Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of Dan Rather, remember he tried to pass off a forged memo as real and was called out on it by a bunch of bloggers.

And recently Hollywood released a movie that tried to whitewash this.

A lot of the hand-wringing about how no one cares for the truth is mainly the elite crying over the loss of power to define truth for everyone.

View on HN

I would think a key difference is once this was found out, Dan Rather was fired.

There will always be failures of integrity. Our expectation can't be infallible people, but rather the rigor of an organization to care about the failures.

I think its more a case of once other people found out it became untenable to keep Dan Rather on.

However if his lies had not become public they would have been happy to ignore it and move on to the next thing.

Who is "they"? You seem to be implying that CBS was aware of the deception but hid it until its hand was forced by bloggers. Was that the case? Because otherwise they obviously couldn't act on something they didn't know.

I think almost certainly their primary motivation was self-preservation. The media simply lies, fabricates, deflects, obsfucates, cherry picks too much to assume they are acting in good faith.

It's important to add that CBS also retracted this story.

Which doesn't really happen anymore. How are you going to retract Russiagate Pulitzers?

Which Russiagate Pulitzer are you referring to, the 1932 one?

Obviously not.

The only part of Russiagate that wasn't true was no proven collision. The remainder was plenty bad.

I’ve always liked Foucault’s inversion of the old cliche: ‘Power is knowledge’

Reply on news.ycombinator.com