Comment by hansvm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hansvm | Hacker News Reader

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The article's framing of the problem (increased authoritarianism, decreased tolerance for reporting) leaves a lot to be desired without more evidence. The evidence is:

- A small increase in total jailed journalists (roughly matching world population growth, and the delta is a small discrete count which would yield large error bounds)

- Specific examples of horrific events (matching atrocities that governments have been more than willing to commit in 2020, 2019, 2018, ...)

Without looking at longer time scales (e.g., over the last 10-20 years journalist jailings significantly outpace population growth) or providing some justification for why circumstances have changed and we would expect journalist jailings to not pace population growth (e.g., if there are significantly fewer journalists per capita (not sure if that's true, just hypothetically)), a story that matches the evidence better is that lots of countries were horrible to journalists in years past and they're repeating that bad behavior now.

To be clear, that's not saying that the overall problem shouldn't be fixed or even that their framing isn't correct, but...it's not exactly hard to provide evidence that _actually_ backs up their claim; why wouldn't they?

The first sentence in the article compares 2021 to 2020 and reflects a 4% increase in jailed journalists. This is 4x larger than the typical 1% population growth.

Sure, more numbers would help. I'm not sure what sort of mindset would make someone immediately jump to defending the jailing of journalists though.

> The article's framing of the problem (increased authoritarianism, decreased tolerance for reporting) leaves a lot to be desired without more evidence.

I think democratic backslide / the rise of authoritarianism globally is broadly recognized at this point. It's not my area of expertise though.

> 4x vs 1%

Very true, but the _discrete_ counts of journalists involved are also miniscule, presenting (the aforementioned) large error bounds on exactly how great the driving force is on journalist incarcerations. 4% isn't meaningfully distinct from 1% given the actual data. It's not that unlike a fun xkcd [0]

[0] https://xkcd.com/1102/

>> > The article's framing of the problem (increased authoritarianism, decreased tolerance for reporting) leaves a lot to be desired without more evidence.

> I think democratic backslide / the rise of authoritarianism globally is broadly recognized at this point.

Assuming people agree on things like that is part of the problem. Different groups of people often have wildly different ideas about what the problems their countries are currently facing are, and if you make assumptions and statements that seem to align with one set of views more than another all you're doing is limiting your audience and pre-seeding a group that will discount your argument.

The way around this is the same as it's ever been (even if people seem somewhat more resistant to it). Make well reasoned arguments backed by publicly available evidence, and reference that evidence so people can verify it.

This is the bar. Not hitting it because of assumptions you're making which the bar is specifically meant to guard against is a shame. We should encourage people to do better, not excuse them when they fail.

The vast majority of this article consists of the exact thing you're claiming to ask for.

I wasn't criticizing this article, so I'm not sure how that's relevant?

I'm not sure that per capita is a very useful rubric to measure over time. Like I'm not saying there's no relation to population size, if you compare a tiny country to a large one, but it's not clear to me that there's a strong relationship - why a government would be expected to lock up 5% more journalists if the population grew by 5%. Or why if a country of 30 million jailed 100 journalists it should be necessarily be considered less repressive than if a country of 40 million jailed 100.

Per capita naturally maps to the idea that people's behaviors are innate in aggregate -- given a particular context you would expect the same distribution of people to behave in a particular fashion (become journalists, become journalists who question authoritarianism at the wrong place and wrong time, have a fetish for murdering journalists, ...).

That isn't always a relevant idea, but it's a useful model that adequately describes a wide variety of phenomena. On the surface it seems applicable to journalist jailings; the count of journalists increases per capita, and if their behavior is independent of world population then you would expect (absent other information or constraining factors) for behaviors leading to imprisonment (not assigning blame -- this could be as simple as wrong-place-wrong-time "behaviors") to also increase per capita.

I'd also argue that at least some percentage of them deserve jail time. I don't feel any sympathy for someone like Judith Miller nor would I shed a tear for James O'Keefe if he is ever brought to justice. I'm sure the overwhelming number of journalists in jail are in jail for offending a despot rather than committing a real crime, but not 100%.

I would actually wager that the biggest problem with this statistic is the meta problem of underreporting of jailed journalists. I would not be surprised if there are dozens or hundreds of journalists in jail in China that we just don't even know about.

Miller deserves censure, but what do you think makes her reporting criminal?

So jail is fine for people you disagree with?

Jail for people who commit genuine crimes. Judith Miller and James O'Keefe are "journalists" who have pushed deliberately false stories leading to negative outcomes.

Are you saying they deserve jail time for that? That the government should be able to jail journalists if they publish "deliberately false stories leading to negative outcomes"? Do you think that might have any sort of ramifications on the freedom of the press?

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