which is effectively state-sanctioned murder.

Taibbi also skips over the key problem with the now-fired NYT editor's conduct: the fact that he admittedly did not even read Cotton's op-ed before approving it."

There is a reasonable debate to be had over whether the Cotton op-ed should have been run or not, with many reasonable folks on both sides, but Taibbi's take is one of the worst I've seen and does not honestly portray the issues involved.

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!"

Before reading this I had a feeling it was related to the James Bennet situation at the Times. I've been following the narratives unfolding around news rooms and I would offer this article as a counter narrative to the one being portrayed in this piece.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-t...

If you look at the James Bennet situation specifically, he willingly published a piece that he said could be dangerous. He tweeted the following

"We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton's argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate."

While this sounds like a noble undertaking of the advancement of public discourse, black journalists have publicly condemned this act because it will put their lives in danger. The problem is that Bennet and many other journalists believe it is ok to push dangerous, even racist narratives in pursuit of "objectivity". For many non-black journalists these debates are exciting and stimulating, but for black people these debates are validating toxic ideologies by giving them a platform to spread.

> he willingly published a piece that he said could be dangerous.

That’s rich. No, he did not say that. He said some readers may find it dangerous. It does not mean he himself finds it dangerous.

I agree, he does not believe it to be dangerous. That's kind of my point. He does not believe it to be dangerous, but many of his readers and even black journalists have acknowledged it is. At this point you either accept that black journalists are saying this piece is dangerous or you reject it, you can't pretend it to be indifferent.

Oh dear. You have falsely ascribed words to the guy and did not even acknowledge it when I brought it to your attention.

To the contrary you doubled down: this time you are saying that the editor was indifferent to raised concerns, despite the fact the he actually did acknowledge them and communicated that in his opinion other considerations overrule. That’s not indifference, that’s disagreement.

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