Nothing groundbreaking here. Ever heard of the Associated Press?
When dealing with large complex issues you need to collaborate to try and provide accurate reporting. It's best to operate under the assumption that most reporting is incomplete or it contains inaccuracies lest you fall for the trap of believing you have a perfectly accurate picture of reality.
In some sense you're right, but I feel like this is also a symptom of how unhealthy news organizations are and will accelerate the trend where local news reporting is anemic and toothless outside of the major media markets.
I have always viewed local news as anemic. As a young child I found it super boring and would always look forward to national and international news. In my hometown, the last time our major news paper ran a good corruption story it got attacked by Carl Lindner and subsequently neutered. Fast forward a few decades and our city was found to be a hotbed of corruption, not by local journalism, but by the FBI. It was unchecked but could have easily been uncovered by decent journalism a lot sooner.
At one point American cities all had multiple newspapers with staff doing real investigative work but those days are getting to be pretty far behind us. Now you've got one guy who covers an entire region and is obviously just writing up press releases.
It is not unheard of for large caches of documents to be vetted by multiple new outlets who coordinate which stories they will cover. For example, the Panama Papers were handled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), who in turn helped coordinate reporters from The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more. https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d...
For the pandora papers, ICIJ coordinated and worked with journalists from 91 outlets, including The Washington Post, Frontline, The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more.
I don't. I smell Human Psychology 101. Groups of humans tend to unify. The US media is already too binary, too lacking in the ability (read: willingness) to communicate the subtlety of issues. Having them work together is only going to amplify that mono-minded approach.
> Parts of the group's embargo fell apart Friday night, and some participating newsrooms posted a batch of articles ahead of the weekend.
That is such a shame, and reflects poorly on those who saw fit to break ranks. However, the overall idea is sound and, I think, positive and encouraging.
I've worked on editorial CMS tools linked to interactive planning modules (open source, and with a stripped-down SaaS variant in the offing) that could be spun up really quickly for such cross-outlet access/collaboration use cases.
The idea of different news organizations coordinating on publications hitting their common hated competitor is a "sound idea"? Don't you want independent and balanced reporting without group think and narrative coordination?
Even the largest news organizations can no longer afford to staff large investigative teams who can research on stories for months and go through tens of thousands of documents to produce few stories.
The collusion is a far lesser problem than getting the story at all, that capacity is diminishing every year.
PR agencies are more than happy to provide the entire story, even the litteral words for the article. All you need to do is slap your name at the top and click publish.
I can understand that viewpoint, but in my opinion that mischaractarises whaat is going on here. This isn't about co-ordinating a zero-hour for publication. The agreed embargo exists so that all partners can benefit equally from the efforts each has contributed. The jointly created information resource is used by each contributor to satisfy aspects/angles of the story that are of relevance/interest to their various audiences. (My reference to "breaking ranks" expresses my distaste at ostensibly professional journalists acting in bad faith to gain a first-mover commercial advantage.)
This is pooling resources to get an essential but hugely expensive, difficult and time-consuming job done (ie inform a public about things affecting them, their society, economy, government etc) than it is about a dog pack targeting an enemy and ripping it to shreds. Even in the Facebook case, there's ample scope and enough evidence to say that lights need to be shone on the activities of something so pervasive, ubiquitous and influential at a global societal scale. Other collaborations, such as Pandora, Panama mentioned in the article, don't even have an entity that one might suggest was a "hated competitor".
Collaboration between news outlets to cover issues too big/expensive to handle is not a new idea; Associated Press in the US and Australian Associated Press in Australia were collaborative efforts between news outlets. AP was created to cover the costs of transmitting information during a war [1]:
The Associated Press was formed in May 1846[7] by five daily newspapers in New York City to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican–American War.[8] The venture was organized by Moses Yale Beach (1800–68), second publisher of The Sun, joined by the New York Herald, the New York Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce, and the New York Evening Express.
And AAP was created to share the costs of cable technology [2]:
Australia was first linked to international telegraph services by a submarine cable that linked Java to Darwin, which was laid by the British-Australian Telegraph Company, and completed on 18 November 1871.[5] The Eastern states were connected through Adelaide on the completion of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line in 1872.[6][7] As a result, the time it took to transmit news from Europe to Australia was dramatically reduced, having previously taken weeks or months to arrive via post on ships, news could now be transmitted in just hours by telegraph.[6][8] Anticipating that the cost of sending messages would be high, the Melbourne newspaper The Argus formed an association with The Sydney Morning Herald, creating an agreement with the Reuters news agency for the transmission of news to Australia.
These associations were formed out of a need to co-operate in order to do a job. It is no different today. News media are no longer awash with money; resources have to be pooled. Even in better times, outlets would divvy up coverage of Olympic and other global sporting events that were too big for one organisation to handle. Also for wars, disasters, elections, coups etc in remote territories.
The ad hoc alliances referred to in the article address newer and more urgent needs. Big stories requiring massive data collection efforts, and then the analysis of millions of data points and documents gathered are truly beyond the capabilities of any individual news outlet, hence co-operation.
Looka like the astroturf brigade is going strong today.
Newsrooms have collaborated on stories for a long time, especially when large amounts of data are involved. It's near impossible to do reporting on these issues (Facebook, Panama/Paradise/Pandora papers, etc) without bringing large amounts of journalists to bear, quickly.
Or, I suppose, you could run with the global conspiracy idea.
i think it’s just an old system. it’s time for it to retire. who really watches major news networks these days anymore? besides anyone in their mid thirties, barely anyone below that demographic. even those in their 40s are kinda meh about the news. i should say broadcast media because news will always be around just not in this current format
Well I mean, let's add up all of the news organisations that have joined together and pit them against their single largest competitor. They're still less than 1/10th the size of their neartest competitor (facebook).
Mainstream/establishment media like to hit at Facebook, probably because it is eating their profits. But it's a curious double standard - Twitter and Google allow similar nasty stuff on their platforms too but are being tolerated. Facebook has been chosen as the public enemy No.1. Maybe it's because Facebook prefers profits and is not obeying establishment narratives?
> it's a curious double standard - Twitter and Google allow similar nasty stuff on their platforms too but are being tolerated
This is a curiously-repeated line. The nastiness isn't the crux of the issue. It's the core of the issue. But what puts Facebook front and centre is its abysmal track record of lying.
Google and twitter direct traffic to them and aren't seen as a competitor by most. You can always tell how untrustworthy a news company is when the knives come out against any target who isn't good for their business interests while they lob softball whomever is in power in exchange for access to information they will never even properly cover!
this is hilarious, they are finally doomed. sorry not sorry. i was a media major, i have nothing against the people themselves but, it’s an old system, it’s connected to old school broadcast tv. there are more voices now, ones of the people. not saying broadcast employees are not people, clearly they are but the system is changing just like cassettes and cds, out with the old in with the new
Actually what's been happening is they've been replaced with the voices of moneyed interests who have the means to do "reporting" at a loss, but hey at least a lot of people got fired.
The topic is already quite sensitive and divisive. Was it really necessary to use the image with a gun covered in american flag? If this is not fanning the flames of divisions, what is? And now they want to collude?
I think you have a point, however, there's a fair amount of folks that think news coverage is just fine. I'm sure where you use the word collude those folks use the word "collaborate".
The way I understand it is this: if you have multiple companies covering the same topic using their own channels, then someone has to try to stick out in the variety. This could be good or this could be bad. There's a lot of ways I can think to interpret that image, but I'd say it's probably planted to agitate liberals. That's a company trying to stick out in a negative way.
If they work together, they can produce common narratives -- even if they're wrong, but especially under certain pervasive ideologies that may be trendy at the time. The whole Covington incident and the outpouring of blind rage was a fairly good example of this very thing. Entire reporting fueled off of a tweet and other companies speculative reports. This tells me there's something deeper wrong, or at least - this is not the place to institute a patch.
Perhaps it's because gun owners love to festoon everything they own with American flags and not because of some nefarious plan to "sow division," a kind of paranoia that sounds to me like a mirror image of the liberals seeing Russians under the bed every night.
Speaking of coordinated reporting, what ever happened to the Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election story? It's been bugging me for a long time.
It just dropped out of existence all of a sudden. For a couple of straight that made up what felt like 50% of everything I heard of coming out of most news corporations and politicians, talkshows, twiter, everywhere. Then suddenly they all pretty much in unison stopped talking about it.
This is going off topic I realize, but it's bugged me. Does nobody care to follow up on this or find out who knew what and when and what went wrong? We were assured many times there was ample evidence of this by many politicians and journalists. So either it's been kept secret and even seemingly hidden from special council Mueller, or else it doesn't exist and it was all a huge coordinated lie. I don't really see a 3rd option, so anything would be a huge story I would have thought. Nobody seems to care though.
EDIT: I have to ask who is down voting this. Am I not supposed to be wondering about this massively weird thing that happened and has apparently been memory holed? Is it verboten to ask the wrong questions?
It would be more accurate to say that nobody who matters cares.
Manufacturing Consent was broadly correct, but now add the surprising power of the Twitter echo chamber, where most American journalists spend their time. That, and Trump got eyeballs.
Why would media come up with such an absurd, 4chan-style conspiracy theory that Trump was a KGB puppet or that somehow Russia brainwashed people into voting for him?
The only thing I can think of is the governing class was shocked and terrified by Trump winning the election and was scrambling for some kind of narrative, and so a random accusation used in the campaign became a Schelling point for "the resistance". It was not the result of cool deliberation, or thoughtful investigation into the facts. It was a cry of panic.
But once it became the thing people rallied around, the news couldn't just backtrack and say "Yeah, this is cringe. Please ignore."
So they had to keep pushing it, or at least pretend to treat it like it was a real story, and it was used as the cloak for impeachment and other types of political battles. This was the time when independent reporters like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi went full WTF mode on US news media, and were responsible for some of the most enjoyable picking apart of this narrative. Much better than the whole propaganda surrounding the invasion of Iraq, which was a war completely prosecuted on word-association - in which "Saddam" was pronounced next to "Al Qaeda" over and over again, in press conference after press conference and news reports ad nauseam until many otherwise honest people started saying "Yeah, they must be colluding together."
But that was nothing compared to hordes of angry New England soccer moms wearing pussy hats marching against KGB-puppets seizing control of their nation. Someone needs to make a movie.
But now there is no need for the "resistance" narrative and I'm sure almost everyone who participated in pushing that hoax turns a bit red when they look back on it. That's why you are not hearing a lot about it, just as people would prefer you not spend a lot of time thinking about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda.
I don't see what you're getting at. This stuff has been written about at great length. Many people in positions of power were caught in criminal acts in that investigation, which to me makes it a very useful and successful investigation. I hope to see much more of the same in the future.
If you don't believe there is more to the story, then you would accept that you were badly mislead by the investigation and the reporting around it though?
If that's all it was, just going after a few lackeys, do you think it would have been better if they had come out right away and said "we have never seen any evidence or suggestion that Trump or his campaign was involved in any wrongdoing surrounding the election or Russian collusion, all we are investigating is Cohen and Manafort's finances and taxes? You don't see any problems with how things were conducted?
> But once it became the thing people rallied around, the news couldn't just backtrack and say "Yeah, this is cringe. Please ignore."
Well firstly, why couldn't they do that? And secondly, why would they do that? If/when they realized it turned out to be wrong, doesn't the story then become who got it wrong and why? Why did no media organization start asking those questions?
But secondly it wasn't just the news corporations involved in this. People like Schiff, sitting on the powerful house intelligence committee, were coming out and saying they had "ample evidence" Trump had colluded with Putin. Of course this is a newsworthy thing to report on, but where is that evidence? Did Adam never have any, or is he now hiding it (maybe he's been blackmailed by Putin too?) Why did Mueller's investigation string out for years only to come out and say they found no evidence to substantiate the claim Trump or campaign conspired with Russians? Why was that never clarified that the investigation did not actually have any evidence yet?
And why haven't any real journalists from actual news organizations seriously been looking into these things?
Just really weird that there was this massive story that was front page news literally for years that pretty much got memory-holed overnight one day.
It was talked about for a long time. People went to prison or got in trouble.
People don’t talk about Trump that much any more either. That’s just how the world works. It moves on very, very quickly. Almost everything gets memory holed. Besides 9/11 and a few other major major things, past stuff doesn’t get talked about much.
Why is no one talking about whatever it was with Hunter Biden any more? Or Hillary’s emails? What about those caravans that were all supposed to be coming countless different times. None of this stuff is discussed any more.
I’m not sure if you’re pulling an elaborate troll job here. The way you worded portions of this post is exactly how certain politicians also speak. The feigned surprise of it being all the rage then dropping out of existence. The questioning of why no one is doing something, etc.
> It was talked about for a long time. People went to prison or got in trouble.
Have you read the Mueller report? It explicitly says that they did not find evidence that Trump or his associates colluded (conspired) with Russia.
There were people who who weren't Trump who went to jail for things that did not include colluding with Russia or attempting to cheat in the election. I can't see how that possibly "settles" the matter about Trump, what happened to Trump being a Russian agent? What happened to him colluding with Putin to hack the election?
> People don’t talk about Trump that much any more either.
Well they do strangely enough, but I'm talking about after the investigation _while Trump was still president_! Not just today. They certainly kept talking about Trump, it's just they memory holed the Russia thing and moved on.
> Why is no one talking about whatever it was with Hunter Biden any more?
Good question I guess, lots of unanswered things or weirdness happens, I'm not saying this is the only thing strange that has ever happened in politics. I'm talking about what I think is a much bigger and stranger recent issue.
> Or Hillary’s emails?
Well that was litigated. The FBI found evidence of violations of classified information handling statutes but decided not to pursue it. That's basically what was alleged by Hillary opponents, wasn't it? Do you not see the difference? They had some evidence of wrongdoing possibly a crime and certainly incompetence. It might have been politicized and exaggerated to some degree, but it wasn't like it came out of thin air. Imagine exact same Hillary email scandal playing out the same way with the only difference being being no emails ever leaked or stored on private servers and nobody seeing any suggestion of that happening. But they all insisted they had seen them. Wouldn't that be weird?
> What about those caravans that were all supposed to be coming countless different times. None of this stuff is discussed any more.
I'm not sure about caravans and stuff.
> I’m not sure if you’re pulling an elaborate troll job here. The way you worded portions of this post is exactly how certain politicians also speak. The feigned surprise of it being all the rage then dropping out of existence. The questioning of why no one is doing something, etc.
Ad hominem. And I'm not saying one or the other or both "sides" don't do it, or there has been no other examples ever of malfeasance or lying in government or news media. If you don't accept this was a massive thing for the country far far bigger and graver than Hillary's mishandling of classified information then fine, but you really can't accept that someone else might think that?
It seems you have no curiosity about where Adam Schiff of the house IC committee has hidden all that ample evidence he said he knew about. If he covered it up, if he was lying from the start, doesn't really matter to you. Anybody who asks about it must be a trolle who "sounds exactly like certain politicians"?! That's just fine for you either way you don't want to know what the deal was and you get upset by other people asking about it. Strange attitude.
For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question ofjoint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term“collusion.” The Officeconsidered in particular whethercontacts between Trump Campaign officials andRussia-linked individuals could trigger liability for the crimeof conspiracy—either under statutes that have their own conspiracy language (e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 1349, 1951(a)), or under the general conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. § 371). The investigation did not establishthat the contacts describedin VolumeI, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commitany substantive violation of federal criminal law—including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below. The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either under a specific statute or under Section 371’s offenses clause.
The Office also did not charge any campaign official or associate with a conspiracy under Section 371’s defraud clause. That clause criminalizes participating in an agreement to obstruct a lawful function of the U.S. government or its agencies through deceitful or dishonest means. See Dennis v. United States, 384 U.S. 855, 861 (1966); Hammerschmidt v. United States, 265 U.S. 182, 188 (1924); see also United States v. Concord Mgmt. & Consulting LLC, 347 F. Supp. 3d 38, 46 (D.D.C. 2018). The investigation did not establish any agreement among Campaign officials—or between such officials and Russia-linked individuals—to interfere with or obstruct a lawful function of agovernment agency during the campaign or transition period. And, as discussed in VolumeI, Section V.A, supra, the investigation did not identify evidence thatanyCampaignofficial or associate knowingly and intentionally participated in the conspiracy to defraud that the Office charged, namely, the active-measures conspiracy described in Volume I, Section II, supra. Accordingly, the Office did not charge anyCampaign associate or other U.S. person with conspiracy to defraud the United States based onthe Russia-related contacts described in SectionIV above.
p. 183
he investigation did not, however, yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated withthe TrumpCampaign acted as an agentofa foreign principal within themeaning of FARA or, in terms of Section 951, subject to the direction or control of the governmentof Russia, or any official thereof. In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government—or atits direction,control, or request—during the relevant time period.
-- end copy
Can you quote and reference the exact part of the document where they claim to have found evidence that Trump or campaign associates conspired with Russia?
> The rest of the parent rehashes tired old Trump propaganda. Let's move on.
No it doesn't, and no I won't. If you can't cope with discussing it or people asking questions, you can just move on. It's not propaganda to ask why Adam Schiff did not provide Mueller with any of that ample evidence he allegedly saw as an intelligence committee member. Nobody has asked that. Nobody has asked why Schiff either covered it up or lied about it. Was Schiff himself mislead by intelligence agencies? That's such a huge newsworthy story, it's not old or tired. Asking questions is not propaganda, you are the one engaging in propaganda slinging around your unsubstantiated claims and personal attacks.
Well I don't know I don't think it's dead at all, it's massively interesting. It's not just hack entertainers masquerading as journalists selling tabloid conspiracy theories here, it was an entire political party (maybe both parties) plus the state security and surveillance apparatus who were all saying there was evidence here and going to secret courts and all this crazy stuff. Where is it? The Mueller report says plain as day they did not find evidence to substantiate claims that Trump or his campaign associates colluded (conspired) in any way with Russia.
1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, making false statements to the FBI. He got a 14-day sentence.
2) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted on a total of 25 different counts by Mueller’s team, related mainly to his past work for Ukrainian politicians and his finances.
3) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort’s longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges to Manafort.
4) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
36) Michael Cohen: In August 2018, Trump’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to 8 counts — tax and bank charges, related to his finances and taxi business, and campaign finance violations
37) Roger Stone: In January 2019, Mueller indicted longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone on 7 counts. He accused Stone of lying to the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks during the campaign, and tampering with a witness who could have debunked his story.
It wasn't all that many people at all really and none of the ones vaguely related to Trump had anything to do with colluding with Putin or hacking the election. Where was the evidence that kicked all this off? Where was the evidence that kept it all going for nearly 3 years? Even right after the Mueller report was released nobody retracted anything and everybody falsely claimed that it did not exonerate Trump, (which it pretty clearly did of the main thrust of the investigation and media circus that had gone on which was of Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election, for which Mueller stated clearly they found no substantial evidence for). Then everybody just kind of forgot about it and moved on. None of that strikes you as slightly odd? All seems above board, no unanswered questions left. Not concerned that maybe Putin got to Mueller and Schiff as well?
Doesn't strike you as even slightly strange that all the news corporations who were banging the "ample evidence" that Trump colluded with Putin drum for years were suddenly perfectly fine with the Mueller report which said that no such evidence had ever been found? Not strange that any of these trusted journalists and truth seekers were placated by that and all in unison decided that was the end of the story, nothing more to investigate?
Absolutely none of these were found guilty of "Russian collusion", "hacking the election", or any such thing. Especially notable is Ukraine bribery, which is something both parties are guilty of, but part of the reason why you do not see cries that Ukraine hacked the election is that we launched a coup there and installed an extremely corrupt government (one that pays lots of bribes to US elites). That government is an enemy of Russia, so I don't see how these (legitimate) concerns about Ukrainian payoffs have much bearing on the Putin-puppet thesis. I guess they are both slavic nations, so hey, that should be good enough for low information voters.
The rest were all charged for things like making false statements, tax evasion, etc. Given the general witchunts and prosecutorial abuse of that era, you'd think they'd be able to convict just one person for something related to "hacking the election" or "colluding" with Russians.
Weird comparison given the events aren’t all that similar. We know COVID transmission risk is much higher when people are indoors. The Capitol riot involved large numbers of people being indoors, the BLM protests mostly did not.
The only reason to compare coverage of the BLM marches and Capitol riot is, ironically, in service of propaganda that seeks to portray both events two sides of the same coin. Why not compare the Capitol riot and, I dunno, coverage of an indoor sport event? It would be a more accurate comparison but it wouldn’t serve a partisan political purpose, so it’s not done.
And “release at the same time” is just kind of funny as accusations go: an event occurred. Multiple news organisations wrote it about it shortly afterwards? Some even publishing stories on the same day? How very, very suspicious.
Both the Capitol protest and antifa/BLM riots involved Democrat politicians shirking their sworn duty to provide security and policing.
The 2 people in charge of adding Capitol policing were the House Manager and Nancy Pelosi. Note Pelosi's Jan. 6 committee doesn't want to talk about that - she cherry-picked Republian members who wouldn't demand that.
Trump offered the National Guard to the Democrat cities that were burned, but mayors refused.
The antifa/BLM riots stopped just before the Presidential election, since the Democratic Party knew it was hurting their support.
You're not too bright, so I'll spell it out for you:
1) Pelosi recently demanded on video that the MSM "sell the budget" - ie. demanding coordination from the media.
2) cnn.com/WaPo has retracted most of their stories about Trump. msnbc carried the same stories, but I haven't seen any retractions. How do you print the same false stories across 3 outlets without a coordinated media narrative?
If you look closely, the point is that media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda. When you collect the headlines and list them side by side, the implicitly (or explicitly?) coordinated propaganda becomes obvious.
> If you look closely, the point is that media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda.
One is more likely to read political/cultural agendas into everything they can when one primarily consumes media that compulsively frames everything it doesn't like in political/cultural terms.
> One is more likely to read political/cultural agendas into everything they can when one primarily consumes media that compulsively frames everything it doesn't like in political/cultural terms.
Well, when one sees how much evidence there is that the corporate press has an agenda[1], one tends to believe that the corporate press has an agenda[2].
The medical arguments[3] given for why January 6th was a greater COVID risk than the BLM protests are quite weak. Each one of the arguments either relies on contested science (asymptomatic spread) or exaggeration of the facts (ignoring that the majority of the January 6th protesters remained outside). This is not the work of people who are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of the truth.
No, it really is as simple as "media outlets regularly contradict themselves in pursuit of a consistent political agenda." It's blatantly obvious, and not even questionable. However, it's also not new.
This narrative presents “the media” as one collective group. People have different opinions even within the same program so of course they’ll have different points of view across an organization. The people working there are also human, bias and all.
I'm looking closely and not seeing the contradiction. I see a bunch of stuff about corona virus and super-spread events occurring when people aren't masked and show up even if they're sick. Which is exactly what I would expect.
You seem to be implying that any gathering has the exact same odds of being a super-spread event regardless of personal responsibility and precautions. That's not how this works...
Neither the peacful capitol protest or the thousand days of violent riots in Portland lead to significant upticks in corona virus spreading, but some spreading did happen.
And to hammer the point home, the spin is consistently and ubiquitously slanted against anything right leaning. Its way past confirmation bias, and yeah, one could argue that the right has its own media wing, except right leaning sources have unilaterally been defined as "unreliable" and are collusively excluded from all manner of popular information sources - stackexchange, wikipedia, default news/politics subreddits...
Reality's supposed liberal bias is an illusion, concocted by a decentralized network of activists who have quietly infiltrated all of our institutions and suppress right leaning opinions with what amounts to bullying. Don't believe me? Try editing any remotely political article on wikipedia with anything but the "approved" narrative carried by lefwting sources with a suspicious consistency.
There is more than enough uncertainty in the reporting of contemporary events for news agencies to disagree while remaining factual; yet, suspiciously, the set of "reliable" sources are nearly always consistent in their interpretation of events and the language they choose to slyly inject political bias into their articles.
Objective journalism is dead, and was long ago replaced by increasingly naked political activism. Sure, it's impossible to be truly objective, but that's not an excuse to constantly manufacture one sided propaganda. Apparently people are so hung up on diversity of skin color/gender/sexuality that they've lost sight of the entire point, diversity of thought.
Could you elucidate your point a bit more without the clickbaity link?
Tim Pool is also a cherry-picker and propagandist in his own right. He creates a cult following by sowing distrust in the legacy media while pushing alt-media as a beacon of truth.
There are tons of fair and valid criticisms to be made of existing media, but this fails to hit the mark.
I don't know - I saw most BLM protestors wearing masks. There was a distinct lack of them at the capitol ... that's what happens when a sensible public health measure becomes politicised I guess.
On the contrary, I read / listen to news constantly.
The issue I take, is that there's actually very very little legitimate news being promoted. Blogs and detailed substack's have way WAY more interesting content than the New York Times on most topics.
The problem is group think, their articles / investigations tend to be just an opinion piece masked in "research". That's not to say it's all that way, but it often is.
Collaborations are occurring because they quite literally have to share the story to keep the narrative(s) the same. There's only so many stories there allowed to comment on and only so many views they can get for their content. Collaborations are necessary to ensure revenue sharing.
>The issue I take, is that there's actually very very little legitimate news being promoted. Blogs and detailed substack's have way WAY more interesting content than the New York Times on most topics.
So you criticize them based on the idea of "legitimate news," but the standard you use for yourself is "interesting content." These are not the same thing and don't even necessarily overlap. There is also interesting illegitimate news and boring legitmate news, but these related forms of content don't exist in your argument because you're comparing the apples of your insides to the oranges of journalism's outsides.
>because they quite literally have to share the story to keep the narrative(s) the same
This isn't very charitable. What do you think is driving them to "keep the narratives the same?" What is the value of it?
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. Seriously not cool.
I hate to ban an account that has been this active and contributed quite a few good posts as well, but the damage outweighs the benefits when an account is this aggressive.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
When dealing with large complex issues you need to collaborate to try and provide accurate reporting. It's best to operate under the assumption that most reporting is incomplete or it contains inaccuracies lest you fall for the trap of believing you have a perfectly accurate picture of reality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press
For the pandora papers, ICIJ coordinated and worked with journalists from 91 outlets, including The Washington Post, Frontline, The Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers#Participating_m...
There's also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
That is such a shame, and reflects poorly on those who saw fit to break ranks. However, the overall idea is sound and, I think, positive and encouraging.
I've worked on editorial CMS tools linked to interactive planning modules (open source, and with a stripped-down SaaS variant in the offing) that could be spun up really quickly for such cross-outlet access/collaboration use cases.
The collusion is a far lesser problem than getting the story at all, that capacity is diminishing every year.
That depends on whether you're the pawn or the billionaire media owner
This is pooling resources to get an essential but hugely expensive, difficult and time-consuming job done (ie inform a public about things affecting them, their society, economy, government etc) than it is about a dog pack targeting an enemy and ripping it to shreds. Even in the Facebook case, there's ample scope and enough evidence to say that lights need to be shone on the activities of something so pervasive, ubiquitous and influential at a global societal scale. Other collaborations, such as Pandora, Panama mentioned in the article, don't even have an entity that one might suggest was a "hated competitor".
Collaboration between news outlets to cover issues too big/expensive to handle is not a new idea; Associated Press in the US and Australian Associated Press in Australia were collaborative efforts between news outlets. AP was created to cover the costs of transmitting information during a war [1]:
The Associated Press was formed in May 1846[7] by five daily newspapers in New York City to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican–American War.[8] The venture was organized by Moses Yale Beach (1800–68), second publisher of The Sun, joined by the New York Herald, the New York Courier and Enquirer, The Journal of Commerce, and the New York Evening Express.
And AAP was created to share the costs of cable technology [2]:
Australia was first linked to international telegraph services by a submarine cable that linked Java to Darwin, which was laid by the British-Australian Telegraph Company, and completed on 18 November 1871.[5] The Eastern states were connected through Adelaide on the completion of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line in 1872.[6][7] As a result, the time it took to transmit news from Europe to Australia was dramatically reduced, having previously taken weeks or months to arrive via post on ships, news could now be transmitted in just hours by telegraph.[6][8] Anticipating that the cost of sending messages would be high, the Melbourne newspaper The Argus formed an association with The Sydney Morning Herald, creating an agreement with the Reuters news agency for the transmission of news to Australia.
These associations were formed out of a need to co-operate in order to do a job. It is no different today. News media are no longer awash with money; resources have to be pooled. Even in better times, outlets would divvy up coverage of Olympic and other global sporting events that were too big for one organisation to handle. Also for wars, disasters, elections, coups etc in remote territories.
The ad hoc alliances referred to in the article address newer and more urgent needs. Big stories requiring massive data collection efforts, and then the analysis of millions of data points and documents gathered are truly beyond the capabilities of any individual news outlet, hence co-operation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Associated_Press
Newsrooms have collaborated on stories for a long time, especially when large amounts of data are involved. It's near impossible to do reporting on these issues (Facebook, Panama/Paradise/Pandora papers, etc) without bringing large amounts of journalists to bear, quickly.
Or, I suppose, you could run with the global conspiracy idea.
This is a curiously-repeated line. The nastiness isn't the crux of the issue. It's the core of the issue. But what puts Facebook front and centre is its abysmal track record of lying.
The topic is already quite sensitive and divisive. Was it really necessary to use the image with a gun covered in american flag? If this is not fanning the flames of divisions, what is? And now they want to collude?
The way I understand it is this: if you have multiple companies covering the same topic using their own channels, then someone has to try to stick out in the variety. This could be good or this could be bad. There's a lot of ways I can think to interpret that image, but I'd say it's probably planted to agitate liberals. That's a company trying to stick out in a negative way.
If they work together, they can produce common narratives -- even if they're wrong, but especially under certain pervasive ideologies that may be trendy at the time. The whole Covington incident and the outpouring of blind rage was a fairly good example of this very thing. Entire reporting fueled off of a tweet and other companies speculative reports. This tells me there's something deeper wrong, or at least - this is not the place to institute a patch.
For those that need an update on Covington: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memoria...
It just dropped out of existence all of a sudden. For a couple of straight that made up what felt like 50% of everything I heard of coming out of most news corporations and politicians, talkshows, twiter, everywhere. Then suddenly they all pretty much in unison stopped talking about it.
This is going off topic I realize, but it's bugged me. Does nobody care to follow up on this or find out who knew what and when and what went wrong? We were assured many times there was ample evidence of this by many politicians and journalists. So either it's been kept secret and even seemingly hidden from special council Mueller, or else it doesn't exist and it was all a huge coordinated lie. I don't really see a 3rd option, so anything would be a huge story I would have thought. Nobody seems to care though.
EDIT: I have to ask who is down voting this. Am I not supposed to be wondering about this massively weird thing that happened and has apparently been memory holed? Is it verboten to ask the wrong questions?
It would be more accurate to say that nobody who matters cares.
Manufacturing Consent was broadly correct, but now add the surprising power of the Twitter echo chamber, where most American journalists spend their time. That, and Trump got eyeballs.
The only thing I can think of is the governing class was shocked and terrified by Trump winning the election and was scrambling for some kind of narrative, and so a random accusation used in the campaign became a Schelling point for "the resistance". It was not the result of cool deliberation, or thoughtful investigation into the facts. It was a cry of panic.
But once it became the thing people rallied around, the news couldn't just backtrack and say "Yeah, this is cringe. Please ignore."
So they had to keep pushing it, or at least pretend to treat it like it was a real story, and it was used as the cloak for impeachment and other types of political battles. This was the time when independent reporters like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi went full WTF mode on US news media, and were responsible for some of the most enjoyable picking apart of this narrative. Much better than the whole propaganda surrounding the invasion of Iraq, which was a war completely prosecuted on word-association - in which "Saddam" was pronounced next to "Al Qaeda" over and over again, in press conference after press conference and news reports ad nauseam until many otherwise honest people started saying "Yeah, they must be colluding together."
But that was nothing compared to hordes of angry New England soccer moms wearing pussy hats marching against KGB-puppets seizing control of their nation. Someone needs to make a movie.
But now there is no need for the "resistance" narrative and I'm sure almost everyone who participated in pushing that hoax turns a bit red when they look back on it. That's why you are not hearing a lot about it, just as people would prefer you not spend a lot of time thinking about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda.
If that's all it was, just going after a few lackeys, do you think it would have been better if they had come out right away and said "we have never seen any evidence or suggestion that Trump or his campaign was involved in any wrongdoing surrounding the election or Russian collusion, all we are investigating is Cohen and Manafort's finances and taxes? You don't see any problems with how things were conducted?
Well firstly, why couldn't they do that? And secondly, why would they do that? If/when they realized it turned out to be wrong, doesn't the story then become who got it wrong and why? Why did no media organization start asking those questions?
But secondly it wasn't just the news corporations involved in this. People like Schiff, sitting on the powerful house intelligence committee, were coming out and saying they had "ample evidence" Trump had colluded with Putin. Of course this is a newsworthy thing to report on, but where is that evidence? Did Adam never have any, or is he now hiding it (maybe he's been blackmailed by Putin too?) Why did Mueller's investigation string out for years only to come out and say they found no evidence to substantiate the claim Trump or campaign conspired with Russians? Why was that never clarified that the investigation did not actually have any evidence yet?
And why haven't any real journalists from actual news organizations seriously been looking into these things?
Just really weird that there was this massive story that was front page news literally for years that pretty much got memory-holed overnight one day.
If it bleeds, it leads was 20th century. Now what we have is fearmongering and outrage soundbite peddlers.
People don’t talk about Trump that much any more either. That’s just how the world works. It moves on very, very quickly. Almost everything gets memory holed. Besides 9/11 and a few other major major things, past stuff doesn’t get talked about much.
Why is no one talking about whatever it was with Hunter Biden any more? Or Hillary’s emails? What about those caravans that were all supposed to be coming countless different times. None of this stuff is discussed any more.
I’m not sure if you’re pulling an elaborate troll job here. The way you worded portions of this post is exactly how certain politicians also speak. The feigned surprise of it being all the rage then dropping out of existence. The questioning of why no one is doing something, etc.
Have you read the Mueller report? It explicitly says that they did not find evidence that Trump or his associates colluded (conspired) with Russia.
There were people who who weren't Trump who went to jail for things that did not include colluding with Russia or attempting to cheat in the election. I can't see how that possibly "settles" the matter about Trump, what happened to Trump being a Russian agent? What happened to him colluding with Putin to hack the election?
> People don’t talk about Trump that much any more either.
Well they do strangely enough, but I'm talking about after the investigation _while Trump was still president_! Not just today. They certainly kept talking about Trump, it's just they memory holed the Russia thing and moved on.
> Why is no one talking about whatever it was with Hunter Biden any more?
Good question I guess, lots of unanswered things or weirdness happens, I'm not saying this is the only thing strange that has ever happened in politics. I'm talking about what I think is a much bigger and stranger recent issue.
> Or Hillary’s emails?
Well that was litigated. The FBI found evidence of violations of classified information handling statutes but decided not to pursue it. That's basically what was alleged by Hillary opponents, wasn't it? Do you not see the difference? They had some evidence of wrongdoing possibly a crime and certainly incompetence. It might have been politicized and exaggerated to some degree, but it wasn't like it came out of thin air. Imagine exact same Hillary email scandal playing out the same way with the only difference being being no emails ever leaked or stored on private servers and nobody seeing any suggestion of that happening. But they all insisted they had seen them. Wouldn't that be weird?
> What about those caravans that were all supposed to be coming countless different times. None of this stuff is discussed any more.
I'm not sure about caravans and stuff.
> I’m not sure if you’re pulling an elaborate troll job here. The way you worded portions of this post is exactly how certain politicians also speak. The feigned surprise of it being all the rage then dropping out of existence. The questioning of why no one is doing something, etc.
Ad hominem. And I'm not saying one or the other or both "sides" don't do it, or there has been no other examples ever of malfeasance or lying in government or news media. If you don't accept this was a massive thing for the country far far bigger and graver than Hillary's mishandling of classified information then fine, but you really can't accept that someone else might think that?
It seems you have no curiosity about where Adam Schiff of the house IC committee has hidden all that ample evidence he said he knew about. If he covered it up, if he was lying from the start, doesn't really matter to you. Anybody who asks about it must be a trolle who "sounds exactly like certain politicians"?! That's just fine for you either way you don't want to know what the deal was and you get upset by other people asking about it. Strange attitude.
That's not what the report says. I encourage anyone interested to read it or a summary from a credible source.
The rest of the parent rehashes tired old Trump propaganda. Let's move on.
Yes it is. Is this a credible enough source for you?
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
Verbatim, p. 181
For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question ofjoint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term“collusion.” The Officeconsidered in particular whethercontacts between Trump Campaign officials andRussia-linked individuals could trigger liability for the crimeof conspiracy—either under statutes that have their own conspiracy language (e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 1349, 1951(a)), or under the general conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. § 371). The investigation did not establishthat the contacts describedin VolumeI, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commitany substantive violation of federal criminal law—including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below. The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either under a specific statute or under Section 371’s offenses clause.
The Office also did not charge any campaign official or associate with a conspiracy under Section 371’s defraud clause. That clause criminalizes participating in an agreement to obstruct a lawful function of the U.S. government or its agencies through deceitful or dishonest means. See Dennis v. United States, 384 U.S. 855, 861 (1966); Hammerschmidt v. United States, 265 U.S. 182, 188 (1924); see also United States v. Concord Mgmt. & Consulting LLC, 347 F. Supp. 3d 38, 46 (D.D.C. 2018). The investigation did not establish any agreement among Campaign officials—or between such officials and Russia-linked individuals—to interfere with or obstruct a lawful function of agovernment agency during the campaign or transition period. And, as discussed in VolumeI, Section V.A, supra, the investigation did not identify evidence thatanyCampaignofficial or associate knowingly and intentionally participated in the conspiracy to defraud that the Office charged, namely, the active-measures conspiracy described in Volume I, Section II, supra. Accordingly, the Office did not charge anyCampaign associate or other U.S. person with conspiracy to defraud the United States based onthe Russia-related contacts described in SectionIV above.
p. 183
he investigation did not, however, yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated withthe TrumpCampaign acted as an agentofa foreign principal within themeaning of FARA or, in terms of Section 951, subject to the direction or control of the governmentof Russia, or any official thereof. In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government—or atits direction,control, or request—during the relevant time period.
-- end copy
Can you quote and reference the exact part of the document where they claim to have found evidence that Trump or campaign associates conspired with Russia?
> The rest of the parent rehashes tired old Trump propaganda. Let's move on.
No it doesn't, and no I won't. If you can't cope with discussing it or people asking questions, you can just move on. It's not propaganda to ask why Adam Schiff did not provide Mueller with any of that ample evidence he allegedly saw as an intelligence committee member. Nobody has asked that. Nobody has asked why Schiff either covered it up or lied about it. Was Schiff himself mislead by intelligence agencies? That's such a huge newsworthy story, it's not old or tired. Asking questions is not propaganda, you are the one engaging in propaganda slinging around your unsubstantiated claims and personal attacks.
Or people were gullible, keen to sell an anti-Trump story, overestimated the chances of something being true, were embarrassed about it later...?
I think that story is mostly dead but Matt Taibbi will probably tell you about it, in between ranting.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m...
1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, making false statements to the FBI. He got a 14-day sentence.
2) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted on a total of 25 different counts by Mueller’s team, related mainly to his past work for Ukrainian politicians and his finances.
3) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort’s longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges to Manafort.
4) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
36) Michael Cohen: In August 2018, Trump’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to 8 counts — tax and bank charges, related to his finances and taxi business, and campaign finance violations
37) Roger Stone: In January 2019, Mueller indicted longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone on 7 counts. He accused Stone of lying to the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks during the campaign, and tampering with a witness who could have debunked his story.
It wasn't all that many people at all really and none of the ones vaguely related to Trump had anything to do with colluding with Putin or hacking the election. Where was the evidence that kicked all this off? Where was the evidence that kept it all going for nearly 3 years? Even right after the Mueller report was released nobody retracted anything and everybody falsely claimed that it did not exonerate Trump, (which it pretty clearly did of the main thrust of the investigation and media circus that had gone on which was of Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election, for which Mueller stated clearly they found no substantial evidence for). Then everybody just kind of forgot about it and moved on. None of that strikes you as slightly odd? All seems above board, no unanswered questions left. Not concerned that maybe Putin got to Mueller and Schiff as well?
Doesn't strike you as even slightly strange that all the news corporations who were banging the "ample evidence" that Trump colluded with Putin drum for years were suddenly perfectly fine with the Mueller report which said that no such evidence had ever been found? Not strange that any of these trusted journalists and truth seekers were placated by that and all in unison decided that was the end of the story, nothing more to investigate?
The rest were all charged for things like making false statements, tax evasion, etc. Given the general witchunts and prosecutorial abuse of that era, you'd think they'd be able to convict just one person for something related to "hacking the election" or "colluding" with Russians.
Trump did everyone the favor of opening their eyes to how fake the mass media is.
https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1420050776785883136/photo...
???
The only reason to compare coverage of the BLM marches and Capitol riot is, ironically, in service of propaganda that seeks to portray both events two sides of the same coin. Why not compare the Capitol riot and, I dunno, coverage of an indoor sport event? It would be a more accurate comparison but it wouldn’t serve a partisan political purpose, so it’s not done.
And “release at the same time” is just kind of funny as accusations go: an event occurred. Multiple news organisations wrote it about it shortly afterwards? Some even publishing stories on the same day? How very, very suspicious.
The 2 people in charge of adding Capitol policing were the House Manager and Nancy Pelosi. Note Pelosi's Jan. 6 committee doesn't want to talk about that - she cherry-picked Republian members who wouldn't demand that.
Trump offered the National Guard to the Democrat cities that were burned, but mayors refused.
The antifa/BLM riots stopped just before the Presidential election, since the Democratic Party knew it was hurting their support.
1) Pelosi recently demanded on video that the MSM "sell the budget" - ie. demanding coordination from the media.
2) cnn.com/WaPo has retracted most of their stories about Trump. msnbc carried the same stories, but I haven't seen any retractions. How do you print the same false stories across 3 outlets without a coordinated media narrative?
One is more likely to read political/cultural agendas into everything they can when one primarily consumes media that compulsively frames everything it doesn't like in political/cultural terms.
Well, when one sees how much evidence there is that the corporate press has an agenda[1], one tends to believe that the corporate press has an agenda[2].
The medical arguments[3] given for why January 6th was a greater COVID risk than the BLM protests are quite weak. Each one of the arguments either relies on contested science (asymptomatic spread) or exaggeration of the facts (ignoring that the majority of the January 6th protesters remained outside). This is not the work of people who are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of the truth.
[1]https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1348352300746731523?...
[2]https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1361011464513880065
[3]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/was-the-capitol-siege-a-co...
Is it objectively true?
You seem to be implying that any gathering has the exact same odds of being a super-spread event regardless of personal responsibility and precautions. That's not how this works...
Neither the peacful capitol protest or the thousand days of violent riots in Portland lead to significant upticks in corona virus spreading, but some spreading did happen.
Reality's supposed liberal bias is an illusion, concocted by a decentralized network of activists who have quietly infiltrated all of our institutions and suppress right leaning opinions with what amounts to bullying. Don't believe me? Try editing any remotely political article on wikipedia with anything but the "approved" narrative carried by lefwting sources with a suspicious consistency.
There is more than enough uncertainty in the reporting of contemporary events for news agencies to disagree while remaining factual; yet, suspiciously, the set of "reliable" sources are nearly always consistent in their interpretation of events and the language they choose to slyly inject political bias into their articles.
Objective journalism is dead, and was long ago replaced by increasingly naked political activism. Sure, it's impossible to be truly objective, but that's not an excuse to constantly manufacture one sided propaganda. Apparently people are so hung up on diversity of skin color/gender/sexuality that they've lost sight of the entire point, diversity of thought.
Could you elucidate your point a bit more without the clickbaity link?
Tim Pool is also a cherry-picker and propagandist in his own right. He creates a cult following by sowing distrust in the legacy media while pushing alt-media as a beacon of truth.
There are tons of fair and valid criticisms to be made of existing media, but this fails to hit the mark.
The issue I take, is that there's actually very very little legitimate news being promoted. Blogs and detailed substack's have way WAY more interesting content than the New York Times on most topics.
The problem is group think, their articles / investigations tend to be just an opinion piece masked in "research". That's not to say it's all that way, but it often is.
Collaborations are occurring because they quite literally have to share the story to keep the narrative(s) the same. There's only so many stories there allowed to comment on and only so many views they can get for their content. Collaborations are necessary to ensure revenue sharing.
So you criticize them based on the idea of "legitimate news," but the standard you use for yourself is "interesting content." These are not the same thing and don't even necessarily overlap. There is also interesting illegitimate news and boring legitmate news, but these related forms of content don't exist in your argument because you're comparing the apples of your insides to the oranges of journalism's outsides.
>because they quite literally have to share the story to keep the narrative(s) the same
This isn't very charitable. What do you think is driving them to "keep the narratives the same?" What is the value of it?
I hate to ban an account that has been this active and contributed quite a few good posts as well, but the damage outweighs the benefits when an account is this aggressive.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.