9 ms·

Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us

16 points by laurex 6y ago

alacombe 6y ago
It's kinda funny for a newspaper could colluding with government to influence a country to go to war (in that case the Iraq war), and more recently doxing bloggers to pick publish such opinions pieces...
- skrebbel 6y ago
  A good newspaper doesn't have a singular, consistent opinion. They'll publish opinion pieces from many authors who will often disagree with one another and with newspaper editors.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  The legacy media has spent the better part of the last decade trying to find a means to blunt the effect of the social media and probably two decades trying to blunt the effect of the internet as a whole. So they go the route that should have been obvious 1) Declare a problem that threatens all 2) Spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt 3) State that they are the solution Step two also involves using seemingly unrelated parties along with their own efforts to make it appear more of a problem than it otherwise would be. It is along the lines of when a group of politicians suddenly all use the same new word, a word they never used before and likely to never use again. they had the public trust when the public did not know better and we have a very well established self checking system where nearly every false claim can be called out and usually is. I don't know of a legacy media brand that has not tarnished their name. Social media is here to stay and while some may not like Facebook, Twitter, and similar, the legacy media and the politicians who rely on them to spread the news they desire look to muzzle all forms of communication they don't themselves control or influence.
- Terretta 6y ago
  > newspaper colluding with government Clever conspiracy seems less likely than sloppy stupidity. This didn’t need “collusion” for the same bad outcome. ”Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right.” In what way was NYT in a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation with the government to influence the country to go to the Iraq war? NY Times has said, “The lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not the Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous.” Media Matters covered this at the time, and also quoted Slate, attributing the collusion as between Bush administration and Chalabi, and NYT report Miller and Chalabi, with Chalabi as the common element: “Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi.” https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti... This is not saying Miller colluded with the White House, but that the method of corroboration was flawed, as both paper and government were relying on the same (false) source such that fake news checked out. Insufficient skepticism of a very high ranking source is not the same thing as collusion with another party also over-reliant on the same source. And journos protecting a source or CIA keeping a source secret are also not secret cooperation. The result is the same for similar reasons, you want future sources to be willing to share, but this doesn’t imply collusion. TL;DR: Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most “conspiracies” are probably just people being coincidentally dumb, incompetent, or lazy.
  - zepto 6y ago
    > TL;DR: Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most “conspiracies” are probably just people being coincidentally dumb, incompetent, or lazy. At some point Hanlon’s razor becomes a middlebrow dismissal, and a bit of a red herring. It’s a good rule of thumb for not getting mad at your boss, but useless when analyzing the actions of powerful institutions. It really doesn’t matter whether we can prove some kind of ‘malice’ in the hearts of NYT journalists. It does seem unlikely that they are any more malicious than any other corporation. However that is utterly irrelevant to whether their institutional biases or lack of analytical capacity make them harmful given the power they hold.
    - Terretta 6y ago
      GP comment was a particular accusation of collusion with the government versus check on the government. I’d been responding more narrowly to that, rather than the “is the press net harmful” question you’re posing. Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics. The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve. Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.
      - zepto 6y ago
        > GP comment was a particular accusation of collusion with the government versus check on the government. I’d been responding more narrowly to that, rather than the “is the press net harmful” question you’re posing. I don’t think that changes the sense of what I said. ‘Collusion’ can be a conspiracy of people actually meeting in smoke filled rooms, or it can be simply giving the benefit of the doubt to ones ideological bedfellows. > Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics. The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry. > it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve. That’s a problem. What you are callings journalism skepticism, I consider to be journalism criticism. It’s reasonable to assume that Journalism is just as susceptible to institutional problems as any of the institutions it purports to be a check-and-balance on. I’m not anti-journalism, but I’m appalled by the lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for it negative impacts. > Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom. Being ‘better than Facebook’ is at this point, not much different from being better than a cigarette company. I agree without but I’m not why you’re even mentioning this, but it’s not a good thing to compare journalism with.
blakesterz 6y ago
I don't have much to say about this article, it's an opinion piece. I did find it interesting that the URL is "digital-revolution-democracy-fake-news.html" but the headline (and title tag) is "Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us" I that some kind of SEO thing or did the title/headline change while the URL stays the same? Earlier there was just this discussion on "Investigating how the New York Times A/B tests their headlines" which made me wonder. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419070
- minimaxir 6y ago
  URLs never change when doing A/B testing because that would break a lot of things. It's one of the reasons slugs tend to be more generic/SEO friendly.
oh_sigh 6y ago
I feel like americans are brainwashed to revere democracy from a young age, so we go through life speaking these platitudes about believing in democracy even if really we just want political power however it may come. Trump was not our guy but popular therefore he was a populist and a demagogue and problematic. Obama was our guy and popular therefore he represented the aspirations of the common people.
- loopz 6y ago
  You gotta first decide wether to burn the house down, or plant the seeds for tomorrow. The answer is in the middle somewhere.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Trump isn't problematic because he's a populist, he's problematic because he does things like call the Secretary of State and beg him to alter the certified count to give him an extra 11,780 votes.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Trump was viewed as problematic before November 2020
    - kmos17 6y ago
      Yes, specifically when he refused to commit to accept the results of the election if he didn’t win. As the events leading to and including Jan 6 showed, this was not just bluster, he used all means including illegal ones to try to hold on to power after losing the election. That is what made him the most problematic, someone who doesn’t want to play by the rules of democracy.
    - jfengel 6y ago
      That was an example so straightforward that it's hard to imagine any honest person looking at it and saying "Yeah, that's all right". The people who opposed him before could cite numerous other examples, and to be honest I can't really imagine how many people changed their minds over that one if they'd accepted everything else. If they do exist, it's hard to imagine that it came as a complete surprise. I would imagine that in retrospect they'd have to say, "Yeah, maybe the people whose guy he wasn't weren't completely off base". That is, it's not just the usual "not our guy" thing. This was different in kind, not just in amount. Maybe some people opposed him just because he wasn't their guy, but there were things that should have broken the mold of "he's our guy therefore he's ok".
macrowhat 6y ago
Well, I don't expect more than far-leftist "opinions" from this once-great institution. My message for Thomas is that democracy only works when you have cultural cohesion. So why even act surprised?
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
  What is "far-left" about this article?
  - macrowhat 6y ago
    Its blatant anti-Trump sentiment
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      So... "far-left" is anyone who disagrees with you, then? That's a rather bold attempt to push the Overton Window; I don't think it will work, though.
      - macrowhat 6y ago
        I think it will. In retrospect he was pretty good.
      - jfengel 6y ago
        I bet it will. It has worked so far. We always assumed that saying the quiet part out loud worked against you. Turns out that people like saying the quiet part out loud. It gives them a rush. And the people who weren't supposed to hear the quiet part heard it all along, so it doesn't really change anything. So yeah, they can go ahead and say "Anybody who dislikes my guy is Socialist/Communist/Leftist/Other Vacuous Word That Means Bad To Me". They enjoy it, you hate it, but you can't vote against him any harder than you already were. And for those who were meh on it, they either join in on the joy, or remain meh rather that push back. It's pretty much win-win for them. It didn't work last time only because of a literal pandemic that would have worked against anybody who was in charge, even if they didn't obviously bungle it. So basically, expect more of it. Because it works, and it will continue to work.
chr1 6y ago
It is a mistake to call the form of representative government used today "democracy". The system is designed in such a way as to keep the influence of ordinary people, who are not heavily invested in the system, very minimal. Usually this is done by parties promising rather different things before elections, but afterwards coming to some agreement and doing something unrelated to the promises. Now that there are new ways to organize via social media, people can behave in unexpected ways, and some people bemoan this as weakening of democracy. But in fact it is not. People deciding what policies to use doesn't become less democratic simply because someone thinks these people are stupid/mislead by false news etc. Refusing them the right to vote or to communicate their beliefs is just as undemocratic as refusing well educated citizen the same right. The focus should be on finding ways to make decisions less global, so that ill effects of a bad decision are experienced only by the people making it, and they have an opportunity to learn from it and make a better decision the next time. The solution is to stop voting for people and vote for individual policies. With open online direct voting with a way to trade votes and option to delegate votes [1], we'll discover that in reality we agree on much more than we are led to believe from following social media. And we'll discover that there is a huge space for compromise that we were unable to explore so far because exploring it was disadvantageous to the representatives that we had to elect. [1] https://voteflux.org/#flux-in-a-nutshell https://voteflux.org/#flux-in-a-nutshell
- rado 6y ago
  Spot on. Can anyone explain why the majority of grown-up intelligent people believe in it besides the hard facts, akin to religious fanaticism? The so-called democratic countries have some degree of liberty and rule of law, which is great. But democracy as such is an illusion. Even in ancient Athens only ~15% of the population had the right to vote. The rest were slaves (workers).

16 points by laurex 6y ago

It's kinda funny for a newspaper could colluding with government to influence a country to go to war (in that case the Iraq war), and more recently doxing bloggers to pick publish such opinions pieces...

skrebbel 6y ago
A good newspaper doesn't have a singular, consistent opinion. They'll publish opinion pieces from many authors who will often disagree with one another and with newspaper editors.
Shivetya 6y ago
The legacy media has spent the better part of the last decade trying to find a means to blunt the effect of the social media and probably two decades trying to blunt the effect of the internet as a whole. So they go the route that should have been obvious 1) Declare a problem that threatens all 2) Spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt 3) State that they are the solution Step two also involves using seemingly unrelated parties along with their own efforts to make it appear more of a problem than it otherwise would be. It is along the lines of when a group of politicians suddenly all use the same new word, a word they never used before and likely to never use again. they had the public trust when the public did not know better and we have a very well established self checking system where nearly every false claim can be called out and usually is. I don't know of a legacy media brand that has not tarnished their name. Social media is here to stay and while some may not like Facebook, Twitter, and similar, the legacy media and the politicians who rely on them to spread the news they desire look to muzzle all forms of communication they don't themselves control or influence.
Terretta 6y ago
> newspaper colluding with government Clever conspiracy seems less likely than sloppy stupidity. This didn’t need “collusion” for the same bad outcome. ”Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right.” In what way was NYT in a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation with the government to influence the country to go to the Iraq war? NY Times has said, “The lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not the Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous.” Media Matters covered this at the time, and also quoted Slate, attributing the collusion as between Bush administration and Chalabi, and NYT report Miller and Chalabi, with Chalabi as the common element: “Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi.” https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti... This is not saying Miller colluded with the White House, but that the method of corroboration was flawed, as both paper and government were relying on the same (false) source such that fake news checked out. Insufficient skepticism of a very high ranking source is not the same thing as collusion with another party also over-reliant on the same source. And journos protecting a source or CIA keeping a source secret are also not secret cooperation. The result is the same for similar reasons, you want future sources to be willing to share, but this doesn’t imply collusion. TL;DR: Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most “conspiracies” are probably just people being coincidentally dumb, incompetent, or lazy.
- zepto 6y ago
  > TL;DR: Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most “conspiracies” are probably just people being coincidentally dumb, incompetent, or lazy. At some point Hanlon’s razor becomes a middlebrow dismissal, and a bit of a red herring. It’s a good rule of thumb for not getting mad at your boss, but useless when analyzing the actions of powerful institutions. It really doesn’t matter whether we can prove some kind of ‘malice’ in the hearts of NYT journalists. It does seem unlikely that they are any more malicious than any other corporation. However that is utterly irrelevant to whether their institutional biases or lack of analytical capacity make them harmful given the power they hold.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    GP comment was a particular accusation of collusion with the government versus check on the government. I’d been responding more narrowly to that, rather than the “is the press net harmful” question you’re posing. Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics. The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve. Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.
    - zepto 6y ago
      > GP comment was a particular accusation of collusion with the government versus check on the government. I’d been responding more narrowly to that, rather than the “is the press net harmful” question you’re posing. I don’t think that changes the sense of what I said. ‘Collusion’ can be a conspiracy of people actually meeting in smoke filled rooms, or it can be simply giving the benefit of the doubt to ones ideological bedfellows. > Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics. The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry. > it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve. That’s a problem. What you are callings journalism skepticism, I consider to be journalism criticism. It’s reasonable to assume that Journalism is just as susceptible to institutional problems as any of the institutions it purports to be a check-and-balance on. I’m not anti-journalism, but I’m appalled by the lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for it negative impacts. > Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom. Being ‘better than Facebook’ is at this point, not much different from being better than a cigarette company. I agree without but I’m not why you’re even mentioning this, but it’s not a good thing to compare journalism with.

blakesterz 6y ago

I don't have much to say about this article, it's an opinion piece. I did find it interesting that the URL is "digital-revolution-democracy-fake-news.html" but the headline (and title tag) is "Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us" I that some kind of SEO thing or did the title/headline change while the URL stays the same? Earlier there was just this discussion on "Investigating how the New York Times A/B tests their headlines" which made me wonder. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419070

minimaxir 6y ago
URLs never change when doing A/B testing because that would break a lot of things. It's one of the reasons slugs tend to be more generic/SEO friendly.

oh_sigh 6y ago

I feel like americans are brainwashed to revere democracy from a young age, so we go through life speaking these platitudes about believing in democracy even if really we just want political power however it may come. Trump was not our guy but popular therefore he was a populist and a demagogue and problematic. Obama was our guy and popular therefore he represented the aspirations of the common people.

loopz 6y ago
You gotta first decide wether to burn the house down, or plant the seeds for tomorrow. The answer is in the middle somewhere.
jcranmer 6y ago
Trump isn't problematic because he's a populist, he's problematic because he does things like call the Secretary of State and beg him to alter the certified count to give him an extra 11,780 votes.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Trump was viewed as problematic before November 2020
  - kmos17 6y ago
    Yes, specifically when he refused to commit to accept the results of the election if he didn’t win. As the events leading to and including Jan 6 showed, this was not just bluster, he used all means including illegal ones to try to hold on to power after losing the election. That is what made him the most problematic, someone who doesn’t want to play by the rules of democracy.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    That was an example so straightforward that it's hard to imagine any honest person looking at it and saying "Yeah, that's all right". The people who opposed him before could cite numerous other examples, and to be honest I can't really imagine how many people changed their minds over that one if they'd accepted everything else. If they do exist, it's hard to imagine that it came as a complete surprise. I would imagine that in retrospect they'd have to say, "Yeah, maybe the people whose guy he wasn't weren't completely off base". That is, it's not just the usual "not our guy" thing. This was different in kind, not just in amount. Maybe some people opposed him just because he wasn't their guy, but there were things that should have broken the mold of "he's our guy therefore he's ok".

macrowhat 6y ago

Well, I don't expect more than far-leftist "opinions" from this once-great institution. My message for Thomas is that democracy only works when you have cultural cohesion. So why even act surprised?

virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
What is "far-left" about this article?
- macrowhat 6y ago
  Its blatant anti-Trump sentiment
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    So... "far-left" is anyone who disagrees with you, then? That's a rather bold attempt to push the Overton Window; I don't think it will work, though.
    - macrowhat 6y ago
      I think it will. In retrospect he was pretty good.
    - jfengel 6y ago
      I bet it will. It has worked so far. We always assumed that saying the quiet part out loud worked against you. Turns out that people like saying the quiet part out loud. It gives them a rush. And the people who weren't supposed to hear the quiet part heard it all along, so it doesn't really change anything. So yeah, they can go ahead and say "Anybody who dislikes my guy is Socialist/Communist/Leftist/Other Vacuous Word That Means Bad To Me". They enjoy it, you hate it, but you can't vote against him any harder than you already were. And for those who were meh on it, they either join in on the joy, or remain meh rather that push back. It's pretty much win-win for them. It didn't work last time only because of a literal pandemic that would have worked against anybody who was in charge, even if they didn't obviously bungle it. So basically, expect more of it. Because it works, and it will continue to work.

chr1 6y ago

It is a mistake to call the form of representative government used today "democracy". The system is designed in such a way as to keep the influence of ordinary people, who are not heavily invested in the system, very minimal. Usually this is done by parties promising rather different things before elections, but afterwards coming to some agreement and doing something unrelated to the promises. Now that there are new ways to organize via social media, people can behave in unexpected ways, and some people bemoan this as weakening of democracy. But in fact it is not. People deciding what policies to use doesn't become less democratic simply because someone thinks these people are stupid/mislead by false news etc. Refusing them the right to vote or to communicate their beliefs is just as undemocratic as refusing well educated citizen the same right. The focus should be on finding ways to make decisions less global, so that ill effects of a bad decision are experienced only by the people making it, and they have an opportunity to learn from it and make a better decision the next time. The solution is to stop voting for people and vote for individual policies. With open online direct voting with a way to trade votes and option to delegate votes [1], we'll discover that in reality we agree on much more than we are led to believe from following social media. And we'll discover that there is a huge space for compromise that we were unable to explore so far because exploring it was disadvantageous to the representatives that we had to elect. [1] https://voteflux.org/#flux-in-a-nutshell https://voteflux.org/#flux-in-a-nutshell

rado 6y ago
Spot on. Can anyone explain why the majority of grown-up intelligent people believe in it besides the hard facts, akin to religious fanaticism? The so-called democratic countries have some degree of liberty and rule of law, which is great. But democracy as such is an illusion. Even in ancient Athens only ~15% of the population had the right to vote. The rest were slaves (workers).