There's also a lot of dodgy terminology too, like Trump "putting children in cages" which is a "right-style" (think of the children) provocation not dissimilar to anti-Semitic or witch-hunting misrepresentations.
But sure, keep supporting the censors so we keep getting more divided. I don't mind, the right wing is getting most of generation z, and more and more people see the lies as what they are by MSM - FAKE NEWS!
> Remember how they spent years saying Trump was connected to Russia even though that was later proven to be false?
No, the media spent years reporting about suspicious about his connections to Russia. That's an entirely different thing, and they were entirely right to do that.
> Remember how they lied about the Covington Catholic incident?
No, because that's pretty inaccurate and tendentious framing. I highly doubt they "lied." IIRC, the media, in general, reported on social media outrage which was actually happening and then later reporting corrected the misconceptions that were fueling that outrage.
They probably should not have covered the outrage itself until the later reporting was done, but that's a far cry from "lying."
> Remember how they said BLM protests were "mostly peaceful" as protesters burned down buildings causing over $2 billion in damage?
So? Both those things can be true at the same time.
> Why aren’t Democrats paying people to do this kind of thing with the truth? No idea. None. They can do it, just like that other company crushed us, but they haven’t learned.
As a casual observer, it certainly does seem like the political right in America has consistently been more willing and eager to bend the rules of the information game - up to and including willfully propagating falsehoods. This has at a minimum been repeatedly evidenced over the last 20 years, first in cable news and now online.
Is the solution - as the OP implies - for the left / center left to adopt the same dirty tactics as their counterparts? Is there any alternative? I'm sure every rational individual (a group in which I hope to include myself), would really just prefer if everyone started behaving like adults and returned to discussing issues in what at least looks like good faith. Is that at this point a pipe dream?
> even if one source is factual and the Daily Stormer is…
I think it's disingenuous to use the Daily Stormer here as an example. I have definitely come across publications on the left that play loose with the facts or have unlikely explanations for directly observable facts.
It would be more fair to use something like PragerU:
>>In my observation these fact checking organisations usually fall down on the left's side of things, so either it's predominantly the right that lies, or the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad behaviour on the left, or my perception is incorrect.
> How do you know who is actually lying if half the information is removed from the sources that you usually read?
As far as I know, they're not broadly removing "half the information" (which I'm taking to refer to conservative viewpoints), but disinformation related to QAnon, voting, covid, etc.
Disinformation is not something that will help anyone make better judgements.
[2] A lie doesn't have to preposterous, e.g. "the Pope is routing for Trump!". Distorting reality, not revealing facts, etc. are all lies in the sense that the author in order to drive a point, actively distorts/hides/ignores facts. We're not talking regular people, we're talking professional journalists who are taught how to cover and approach a subject to minimise distortion effects.
That's one of numerous examples of selective editing by CNN.
> The Left doesn't lie and manipulate on an industrial scale like this. The Left sometimes gets facts wrong, but there is no industrial fake-news network supporting left-leaning ideas. (And no - the mainstream media are not that network. The MSM are primarily pro-corporate and pro-establishment, not left-leaning.)
Even if that is true now (and it's a very dubious claim), you don't have to go back very far in history to see the left bending over backwards to justify the socialist utopia Stalin was building in the USSR.
If you believe in truth, if you believe in honesty, stop making excuses when the liars are on your side. Stop using the no true Scotsman fallacy to excuse liars. Dishonesty is used by human beings of all classes and political stripes. It always has and it always will be.
If you catch them just deleting a full article, you'll be a hero for the alt-right. They've been complaining about the Iraq war coverage for the last 18 years, and at some point even they start finding it a little odd that there are no more recent example of major errors for something supposedly evil incarnate.
More or less the same applies to other reputable sources.
I believe part of the misunderstanding here is that your accusation, if true, would be far more serious than you believe it to be. Extraordinary claims require evidence of the same magnitude. But because you consider journalists to be routinely lying, you don't see the need for any evidence.
I consider it reasonable to expect people mentioning such a scandal, which they would have read about in the last week or so, to remember one or two details from the story, such as the outlet it supposedly ran in, or the place where it happened.
With the name or a state or hospital, plus maybe the publisher, it should be easy to find someone on twitter or reddit mentioning it, or other outlets picking up on the story (and its eventual fate).
Instead, this thread is now four-deep with meta discussion, but nobody has found a link which would easily settle the matter.
> but I don't understand how anyone can claim the media is not reporting on something, and then link directly to media about that thing
Well let's look at once recent example that I mentioned.
[0] CNN completely discredited the Hunter Biden story when it was released. They called it 'Russian Disinformation' and in their articles repeatedly used charged language such as "dubious" to refer to the information presented.
This was done on an ongoing basis by the majority of news organizations at the time. EDIT - [3] And supported by social media giants (Famously Twitter, but Google/Youtube did the same thing)
Fast forward past the election and the narrative has changed rather sharply. [1] They no longer call the story Russian Disinformation, and instead publish that the FBI is actively investigating Hunter Biden.
[2] As I mentioned, the same thing happened after 2001. The largest news institutions eagerly promoted that the US was under extreme threat. CNN in 2002 was publishing quotes like "we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” and "Saddam is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.”
Then when it became clear that there was no WMD's to be found they started giving room to the opposing narrative such as: Joe Wilson “I think it’s safe to say that the US government should have or did know that [the Niger documents were] fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the UN yesterday.”
Just to be clear, I'm not saying 'everything is a lie and the election was stolen and Trump is telling the truth'
What I am saying is that the sources of information have proven themselves to be incredibly untrustworthy to the point where many people automatically believe the inverse of what they claim.
> since you imply that a publication somehow automatically loses credibility on this topic by leaning left
Funny how so many of the replies are shocked by this idea when virtually every single story posted to HN from a right leaning outlet is flooded with comments of the form "you can't trust this story, it comes from a right leaning outlet" and the post itself will often be quickly flagged to death. What goes around comes around.
>One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake news" to dilute its bite
When has he done that and it hasn't been fake news?
Do you think that fake news is just right wing news that is false or can false left wing news also be fake news? Hypocrites.
> [...] news orgs are wrong from time to time, and that is a fact
The difference is that when news orgs on the top half of this chart [1] are wrong, even the ones that are quite partisan either left or right, it is almost always the case that they thought they were right when the published. The are wrong by accident.
When orgs along the bottom, whether they be far left like AlterNet or far right like Breitbart, are wrong it is often they case that they know they are wrong before they publish, but since their purpose is not news but rather pushing their partisan agenda, they consider that a feature, not a bug.
or lie by lying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774315
I also would let left-media (which I consider to be the majority) off the hook as not "exaggerate[ing] and outright mak[ing] shit up":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...
Insurrection cop was hit on head (and killed) with fire extinguisher: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...
There's also a lot of dodgy terminology too, like Trump "putting children in cages" which is a "right-style" (think of the children) provocation not dissimilar to anti-Semitic or witch-hunting misrepresentations.
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