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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

> enormous bias and propensity for lies

So based on your citations, "enormous" is roughly a handful between the thirty of them over the last decade?

Get some perspective, do you actually think the WaPo literally made up a story or do you think they (let's be uncharitable) ran with a story they should've done more due diligence on?

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Between the Iraq war and the absolutely atrocious handling of mask misinformation (Openly saying "No, you shouldn't wear masks. They are for doctors only." and then wondering why people became skeptic of mask usage) at the beginning of Covid, the death toll of missing due diligence is quite high. Both seem to have some incentives for making up the stories (fueling the war machine, securing masks for doctors) and should not have been printed if any amount of due diligence was done.

There's no difference between incompetence and malice when the stakes are war. In any case, it indicates they are not fit to moderate discourse.

It's easy to see how a false story about a serious attack on US infrastructure could spark confrontation, or even more serious war (much like when NYT fabricated evidence that WMDs existed in Iraq).

The citations can only include mistakes, not the enormous (and much more effective) bias in choosing which stories to run and how to frame them. Do you think it's a coincidence you only hear of police killings when the victim is black? Or, in the rare case when covering a white victim, that their race never makes the headline?

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