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Reuters' position on covering Trump

328 points by anjalik 10y ago

a_humean 10y ago
So Reuter's position is that the media environment in the US is rapidly becoming like illiberal democracies in Egypt, Russia and Iran, and so its time to use skills applicable when operating within typically third world authoritarian regimes. What heart warming times we live in.
- bredren 10y ago
  Another way to look at it is their reporters on US press have been caught flat-footed on daily news gathering. They don't have the same skills as their non-US counterparts and are rattled. This is a call to arms. We are facing darkness now, and I believe this will have a lasting impact in what reporters are capable of and willing to do to offer free press.
  - testUser69 10y ago
    The press was asking for this though, at least the mainstream press like CNN and MSNBC. Not only did they push the Hillary Clinton agenda, but it was obvious to anyone with a brain that the liberal news networks didn't mind that they were helping Trump win the republican nominee, because they thought he would easily loose, and be a great figure head to point at next time someone tries to claim not all white men are racist. Their plan back fired though and now this is what we have. The left kept saying the right was going to destroy our rights and every day it gets worse and worse. They act as if we're in the end times. What's going to happen when Trump actually does something insane? No one will take the media seriously then (most have already lost faith). It's like the boy who cried wolf, but the media who cried fascism. Part of me wonders if maybe the media is trying to destroy the American empire, they seem to be spiraling out of control.
    - wootness 10y ago
      Does something? Have you not seen the past 11 days? Complete corruption and insane plans.
    - pmoriarty 10y ago
      It really cracks me up whenever I hear the extreme right lambast the mainstream media, who (at least in the US) is mostly right wing anyway. Trump should be kissing the feet of the mainstream media, who were the single biggest force responsible for his election. Without "Trump" being the most often repeated word on every mainstream reporter's lips ever since he started running for office, he wouldn't have stood a chance. Trump got virtually non-stop, world-wide, free advertising -- the kind that even his money couldn't buy. His election is proof positive that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Trump should be grovelling before the mainstream media. But to pander to his base, who long ago swallowed the "liberal mainstream media" conspiracy theory, and to deflect criticism, he has to pretend that he's a victim of the mainstream media, when he's really their beneficiary.
- ErikVandeWater 10y ago
  That's a very sensationalist way of putting it, especially when they say "Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment..."
  - unreal37 10y ago
    But it's true. Reuters is going to treat media reporting in the US like they treat reporting in countries heavy on censorship and hostile to the media. Let's see if that improves the reporting of facts.
    - dmix 10y ago
      Reuters simply said they have experience reporting in authoritarian countries and they don't yet know how 'sharp' Trump will be regarding the media. They're basically saying Reuters is prepared to deal with that, assuming it becomes a reality. They are not saying it's currently the case. As far as I can tell the 'war on journalists' has almost entirely been words so far. The administration has been light with facts yes but that is a far cry from the type of media control exhibited under authoritarian regimes. So yes the OPs comment is a sensationalist interpretation. I get the impression that people are a little too eager to characterize themselves as repressed, as if America has suddenly turned into an all-out authoritarian regime in the last week, where they are becoming a bit disconnected from reality, or at the very minimum jumping the gun. Reminds me of the classic Monty Python scene https://youtu.be/Vl4ufIrMtXg https://youtu.be/Vl4ufIrMtXg
      - dhfhduk 10y ago
        You might be right about things, but there's plenty of time. Part of the issue, for me, isn't so much what Trump has done so far policy-wise, it's the environment this is all occurring in, and what Trump is setting up and what he has done in the past. If the legislature was in Democratic control, I wouldn't be so concerned. If Trump had actually divested his business, I might rest easier. If Trump weren't so much in the pockets of Russia for obvious reasons, it might not be so bad. And so forth and so on. Instead, we have all of it happening simultaneously. To summarize: 1. You have a white supremacist in a central position in the white house. 2. There are concerns about Trump's vulnerability to Russia, with reports of his involvement in hacking, and evidence prior to the election that this is true. 3. To make (2) worse, you have a visible schism developing between Trump and the people who would know about those things, the intelligence and military communities. The president is actually essentially siding with Russia and distancing himself from US military and intelligence. 4. At the same time, he's bringing the FBI, who is in charge of domestic enforcement, more under his control, and eliminating segments of it that disagree with him. He rewards Comey, who arguably was complicit in using his position to sway the election. 5. The FBI itself reports concerns about white supremacy in law enforcement. So now you have white supremacists cuddling up to the people who are supposed to do something about white supremacy. 6. The other person who might be in a position to do something, the AG, also has a history of white supremacist positions. 7. Trump refuses to actually divest of himself of his business interests, creating huge conflicts of interests. 8. He places people with massive financial conflicts of interest in certain cabinet posts, essentially letting foxes run the henhouses. 9. He's actively hostile toward the press, who are simply doing what they should be doing and holding public officials to the high standard of scrutiny they should be held to. Do I need to go on? Essentially, there's no checks and balances anymore. At all. The person in the white house, who lost the popular vote, is behaving as if he's an organized crime boss. And the GOP is acting as if the ends always justifies the means, even if it means dismantling democratic processes. See NC for an example of this playing out. This is why some people are freaking out. Because even if it's not currently fascism nationally, it's feeling very similar to it. I know those terms were used by those on the hard right about Obama, and maybe diluted the meaning of the term, but at the moment there's too much unchecked power. Way too much. My political beliefs actually don't align well with either major party, but to me this is a very very very bad situation. We shouldn't have to worry about whether or not we're jumping the gun. That's the point.
- beat 10y ago
  Look at it this way... they just called Steve Bannon a rank, timid amateur when it comes to intimidating the press. They said, very loudly, we are not afraid of you. Good for them.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    I would not underestimate Bannon. He is a very smart guy.
    - beat 10y ago
      Oh, I don't doubt he's very smart. But there are both laws and traditions in place to prevent the kind of subservient lapdog press he wants to have. And he lacks the cajones to just toss the First Amendment out the window on a broad scale (yet). Reuters' point was that even without the First Amendment and other protections afforded journalists in America, they're capable of publishing important, relevant news anyway. So that's not just a statement of intent. It's deliberately poking at Bannon's bluster. We are not afraid of you. He's trying to intimidate the press, and Reuters, at least, is having none of that. So Bannon is smart. So what? That won't keep Reuters from doing their jobs. edit: I should probably add here that I think assuming one's political opponents are stupid is a pet peeve of mine. Of course Bannon is very smart, or he wouldn't be where he is today.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        First, it's cojones. Cajones would be something related to boxes (from "caja" - note that Cajon Pass in California is named for a box canyon). Second, it may or may not be that he lacks the courage. He may lack the desire to go where you suspect that he wants to go. Mostly, though, what he lacks is the freedom to do so. Just tossing the First Amendment out the window, at the current time, would not have the support of the courts. It would be declared illegal in no time. It would then require using the power of the office to suppress free speech by force - literally having police or military shut down radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, and the internet (don't forget cell networks and ham radios). The military is unlikely to undividedly follow such a course. Now you very likely have a civil war. So even if he wants to, he can't blatantly toss the First Amendment out the window, and not because of lack of courage. It's because the people won't put up with it (at least not yet).
- logicallee 10y ago
  America is a country where you can read Hillary's emails (via wikileaks, that you won't get in trouble for visiting) but she can't read yours. (Nor can Trump.)
  - malnourish 10y ago
    We can really only read those emails due to leaks. Public officials' communications should be in the domain of the public by default unless there is a real urgent need to keep something secret.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      Wow, that is a pretty extreme position. (I can't dismiss it outright as obviously the senate can debate things and come to conclusions and make policy, even if all the debates and hearings are public.) In your opinion should politicians be allowed to meet each other and talk privately (about politics) at all? Or should there be no private meetings allowed? (Or at least no talking politics if they do meet.)
    - a_humean 10y ago
      I would actually strongly disagree with that. Officials need to be able to exchange ideas freely amongst themselves and within confidence in a non-media environment. They need to be able to say things to each other in person, on phones, and in email communications in less discrete terms that otherwise would need to be crafted to appease their political coalitions and oppositions. They need to be able to ask and say stupid things. If you take that away from officials they lose their ability to actually deliberate and think about policy in terms of the merits of the policy. There is a balance to strike in terms of transparency and public accountability, but a transparency free for all in which no communication is private can easily lead to bad policy and outcomes. Its not too different from not having a client see your business's internal communications. 99% of the time you aren't trying to screw your client and are trying to do a good job for them, but you really don't want to show them the sausage factory in any case because it will make it harder to do a good job for them if everything you do or say is presented to the client.
- ufmace 10y ago
  I should note that if you lean to the Right and/or don't worship the Clintons and the Democratic party, then most of the US media has seemed like a third-world Party Line news for a long time.
  - malnourish 10y ago
    It's a damn shame that our country is so split into two parties (or worse -- "moderates") that we assume you're either Left or your Right. I know many people who would feel more involved in the political system if there were viable parties that represented beliefs that cross (or often are completely unrepresented in) party lines. The two party system coerces us into false dichotomies far too often.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    If you view people who don't agree with you politically as strawmen who "worship" your least favorite politicians, then you've already failed at understanding the world. Everyone disagrees on stuff, but if you want to understand people and the world, the only way to do that is to see things from other peoples' perspective. They have plenty of reasons for voting the way they do that have nothing to do with being brainwashed or worshipping false idols or whatever. You may or may not agree with those reasons, and those reasons may be based on true or false premises, but if you don't understand your opposition you will never defeat them, if that's your goal. You might even find that better government is a higher goal than beating whatever group you've lumped into a single hate bucket. What you said is no different from how you think "those people" view you.
    - fvdessen 10y ago
      I don't think parent poster has a problem with people having opposing views, but with media organisations affirming they are unbiased while they are not. And this criticism is not limited to the right wing -- see Chomsky.
    - ufmace 10y ago
      I don't object to people disagreeing with me politically. Yes, the "worship the Clintons and Democratic party" part is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Are you sure your own political position isn't blinding you? I do object when those who disagree with me politically smear my side, or even anyone on their side who doesn't agree with them enthusiastically enough, as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, ignorant, redneck, while they claim to be the most intelligent people in the world and the sole source of compassion and tolerance. I'm happy to have a reasonable discussion with anyone who has at least put some thought into their position and doesn't devolve to slinging insults around when they see facts they don't like.
- smsm42 10y ago
  Surely, Trump mouthing off couple of guys from White House press corps makes US media as tightly state-controlled as in Russia and Iran. How does it even make sense? Media environment in US is nowhere nearly similar to Russia or Iran, and is not "becoming" anything like it, regardless of what Trump tweets. If Trump nationalizes CNN or bans access to NYT website, then it would be one small step towards where Russia and Iran is. That kind of exaggeration is exactly why it is so hard to take many MSM outlets seriously.
r00fus 10y ago
I think what's been said is admirable. What is being unsaid? "[covering Trump] is an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world" Hint: they already recognize that Trump is an authoritarian in all but name. Long live the King, I guess.
- coldtea 10y ago
  "We always put out the official western establishment party line for those places, and we'll do the same for Trump's administration".
  - sprafa 10y ago
    Do you actually think saying Iran is a repressive state is false? Do you actually think Bannon's statements are normal? It's at least Nixon level bullshit at the moment; I expect it to get worst.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Do you actually think saying Iran is a repressive state is false? In a way yes. Some peoples (populations) are predominantly conservative an religious, and want to be in a state that works that way. Calling it conservative or backwards etc (and with a qualifier "according to our standards" etc even better) is OK. Calling it repressive, as if the people there do not want it, can be downright misleading if not calculated. Not everybody has the "American dream" or western style democracy as their operating vision. And of course, it's easy to find some minority that is in opposition to the government everywhere, and present it such as it represents the majority. But it doesn't always, and seldom in such states, where some westernized affluent outliers (usually with twitter accounts) are paraded as "the voice of the new generation" etc, when they are as rare as hipsters in Salt Lake City. Trump has the Presidential office, at least 30%+ of the voters, and some major outlets etc supporting him, would you say he is the "real voice of America"? I guess not, and that's fair. But people and media do it all the time with some minority groups in arab states, latin america, etc., that don't reflect the general sentiment in their country at all (but are convenient for foreign interests). Even worse when this misreading turns a relatively stable country (Iraq, Libya) into a hell whole of civil war, chaos and fundamentalist muslim wackos of different fractions. Because some big powers interested in destabilizing the region or securing some natural resources for cheap convinced "do-gooders" that they are a "repressive state" and they need to "fix it". Millions have been murdered in fixing "repressive states" into far more repressive hellholes with the aid of such media reporting...
JoshGlazebrook 10y ago
Honestly I feel way overwhelmed by the administration related news and it has barely been over a week. It's also a constant reminder that oh yeah this really did happen and it continues to get worse.
- ApostleMatthew 10y ago
  I think the evolution of how the media operates over the next 4ish years will be very interesting to watch.
- camperman 10y ago
  This is entirely intentional. The God Emperor is overwhelming you with shock and awe to make opposition seem pointless, which it is of course.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    I don't know why you are downvoted, because it's clearly true. It's part of his playbook, The Art of the Deal. Scott Adams continues to be an annoying but fairly accurate narrator of the Trump narrative: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156399716951/outrage-dilution http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156399716951/outrage-dilution
    - camperman 10y ago
      Yep. I'm downvoted because anything even remotely right is on here.
Bartweiss 10y ago
I've seen several people suggest that covering Trump is an unprecedented challenge which news orgs have no understanding of how to handle. This is a good reminder that this isn't true; even a presidency which is exceptional by American standards is well within the familiar scope of international news organizations.
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  International news organizations are used to covering tin-pot autocracies around the world. Before it just always seemed bemusedly distant.
- varjag 10y ago
  Yes, apparently the new administration isn't especially different in approach from covering warlords, post-Soviet dictators and Middle-Eastern autocrats.
- jerf 10y ago
  I realize that it may be a lot more fun and topical to blame Trump, but the HN gestalt has been discussing the increasingly hollowed-out nature of American news reporting for years now. Public trust of the press has been dropping for decades. If this manifests as "hey, we've all got to get back to real reporting", then it will be positive. (Not a mere rhetorical sop; that is genuinely my preferred, best-case outcome.) If this is a socially-acceptable way of saying "we've really got to double-down on the things that have been making HN discuss how crap most of the press' output is and has been causing our public trust to notch down another couple of percent every year for the past couple of decades", then it's just so many words on a screen. Given that people have been commenting that Reuters seems pretty good, which I tend to agree with, if this is a declaration that they're going to join the rest of the media, that's not going to be a positive. Just because you suddenly like the political orientation of the press in the last couple weeks doesn't mean anything has changed. It is still the same shallow, click-bait-driven, hype machine it was last year, it's just that now it's hitting you in a direction that many of you are less prepared to apply skepticism about. That doesn't mean anything's gotten better in the past couple of weeks... in fact as a whole, that is a sign the situation has gotten even worse.
twoquestions 10y ago
One item on the Do list tickled me pink: > Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources. I'm excited to read what they print using this policy.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  Yes, me too. "Access journalism" has always seemed like a dead-end to me anyway, as it gives the subject a powerful veto on stories they don't like simply by threatening to limit or remove the access. Access feels like privilege, but in reality it's just a gilded cage. (I wrote a whole thing on this subject, a couple of years back: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/01/rick-reillys-lance-armstrong-problem-is-all-of-journalisms-problem/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/01/rick-reillys-lance-armstr...) Of course we'll see how this plays out in the coverage Reuters provides going forward. And we'll even have an interesting example to contrast it with: Axios (https://www.axios.com/ https://www.axios.com/), the just-launched operation from some of the big wheels behind the success of Politico, which has positioned itself explicitly as an insider, access-oriented outlet.
- mturmon 10y ago
  Here's a longer take on the concept of rejecting access journalism and getting the real story using other sources, including leaks: http://pressthink.org/2017/01/send-the-interns/ http://pressthink.org/2017/01/send-the-interns/
anon987 10y ago
Please reinstate the ban on political stories.
- geofft 10y ago
  Is a political blog post from Jupyter a political story? Is a discussion of whether RustConf should be held in the US a political story? Are the Snowden leaks political stories? Is YC funding ACLU a political story?
  - sglane 10y ago
    To quote the HN Guidelines: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - RickS 10y ago
      >some interesting new phenomenon There's a case to be made that much of today's politics are interesting new phenomenons.
      - VLM 10y ago
        HN being an unobjective far left echo chamber is not new, making the stories kind of tiresome propaganda.
        matthewmacleod 10y ago
        HN being full of clichè dissenting know-it-alls is not new, either.
        AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        To the contrary. The signal-to-noise ratio here is not as good as I would like, but I can still find reasoned, thoughtful comments from people who don't think like me. It's still better than almost anywhere else.
SixSigma 10y ago
No mention that Thomson Reuters, owner of the Reuters news service, donated between $1m-$5m to Clinton. http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundation-donors-include-dozens-of-media-organizations-individuals-207228 http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundati...
- BryantD 10y ago
  There's a slight inaccuracy here; by simply saying "donated to Clinton" you imply that the donation was to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The donation was, however, to the Clinton Foundation. Given that the donations to the Clinton Foundation also came from conservative media outlets such as Newsmax and Fox, I'm confident that donating to the Clinton Foundation does not prove bias towards Hillary Clinton.
  - contergan 10y ago
    The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative are just two fronts the Clintons used over the years to receive bribes. How else do you explain this: http://observer.com/2017/01/the-clinton-foundation-shuts-down-clinton-global-initiative/ http://observer.com/2017/01/the-clinton-foundation-shuts-dow... As soon as Clinton was out of the race, all those donations suddenly stopped coming in. It's pretty obvious that the whole thing was pretty much just legal bribery und the disguise of altruism. Since the Global Initiative has already shut down, it's probably only a matter of time until the Foundation shuts down, too.
    - mjmsmith 10y ago
      By all means, let's keep focusing on the Clintons. That's obviously the important thing here.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      The diametrically opposed interpretation that donors were afraid of retaliation by the Trump administration is frequently offered; and there are a lot of subtle shadings in between that one might also reasonably believe -- e.g., donors perceived the power of the Clinton brand as a key advantage of that organization over others, but the election defeat tarnished the brand and eliminated the advantage.
Gargoyle 10y ago
I was amused by this line- >We try to avoid “permanent exclusives” – first but wrong. Funny way to phrase it!
owenversteeg 10y ago
Reuters is consistently my favorite news source. What I love about them is how they sell news to everyone, so they've got to make it as factual and unbiased as possible. Of course, like any news organization, they have a few biases, but I think that purely because of the position that they're in they are the least biased news source today. They might sell the same article to Russia Today, the New York Times, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the Times of India, so they can't cater to one crowd's political biases. I'm serious; all these news sources pay for Reuters articles. And even if you don't like Reuters, you've got to respect the speed at which they get out correct news. Before the Twittersphere erupts, before CNN loses its mind, before the alerts on the radio, Reuters has it. And if they don't know something, they say that they don't know it. It can make for frustratingly light articles, but any time I'm annoyed how empty the article is I realize that if it was bigger it'd be fluff or unverified claims.
- ErikVandeWater 10y ago
  As a supplement to that, it's also good to get news from diverse perspectives (not just left/right). For example, Techdirt and Reason might have ideas that neither NBC nor WSJ are going to give you, and talk about niche topics that don't otherwise hit the radar. R/neutralnews is also a great community for people who want to discuss news with documented facts as a requirement.
  - malnourish 10y ago
    NeutralNews is all right, but there are some substantial biases in the comments that people get away with.
- malnourish 10y ago
  I almost exclusively read Reuters and have turned all my friends onto Reuters. If I could read the AP feeds I would read those too. I'm not looking for what to think, I'm looking for what happened, and Reuters tends to give me that, even if I miss out on some stories.
  - akeck 10y ago
MrZongle2 10y ago
I think these are excellent guidelines. If Reuters adheres to them, they'll continue to rise above the other mainstream media outlets. I suspect they'll be unlikely to come under fire from the current Administration, whose feud with the media seems to be concentrated on "info-tainment" organizations like CNN that for years now have eschewed factual reporting for titillation and talking heads.
- BryantD 10y ago
  We can probably dial that in a little more: Fox News is certainly no better than CNN as far as talking heads goes, but the Trump Administration isn't feuding with them. Trump is feuding with talking heads who don't advance his agenda.
  - MrZongle2 10y ago
    No disagreement about Fox. But is the feud really because those media outlets aren't advancing his agenda? The tone from the press started with mockery during the primaries and advanced to hostility once Trump became the forerunner. Look at the election night coverage from most of the networks: it looked like a funeral, which is rather surprising given the supposed objectivity of these organizations. IMO the feud is about a lack of objectivity rather than a lack of full-throated support. Nobody should want a complicit, docile press: that's what we largely had for the last 8 years.
    - oculusthrift 10y ago
      "Last week, New York magazine reported that Trump’s feud with CNN has roots in his relationship with CNN President Jeff Zucker, a former NBC president who brought Trump's television show “The Apprentice” to the network. Trump, the magazine reported, has told White House staffers that he feels personally betrayed by Zucker and that Zucker should tilt CNN programming more favorably toward him because of their long relationship." http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cnn-press-234455 http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cnn-press-234455
genieyclo 10y ago
"Clinton has 90 percent chance of winning: Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation" - Nov 8 - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1322J1 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1...
- iriche 10y ago
  Which news outlet didn't say that?
  - swang 10y ago
    seriously. fox news. cnn. msnbc. EVERYONE said it. 538 said it was 66/33 or 75/25 or something similar (i forget, but it wasn't 90/10 in favor of Clinton) and they got roasted over it when they don't even control any of the polls.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    The most well-regarded poll-based predictor, 538, gave Clinton a much lower than 90% chance and pointed out the key error of those predictors giving that high of a chance -- they used models which assumed, contrary to evidence, that deviations from polling results in different states in the same Presidential election are independent, when in fact they are strongly correlated.
- khuey 10y ago
  Trump winning doesn't prove they were wrong. That's not how p-values work.
- joekrill 10y ago
  OK, and your point? They said 90 percent. Not 100.
  - alexc05 10y ago
    Exactly - I've played enough Dungeons & Dragons to know that it is possible to roll 1 or 2 on a D20. If there was a 90% chance of winning, it is the 10% which happened. That's pretty clear by how crazy close it wound up being to. Just 80,000 specific votes in specific states are outweighing more than 3,000,000 across the rest of the United States. That really feels like something that had about a 10% chance of happening (or less really).
coldtea 10y ago
Isn't everybody in media and business making "position statements" and being angry at you, the best way to show that you are "against the establishment"?
- cirath 10y ago
  That is kind of a false statement, though. If he were to say that Freedom of the Press is no longer protected, the press would be very angry with you -- but I don't think it would improve your image of being against the establishment. "The best" way to show you are against the establishment is to either a) prove the media's criticisms wrong, or b) have several actions that would stand against whatever "the establishment" is in our example. What Trump has done is very seldom given examples of what is wrong, he has just unilaterally declared that the MSM is crooked. He has not eroded trust in an article or statement, or in most cases proving the left-leaning or progressive media wrong, he has made declarations that reach far further than his original aim. This is very in line with his character, which has been largely reactionary and often quick to pass judgments without truly "aiming" them first. The parallels, for example, between his declarations of the media being wrong having much broader effects than intended, and his immigration bill which ultimately affected masses of people it shouldn't have, are difficult to ignore. Both were made in haste, both were aimed at a specific goal, and both had broad implications that were not originally intended.
general_ai 10y ago
Press will never be the same again. Over the past year and a half, most mainstream press outlets have shown themselves to be nothing more than a propaganda wing of the party their owners affiliate themselves with. This was particularly obvious on the democratic side, where they worked really hard to shove a pre-selected, cheating psychopath into the White House, and failed, much to the chagrin of their owners. If there was any doubt about the lack of impartiality and fairness, we're way beyond it now. No matter what they "report" now, their reputation is gone and only completely gullible idiots trust any of it. This reminds me very much of Soviet Pravda newspaper, where you'd first read the article, and then try to read between the lines and guess what really happened.
weberc2 10y ago
If the media generally practiced the principles outlined in this post, the criticisms levied against the industry wouldn't be credible. Not that Trump has any moral authority to complain about anyone's integrity, but many have been complaining about the increasing partisanship among the U.S. media for a long time, and their complaints are largely valid.
fareesh 10y ago
I remember being on Twitter on most of election day and seeing evidence of all sorts of manufactured rhetoric from Reuters, and was really disturbed (proof below). There are a lot of other explanations for why this happened, but I'm not inclined to believe them given the reality of what happened on election day. It looked like Reuters' polling towards the 8th showed Trump taking the lead, but they deleted the data and replaced it with Nov 1 data. Plenty of people caught it and called them out - several people took videos as well so the chance of them being a coordinated effort to doctor screenshots seems low. I don't know if they ever responded to this issue, but it forever changed my opinion of Reuters. If we're to assume the worst about this then it's pretty disgusting if this is the kind of shady stuff the media is pulling. I sympathize in principle, but in reality the question is whether this breed of media deserves anything but contempt. Tweets with screenshots / photos (more in the same thread): https://twitter.com/Blazingcatfur/status/796071971700244480 https://twitter.com/Blazingcatfur/status/796071971700244480 https://twitter.com/ProtectthePope/status/796068457137733637 https://twitter.com/ProtectthePope/status/796068457137733637 Also of note (posted elsewhere in the comments here, but downvoted): They posted this article on the 8th, saying there was a 90% chance of a Clinton win. Their data didn't support this claim. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1322J1 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1...
- cirath 10y ago
  The linked Reuters article said their polls showed a 90% chance of a Clinton win, but the polls across all boards proved to be unreliable after the fact. What they did that advanced the idea of unbiased journalism is twofold: First, they reported on early election numbers in North Carolina which directly contradicted their poll numbers and showed Trump performing better than predicted. Second, they outlined a clear and realistic path to Trump winning. While their own poll numbers did not support this fact, they ultimately included it. They also did not rule out a Trump win in any way. It is always important to note that a 90% chance of winning is in no way a guarantee, and I do not believe Reuters ever truly ruled out Trump as a contender. They used the only early data available, polls--and when every poll is wrong, and psychics are still not a real thing, they did what they could with the data they had. At least, in my reading of the article you linked. Regarding the polls you linked, those are not the Reuters/Ipsos polls of 15,000 participants. Those are much smaller polls (850 users) with far larger margins for error. While I cannot speak to the censoring of the 11/6 poll mentioned in the second tweet, having Trump leading in popular vote nationally (eg: what polls generally check) was ultimately incorrect, regardless of what you believe. Polls need to be carefully read, interpreted, and corrected for -- which is why fivethirtyeight gave Trump a much higher chance to win than any other body.
williamle8300 10y ago
I'm a Trump supporter so take this with a grain of salt. When he said the media was dishonest, he was referring to CNN, WaPo and the mainstream media (excluding Fox News). Anyone who follows Trump know these are the folks he's referring to. If he didn't like ALL of the media, he wouldn't even have a press corps. Reuters isn't really engaging with what Trump's saying. Are Trump's claims substantiated? I would say, Yes. During the last election cycle, anybody who knows anything about the DNC leaks, Podesta emails, CNN feeding Hillary questions during townhall meetings against Sanders, Hillary's gliding past the FBI investigations, "bleaching" her email servers (which were under subpoena), Bill Clinton's unprofessional meeting with Loretta Lynch... knows that there's some serious corruption happening at the top of these major news companies. As a litmus test... the fact that almost every liberal in America is yelling at Trump more than they're yelling at the DNC (and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) shows the state of mainstream media. The DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders nomination, and he was the only candidate that would have a chance of beating Trump (a very high chance since he had young vote). When the DNC sabotaged Sanders' nomination, and doubled-down on Hillary the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide[1] Mainstream media is really broken in America. There really needs to be a breakup of corporation-owned news companies. It really is a swamp in Trump's idiom. [1] http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president
- Endama 10y ago
  While I may not agree with your position, I appreciate your perspective. Thank you for sharing.
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  Bernie supporter here, so obvious bias, but the way they (CNN, Fox, etc.) talked down to Sanders in the primaries was disgusting, so I have to agree there. However, the trump administration wasn't attacking Fox news which I think we can all agree from an objective standpoint is several times worse than CNN in their distortion of the truth.
  - williamle8300 10y ago
protomyth 10y ago
I'm not sure what they are going for with this statement. I really wonder who is the audience. I just don't know what good they were hoping to achieve. I'm not being cynical, I just don't understand. Reaction wise this is basically signaling to most conservatives that Reuters hasn't been doing their job. Its a positive reinforcement that they didn't properly investigate or cover the scandals. I imagine #3 (Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access) is going to generate most of the commentaries about what has been reported with the prior administration. "Get out into the country..." was supposed to be your job. Maybe if they had done it properly a lot of surprising things wouldn't have been surprises.
- jeremywho 10y ago
  U.S. president calls journalists "among the most dishonest human beings on earth” or that his chief strategist dubs the media “the opposition party." I think their reason to respond is self-explanatory.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Prior administrations have had some amazingly unkind things to say about the press. I don't think those comments are any reason to respond.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      From my memory, what Trump said is unprecedented. If you have contrary data, please share it.
      - protomyth 10y ago
        President Obama as his comments on Fox News (he went farther and included comments on their viewers). For a bit of history, President Jackson was fairly salty with his views of newspapers. Unprecedented has pretty much been they insulted my guys instead of their guys.
Clubber 10y ago
The problem is that many of the people who voted for Trump don't read any news other than news explicitly designed to make Trump or the GOP look good.
netcraft 10y ago
> Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources. I like this take, if nothing else because when you're being fed your information theres always the chance to be less thorough. Its how propaganda is made.
charred_toast 10y ago
It's sad and unfortunate that considering the progress we've made as humans, that those in power are utterly afraid of the truth. It makes me ashamed to be a human being sometimes for this reason. We won't progress or 'evolve' unless this fact changes.
chetanahuja 10y ago
I'd like to see reuters/AP etc. not only take the same approach, but even use the same language to US reporting as they do in other "regimes". Here's a slate.com series that I thought was doing a great job but for some reason hasn't continued into the Trump regime. e.g. When Justice Scalia died: WASHINGTON, United States—The unexpected death of a hard-line conservative jurist on America’s constitutional court has exposed deep fissures within the ruling regime and threatens to throw the country’s fragile political system into months of chaos. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/17/how_the_u_s_media_would_cover_the_supreme_court_nomination_fight_if_it_happened.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/17/how_the_u_...
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  "Deep fissures within the ruling regime"? Deep fissures, sure, between the President and the majority of the Senate, who are of the other party. It seems a bit of a stretch to call Democrats and Republicans together "the ruling regime", though. "Fragile political system"? More fragile than it used to be, but not yet fragile. We weathered that mess with barely a sweat. "Months of chaos"? Not even. That is: The language doesn't fit the reality in the US, whereas it often does fit the reality of the third world.
  - chetanahuja 10y ago
    "That is: The language doesn't fit the reality in the US, whereas it often does fit the reality of the third world." Yeah... this is what we keep telling ourselves.
grokkable 10y ago
Fllllaaaaaaggggg

328 points by anjalik 10y ago

So Reuter's position is that the media environment in the US is rapidly becoming like illiberal democracies in Egypt, Russia and Iran, and so its time to use skills applicable when operating within typically third world authoritarian regimes. What heart warming times we live in.

bredren 10y ago
Another way to look at it is their reporters on US press have been caught flat-footed on daily news gathering. They don't have the same skills as their non-US counterparts and are rattled. This is a call to arms. We are facing darkness now, and I believe this will have a lasting impact in what reporters are capable of and willing to do to offer free press.
- testUser69 10y ago
  The press was asking for this though, at least the mainstream press like CNN and MSNBC. Not only did they push the Hillary Clinton agenda, but it was obvious to anyone with a brain that the liberal news networks didn't mind that they were helping Trump win the republican nominee, because they thought he would easily loose, and be a great figure head to point at next time someone tries to claim not all white men are racist. Their plan back fired though and now this is what we have. The left kept saying the right was going to destroy our rights and every day it gets worse and worse. They act as if we're in the end times. What's going to happen when Trump actually does something insane? No one will take the media seriously then (most have already lost faith). It's like the boy who cried wolf, but the media who cried fascism. Part of me wonders if maybe the media is trying to destroy the American empire, they seem to be spiraling out of control.
  - wootness 10y ago
    Does something? Have you not seen the past 11 days? Complete corruption and insane plans.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    It really cracks me up whenever I hear the extreme right lambast the mainstream media, who (at least in the US) is mostly right wing anyway. Trump should be kissing the feet of the mainstream media, who were the single biggest force responsible for his election. Without "Trump" being the most often repeated word on every mainstream reporter's lips ever since he started running for office, he wouldn't have stood a chance. Trump got virtually non-stop, world-wide, free advertising -- the kind that even his money couldn't buy. His election is proof positive that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Trump should be grovelling before the mainstream media. But to pander to his base, who long ago swallowed the "liberal mainstream media" conspiracy theory, and to deflect criticism, he has to pretend that he's a victim of the mainstream media, when he's really their beneficiary.
ErikVandeWater 10y ago
That's a very sensationalist way of putting it, especially when they say "Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment..."
- unreal37 10y ago
  But it's true. Reuters is going to treat media reporting in the US like they treat reporting in countries heavy on censorship and hostile to the media. Let's see if that improves the reporting of facts.
  - dmix 10y ago
    Reuters simply said they have experience reporting in authoritarian countries and they don't yet know how 'sharp' Trump will be regarding the media. They're basically saying Reuters is prepared to deal with that, assuming it becomes a reality. They are not saying it's currently the case. As far as I can tell the 'war on journalists' has almost entirely been words so far. The administration has been light with facts yes but that is a far cry from the type of media control exhibited under authoritarian regimes. So yes the OPs comment is a sensationalist interpretation. I get the impression that people are a little too eager to characterize themselves as repressed, as if America has suddenly turned into an all-out authoritarian regime in the last week, where they are becoming a bit disconnected from reality, or at the very minimum jumping the gun. Reminds me of the classic Monty Python scene https://youtu.be/Vl4ufIrMtXg https://youtu.be/Vl4ufIrMtXg
    - dhfhduk 10y ago
      You might be right about things, but there's plenty of time. Part of the issue, for me, isn't so much what Trump has done so far policy-wise, it's the environment this is all occurring in, and what Trump is setting up and what he has done in the past. If the legislature was in Democratic control, I wouldn't be so concerned. If Trump had actually divested his business, I might rest easier. If Trump weren't so much in the pockets of Russia for obvious reasons, it might not be so bad. And so forth and so on. Instead, we have all of it happening simultaneously. To summarize: 1. You have a white supremacist in a central position in the white house. 2. There are concerns about Trump's vulnerability to Russia, with reports of his involvement in hacking, and evidence prior to the election that this is true. 3. To make (2) worse, you have a visible schism developing between Trump and the people who would know about those things, the intelligence and military communities. The president is actually essentially siding with Russia and distancing himself from US military and intelligence. 4. At the same time, he's bringing the FBI, who is in charge of domestic enforcement, more under his control, and eliminating segments of it that disagree with him. He rewards Comey, who arguably was complicit in using his position to sway the election. 5. The FBI itself reports concerns about white supremacy in law enforcement. So now you have white supremacists cuddling up to the people who are supposed to do something about white supremacy. 6. The other person who might be in a position to do something, the AG, also has a history of white supremacist positions. 7. Trump refuses to actually divest of himself of his business interests, creating huge conflicts of interests. 8. He places people with massive financial conflicts of interest in certain cabinet posts, essentially letting foxes run the henhouses. 9. He's actively hostile toward the press, who are simply doing what they should be doing and holding public officials to the high standard of scrutiny they should be held to. Do I need to go on? Essentially, there's no checks and balances anymore. At all. The person in the white house, who lost the popular vote, is behaving as if he's an organized crime boss. And the GOP is acting as if the ends always justifies the means, even if it means dismantling democratic processes. See NC for an example of this playing out. This is why some people are freaking out. Because even if it's not currently fascism nationally, it's feeling very similar to it. I know those terms were used by those on the hard right about Obama, and maybe diluted the meaning of the term, but at the moment there's too much unchecked power. Way too much. My political beliefs actually don't align well with either major party, but to me this is a very very very bad situation. We shouldn't have to worry about whether or not we're jumping the gun. That's the point.
beat 10y ago
Look at it this way... they just called Steve Bannon a rank, timid amateur when it comes to intimidating the press. They said, very loudly, we are not afraid of you. Good for them.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I would not underestimate Bannon. He is a very smart guy.
  - beat 10y ago
    Oh, I don't doubt he's very smart. But there are both laws and traditions in place to prevent the kind of subservient lapdog press he wants to have. And he lacks the cajones to just toss the First Amendment out the window on a broad scale (yet). Reuters' point was that even without the First Amendment and other protections afforded journalists in America, they're capable of publishing important, relevant news anyway. So that's not just a statement of intent. It's deliberately poking at Bannon's bluster. We are not afraid of you. He's trying to intimidate the press, and Reuters, at least, is having none of that. So Bannon is smart. So what? That won't keep Reuters from doing their jobs. edit: I should probably add here that I think assuming one's political opponents are stupid is a pet peeve of mine. Of course Bannon is very smart, or he wouldn't be where he is today.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      First, it's cojones. Cajones would be something related to boxes (from "caja" - note that Cajon Pass in California is named for a box canyon). Second, it may or may not be that he lacks the courage. He may lack the desire to go where you suspect that he wants to go. Mostly, though, what he lacks is the freedom to do so. Just tossing the First Amendment out the window, at the current time, would not have the support of the courts. It would be declared illegal in no time. It would then require using the power of the office to suppress free speech by force - literally having police or military shut down radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, and the internet (don't forget cell networks and ham radios). The military is unlikely to undividedly follow such a course. Now you very likely have a civil war. So even if he wants to, he can't blatantly toss the First Amendment out the window, and not because of lack of courage. It's because the people won't put up with it (at least not yet).
logicallee 10y ago
America is a country where you can read Hillary's emails (via wikileaks, that you won't get in trouble for visiting) but she can't read yours. (Nor can Trump.)
- malnourish 10y ago
  We can really only read those emails due to leaks. Public officials' communications should be in the domain of the public by default unless there is a real urgent need to keep something secret.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    Wow, that is a pretty extreme position. (I can't dismiss it outright as obviously the senate can debate things and come to conclusions and make policy, even if all the debates and hearings are public.) In your opinion should politicians be allowed to meet each other and talk privately (about politics) at all? Or should there be no private meetings allowed? (Or at least no talking politics if they do meet.)
  - a_humean 10y ago
    I would actually strongly disagree with that. Officials need to be able to exchange ideas freely amongst themselves and within confidence in a non-media environment. They need to be able to say things to each other in person, on phones, and in email communications in less discrete terms that otherwise would need to be crafted to appease their political coalitions and oppositions. They need to be able to ask and say stupid things. If you take that away from officials they lose their ability to actually deliberate and think about policy in terms of the merits of the policy. There is a balance to strike in terms of transparency and public accountability, but a transparency free for all in which no communication is private can easily lead to bad policy and outcomes. Its not too different from not having a client see your business's internal communications. 99% of the time you aren't trying to screw your client and are trying to do a good job for them, but you really don't want to show them the sausage factory in any case because it will make it harder to do a good job for them if everything you do or say is presented to the client.
ufmace 10y ago
I should note that if you lean to the Right and/or don't worship the Clintons and the Democratic party, then most of the US media has seemed like a third-world Party Line news for a long time.
- malnourish 10y ago
  It's a damn shame that our country is so split into two parties (or worse -- "moderates") that we assume you're either Left or your Right. I know many people who would feel more involved in the political system if there were viable parties that represented beliefs that cross (or often are completely unrepresented in) party lines. The two party system coerces us into false dichotomies far too often.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  If you view people who don't agree with you politically as strawmen who "worship" your least favorite politicians, then you've already failed at understanding the world. Everyone disagrees on stuff, but if you want to understand people and the world, the only way to do that is to see things from other peoples' perspective. They have plenty of reasons for voting the way they do that have nothing to do with being brainwashed or worshipping false idols or whatever. You may or may not agree with those reasons, and those reasons may be based on true or false premises, but if you don't understand your opposition you will never defeat them, if that's your goal. You might even find that better government is a higher goal than beating whatever group you've lumped into a single hate bucket. What you said is no different from how you think "those people" view you.
  - fvdessen 10y ago
    I don't think parent poster has a problem with people having opposing views, but with media organisations affirming they are unbiased while they are not. And this criticism is not limited to the right wing -- see Chomsky.
  - ufmace 10y ago
    I don't object to people disagreeing with me politically. Yes, the "worship the Clintons and Democratic party" part is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Are you sure your own political position isn't blinding you? I do object when those who disagree with me politically smear my side, or even anyone on their side who doesn't agree with them enthusiastically enough, as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, ignorant, redneck, while they claim to be the most intelligent people in the world and the sole source of compassion and tolerance. I'm happy to have a reasonable discussion with anyone who has at least put some thought into their position and doesn't devolve to slinging insults around when they see facts they don't like.
smsm42 10y ago
Surely, Trump mouthing off couple of guys from White House press corps makes US media as tightly state-controlled as in Russia and Iran. How does it even make sense? Media environment in US is nowhere nearly similar to Russia or Iran, and is not "becoming" anything like it, regardless of what Trump tweets. If Trump nationalizes CNN or bans access to NYT website, then it would be one small step towards where Russia and Iran is. That kind of exaggeration is exactly why it is so hard to take many MSM outlets seriously.

r00fus 10y ago

I think what's been said is admirable. What is being unsaid? "[covering Trump] is an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world" Hint: they already recognize that Trump is an authoritarian in all but name. Long live the King, I guess.

coldtea 10y ago
"We always put out the official western establishment party line for those places, and we'll do the same for Trump's administration".
- sprafa 10y ago
  Do you actually think saying Iran is a repressive state is false? Do you actually think Bannon's statements are normal? It's at least Nixon level bullshit at the moment; I expect it to get worst.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Do you actually think saying Iran is a repressive state is false? In a way yes. Some peoples (populations) are predominantly conservative an religious, and want to be in a state that works that way. Calling it conservative or backwards etc (and with a qualifier "according to our standards" etc even better) is OK. Calling it repressive, as if the people there do not want it, can be downright misleading if not calculated. Not everybody has the "American dream" or western style democracy as their operating vision. And of course, it's easy to find some minority that is in opposition to the government everywhere, and present it such as it represents the majority. But it doesn't always, and seldom in such states, where some westernized affluent outliers (usually with twitter accounts) are paraded as "the voice of the new generation" etc, when they are as rare as hipsters in Salt Lake City. Trump has the Presidential office, at least 30%+ of the voters, and some major outlets etc supporting him, would you say he is the "real voice of America"? I guess not, and that's fair. But people and media do it all the time with some minority groups in arab states, latin america, etc., that don't reflect the general sentiment in their country at all (but are convenient for foreign interests). Even worse when this misreading turns a relatively stable country (Iraq, Libya) into a hell whole of civil war, chaos and fundamentalist muslim wackos of different fractions. Because some big powers interested in destabilizing the region or securing some natural resources for cheap convinced "do-gooders" that they are a "repressive state" and they need to "fix it". Millions have been murdered in fixing "repressive states" into far more repressive hellholes with the aid of such media reporting...

JoshGlazebrook 10y ago

Honestly I feel way overwhelmed by the administration related news and it has barely been over a week. It's also a constant reminder that oh yeah this really did happen and it continues to get worse.

ApostleMatthew 10y ago
I think the evolution of how the media operates over the next 4ish years will be very interesting to watch.
camperman 10y ago
This is entirely intentional. The God Emperor is overwhelming you with shock and awe to make opposition seem pointless, which it is of course.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- akvadrako 10y ago
  I don't know why you are downvoted, because it's clearly true. It's part of his playbook, The Art of the Deal. Scott Adams continues to be an annoying but fairly accurate narrator of the Trump narrative: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156399716951/outrage-dilution http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156399716951/outrage-dilution
  - camperman 10y ago
    Yep. I'm downvoted because anything even remotely right is on here.

Bartweiss 10y ago

I've seen several people suggest that covering Trump is an unprecedented challenge which news orgs have no understanding of how to handle. This is a good reminder that this isn't true; even a presidency which is exceptional by American standards is well within the familiar scope of international news organizations.

nerfhammer 10y ago
International news organizations are used to covering tin-pot autocracies around the world. Before it just always seemed bemusedly distant.
varjag 10y ago
Yes, apparently the new administration isn't especially different in approach from covering warlords, post-Soviet dictators and Middle-Eastern autocrats.
jerf 10y ago
I realize that it may be a lot more fun and topical to blame Trump, but the HN gestalt has been discussing the increasingly hollowed-out nature of American news reporting for years now. Public trust of the press has been dropping for decades. If this manifests as "hey, we've all got to get back to real reporting", then it will be positive. (Not a mere rhetorical sop; that is genuinely my preferred, best-case outcome.) If this is a socially-acceptable way of saying "we've really got to double-down on the things that have been making HN discuss how crap most of the press' output is and has been causing our public trust to notch down another couple of percent every year for the past couple of decades", then it's just so many words on a screen. Given that people have been commenting that Reuters seems pretty good, which I tend to agree with, if this is a declaration that they're going to join the rest of the media, that's not going to be a positive. Just because you suddenly like the political orientation of the press in the last couple weeks doesn't mean anything has changed. It is still the same shallow, click-bait-driven, hype machine it was last year, it's just that now it's hitting you in a direction that many of you are less prepared to apply skepticism about. That doesn't mean anything's gotten better in the past couple of weeks... in fact as a whole, that is a sign the situation has gotten even worse.

twoquestions 10y ago

One item on the Do list tickled me pink: > Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources. I'm excited to read what they print using this policy.

smacktoward 10y ago
Yes, me too. "Access journalism" has always seemed like a dead-end to me anyway, as it gives the subject a powerful veto on stories they don't like simply by threatening to limit or remove the access. Access feels like privilege, but in reality it's just a gilded cage. (I wrote a whole thing on this subject, a couple of years back: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/01/rick-reillys-lance-armstrong-problem-is-all-of-journalisms-problem/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/01/rick-reillys-lance-armstr...) Of course we'll see how this plays out in the coverage Reuters provides going forward. And we'll even have an interesting example to contrast it with: Axios (https://www.axios.com/ https://www.axios.com/), the just-launched operation from some of the big wheels behind the success of Politico, which has positioned itself explicitly as an insider, access-oriented outlet.
mturmon 10y ago
Here's a longer take on the concept of rejecting access journalism and getting the real story using other sources, including leaks: http://pressthink.org/2017/01/send-the-interns/ http://pressthink.org/2017/01/send-the-interns/

anon987 10y ago

Please reinstate the ban on political stories.

geofft 10y ago
Is a political blog post from Jupyter a political story? Is a discussion of whether RustConf should be held in the US a political story? Are the Snowden leaks political stories? Is YC funding ACLU a political story?
- sglane 10y ago
  To quote the HN Guidelines: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - RickS 10y ago
    >some interesting new phenomenon There's a case to be made that much of today's politics are interesting new phenomenons.
    - VLM 10y ago
      HN being an unobjective far left echo chamber is not new, making the stories kind of tiresome propaganda.
      - matthewmacleod 10y ago
        HN being full of clichè dissenting know-it-alls is not new, either.
      - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
        To the contrary. The signal-to-noise ratio here is not as good as I would like, but I can still find reasoned, thoughtful comments from people who don't think like me. It's still better than almost anywhere else.

SixSigma 10y ago

No mention that Thomson Reuters, owner of the Reuters news service, donated between $1m-$5m to Clinton. http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundation-donors-include-dozens-of-media-organizations-individuals-207228 http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundati...

BryantD 10y ago
There's a slight inaccuracy here; by simply saying "donated to Clinton" you imply that the donation was to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The donation was, however, to the Clinton Foundation. Given that the donations to the Clinton Foundation also came from conservative media outlets such as Newsmax and Fox, I'm confident that donating to the Clinton Foundation does not prove bias towards Hillary Clinton.
- contergan 10y ago
  The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative are just two fronts the Clintons used over the years to receive bribes. How else do you explain this: http://observer.com/2017/01/the-clinton-foundation-shuts-down-clinton-global-initiative/ http://observer.com/2017/01/the-clinton-foundation-shuts-dow... As soon as Clinton was out of the race, all those donations suddenly stopped coming in. It's pretty obvious that the whole thing was pretty much just legal bribery und the disguise of altruism. Since the Global Initiative has already shut down, it's probably only a matter of time until the Foundation shuts down, too.
  - mjmsmith 10y ago
    By all means, let's keep focusing on the Clintons. That's obviously the important thing here.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    The diametrically opposed interpretation that donors were afraid of retaliation by the Trump administration is frequently offered; and there are a lot of subtle shadings in between that one might also reasonably believe -- e.g., donors perceived the power of the Clinton brand as a key advantage of that organization over others, but the election defeat tarnished the brand and eliminated the advantage.

Gargoyle 10y ago

I was amused by this line- >We try to avoid “permanent exclusives” – first but wrong. Funny way to phrase it!

owenversteeg 10y ago

Reuters is consistently my favorite news source. What I love about them is how they sell news to everyone, so they've got to make it as factual and unbiased as possible. Of course, like any news organization, they have a few biases, but I think that purely because of the position that they're in they are the least biased news source today. They might sell the same article to Russia Today, the New York Times, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the Times of India, so they can't cater to one crowd's political biases. I'm serious; all these news sources pay for Reuters articles. And even if you don't like Reuters, you've got to respect the speed at which they get out correct news. Before the Twittersphere erupts, before CNN loses its mind, before the alerts on the radio, Reuters has it. And if they don't know something, they say that they don't know it. It can make for frustratingly light articles, but any time I'm annoyed how empty the article is I realize that if it was bigger it'd be fluff or unverified claims.

ErikVandeWater 10y ago
As a supplement to that, it's also good to get news from diverse perspectives (not just left/right). For example, Techdirt and Reason might have ideas that neither NBC nor WSJ are going to give you, and talk about niche topics that don't otherwise hit the radar. R/neutralnews is also a great community for people who want to discuss news with documented facts as a requirement.
- malnourish 10y ago
  NeutralNews is all right, but there are some substantial biases in the comments that people get away with.
malnourish 10y ago
I almost exclusively read Reuters and have turned all my friends onto Reuters. If I could read the AP feeds I would read those too. I'm not looking for what to think, I'm looking for what happened, and Reuters tends to give me that, even if I miss out on some stories.
- akeck 10y ago

MrZongle2 10y ago

I think these are excellent guidelines. If Reuters adheres to them, they'll continue to rise above the other mainstream media outlets. I suspect they'll be unlikely to come under fire from the current Administration, whose feud with the media seems to be concentrated on "info-tainment" organizations like CNN that for years now have eschewed factual reporting for titillation and talking heads.

BryantD 10y ago
We can probably dial that in a little more: Fox News is certainly no better than CNN as far as talking heads goes, but the Trump Administration isn't feuding with them. Trump is feuding with talking heads who don't advance his agenda.
- MrZongle2 10y ago
  No disagreement about Fox. But is the feud really because those media outlets aren't advancing his agenda? The tone from the press started with mockery during the primaries and advanced to hostility once Trump became the forerunner. Look at the election night coverage from most of the networks: it looked like a funeral, which is rather surprising given the supposed objectivity of these organizations. IMO the feud is about a lack of objectivity rather than a lack of full-throated support. Nobody should want a complicit, docile press: that's what we largely had for the last 8 years.
  - oculusthrift 10y ago
    "Last week, New York magazine reported that Trump’s feud with CNN has roots in his relationship with CNN President Jeff Zucker, a former NBC president who brought Trump's television show “The Apprentice” to the network. Trump, the magazine reported, has told White House staffers that he feels personally betrayed by Zucker and that Zucker should tilt CNN programming more favorably toward him because of their long relationship." http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cnn-press-234455 http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cnn-press-234455

genieyclo 10y ago

"Clinton has 90 percent chance of winning: Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation" - Nov 8 - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1322J1 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1...

iriche 10y ago
Which news outlet didn't say that?
- swang 10y ago
  seriously. fox news. cnn. msnbc. EVERYONE said it. 538 said it was 66/33 or 75/25 or something similar (i forget, but it wasn't 90/10 in favor of Clinton) and they got roasted over it when they don't even control any of the polls.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  The most well-regarded poll-based predictor, 538, gave Clinton a much lower than 90% chance and pointed out the key error of those predictors giving that high of a chance -- they used models which assumed, contrary to evidence, that deviations from polling results in different states in the same Presidential election are independent, when in fact they are strongly correlated.
khuey 10y ago
Trump winning doesn't prove they were wrong. That's not how p-values work.
joekrill 10y ago
OK, and your point? They said 90 percent. Not 100.
- alexc05 10y ago
  Exactly - I've played enough Dungeons & Dragons to know that it is possible to roll 1 or 2 on a D20. If there was a 90% chance of winning, it is the 10% which happened. That's pretty clear by how crazy close it wound up being to. Just 80,000 specific votes in specific states are outweighing more than 3,000,000 across the rest of the United States. That really feels like something that had about a 10% chance of happening (or less really).

coldtea 10y ago

Isn't everybody in media and business making "position statements" and being angry at you, the best way to show that you are "against the establishment"?

cirath 10y ago
That is kind of a false statement, though. If he were to say that Freedom of the Press is no longer protected, the press would be very angry with you -- but I don't think it would improve your image of being against the establishment. "The best" way to show you are against the establishment is to either a) prove the media's criticisms wrong, or b) have several actions that would stand against whatever "the establishment" is in our example. What Trump has done is very seldom given examples of what is wrong, he has just unilaterally declared that the MSM is crooked. He has not eroded trust in an article or statement, or in most cases proving the left-leaning or progressive media wrong, he has made declarations that reach far further than his original aim. This is very in line with his character, which has been largely reactionary and often quick to pass judgments without truly "aiming" them first. The parallels, for example, between his declarations of the media being wrong having much broader effects than intended, and his immigration bill which ultimately affected masses of people it shouldn't have, are difficult to ignore. Both were made in haste, both were aimed at a specific goal, and both had broad implications that were not originally intended.

general_ai 10y ago

Press will never be the same again. Over the past year and a half, most mainstream press outlets have shown themselves to be nothing more than a propaganda wing of the party their owners affiliate themselves with. This was particularly obvious on the democratic side, where they worked really hard to shove a pre-selected, cheating psychopath into the White House, and failed, much to the chagrin of their owners. If there was any doubt about the lack of impartiality and fairness, we're way beyond it now. No matter what they "report" now, their reputation is gone and only completely gullible idiots trust any of it. This reminds me very much of Soviet Pravda newspaper, where you'd first read the article, and then try to read between the lines and guess what really happened.

weberc2 10y ago

If the media generally practiced the principles outlined in this post, the criticisms levied against the industry wouldn't be credible. Not that Trump has any moral authority to complain about anyone's integrity, but many have been complaining about the increasing partisanship among the U.S. media for a long time, and their complaints are largely valid.

fareesh 10y ago

I remember being on Twitter on most of election day and seeing evidence of all sorts of manufactured rhetoric from Reuters, and was really disturbed (proof below). There are a lot of other explanations for why this happened, but I'm not inclined to believe them given the reality of what happened on election day. It looked like Reuters' polling towards the 8th showed Trump taking the lead, but they deleted the data and replaced it with Nov 1 data. Plenty of people caught it and called them out - several people took videos as well so the chance of them being a coordinated effort to doctor screenshots seems low. I don't know if they ever responded to this issue, but it forever changed my opinion of Reuters. If we're to assume the worst about this then it's pretty disgusting if this is the kind of shady stuff the media is pulling. I sympathize in principle, but in reality the question is whether this breed of media deserves anything but contempt. Tweets with screenshots / photos (more in the same thread): https://twitter.com/Blazingcatfur/status/796071971700244480 https://twitter.com/Blazingcatfur/status/796071971700244480 https://twitter.com/ProtectthePope/status/796068457137733637 https://twitter.com/ProtectthePope/status/796068457137733637 Also of note (posted elsewhere in the comments here, but downvoted): They posted this article on the 8th, saying there was a 90% chance of a Clinton win. Their data didn't support this claim. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1322J1 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN1...

cirath 10y ago
The linked Reuters article said their polls showed a 90% chance of a Clinton win, but the polls across all boards proved to be unreliable after the fact. What they did that advanced the idea of unbiased journalism is twofold: First, they reported on early election numbers in North Carolina which directly contradicted their poll numbers and showed Trump performing better than predicted. Second, they outlined a clear and realistic path to Trump winning. While their own poll numbers did not support this fact, they ultimately included it. They also did not rule out a Trump win in any way. It is always important to note that a 90% chance of winning is in no way a guarantee, and I do not believe Reuters ever truly ruled out Trump as a contender. They used the only early data available, polls--and when every poll is wrong, and psychics are still not a real thing, they did what they could with the data they had. At least, in my reading of the article you linked. Regarding the polls you linked, those are not the Reuters/Ipsos polls of 15,000 participants. Those are much smaller polls (850 users) with far larger margins for error. While I cannot speak to the censoring of the 11/6 poll mentioned in the second tweet, having Trump leading in popular vote nationally (eg: what polls generally check) was ultimately incorrect, regardless of what you believe. Polls need to be carefully read, interpreted, and corrected for -- which is why fivethirtyeight gave Trump a much higher chance to win than any other body.

williamle8300 10y ago

I'm a Trump supporter so take this with a grain of salt. When he said the media was dishonest, he was referring to CNN, WaPo and the mainstream media (excluding Fox News). Anyone who follows Trump know these are the folks he's referring to. If he didn't like ALL of the media, he wouldn't even have a press corps. Reuters isn't really engaging with what Trump's saying. Are Trump's claims substantiated? I would say, Yes. During the last election cycle, anybody who knows anything about the DNC leaks, Podesta emails, CNN feeding Hillary questions during townhall meetings against Sanders, Hillary's gliding past the FBI investigations, "bleaching" her email servers (which were under subpoena), Bill Clinton's unprofessional meeting with Loretta Lynch... knows that there's some serious corruption happening at the top of these major news companies. As a litmus test... the fact that almost every liberal in America is yelling at Trump more than they're yelling at the DNC (and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) shows the state of mainstream media. The DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders nomination, and he was the only candidate that would have a chance of beating Trump (a very high chance since he had young vote). When the DNC sabotaged Sanders' nomination, and doubled-down on Hillary the loss wasn't just technical––it was a landslide[1] Mainstream media is really broken in America. There really needs to be a breakup of corporation-owned news companies. It really is a swamp in Trump's idiom. [1] http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president

Endama 10y ago
While I may not agree with your position, I appreciate your perspective. Thank you for sharing.
deepnotderp 10y ago
Bernie supporter here, so obvious bias, but the way they (CNN, Fox, etc.) talked down to Sanders in the primaries was disgusting, so I have to agree there. However, the trump administration wasn't attacking Fox news which I think we can all agree from an objective standpoint is several times worse than CNN in their distortion of the truth.
- williamle8300 10y ago

protomyth 10y ago

I'm not sure what they are going for with this statement. I really wonder who is the audience. I just don't know what good they were hoping to achieve. I'm not being cynical, I just don't understand. Reaction wise this is basically signaling to most conservatives that Reuters hasn't been doing their job. Its a positive reinforcement that they didn't properly investigate or cover the scandals. I imagine #3 (Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access) is going to generate most of the commentaries about what has been reported with the prior administration. "Get out into the country..." was supposed to be your job. Maybe if they had done it properly a lot of surprising things wouldn't have been surprises.

jeremywho 10y ago
U.S. president calls journalists "among the most dishonest human beings on earth” or that his chief strategist dubs the media “the opposition party." I think their reason to respond is self-explanatory.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Prior administrations have had some amazingly unkind things to say about the press. I don't think those comments are any reason to respond.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    From my memory, what Trump said is unprecedented. If you have contrary data, please share it.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      President Obama as his comments on Fox News (he went farther and included comments on their viewers). For a bit of history, President Jackson was fairly salty with his views of newspapers. Unprecedented has pretty much been they insulted my guys instead of their guys.

Clubber 10y ago

The problem is that many of the people who voted for Trump don't read any news other than news explicitly designed to make Trump or the GOP look good.

netcraft 10y ago

> Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources. I like this take, if nothing else because when you're being fed your information theres always the chance to be less thorough. Its how propaganda is made.

charred_toast 10y ago

It's sad and unfortunate that considering the progress we've made as humans, that those in power are utterly afraid of the truth. It makes me ashamed to be a human being sometimes for this reason. We won't progress or 'evolve' unless this fact changes.

chetanahuja 10y ago

I'd like to see reuters/AP etc. not only take the same approach, but even use the same language to US reporting as they do in other "regimes". Here's a slate.com series that I thought was doing a great job but for some reason hasn't continued into the Trump regime. e.g. When Justice Scalia died: WASHINGTON, United States—The unexpected death of a hard-line conservative jurist on America’s constitutional court has exposed deep fissures within the ruling regime and threatens to throw the country’s fragile political system into months of chaos. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/17/how_the_u_s_media_would_cover_the_supreme_court_nomination_fight_if_it_happened.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/17/how_the_u_...

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
"Deep fissures within the ruling regime"? Deep fissures, sure, between the President and the majority of the Senate, who are of the other party. It seems a bit of a stretch to call Democrats and Republicans together "the ruling regime", though. "Fragile political system"? More fragile than it used to be, but not yet fragile. We weathered that mess with barely a sweat. "Months of chaos"? Not even. That is: The language doesn't fit the reality in the US, whereas it often does fit the reality of the third world.
- chetanahuja 10y ago
  "That is: The language doesn't fit the reality in the US, whereas it often does fit the reality of the third world." Yeah... this is what we keep telling ourselves.

grokkable 10y ago

Fllllaaaaaaggggg