Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

In the wake of all this NSA/GlennGreenwald/Snowden coverage, it's been painfully clear how little the press actually functions as investigative journalists anymore. Any large organization (BBC, all US cable news, NYTimes, anything close to this size) is hopelessly broken. They all seem afraid to speak out against the five eyes' governments.

Seymour Hersh calls out the NYTimes (supposedly the best news source in the US) for "carrying so much water" and publishing the Obama administration's press releases[1]. There is no "real" journalism happening on these issues. The NYTimes is too afraid of losing favor with the Federal government, or alienating their lucrative big-business sponsors, so they refuse to dig into even the weakest of tales the Obama administration gives them.

The same is true for the BBC, as seen in this interview. That woman "journalist" regurgitates the governments talking points.

1) http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seym...

The current problem with the BBC is that the current UK government is looking for a chance to destroy the BBC and there have been several significant scandals around the BBC lately, all of which lead it to be significantly more careful that some might like.

That said, I don't think there are many critisims that the BBC hasn't had leveled at it[1], and my personal belief is that it's unfortunate that the disproportionate and (often) agenda fueled critisisms get as much concideration as they do (in short, fuck the Daily Mail).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC

The job of an interviewer is to attempt to refute the interviewee's position as well as possible. In other words, the interviewer should imagine the protestations of their most antagonistic viewer and voice them. This gives the interviewee the opportunity to defend their position, and, hopefully, to attack the common arguments against them.

While true this phenomenon isn't recent. Herman and Chomsky wrote about it in 1988 and discussed examples going back at least to the 1960s.

Ironically, some of the best journalism in the US is found on tax-payer funded PBS (I'm thinking of Frontline and Bill Moyer).

Have Glenn Greenwald "leak" some information discussed by Frontline or Bill Moyer and a lot of people will suddenly discover it for the first time.

To be fair, most of PBS' funding does not come from the government, but instead by donations from members (via local stations). With that said, I'm glad that there are still grants going to support PBS, as their work is excellent.

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