It's more a question about the visibility of information, and HN increases visibility. HN originating content is irrelevant.
News about Assange is niche, that niche is here. Lack of mainstream reporting might not be a vast conspiracy. So I would say that this news has been surfaced appropriately to the correct audience, and not actually suppressed.
If you want to be pedantic, HN also does not fact check its articles or comments. Nothing else supports HN being a media outlet or rebut this as a media blackout.
There have been 20 articles in print and on the web mentioning Assange in the NY Times since 2021 began, avidly covering the details of his trial and extradition, but now nothing. If their search features are any indication, CNN doesn't believe you should seek out news as much as passively accept it-same pattern and then no recent mention.
Reuters' latest article from 25 June in a break from the style of their previous coverage leaves out mention of the trial details entirely in favor of a human element story petitioning Biden free Assange "to show the US has changed". This narrative does little to exculpate Assange or share why the trial may be over for good while preempting any credit for what follows to the mercy and wisdom of Biden. Whether Biden ignores or denies, well, them's the laws, you know.
If the whole rest of the town doesn't have power and you refuse to call it a blackout because you can see some people have working generators, you don't understand what a blackout is.
Your literal blackout analogy falls apart pretty quickly when you consider that this story lives in the attention economy, a seething ocean of information all vying for our eyeballs. It's more like there's a town (with power) and somewhere there a light that's blue and nobody can see it from the air, and you think everyone in an airplane should be able to see it. Maybe there is a vast conspiracy, but just because this one story didn't show up in in the mainstream news, reputable or otherwise, doesn't mean there's a conspiracy against blue lights.
Have you ever seen any original reporting here?
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