Consider the power of this statement then: if they were ok with all of those things and now they draw a line that means that things have gotten much, much worse than they were before.
Well... maybe. If a company brings in new anti-sexual-assault training and a bunch of people quit around the same time that doesn't necessarily suggest the problem is the outrageous training.
I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.
This clearly has nothing to do with security, but do you really believe journalists are just "wandering" around the Pentagon and getting into classified materials?
I was wrong. My source was Major Garret of CBS News. I was reminded of this as he is, as I type this, on KMOX Radio in St Louis discussing this very subject. You can probably listen to it online now and later, too.
The news outlets, by and large, are not upset at the idea they need to keep to more restrictive areas (though they've already had their access limited by this administration).
The concern is the "you can't report on anything we don't want you to" rule.
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.
The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?
If that's the case, shouldn't we also ban the top brass from restaurants, bars, churches and golf courses lest they encounter strangers there?
Why bother? It hasn't caused a major problem so far. This isn't new, it is how the world has worked for all of military history.
I know classified US secrets, the leaks around the Snowden era were pretty interesting. Guarantee you the people in the building know more than me. The NOFORN stuff actually tends to be the spiciest if you feel an urge to go look at something.
Strike packages being leaked before launch? Yes. Yes, that’s new. We spent a lot of time and money to get that access in WWII. It was what Turing built the Enigma to do.
You made the counter argument, there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personal outside of a building the handles secret documents.
I'm surprised they were let in the building in the first place. Should I be allowed to go if I have a press pass?
> The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?
I can think of one. Name ends on Hegseth.
And that same lying press and propaganda club that roenxi is arguing against here reported his gaffe pretty accurately, which if they had been who he claims they are they never would have.
National security has been the excuse of damn near every uncharacteristically authoritarian move our government has made, and the pentagon has unprecedented means to securely discuss and transfer information. The onus of controlling that information has always fallen on people with clearance, and the biggest sensitive information compromises in the past couple decades were perpetrated by national political figures. There are people a lot snoopier than reporters looking for information a lot more sensitive than they are who’ll leak it to foreign governments without us ever knowing — that’s who they really have to worry about. Controlling media is, and has always been about protecting themselves from embarrassment.
* whether you need to limit people learning something
* whether you need to limit people publishing something
"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.
1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.
You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.
Roenxi implied that the real perpetrators/bad people are the journalists that left. And that they left because the government started to prosecute their crimes.
Does that really need an in-depth analysis to point out how dumb that idea is?
"In depth analysis?" No, but if you're calling someone confused it's probably basic decency--not to mention in keeping with the spirit of the site guidelines--to briefly state why.
Yes! There is no character limit here. It drives me bonkers when I read comments like that one. What is anyone supposed to get out of it? It has the same meaning as "lol".
Comments like that are why I left reddit - they do not foster discussion, they are low-effort attempts at getting updoots. If the only meaning that can be extracted from a comment is "I disagree", it shouldn't be a comment, it should be a downvote. It's a waste of an indentation level.
The idea that these journalists suddenly found a spine is also dumb [0]. It was an example about as far on the other end of the spectrum from what jacquesm said as I could think of; obviously it is dumb too. It's an extreme example. That doesn't make it confused though, and this is the thing about explaining what you read. If you comment about what you think got said directly it is easier for people to clear up misunderstandings.
[0] If they're sitting in the same office as the US military, they're propagandists. Their job is to spread propaganda. They aren't going to suddenly catch a case of principles now. This is the class of people that keeps cheer-leading every disastrous military expedition the US goes on.
It is a safe starting point that my comments are my opinion. If I'm presenting a fact or someone else's opinion I usually hyperlink it with square brackets.
> Then why are they not paid by the government?
They're not government propagandists. They're more an outcrop of the military-industrial complex propaganda and generally associated with the neocons from what I've seen. From the outside this looks like it might be a turf war between the Trumpists and the Neocons, but it is hard to be sure.
> You are just parroting the usual 'luegenpresse' shit.
If they put more effort into intellectually honest reporting of what the US military is doing it'd be harder to make the epithet stick. Always an option; a bunch of journalists do actually manage it. Just not so many of the ones literally sitting with the military. Someone like Snowden may well have walked past a lot of journalists at his day job, but I don't think any of them were leaking the large and credibly illegal government spying program.
On the contrary, it is perfectly on point, the poster in fact admits further down below that it was a stupid comment. It is so confused that I can't make heads or tails of it but after some more back-and-forth (which if you had read the thread you would have known, rather than put in your uselesswords here) it became more clear: they really don't understand the comment did not make any sense.
If you want me to try explaining something more clearly you should include a rough outline of what you think I said. Otherwise I've basically got nothing to do but repeat myself. Hopefully this helps.
The journalists and the generals can presumably still talk to each other over drinks after work. The journalists were only ever going to be tolerated in the building because US leadership thinks they are helping them achieve military propaganda aims which are rarely noble things. There isn't much at stake here beyond classified information.
US classified information has been a bit of a disaster for them. It just means the government is slowly escaping accountability for what it does. They have that massive spying program on US citizens and the last I heard of the story was they can't sue anyone over it because the courts aren't allowed to believe it exists.
This isn't about security at all. This is about control of the narrative. Hegseth and co would like you to believe it is about security. But there is absolutely no indication that there was an urgent issue that needs resolution.
The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative. We're moving from a state where the government was trying to control the narrative to the same state.
That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.
> The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative.
At that point you can just claim everyone working in the government is doing the same, or given the fact that they are working for the government it’s even worse since they’re employed full time (or were) to advance the government’s agenda!
Except that the government’s agenda is by and large the agenda of the people that it represents.
Not only is the point of view you’re expressing uselessly cynical, you’re depriving others of agency as well. It’s still a free country - press access doesn’t mean “government mouthpiece”. There are lots of news organizations and journalists with differing levels of professional standing and points of view and you can read all about them for yourself.
> Except that the government’s agenda is by and large the agenda of the people that it represents.
In this case the government's agenda is that these journalists should either get Hegseth to stamp their articles or pack their cardboard boxes and get out of the building. Make of that what you will.
The deal is the journalists (propagandists) get to be in the building if they're compliant with whatever narrative the US government wants to be spread. The US government is changing the narrative they want to target, implementing that policy with some administrative changes and some of the journalists aren't compliant with it any more. They now have to leave the building and sit in a different building. It is quite challenging to tag whether this development is good or bad in the big picture. The basic deal on offer to the journalists hasn't changed - the ones in the building are compliant, the ones out of the building may or may not be compliant with what the US administration wants said.
There's arguments that no journalists should be in the building, there's an argument that more eyes are always better and it is easier to keep track of these people if they are in the building.
Access is what allows them to form the relationships and contacts that let them report information that counters the propaganda. It is a two way street. The NPR reporter you mentioned, Tom Bowman, is not OANN and has reported many times very critically of the military.
Unlike yours, which are off topic and do not contribute at all.
> I with there was an "original thought" button that just showed root comments.
I think you meant 'wish', there is a little - mark at the beginning of each comment thread, if you click that the comments will collapse, there is also a 'start with collapsed comments' setting that only appears above 200K karma.
>They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.
As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.
So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.
Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time. Which is why many, except for quatari al jazeera djihadis refused to go.
Same as with the tulkarem incident where the west bank police lynched two israelis on camera and the mob noticed the filming reporters and smashed the cameras.
Since your unsubstantiated comment did not reference the content of the sourced article in any way I can only conclude you're replying in bad faith and trolling.
>SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised
He acts like every other person (myself included) that i know that had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed but still looks funny at his favorite drink. With a guy like this you literally never know what the clear liquid in the glass bottle is.
The silent treatment was basically required by law, when it became clear the event was really a political rally using them as props. They just didn’t break the law (unlike what other, hand-picked service members used as props at Trump rallies have done in the past)
Also, in some cases the press did apologise, e.g. https://archive.ph/F3Ra1 . Fox news were notoriously the worst propagandisers in this case; I searched but could not find any apology from them.
> Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?
I have to ask -- why? Your population is hundreds of millions, you can afford to let go of bad people and replace them with better people. You don't need to let go of a grudge against war criminals and their media collaborators. They're not your family, or people that you simply have to learn how to deal with because you can't lose them.
I'm assuming here that it is a goal to get rid of such people eventually. Then that requires making steps towards that goal. Be unforgiving towards people who wield power unethically.
Your right it’s different, but the problem is that I want a fair and consistent standard.
Shouldn’t telling the truth and apologize when you “accidentally” misinform the public be the standard?
They collectively have proven themselves to be untrustworthy and now they can’t be trusted anymore but some people continue to pretend they are authoritative sources of truth despite the facts that they help lie America into a war that kill many and caused massive financial damage to the economy.
I’m saying that people and corporations should be held accountable and responsible for their actions?
This kind of boycott needs to happen for the WH press corps. If there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions, or being expelled from the room for asking tough questions, then everyone needs to walk. Immediately.
Game theory applies here. There will always be one journalist without any moral qualms that’ll stay, betting on everyone else leaving, and making a scoop.
Rely on traditional trade craft. A bouncing bevy of brothel, escort service, deepthroats; historically and dramatized, is a staid and proven primary source.
That's some bar moving. In one case we're saying that even if you report garbage, your competitors are going to occupy the niche without you, therefore something something game theory.
But in this other case, well there's just no value to reporting garbage.
Have you ever seen a White House press conference? People scream their questions in the hope of being the loudest, because the president only answers a few. If most of the competition for question time leaves, there’s more time for you to get that juicy soundbite you’re after.
Have you seen a white house press conference lately? It's all just the same talking points. Everyone gets to report on the sound bites. You're choosing to describe these things as if the game theoretics are qualitatively different. Your description is doing more of the work than the game theory.
Well, the White House press corps has already been changed to (how do I write this in a way that won't get me downvoted?) include more reporters friendly to the current administration since the White House asserted the right to determine itself who gets access (formerly it was the White House Correspondents' Association), so the chances of such a more-or-less unified boycott are slim. And I don't have any doubts that the Pentagon will also quickly find enough "warm bodies" (besides those from OANN) to prevent an embarrassing almost empty room at the next press conference...
It's less about having an effect but all about moral integrity. They want to signal that they still abide to their professional standards in order to keep their reputation among their peers and the public, those who aren't gleichgeschaltet (yet).
dang is, at best, oblivious to the fact that that this site has become a battleground. At worst, he's intentionally chosen sides with his selective removal of flags.
dang is not the only moderator. There is apparently an unspoken moderation guideline that if enough people (i.e., a mob) think something should be here then it stays regardless of how many guidelines it violates. To the detriment of the community, in my opinion.
The press corps is already 50% right wing podcasters and 5th-tier far right / conspiracy outlets. And any time one of the remaining actual reporters asks even a mundane and non-confrontational question they just get called names, told their network/paper is failing, told their question is “nasty”, and don’t get an answer. The access they have is even more pointless than it usually is, they may as well not show up.
>>there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions
That's not exactly what's happening.
>>The rules limit where reporters can go without an official escort and convey “an unprecedented message of intimidation” for anyone in the Defense Department who might want to speak to a reporter without the approval of Hegseth’s team
On NPR (National Public Radio) a few days ago, a reporter said they could wander the halls of the Pentagon and ask anyone they ran into any question about anything. This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
If you don’t quote it out of context you’ll see that a) he doesn’t have any problems with not having physical access to parts of the pentagon and b) the quote was part of a broader anecdote where generals contradicted the secretary of defense.
The new pledge would not allow him to report that disagreement. Which is extremely telling.
They wouldn't have full access, but yes, journalists should be able to ask anyone anything. Asking is legal, and it's up to the person being asked to not say anything that a journalist isn't supposed to know.
What bad things have happened from what you're describing?
I would think anyone visiting this board would be educated enough to figure out for themselves what could happen should a foreign agent posing as a reporter asking questions inside a top military organization. Or any reporter discreetly obtaining information they shouldn't have.
They wouldn't get an answer hopefully. You do know that allowing journalists to ask all questions isn't the same thing as anwering all those questions?
In a democratic functioning society the gold standard is that citizen are allowed to ask anything and allowed to answer nothing. The GOP wants to reverse both.
That’s not what the new rules say. They say they will be denied access to the pentagon if they ask questions of military or DoD personnel that isn’t explicitly cleared by the DoD.
Access to the Pentagon is the privilege they are revoking but the action they are punishing is not related to the Pentagon.
Well, military personnel shouldn’t be sharing sensitive information with any reporter, so not a problem? Once you tell a reporter, you tell your enemy (assuming your enemy can read newspapers).
When your "enemy" becomes the oversight providing public, we have a major problem.
A government with public alignment and maybe a slow leak will be fine. A government without public alignment needs to have every crack pried open until alignment with the public is restored.
The status quo is that they have access credentials, which presumably come with some sort of vetting. So a "foreign agent" showing up and impersonating a reporter is unlikely.
I've visited the White House a couple of times and even setting foot on the complex as a visitor requires a background check, I assume the Pentagon functions similarly.
You honestly think a foreign agent impersonating a reporter is any more unlikely than a foreign agent--or one working on their behalf--isn't likely to be working within the government?
> This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
I do love that despite the administration lying about everything there are still people who will take what they say at face value without a shred of critical thinking.
They're doing this because people keep leaking unflattering pieces of information and Petey gets his feelings hurt pretty quickly. It has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control.
An industrial reel spool of paper, direct from the mill, feeding into a continuous printer tanked with lemon juice ink, then feeding into an operating shredder.
What I want to know is: why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
If you did agree to the terms you'd be limited to publishing the official story (and can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff), but you get that for free anyway even if you never show up, so why bother with the extra expense of actually going to the Pentagon?
They'll get exclusive interviews, they'll get to be visible on TV asking questions to important people, they'll get invited on trips where they can film in front of a cool background like a military base or something.
I think it's worth it for anyone that cares about the aesthetics of journalism more than actually reporting anything of value.
Lol you're making it out like the individual reporters make these calls. If anyone stayed it's because their employer believes there's money to be made in staying. The end.
So those news agencies made the decisions to stay in the press corps just as a nice treat for those reporters (nice trips etc)? Is that what you're saying?
Can you first clarify what point you're trying to make in the context of these news agencies staying or going?
Edit: the equivocation about people not being cynical always in their roles in a corporation (a very trite claim to begin with) is extra funny in the context of the literal laws that bind employees of corporations to do exactly what we all already know they are bound to do:
> They must discharge their actions in good faith and in the best interest of the corporation, exercising the care an ordinary person would use under similar circumstances.
Well I don’t live in the US, maybe there are only cynical people there.
Somehow I doubt that though.
Also remember that “best interests of the corporation” doesn’t necessarily mean get money now and lose reputation for a long time.
Some people might interpret it that way, others not. It is all context dependent and there is no guarantee people would be convinced for taking the long view if they can provide justification.
I can buy that. But even then, I've seen plenty of videos where one person is just commenting on another video, so even for those influencers… they can do it without actually showing up.
Edit: I suspect you're right anyway. Typical mind fallacy on my part, as there have been people giving anecdotal stories of DOGE recruiters offering them a pay cut relative to their current roles just for the chance to do that work and get DOGE on their CVs, recruiters very confused that the response was that DOGE would be seen as a negative by future employers.
> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
Imagine being an aspiring blogger/independent journalist. One can only dream of such a possibility as to join the press corp of Pentagon. Of course many will agree to all restrictions and rules for the opportunity.
Your audience chooses you over the press releases because you sound like a human, trim out the boring items and more obvious propaganda, place things in context, reduce jargon/simplify things, also report on other things the pentagon doesn't have press releases about, and throw in some jokes.
You choose to keep at it because you think military stuff is pretty neat; you get paid by the view; getting briefings from the pentagon makes you seem important to yourself and others; and you like being a celebrity (albeit a very minor one)
If you do a good enough job publishing the official government narrative, you might get promoted to cabinet member. Half this cabinet are former teenage youtubers who did a good enough job supporting the regime's first term.
As somebody from former Eastern Block, getting promoted by your own party often times meant that you will be also first to end up in gulag/labor camp/prison as a scape goat when dear leader made wrong decision because you have provided him misleading information.
So many communists ended up imprisoned by other communists because they weren't pure enough or because scape goat was needed.
It means you'll either to go to gulag or you'll become supremely wealthy. Possibly both, first the latter, then the former when you outlive your usefulness.
Which is better than just being a normal person who goes to gulag with no wealth.
You saw it on a smaller scale before. Supporters of the current regime would get paid a lot for a while, then promptly forgotten about. Remember Steven Crowder complaining that 50 million dollars was too little - but where is he now? He's irrelevant. That was before they had gulags.
> Remember Steven Crowder complaining that 50 million dollars was too little - but where is he now? He's irrelevant.
To be clear, his career imploded when he got caught on camera abusing his wife. It's not like he ended up on the wrong side of a power struggle.
And it's worth noting that as of last month he's now the #1 right wing influencer on Youtube. (The reason why he's now in that spot is left as an exercise for the reader.)
It seems like basically the only ones who stayed are OAN; in their case it's probably just a demonstration of loyalty to Dear Leader. As you say, being there under those rules seems otherwise rather pointless.
They couldn’t do anything else. The power grab happens even when they would have succumbed. At least they quit with a spine.
If they don’t go back in a week, which can be seen from several examples, like Hungary, that it doesn’t work. I think compared to the Hungarian government, this was a misstep of Trump (which I hope they make it more). In Hungary, when something like this happened, you always lost when you didn’t succumb to authoritarianism. You lost your previous privileges no matter what, but you lost more if you protested. They tried to keep up a facade that nothing changed, while everything changed. In this case it seems to me as an outside observer, that nothing value was lost by quitting compared to signing up.
Or Trump and co don’t want to keep a facade at all. But then they need to bet on that most people in America are really fascists.
The pentagon and jornos embedded there were always playing the access journalism game all along. Nothing new is happening, this was just the secdef being so thick he asked them to put the punches they'll pull in writing. It should be seen as a union walk-out.
Well every step they do seems to be copy/pasted from North Korea.
Since nobody is protesting now you can expect that 5 years from now the regime will start making disappear people vaguely opposing the gov decisions or being suicided on a regular basis.
Not the case, there are quite large protests, one is this weekend I believe.
As for disappearances, ICE is already doing that. Although in Chicago their attempts to disappear people are going increasingly poorly, since ICE's appearance in a neighborhood now typically draws dozens of people onto the street to protest.
Why is there always someone to hint that Trump &co are 280 IQ geniuses and all of their batshit insane actions actually are a 8d chess move we're too dumb to understand ?
I used to share your opinion, but were to the point where it’s difficult to say it’s dumb luck. Look at the amount of change and impact they’ve had on the country in such a short period - it feels wrong to say that chance/luck/whatever rather than intentional, planned, and skilled manipulation.
But even with the benefit of hindsight, it's not always clear if a politician's impact was good or bad: people over here are debating how good Angela Merkel really was, and she's been out of office for 4 years (after 16 in power).
It's well planned, but the same subtlety as flying planes into a skyscraper.
The skyscraper is the size / scope / power of the US Federal Government (although incidentally it's also housing the US Constitution). And the planes are the entirely unqualified loyalists and useful idiots appointed to top positions of power.
Not a US citizen but affected by the current trajectory of the policies by the current administration.
I wonder at what point in time people will have enough with what they are changing. How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
I do think the HN and tech community is a more diverse group, than just the ultra libertarians, opportunists, and outright fascists. Maybe that's just my naive hope.
In any case I would also like to know how US based techies think about this administration and the direction the country is heading in.
if you look at any recent article here on the current US trajectory there is a pretty large contingent of people who are very much not happy with the way things are going. Of course the articles then get flagged and removed from the front page but from my reading more and more people are speaking up over here. And as US techie I certainly don’t support this BS.
>people who are very much not happy with the way things are going. Of course the articles then get flagged and removed from the front page ...
Can you explain, we're in one now on the front page. In fact, I see the opposite, anything positive of the current administration is drowned out by comments about all the other things not going well.
Ahh got it, agreed. I do experiments every once in awhile where I try to find one thing the current administration has done objectively well, there are some. Some people can't admit to one thing being good, and I'm not even saying the ends justify the means.
Worth noting that I did not realize how many articles are getting flagged regularly here until I switched to active view eg https://news.ycombinator.com/active
The election was less than a year ago. As an outsider, my genuine belief is this is what an average American wants. And honestly, it is what it is.
I mentioned this before as well, but this all can be viewed as a side effect of the general population not feeling improvements in their lives and not having optimism. Hard issue to solve, if I’ll be honest.
They had an election, and in California there was 1 vote for Trump for 1.52 votes for Harris [1] so even within one of the bluest of blue states, 40% of voters support the current administration.
California, like a lot of other "blue" states, turns deeply red once you get away from the cities and into more rural areas. It's just the cities have so many more people that they dominate statewide elections.
What's wrong with that? Do you think the popular vote should pick the president and half the country is ruled by people that prioritize living in a city and all that entails.
Trump is affecting the economy of other countries. The tariffs and the massive uncertainty is causing layoffs and makes companies more hesitant to invest.
The destruction of US scientific institutions has effects on other countries as well, science is very interconnected. It also affects all companies that supply scientific equipment and supply.
The foreign policy has effects on other countries, the US is still the most powerful nation at the moment. And let's assume that there is a chance his threats to invade Greenland or Canada are actually acted upon, that would change world politics in a fundamental way.
Not who you're asking, but the extreme changes in US foreign policy (well, maybe not necessarily policy because I doubt there's much paperwork going on to make the rapidly swinging changes official) are affecting, basically, the stability of global security and making US allies very nervous.
Whilst this is at an international political level, it has effects on individuals world views and therefore psychologies, which can be experienced viscerally.
As an obvious example, I'm sure Ukrainians have gone through some personal ups and downs as a result of the current administrations interpretation of diplomacy.
And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, or making statements they expect the group to agree with. Nobody comes out of the conversation smarter than they went in.
Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.
Problem: Everything is political. Pretending not to talk about politics, is mostly just supporting a certain kind of politics (the one that you get by default if you avoid talking about politics).
It’s that I know the day-to-day headlines from DC are mostly noise, and do not inform in the same way that ESPN talking head analysts do not inform about football.
To understand the state of American politics and of the world, I have news sources I trust. Hacker News will never be one of them. Neither will Reddit. Nor will Facebook.
I don’t want HN to turn into another outrage-bait pseudo-news commentary site. Look at the front page of Reddit (it’s atrociously bad) to see how far this forum could fall.
I flagged this article. If you want to talk about daily political news with other internet people, there are myriad options: WSJ, NYT, and Washington Post all have comment sections. Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and Threads all have comment sections. YouTube has comments. Blogs have comments.
Why do people insist that keeping HN free of politics is tantamount to being blissfully ignorant of world affairs? And why do people insist on turning HN into Reddit v2?
Most people do the same thing with shiny technology topics too.
But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference.
It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
That's not even close to what I said. You should absolutely talk about these things, but you should find knowledgeable people who will challenge you and help you to grow. HN isn't the place for that, when it comes to topics outside of tech.
How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”?
Hacker news should not become strictly or dominated by political discussion, but given AI and its impact on society amongst many other technologies like social media, which are intertwined within political discussion these days, some of the “knowledgeable“ people and particularly those whose careers have been impacted by AI are right here on hacker news.
> How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”?
How do we do this with tech topics? We rely on our expert knowledge to evaluate the claims of others. If someone is seriously asking this question about political discussion on HN that means they're not at the point where they're ready to have political discussions that are anything more than just saying "hey did you read that mainstream news article?" "yeah".
If you know even a modicum of politics or political theory it's almost trivial to prove, disprove, or add color to what's being said in these threads. If you want a really simple way to do this hop onto one of the big prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi. You can probably disprove a solid 15% of top-ranked commenters just by doing that.
If you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings.
The conclusion I've come to on this site is that the incentives around participating on a public internet site, like HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc are such that they attract a crowd of people who are more interested in talking than listening or understanding. There's a subset of them who really enjoy debating but without being grounded in fact or consequence from misprediction it turns largely into verbal sparring games. There's also little difference between these sites because from what I can tell it's the same set of people attracted to all of the same sites.
you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings.
Why do you think, an US centric, vaguely leftist think tank focused on US politics with seat in Washington, financed by American donors, initiates the use of brainpower and understanding? More than any other media, that is. There is such a thing as the rest of the world (95% of the world population) who may be more incentivised to ask honest questions on HN than reading yet another U. S. publication that regards them as a remark in the margins, as demonstrated by the CEIP front page https://carnegieendowment.org/?lang=en
CEIP is just one think tank. There are plenty of others there. I frequently read CEPR [1] for a more EU perspective or JIIA [2] for a more Japanese perspective. I just referenced CEIP because it probably most neatly represents the dominant HN perspective.
> Why do you think, an US centric, vaguely leftist think tank focused on US politics with seat in Washington, financed by American donors, initiates the use of brainpower and understanding?
Incentives. Do you really think that internet commenters are going to produce better research than folks paid to research things and provide insights to decision makers? Everyone has a bias. Having a bias doesn't stop you from doing deep analysis. The CCP traces its ideological origins from Marx-Leninism and still uses that to develop their policy positions. It's a very different perspective than US policy which traces its philosophy back to the European Enlightenment, but that doesn't mean their analysis is any less rigorous.
CEPR is yet another leftist (less vaguely than CEIP) U. S. American think tank with the same attributes as CEIP (donors, location etc.) So, more U. S. centrism with a heavy focus on Vox News. Might just as well read Vox.
JIIA is the only one of your examples, covering worldwide topics right there on the front page, even Africa. Promoting research.
So far, your selection confirms only one of your statements: bias. Everyone has them. Do you really think, the first two of your choices would engage in"deep analysis" on topics contrary to the political agenda of their donors and hence their incentives?
I'll hold that I get more varied opinions and links to sources on HN than from strictly conforming U. S. publications, but thanks for introducing me to JIIA - which, you know, verifies the first part of this sentence.
The philosophical roots of states is not on topic here, so I'll skip that.
> And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions,
A-MEN.
Ton of takes by armchair enthusiasts who think they have the ability call a spade a spade because they're grandmother told them they were a genius after restarting her computer.
I swear to god, DHH has to got to be the best example of this. His blog piece about free speech is so funny in retrospect it's hard for me to read and believe he takes himself seriously.
But LLMs are great piece of technology and closest analogue to the AGI in past 30 years! It's truly a gamechanging future technology.
... And, incidentally, knowing that my value judgements are as broken and human tangential as Borg transwarp control computers, I know that it's a massive bubble that is going to financially ruin absolutely everybody.
I don't hate people who voted for Trump. I sympathize with or outright agree with most conservative grievances (but not their expressions of those grievances).
Supporting Trump, in the general sense, is not the same thing. E.g. "a lot", as you say, implies "majority" or at least more than one or two things, which, of the dozens of (meaningful) things Trump has done, is about how many I'd peg as "theoretically defensible" (for example: Immigration control and getting jobs back to America, both of which I agree with; but obviously not in practice due to his counter-productive/performative/un-American implementations). The rest fall pretty clearly into the category of "materially hurting my home country and my community".
For example: Obliterating discourse, disrespecting rule of law, disrespecting the constitution, disrespecting rights and American principles, encouraging petty hatred and childish mockery, threatening to deport American citizens, calling every crime that might have been committed by a liberal "domestic terrorism", threatening via policy announced on Twitter to imprison my wife (who is a government worker) for the apparent crime of merely attempting to find a legal way to support our local legal immigrant(s) jailed by ICE for months for past non-violent non-drug-related crimes they have already finished serving for, which didn't even include jail time. The hysterical debasement of the amazing country my family has loved and served for hundreds of years.
Just off the top of my head.
There is no "I agree with some of it", or, "on average". It's moot, is what I mean. Yes, "honest discussion" is depressingly rare, but even truer: Focusing on the common person who isn't good at dispassionate political discourse is itself dishonest, when what's happening is hell.
1. Blatantly violating the 14th Amendment by signing an executive order that ends birthright citizenship, potentially stripping tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship.
2. Sending the military onto the streets of major cities, in a fundamental break from the centuries-old principle that the military does not police American citizens.
3. Tolerating open corruption by senior officials, such as the border czar Tom Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe.
4. Openly calling for the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and firing people who refuse to do so.
5. Appointing dangerous and unqualified people like RFK Jr. and Kash Patel to head agencies whose missions they oppose. RFK Jr. is out there making wild claims about autism and vaccines.
6. Trump trying to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results, including calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and demanding that he add 11,000 votes to Trump's total, in order to flip the state in Trump's favor, while threatening to criminally prosecute the Secretary of State if he refuses to change the election result.
7. Trump repeatedly threatening that he will annex Canada, and refusing to rule out the use of military force.
I could go on and on, but I think the above is enough to make the point. This is not just another administration that you can have this or that view about. This is the downfall of the American political system. RIP, 1787 - 2025.
With all of this, you should be sheepish about saying you support Trump.
It's all about trade-offs. Sadly the package deals keep getting worse and even if you refuse to buy, one shows up at your doorstep and they charge you anyways. The parties exist more to oppose each other than to identify and address issues. They serve their donors more than their electorate and sew discontent amongst the populace to distract from the role of capital in the current system. I think it's unrealistic to say you "support everything Trump does" just as it is to say you "do not support anything Trump does". The trend of extreme polarization has allowed them to continually worsen the package deals offered because they know that for a lot of people, it's all or nothing.
If you say you support someone who is fundamentally ripping out the American democratic political system, root and branch, then that's what you support. That's central to the "package deal."
There's no, "Well, I don't like that he's ending the entire system of rule of law and respect for the results of elections, but I like policy X."
There definitely is: "I disagree with X (and maybe A, B, and C too), but I agree with Y." You may not feel that's reasonable or that the negative impacts of X far outweigh the positive effects of Y, but it's possible for people to arrive at this conclusion due to having limited choices and specific interests.
Maybe you want to buy a sports car, but the dealer only has one coupe and it has a sunroof (that you don't want). You can go look at other dealerships for one with the package you like, but in a world where there is only one dealership you have to take what they give you. Lots of people will end up buying that coupe with a sunroof to take to the track. Especially if they approach their decision from a "I want a sports car" perspective and the other option is a minivan.
It's just a decision making analogy. If you want better decisions that produce solutions that are a better fit for the problem then it makes sense to offer more choices of increased variety.
If the situation is as dire as you feel, then I certainly hope that someone mounts an opposition to Trump because that's how we all win... a better alternative that most people recognize as such. Where and why are they hiding the alternatives?
I know what an analogy is. It's just that your analogy is absurd.
We're talking about someone who is obliterating the American democratic political system, and you're basically saying, "Well, there are pros and cons with any package deal, just like when you buy a sports car." These aren't little pros and cons with some trifling issue. This is the continued existence of the United States as a democracy.
>obliterating the American democratic political system
What I think is absurd is people keep writing these things as if they are facts, when a majority of this country doesn't agree. And any amount of anecdotal or skewed headlines won't change minds.
The fact that a majority (a slim plurality, actually) of the country voted for someone who is ripping up the Constitution is a real problem. It doesn't mean that he's not ripping up the Constitution.
> anecdotal or skewed headlines
How are any of my examples above anecdotal or skewed? Did Trump issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship as enshrined in the 14th Amendment or not? Just one action like that would be an incredible break with the American political tradition, but he's done dozens of things that are just as bad or worse.
I don't know what "my approach" is. I'm describing reality as it is. I don't know how or if the American political system will overcome Trump and survive, but that system is facing extinction right now.
People are absurd... a majority of them got together and elected Trump in the first place. Lots of those people never considered any other option. A lot of times the reasoning goes: "Abortion is bad. I vote Republican." or even "I don't like that guy's face. I vote Democrat." People 100% make decisions and affect outcomes based on things that others consider trifling. Most people are not up late racking their brains over some Machiavellian scheme; they're like, "Nah, I want the sports car tho, minivans suck".
I agree that there's still no good option, and that's stupendously frustrating, but even the frustrating status quo is obviously better than outright attacks on America's principles, culture, laws, most citizens, etc. Trump isn't "shaking things up". He's destroying them.
I agree w/ you, but the people elected Trump; It's not Trump that worries me, it's the weakness of his opposition. So long as he continues to stand largely unopposed he will continue to break things.
That is a radical way of thinking, nobody I know IRL talks or thinks this way. The idea that you have to support everything that some group says or you are out is complete BS.
I've seen this over and over again, it's similar to "If you're not with us, you're against us" but on every topic.
Do you think it's reasonable to support someone who tried to strip tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship by executive order, in blatant violation of the 14th Amendment?
How about supporting someone who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election by every means at his disposal?
This is actually a clear case where you have to take a stand. "Well, I like some other things he's done" is not a valid answer here.
You’re okay taking a massive economic hit, removing large amounts of population from the country? Who cares if they’re “illegal” or not? Why does it matter if they’re less criminal than US born, and harder working? And don’t give me, they use services, I work for Medicaid and they don’t get it. So why? You just dislike brown people?
The dollar has fallen pretty drastically against other major currencies since the start of the year. That is, this isn't loss of value in the rather abstract monetary inflation sense but "dollar is down 15% relative to euro in under a year" (that's a pretty rapid shift in such a short timeline).
A decline in the dollar absolutely does impact most wage earning Americans. Those wages are being paid in dollars! A decline in the dollar on that scale will tend to lead to higher price inflation.
What economic hit? Yes, they're illegal and we don't care how hard working they are, they can go be hard working in their own countries. The US is not a soup kitchen. If you want to come here, go through the official process. If they bring as much to the table as you claim, they'll have no problem getting a visa.
> If they bring as much to the table as you claim, they'll have no problem getting a visa.
Nah, you see the fundamental problem here is that (based on Biden's estimate), there's about 10 million or so, and that 60–70% of all U.S. agricultural workers and 15–20% of construction workers are such people.
They do this at a pay rate that is both higher than they'd get in their home country, and lower than any American would work for. This itself, being too cheap, precludes them getting a work visa: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a
And you support this being done with no due process, meaning we just have to trust Trump and his cronies when they claim someone is in the US illegally?
If there is anything Trump is doing popularly, it’s aggressively removing illegal immigrants from our streets. To the extent there is tolerance for Fourth Amendment violations, it may be from historic indifference to enforcing our immigration laws.
100% And most don't realize that many EU nations have tighter restrictions on immigration now than the US after seeing what effect lax policies have on their nation.
You're admitting that you wanted to vote for a guy who is committing an unprecedented amount of corruption? Taking bribes via his own personal bitcoin?
You wanted a President that pardons people who give him money? lol. Really?
Or have the guy who had a literal brainworm and doesn't believe in germs determining American's health? lol
Did you vote to have a WWF person run the dept of education? Are you an adult with a functioning brain?
You voted for a recession lol.
You voted for tanking an economy and prices getting higher lol
You voted to have college students writing op-eds critical of Israel deported (No offense, get out of this country if you don't think people should have the right to criticize any government they want)
You voted for the guy who wants to jail people for burning the flag
You voted for the guy who wants to take away news licenses because they;re mean to him
You voted to have more expensive healthcare
You voted to have all our allies abandon us and laugh at his speeches
You voted for a pedophile. Like an actual pedophile. Congrats on bragging about that one.
You voted to have coal mines reopened lololloooollollo and for the people who don't think solar energy is renewable because it can be nighttime too hahahahahahahahahahah
So you want a dictator? You want random tariffs based on Trump's gut feeling? You want foreign-looking US citizens to be detained at will by ICE? You want every part of the government to be corrupt, rampant insider trading based on political decisions? You want a government that retaliates against companies and people it doesn't like, and uses the force of the government to harrass them?
You're not arguing with someone who is willing to change their mind. Vague responses about "this is what I voted for" and "you're forcing me and others to vote for Trump" are typical signs of someone who's in the cult. It's common for them to feign interest in multiple parties, but they were always going to vote for the Republican candidate and proclaim Dems are the evil elites.
This is common with "centrists", "moderates", "undecided", etc... they'll always be shy Republicans who are too scared to say that they're drinking the kool-aid.
Is it not true that non-illegal immigrants are experiencing more harassment from ICE? And that foreigners entering the US are more likely to be detained, especially if they have anything that might be perceived as anti-Trump on their social media?
I don't live in the US, so I have no direct experience (though I travel there for work once or twice a year)
Come now, be reasonable. You have one side denying climate change, wiping government websites of climate data. You have Trump, the most lying politician in history, who rampantly cheats at golf, and is a pedophile and liar about Epstein. Talking about facts, the GOP has thrown reality to the wind. At least have the wit to see your side doesn’t care about base reality, and admit it. It’s a party of the religious right and corporations, which has been taken over by Trump and a cult of personality has set in. None of these people are served by truth.
We can only conclude yes. Or rather, these people want Federal government violence and troops on the street because they just hate "immigrants" that much. I'm surprised they haven't chiseled the poem off the Statue of Liberty yet.
ap99 The replies here are why politics should not be discussed here. You said nothing wrong, but the replies are ridiculous. They summarize down to something like "When did you start becoming a Nazi" or "When did you start liking pedophiles, are you also a pedophile?"
I dont believe in this fucking kid gloves bullshit. If you made a decision then man up and fucking own its consequences good or bad otherwise admit you are a coward and liar.
I voted for Trump and generally think he's doing a good job. I don't agree with a lot of things he is doing. Am I a Nazi/Fascist or whatever the term of the week is today?
Voting has consequences, and burying your head in the sand is no way to deal with that. If the accusations of fascism make you uncomfortable: good. Maybe you should encourage your side to take less steps in that direction and vote for better people.
As for the pedophilia accusations: one of Trump's main talking points was releasing the Epstein files, his AG "had the files on her desk", right wing media pundits were proclaiming everything was going to get exposed and... we get nothing. He now calls it a "Democrat hoax" and tells everyone to forget about it.
Yes, voting does have consequences. My head isn't buried, I'm not easily manipulated by loud internet activists that resort to name calling.
Idk about Epstein or the files, doesn't affect me or 99% of the daily lives of the average wage earner in America. If you think that makes him a pedophile or anyone who supports him a pedophile, well good luck with that.
That would be approximately the same percentage of the population that voted for Obama in 2008. (69 million votes, 304 million people, 22%.) I don't think this is a crazy argument to make, but only if you make clear by this standard almost no President has ever been "popular", and almost no PM in other countries.
It has worked in the UK. The then government had decided to unilaterally exclude some "hostile" media from the room and all the others walked out in protest.
Naive way of thinking. If authorities hold on to power long enough, nearly everybody will cave under - some minority will go indie route. I've seen this happening in Turkey first hand over 20 years, first some select reporters got banned, than some news organizations got bought out by friends of the president, then a handful of more liberal news orgs lost money, they got bought by some other friends, who actually kept their "opposition" mask, but actually made them a false-flag opposition and fired all the real reporters, some of which went to jail for made up reasons, others went on to be indies on youtube.
Just check how quickly the elite has switched sides. You would have expected some more backbone.
Not sure if it this was ever tried before by any US government entity - but, if the condition for remaining an accredited Pentagon reporter is only reporting the official statements of the Pentagon (which you can also copy from their press releases), then having the accreditation seems largely pointless to me?
Time was when the liberal press looked down on journalists who were embedded with the military. The article mentions one who has had a desk in the pentagon for almost two decades. I would question the independence of someone so well embedded and note nobody is resigning here, just moving to other offices.
They turned in their badges that allows them to access certain spaces in the pentagon. They're still reporters, they still work for their employers, and they can still do reporting.
I used to watch Donald Rumsfeld daily giving his briefing… the hardest questions asked to him by the beacons of democracy in the press corps was “how are you”.
> I remember how then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ecstatic after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, insisting that it showed the success of the U.S. invasion. Not long after, I ran into an officer at the Pentagon who told me, "No, Tom. It's not a success. Saddam Hussein's supporters are attacking our supply lines. Now, we have to send more troops back to guard them." That was because the United States, at Rumsfeld's insistence, never sent an adequate number of forces to Iraq to begin with — a fact another Army general warned me about, unsolicited — and I reported on, before the war even began.
> Instead of toeing the official line, that reporting helped people understand what U.S. troops were really facing. Far from being a success, the fall of Baghdad marked the beginning of an insurgency that stretched on for years.
Maybe I'm not thinking this through clearly enough but isn't this "just fine" for the current administration? From their perspective what exactly is the downside to this?
Of course they’re fine with it. They pushed the policy. They’re enemies of truth and reality, journalism and reporting information is their natural enemy.
Yep, this cannot be called anything less than MURDER today, for sure.
I was literally a Naval Officer on a ship doing counter drug operations about 10-15 years ago, and it was made very clear to us at the time that we were not to use weapons unless fired upon. The only exception was trained sharpshooters from the Coast Guard who were allowed to shoot outboard motors, though they were extremely careful about not harming the people on the boats. We'd "arrest" them (the Coast Guard would) and then turn them over to one of several partner countries. Once we captured the same person twice in one deployment. Today, I am not proud of what we did back then, as I am sure we caused more harm than good and spent more resources than was worth it to capture those drugs.
To be PERFECTLY CLEAR: we RARELY found fishing boats that had drugs on them, or who were even supporting drug operations. The fact that several fishing boats have been hit now makes it CLEAR to me FROM EXPERIENCE that we've MURDERED INNOCENT FISHERMEN because I KNOW that there is ZERO POSSIBILITY that all of these guys were a threat in any way. AT MOST these fishermen would refuel a drug boat, and I don't think that's worthy of death. Furthermore, those people usually were forced to do these jobs under threat from the gangs in their towns against their families, so killing these folks makes even less sense because they aren't the actual dangerous people who are running the narco-gangs.
It's a FUCKING SHAME what this country is doing to those people now and I am ASHAMED of having "served in the military" when in reality I was obviously just a tool for a fucked up regime that has finally gone mask-off.
Personally, I read it as added-emphasis rather than a retort against the author, but I can see how it could be taken that way depending on assumed verbal delivery.
I also read it that way, I didn't take it as an assault.
Because I was in the military in the past and because I grew up on the US continent, I probably have it ingrained in me to not use the words of violence like "murder" for these things, and instead I use the softer words that don't explicitly call out the death that is inflicted by the "bombing". I should work on that, for sure.
What is the point of being a Journalist (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "write", word for word, the article they give you to publish?
If you identify sufficiently with the people giving you the article to publish, it's not a "they" but an "us". Even if the decisions are taken in rooms you don't have access to.
Maybe they think they'll get access to them eventually if they're loyal.
It might seem cowardly, but it isn't that different to what happens every day in business. Society is full of organisations working on the "make the boss' opinions your own" principle.
You're never heard of biased or militant journalists have you?
In fact the most common form of journalism you will find is what's akin to a Propaganda channel of a Sponsoring Party (Defense, Media Company, Political party, Rich Individual with an agenda, etc). Essentialy a PR employee.
But this is true since always.
The kind of journalism we usually think of though is Investigative journalism, but that's a different beast and usually doesn't really pay.
> if you identify too little with them, you probably don't even get to "sit where you're sitting", as Chomsky said
The people winning White House credentials are political influencers. Chomsky was an interesting linguist. His political observations are about as scientific as our current crop of Silicon Valley elites’.
What he said, and I agree is true and important, is that you won't get to work as a journalist and do things like, say, interview people for BBC, unless you believe most of the things your employer believes.
Chomsky's observations about how the media works may not have been solid science, but from the way you describe the present circumstance it really sounds like Chomsky is still on target.
> from the way you describe the present circumstance it really sounds like Chomsky is still on target
The refutation is there are lots of places to sit. Like, yes, the people at a linguistics conference will predominantly be linguists. That doesn’t suggest a linguistics conspiracy.
> "That doesn’t suggest a linguistics conspiracy."
That's Chomsky's point. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky explains how the appearance of collusion can arise without conspiracy. Like-minded people hiring and promoting like-minded people isn't a conspiracy, it only looks like one because people with similar incentives and values will behave in similar ways given similar circumstances.
So you don't have any problem with the Hegseth Pentagon demands then? There are still many places to sit, and who gets access is mostly decided by neutral competence anyway? (That's what your linguistics conference analogy suggests).
Chomsky's whole point is that it doesn't take a conspiracy for journalists to share their superiors' views. Not for those superiors to be very aligned with each other.
What is the point of being a Developer (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "code", word for word, the feature specifications ("user stories") they give you to build?
There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.
It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.
There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.
It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.
The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.
And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.
I think people are being slightly hyperbolic. It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon. In general I think this is a good thing but not because I think it's a good idea. Rather, I think that the government, regardless of who happens to be in power, and the press should have an adversarial relationship, but the deep intertwining of the government and the press undermines this, even without corruption. You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.
People are not being hyperbolic. This is reducing the transparency of Pentagon to the American people. See also the Whitehouse banning the AP earlier this year.
> It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon.
Without access it's going to be very hard to do good reporting, adversarial or otherwise. This is the government working to control what is said.
> You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
The world is built on relationships. One of the keys of being a good journalist/reporter is being able to have relationships which help to build stories while also staying objective.
The Pentagon Papers are one of the biggest leaks that the corporate media has ever published. Its effect on the military industrial complex and the government in general cannot really be overstated. It was published in 1971. [1] In 1972 the Pentagon created the 'Correspondents' Corridor' where journalists could 'embed' with the Pentagon effectively permanently.
From your worldview, do you not find the timing odd? The media releases one of the biggest ever leaks, completely embarrassing the government, and then the government welcomes them in, with privileged access no less, to one of the most sensitive locations in the entirety of the country? And this all happened under Nixon, a man who wasn't exactly known for his benevolence.
There was a time, not that long ago, when embedded war reporters were looked upon negatively. The reason is that it's impossible to remain impartial. This is not only because of the relationships you form in such a location, but also because if "imparial" ends up being negative, you're getting 'unembedded' quite quickly. So it ends up being defacto propaganda.
Think about what "transparency" we've gained from the media being embedded with the Pentagon since 1972. It mostly doesn't exist. Even if somebody wants to leak something it's not like they're going to walk up to a journalist in the Pentagon to do it. On the contrary, the media seems to have become ever more ingrained into the military industrial complex ever since this date, to the point that in 2023 WaPo spent more time trying to track down a leaker and assess his possible motives, than covering what was leaked.
Government and media should be kept separated, and this act is, probably unintentionally, helping to do exactly that.
>> The media releases one of the biggest ever leaks, completely embarrassing the government
The Pentagon Papers covered the period from 1945 to 1968. Nixon took office in 1969. If the leaks were embarrassing, they were particularly embarrassing to the JFK/LBJ administrations. Nixon initially didn't intent to do anything about the leak. Henry Kissinger convinced him that allowing the leaking of classified documents in the press would set a bad example:
"President Nixon’s reaction that Sunday morning was that the damage fell mostly on the Johnson Administration and that he should leave it alone. That afternoon, however, security advisor Kissinger convinced Nixon that he had to act on “this wholesale theft and unauthorized disclosure.”
“The massive hemorrhage of state secrets was bound to raise doubts about our reliability in the minds of other governments, friend or foe, and indeed about the stability of our political system,” Kissinger said in his memoirs.
Once energized, Nixon soon became obsessed. Dissatisfied with the FBI’s progress in the case, he organized his own group of investigators in the White House. They styled themselves “the plumbers” because their job was to stop leaks."
If Nixon had ignored Kissinger that day, he would probably close to the top of the typical lists of greatest US Presidents rather than close to the bottom.
It's always amusing to see attempts to cast Nixon as an "otherwise great" president while simultaneously attempting to distribute the blame for his decisions on those around him. Poor Dick somehow found himself surrounded by the untrustworthy, incompetent, and/or craven sycophants he personally chose to surround himself with.
A man is accountable for his own actions. That's true for Nazi grunts and most certainly for a US President. Nixon had already been wiretapping journalists since his first months in office. [1] The guy was paranoid, anti-media, and then invited the media into permanent residence at the Pentagon. It's not hard to see the ulterior motive because the ulterior motive was the only motive.
As for the impact of the papers directly on Nixon, he could have been honest and immediately come forth with the truth when entering office. He chose not to, which made him complicit in the lies of previous administrations. This is also why if you ask somebody who's war was Vietnam? Most of everybody is going to say Nixon.
You can see strong parallels with Trump and Ukraine in modern times. It's obvious the government is not being at all honest about their assessment of the situation over there, yet Trump continues to 'play along' with the lies and indeed this is a big part of the reason why Ukraine will likely go down in history as 'Trump's War.'
If the 'Ukraine Papers' were leaked, Trump would certainly first try to pin it on Biden, but in reality nobody cares about Biden anymore - and instead the papers would mostly just reveal his own lies and complicity.
With the blatant disregard for any rules and decorum, and a proven self-serving track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.
You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.
Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.
The rules were updated on Oct6 to allow media outlets to report using any information even if classified and unapproved for release, as long as they didn't solicit it or were given it with the premise that it won't be released.
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
This is a hyperbolic take. In countries with military censors, articles are submitted, from the newspaper's offices, to the censor's office for approval before publication. Nothing under this arrangement stops an American colonel from walking into the NYT's offices, dropping a folder at reception, and persuading the NYT to publish the contents of that folder. While it does prevent investigative journalism in the military, which is despicable on its own merits, the fact that it turns newspapers solely into PR outlets is neither new (i.e. as a general phenomenon in American media) nor limited to only the officially sanctioned point of view.
I like your reasoning. There’s nothing stopping a news outlet from publishing anything other than the clearly outlined consequences. In a similar vein there’s nothing stopping anybody from finding out what happens if you swallow a D battery but for some reason none of my friends are doing that
> In a similar vein there’s nothing stopping anybody from finding out what happens if you swallow a D battery but for some reason none of my friends are doing that
Nice caveat, noting that none of your friends are doing that. But plenty of people do really dangerous, stupid shit and upload it to YouTube for the advertising dollars. Because news media is usually ultimately financed by advertising or partisan donors pushing a specific viewpoint, they're incentivized to publish dangerous stuff - but only the kind people want to see, which is why outlets like the New York Times didn't host video clips showing the outright gore from Charlie Kirk getting shot. The democratic value of an independent media rests on editorial discretion finding content that shocks its audience but not its advertisers.
This is no different than pretty much any company. Do you think Apple lets reporters wander throughout their campus looking for new hardware, and allow them to ask engineers information about what they are working on? No. Apple does not let them wander around, and they advise all of their employees to never talk to press.
Apple is neither a state nor a democracy.
The journalists and the government are there to aserve the same boss: the people.
Now one of the people's employees sabotages the work the other employee.
If Apple had the ability to deploy military forces on behalf of my democratically elected government I'd actually be pretty concerned with them locking out the press too.
I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answered to me (a US citizen) by its previous policy of letting a bunch of reporters from some mainstream news outlets have offices inside the Pentagon under one set of rules, and I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answers to me by its current policy of putting more rules on those reporters that they don't like and are willing to resign over. I have a healthy amount of mistrust for both the US military and mainstream US journalism operations, and I don't assume that the military-related stories these reporters covered previously were the ones that were actually important for me to know.
This is about not wanting the journalists to even ask for information from e.g. generals. No-one is saying that they want immediate disclosure of all secrets - I'm concerned that you're building a strawman.
>Journalists asking for classified and sensitive information are acting in bad faifth.
How?
>They know that these people are not allowed to give away the information,
Not true, nor is everything is classified.
It appears you've not actually read the article, or what the new restrictions even asked for. You're acting as if journalists were allowed to go rummaging in office drawers and journalists dislike being told they can't do that anymore.
Or they could be trying to uncover malicious acts hidden behind classification. You may be too young or too old to understand, but historically it goes both ways.
I completely disagree. Their job is to uncover truths that may not be immediately obvious and they may not even know the classification status of sensitive information before asking about it. The military should instead say something like "that information is classified".
Why would the public want journalists to not even be able to ask the questions, never mind actually get the information?
You have classified information for that reason. It's not the same as requiring journalists you literally let into public press conferences to shut up and spread propaganda unquestioningly
This is moving the goal posts from your original position. Spend the time to refocus - if your position was erroneous, it was erroneous. Correct it, figure out what that means, then proceed.
Moving on to a new version is to waste your own intelligence in reactionary sentence creation.
no, actually that requires congressional approval, and the government is currently shut down, mostly as a way to defer the release of the Epstein files. nice try, though.
Democrats could have released yhem already. It would have been bipartisan. They didn't, because there's nothing there and it was better politics to let fringe Republicans obsess about it.
> "When the new policy was issued two weeks ago, news organizations were concerned that signing the rules conveyed agreement with them, including to a restriction that they not report on any news — even if unclassified — without official approval."
Awfully reminiscent of a certain *other* autocratic regime, and its tyrannical control over public discussion of its armed forces.
> "These laws establish administrative and criminal punishments for "discrediting" or dissemination of "unreliable information" about the Russian Armed Forces, other Russian state bodies and their operations, and the activity of volunteers aiding the Russian Armed Forces, and for calls to impose sanctions against Russia, Russian organizations and citizens.[1][2]"... The adoption of these laws resulted in the mass exodus of foreign media from Russia and the termination of war reporting by independent Russian media. More than 10,000 people have been prosecuted under these laws,[4]..."
>> news organizations were concerned that signing the rules conveyed agreement with them, including to a restriction that they not report on any news — even if unclassified — without official approval
Where in the memo does it restrict journalists from reporting on any news without official approval? Can you quote me the relevant section?
I see a section about "unauthorized disclosure of CNSI or CUI", but CNSI and CUI are specific classifications of information that the government is required by law to protect.
> "“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” the directive states. The signature form includes an array of security requirements for credentialed media at the Pentagon."
That section does not restrict reporters, it restricts government employees at the Pentagon from releasing information without authorization.
The section of the memo that pertains to reporters losing badge access only mentions classified and unclassified but controlled information.
"The Pentagon should let reporters report anything they want" is a very different claim than "Pentagon employees should be allowed to tell us anything they want".
Its a foot in the door. If you dont slam the door shut quickly, you'll find yourself thrown out of your house and locked out (remember what android's safety net was when it got introduced and look at ehat it has become now)
Any kind of restriction, no matter how trevally exploitable will become legally and technically insurmountable if given time to metastasize.
The American people need to start prosecuting their war criminals, plain and simple - and this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court.
The notion that American exceptionalism inoculates America's war criminals from facing justice at the hand of International bodies set up specifically for that purpose, is incorrect and anti-human.
It is time for justice.
You can't maintain this culture of warrior narcissism, Americans.
It will end in tragedy - as it has already brought chaos and calamity to millions of innocent people across the globe, this century. The USA and its allies are, by a huge margin, the #1 cause of terror and war on the planet at this time. Nobody even comes close to the level of criminal war-mongering that occurs at the behest of the US' political establishment. No, not Russia. Not China. The USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none.
Come to grips with the crimes of your state. It is the #1 most important thing for Americans to do, for the rest of the world.
The American people are the only force on the planet which can reign in their monsters. It has to be done by the people, for the people.
> this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court
Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense within the scope of geopolitics. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. More realistically, it is a relic of the unipolar world of the 1990s.
America needs to deal with itself through its own laws. (Same as Russia, China and India will.)
> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none
> Your position amounts to "but ma' America Special"
Literally listed three other countries, none of which accept the ICC’s jurisdiction [1]. (A majority of the world’s population lives in non-ICC member states.)
> Obama, Bush, Biden, Trump and Clinton
Sure. This is why it doesn’t work. If you’re going to ignore Putin, Xi and Modi, it just turns into another tool of geopolitics. Not law.
I am not Russian, Chinese, nor Indian - I am a citizen of the 5-eyes criminal military junta, however.
The notion that a citizen of a war-crime committing nation can only have justice if they also demand that other war-crime committing nations face justice, is a dire fallacy.
You cannot, as an American citizen, do anything at all effective about Russia or China or India until you have prosecuted your own war criminals. You simply do not have the moral standing in the world, any more: the entire world sees the crimes of the American people, even if they don't.
Only then will the appropriate precedent be set for others to face justice too.
The whataboutism is why there is no justice.
First, we citizens jail our own war criminals. Only then will we have the tools go go after theirs. There is no other appropriate order of events.
All you do, otherwise, is justify your own states' war crimes without having the moral authority to go after any other states war crimes.
Given the enormous magnitude of the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights at massive scales that the 5-eyes nations have committed THIS CENTURY, there is no higher priority than for us to get on with it and start prosecuting our own war criminals first.
The moral authority you think exists, simply does not exist. Ours are the worst-offending states. Other states cannot even come close to matching the magnitude of OUR states' crimes.
> The notion that a citizen of a war-crime committing nation can only have justice if they also demand that other war-crime committing nations face justice, is a dire fallacy
I agree!
I’m not saying we need to commit war crimes. I’m not saying they should go unpunished. I’m saying we have to deal with this within our own laws. Unilaterally punting to the ICC doesn’t make sense if it has limited global authority and thus questionable legitimacy.
> Given the enormous magnitude of the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights at massive scales that the 5-eyes nations have committed THIS CENTURY, there is no higher priority
I think it’s a priority. Far from the priority. (If American goes right-wing imperial authoritarian, our past war crimes become something of a joke.)
> justify your own states' war crimes without having the moral authority to go after any other states war crimes
Nobody is justifying anything. But post-War international law was first based on a bipolar world, with one set of rules for America and the USSR, and another for everyone else, and then on a unipolar world, where America volunteered to subject itself to international rules and institutions. (We didn’t. But powerful elements within us tried.)
Now that world has fallen. We’re in a multipolar world. Not only is international law falling back into spheres of influence, with every global and regional hegemon regularly committing war crimes, it’s an open question whether anyone with power actually wants to enforce those rules.
(As for the ICC, has any ICC-member state has executed an arrest warrant against a third party’s leader? I return to my thesis that the ICC is a rent-a-Court for post-regime change reconciliation. Not a venue for trying cases and controversies.)
> Ours are the worst-offending states. Other states cannot even come close to matching the magnitude of OUR states' crimes
The facts are not with you on this one. To the point that you undermine your entire argument with the bias. I won’t argue America is better than Russia or China. But if you’re saying we’re in a different league from the USSR or China, you’re an unreliable narrator.
And you can’t vest the ICC with legitimacy while ignoring that it actually issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
The US is preparing for war and disinformation is a tool in such a war. The Pentagon just wants the same level of control as the other authoritarian regimes.
It kind of shows that "democracy" was never real to begin with.
Certainly with Sora 2 level of technology they can just claim whoever they don't like has blown up a federal building while they were asleep. It's not like you can have an alibi when you sleep and everyone sleeps. In a way, this AI nightmare necessitates protocols for protection against false accusations like only being able to open the door exiting a house when three other witnesses are present. There are cryptographic solutions like verified cameras, but almost nobody has those now, not even news crews publish signed videos.
Journalism in war time has no real meaning, because if it's secret information the journalist basically becomes an adversary and at some point it becomes cheaper to kill them. Those waging wars have historically always been corrupt. So, that leaves repeating whatever the Pentagon wants you to know.
Also, calling the US a democracy is like putting lipstick on a pig and saying it's a hot babe.
Perhaps Switzerland still has a democracy, but most kind of suck in various ways (and most importantly, don't do anything to improve their democracies). In a real democracy, there would be continuous improvement with better checks and balances. At some point you start to wonder whether democracy just exists to give people the illusion that their voice means anything. Also, in a real democracy there would be equal opportunity and advertising budget for all political parties. That's just not the case in many democracies.
So, blatantly obvious autocracies are probably worse than our current "democracies", but let's not pretend democracy is a thing right now.
What's next? Asking hard questions, or follow up questions?
If Trump says "I've ended 7 or 8 wars" or says "I've lowered drug prices 800, 900, 1000 percent" and no one says
"Sir, how is it possible to lower a price by 900 percent" or "Could you specify which conflicts it is you refer to by those 7 or 8 wars?" then you aren't a journalist.
If you go to an event where such things are said and there is no opportunity to ask these obvious follow up questions, then you stop going there, or you aren't a journalist.
If someone asks these questions and that leaves them excluded from those events - then you also stop going there in solidarity, or you aren't a journalist.
This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII, often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative. Both points were repopularised in the US around 2016 or so by Richard Spencer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer). For some reason both are now entering more mainstream usage among the right.
Yes, calling the media liars is a thing the Nazis did. However, it's not a good reason to equate someone with Nazis because lots of other people from all parts of the political spectrum have called the media liars from time to time. And a number of times, the media has even deserved it. I challenge anyone who disagrees to go take a dive in historical newspaper archives.
Well, I wouldn't shut down or lock out any press. I wouldn't shut down Jewish-owned press either. All news and media is biased, and there's no such platonic ideal of honesty. Then again, I don't have "enemies" that I need to destroy so maybe you're asking the wrong person.
> This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII,
Presumably you mean "dishonest". Do you think OAN is dishonest and perhaps disruptive to world peace?
Thinking the press is dishonest does not make one a Nazi. Even if disliking the press were a sign if despotism, Clconsider what makes Nazism unique compared to other despotic regimes, disliking the press ain't it.
I don't think any free press is disruptive to world peace. Even if you get your wish and shut up any outlet you personally find dishonest you're not going to achieve world peace. At least not the kind I'd like to live in.
No. They are propaganda outlets, and must not be considered separately from the Republican Party.
The current mechanism is
1) Fringe theory gestates in the internet.
2) Fringe theory gets into the podcast network and is covered
3) Relatively famous personality comes on a Fox program and mentions the theory
4) Government figures repeats theory that was covered on the news
5) Fox repeats government coverage
People on the right who have alternative theories, simply do not get air time. They aren’t suppressed, they are simply not competitive.
In a more economic framing of their efforts - they have found a way to offset the costs of inaccurate content to the future.
So they are now able to “sell” cheap “junk food” content, while the center and left spends more effort in forming more accurate content.
The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
But today the NYT is more a site dependent on its wordle revenue than its subscription revenue. Consolidation of markets means advertisers do not need smaller local newspapers, and platforms get the lions share of attention.
There is no business model to sustain a free information economy.
> The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
Up until about 2016 I would have agreed to this. After the last month or two, I don't see how a rational human can think this anymore. Neither side has any mainstream news outlet which tries to be honest in its reporting. You want facts? The talking heads have their own YouTube channels now. If you can find a decent selection of them, they provide more honest reporting and far better analysis than the media on either side provides currently.
I'd be surprised if anyone believed everything the press said. It doesn't even seem possible as different press outlets will say conflicting things. But even if someone did, that isn't really an argument that a free press is an enemy of world peace so I'm not seeing how your point is related.
Let me try. About 125 years ago there was something called the Spanish-American war. It only lasted 4 days so most people forget about it. It was basically started by the press, specifically by Hurst. It is where we get the term 'yellow journalism'.
Basically the press claimed that the Spanish sabotaged a US navy ship called the USS Maine. The Maine had a boiler accident which caused it to explode but the press claimed it was the Spanish. The government used this as an excuse to take the remaining bits of Spain's empire away from them. So that might be an example of the press being 'an enemy of world peace'. No, I'm not sure the current media would do that. But it is an example of a free press starting a war to sell fish wrap.
It's always fun to compare Trump quotes against other presidential quotes.
Jefferson: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Reagan: "There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our 'noble experiment' in self-government"
FDR: "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."
The issue comes in theory vs practice. Obviously in theory a free press is absolutely key to a free society, but in practice the press often ends up with different motivations. Another, rather more famous comment from Jefferson on the press [1]:
---
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
I'll take a a free press over an authoritarian controlled one any day. A boot stamping on a human face forever is not the kind of world peace I'm interested in, even if it's my boot. But I can understand the allure for a certain kind of person.
It's exactly because I know what our dishonest state-owned press reports about Trump and what they did report about Biden, and I also know what is happening in the US.
If Trump sneezes we find out that sneezing is something Hitler did, if Trump stops a war in Gaza we hear how one time Hitler talked about ending wars.
Our dishonest state-owned press is against wars except when Hamas loses, then they think that war may not have been that bad and want to tell us all the good things about war and the bad things about peace.
Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
> Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
You, uh, you do know this whole idea is right wing propaganda, right? None of that is what actually happened, it's what right wing media says happened.
We all saw the debate. Barry even ghost wrote a book about how senile he was. The gasslighting can only be pushed to a certain point, and we passed that point years ago.
Not really. Biden had a press pool like every president before them, and the press was free to disagree with him. He just didn't do interviews.
Trump's DoD just threatened to revoke press credentials of anyone who reported on things they didn't authorize. Also, the other current scandal is one of the people reporting on RFK both slept with him and gave him positive coverage, which is wild.
Trump regularly kicked reporters out of the press pool for saying things he didn't like and then took over deciding who can be in it and who isn't.
It's not really transparency if you make sure to include only people who promise to say what you want them to say, is it?
Why do we need journalists in a military building that is presumably full of classified information and people having conversations about said information? I was surprised to hear this was even a thing, it seems really odd to me.
If I was tasked to start the Pentagon from scratch and was asked, “should we setup a system to provide offices and constant access to journalists?” I’d be like, fuck no, what a dumb distraction.
Members of the military should not be talking to the press about their work while at work. Sure, talk off the record, just don’t do it at work. And talk as an individual, not as a representative of the military.
Unless of course your job is literally PR for the military. In which case maybe go to the journalist.
Because a large chunk of your taxes goes into projects planned and executed in that building. You have the right to know how it's used, and they decided they didn't want to disclose it themselves.
The whole thing Trump and his minions are doing is so very reminiscent of what was happening in Russia during its turn to fascism. Similarities go to such an extreme degree across the board that I now feel there has to be at least a consultant from Moscow working with the current admin, if not full blown department at the FSB. Blatant lying, complete disregard of any laws, open rejection of norms and mockery of process, justification of extreme cruelty
, obsession with some made up concept of “liberals”, and blaming everything on the predecessors (Putin is still trying to blame all the problems on the collapse of the Soviet Union).
I sincerely hope that people of the United States reject being treated like mindless cattle and choose freedom instead of what appears to be a complete and utter national-fascist tyranny.
In my opinion the role of the press is NOT to spin the narrative but to report objectively and contextualise the reported information, ask critical questions with the aim to uncover inefficiency, injustice etc.
Sadly the media, at least the big one do little if that lately and rather feed on hollow sensations empty of information or critical reflection but generating clicks.
My dude, I agree with the point you were making in the original comment before you edited it. But if you write aggressive comments with no room for discussion, you can't be surprised when people just downvote you.
Rational argument: the government has lied innumerable times. The reason we know about a handful of them is journalism. If you want your spin straight from the tap, you can read press releases on the DoD website. If you want critical analysis, verification, and other perspectives you’re gonna need a healthy fifth estate. Journalists have biases, but so do governments.
The media is called the fourth estate (not 5th). A 5th column would be more like sleeper cells.
And the media lies at least as much as our government. That's why ratings are so far down. They have burned their credibility that previous generations of journalists spent decades building up.
Ah, you’re half right. The fourth estate is what I meant to refer to. The fifth estate means outsider media, not sleeper cells - idk where you’re getting that.
As for “the media lies”, sure, and if a person is speaking lies will be said - but that is hardly a fact that can be used to dismiss all journalism.
That is only part of the story, not the full story, where journalists and CIA analysts get together and determine the truth. you've seen the video Snowden posted about this? It is a known reality. Why hide it behind the facade of a free press? There are many dimensions to this story, including Zionist bias by mainstream "journalists" that told you there was no genocide and Israel is a victim, and they've kept up that lie even after the UN declared it a genocide.
In (Part Two) it was external actors laying bricks that isolated Waters' protaganist, and in (Part Three) cause passes the Rubicon as everyone and everything is lumped together as just more bricks in the wall.
While what the government is doing more widely is quite scary, this in isolation seems sensible?
I don't really get what the journalists' role is? To goad and harass employees of the Department of defense in to slipping up and saying more than they should? To encourage people to leak information?
Given the secretive nature of the whole institution, It seems sensible that there is some formal process for deciding what information should and shouldn't be shared. The previous setup seems sort of insane.
If the army is putting babies on spikes and it needs to be leaked.. it seems that that should happen outside of the Pentagon itself and shouldn't involve getting some government approved badge...
Accountable in what sense? How are journalists trying to pry extra info from staff helpful? If they want to ask questions at press conferences and whatnot - as far as I understand they still can?
> Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?
No.
Real accountability is that the people can torture their leaders when they fail, but that just doesn't happen anymore.
Imagine that this was just a big rock and Trump was sitting on top of the rock like with a group of apes. Also, let's assume that Trump had set fire on the entire banana supply. Do you think the apes would not have picked a different leader immediately?
Rational people would understand that if you make people lose billions that there should be consequences, but someone the world population is more stupid than a bunch of apes.
by questioning them publicly and holding them to account. That's not a leak. That's keeping people in check (or force them to lie in front of camera). Remove that and you only rely on Edward Snowdens of the world.
My understanding is they want off-the-record information from unnamed sources. These aren't public questions like at a press conference. Those can still occur under the current rules.
If they publish off-the-record information without approval of authorities, they will no longer be accredited to attend press conferences. Of course no self-respecting reporter is going to accept this - if you do, next step is "if you publish lies about our president, you will not be accredited" - trust me, I know, this is how it starts.
"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."
Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.
First sign of a profession having a backbone in months.
Although the silent treatment the generals dished out at recent meeting wasn’t bad either
>First sign of a profession having a backbone in months
They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
Now they suddenly grew a "backbone"?
They just see the signs of lack of long term legitimacy for this particular government and play pretend at safe courage.
Consider the power of this statement then: if they were ok with all of those things and now they draw a line that means that things have gotten much, much worse than they were before.
You're making the conclusions you want to see without anything to back them up.
There are countless reasons why they are acting now when they haven't before and most of them do not support what you are implying.
Or that they draw the line when it's about little hummiliations done to themselves, and not to lying and misreporting
You see what you want to see.
Well... maybe. If a company brings in new anti-sexual-assault training and a bunch of people quit around the same time that doesn't necessarily suggest the problem is the outrageous training.
I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.
This clearly has nothing to do with security, but do you really believe journalists are just "wandering" around the Pentagon and getting into classified materials?
According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon. What materials they are getting, I don't know.
> According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon
Source?
I was wrong. My source was Major Garret of CBS News. I was reminded of this as he is, as I type this, on KMOX Radio in St Louis discussing this very subject. You can probably listen to it online now and later, too.
The news outlets, by and large, are not upset at the idea they need to keep to more restrictive areas (though they've already had their access limited by this administration).
The concern is the "you can't report on anything we don't want you to" rule.
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.
The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?
If that's the case, shouldn't we also ban the top brass from restaurants, bars, churches and golf courses lest they encounter strangers there?
Why bother? It hasn't caused a major problem so far. This isn't new, it is how the world has worked for all of military history.
I know classified US secrets, the leaks around the Snowden era were pretty interesting. Guarantee you the people in the building know more than me. The NOFORN stuff actually tends to be the spiciest if you feel an urge to go look at something.
> This isn't new
Strike packages being leaked before launch? Yes. Yes, that’s new. We spent a lot of time and money to get that access in WWII. It was what Turing built the Enigma to do.
You made the counter argument, there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personal outside of a building the handles secret documents.
I'm surprised they were let in the building in the first place. Should I be allowed to go if I have a press pass?
> there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personnel outside of a building the handles secret documents
Under the new rules this would not have been allowed, either, unless the information was pre-approved messaging.
> The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?
I can think of one. Name ends on Hegseth.
And that same lying press and propaganda club that roenxi is arguing against here reported his gaffe pretty accurately, which if they had been who he claims they are they never would have.
National security has been the excuse of damn near every uncharacteristically authoritarian move our government has made, and the pentagon has unprecedented means to securely discuss and transfer information. The onus of controlling that information has always fallen on people with clearance, and the biggest sensitive information compromises in the past couple decades were perpetrated by national political figures. There are people a lot snoopier than reporters looking for information a lot more sensitive than they are who’ll leak it to foreign governments without us ever knowing — that’s who they really have to worry about. Controlling media is, and has always been about protecting themselves from embarrassment.
there are separate issues
* whether you need to limit people learning something
* whether you need to limit people publishing something
"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.
1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.
You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.
> would probably have an easier time securing
Hold up, that's starting to conflate two very different ideas of what's going on:
1. "We cannot tolerate any outside visitors because it could possibly give them an opportunity to commit espionage and other serious federal crimes.
2. "We cannot tolerate specific vetted reporters that haven't promised us control over what they write and how they write it."
We can tell this isn't a (#1) concern over actual security. If it were, this (#2) "deal" would never be offered at all.
This is about controlling messages and opinions, rather than securing specific facts.
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Without giving any indication of the issues you found, your comment is entirely unhelpful and unproductive.
Roenxi implied that the real perpetrators/bad people are the journalists that left. And that they left because the government started to prosecute their crimes.
Does that really need an in-depth analysis to point out how dumb that idea is?
"In depth analysis?" No, but if you're calling someone confused it's probably basic decency--not to mention in keeping with the spirit of the site guidelines--to briefly state why.
Yes! There is no character limit here. It drives me bonkers when I read comments like that one. What is anyone supposed to get out of it? It has the same meaning as "lol".
Comments like that are why I left reddit - they do not foster discussion, they are low-effort attempts at getting updoots. If the only meaning that can be extracted from a comment is "I disagree", it shouldn't be a comment, it should be a downvote. It's a waste of an indentation level.
The idea that these journalists suddenly found a spine is also dumb [0]. It was an example about as far on the other end of the spectrum from what jacquesm said as I could think of; obviously it is dumb too. It's an extreme example. That doesn't make it confused though, and this is the thing about explaining what you read. If you comment about what you think got said directly it is easier for people to clear up misunderstandings.
[0] If they're sitting in the same office as the US military, they're propagandists. Their job is to spread propaganda. They aren't going to suddenly catch a case of principles now. This is the class of people that keeps cheer-leading every disastrous military expedition the US goes on.
> If they're sitting in the same office as the US military, they're propagandists.
You package that as a statement of fact, but it is just your opinion.
> Their job is to spread propaganda.
Then why are they not paid by the government?
> They aren't going to suddenly catch a case of principles now.
Indeed, you could reasonably assume that they had a case of principles all along and that this violates those principles.
> This is the class of people that keeps cheer-leading every disastrous military expedition the US goes on.
Except... they don't. That's why they walked out, because they want to be free to write whatever they want to write.
You are just parroting the usual 'luegenpresse' shit.
It is a safe starting point that my comments are my opinion. If I'm presenting a fact or someone else's opinion I usually hyperlink it with square brackets.
> Then why are they not paid by the government?
They're not government propagandists. They're more an outcrop of the military-industrial complex propaganda and generally associated with the neocons from what I've seen. From the outside this looks like it might be a turf war between the Trumpists and the Neocons, but it is hard to be sure.
> You are just parroting the usual 'luegenpresse' shit.
If they put more effort into intellectually honest reporting of what the US military is doing it'd be harder to make the epithet stick. Always an option; a bunch of journalists do actually manage it. Just not so many of the ones literally sitting with the military. Someone like Snowden may well have walked past a lot of journalists at his day job, but I don't think any of them were leaking the large and credibly illegal government spying program.
Comments like this are snarky, shallowly dismissive, and do little to add to a discussion all of which are against HN guidelines.
On the contrary, it is perfectly on point, the poster in fact admits further down below that it was a stupid comment. It is so confused that I can't make heads or tails of it but after some more back-and-forth (which if you had read the thread you would have known, rather than put in your uselesswords here) it became more clear: they really don't understand the comment did not make any sense.
If you want me to try explaining something more clearly you should include a rough outline of what you think I said. Otherwise I've basically got nothing to do but repeat myself. Hopefully this helps.
The journalists and the generals can presumably still talk to each other over drinks after work. The journalists were only ever going to be tolerated in the building because US leadership thinks they are helping them achieve military propaganda aims which are rarely noble things. There isn't much at stake here beyond classified information.
US classified information has been a bit of a disaster for them. It just means the government is slowly escaping accountability for what it does. They have that massive spying program on US citizens and the last I heard of the story was they can't sue anyone over it because the courts aren't allowed to believe it exists.
This isn't about security at all. This is about control of the narrative. Hegseth and co would like you to believe it is about security. But there is absolutely no indication that there was an urgent issue that needs resolution.
The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative. We're moving from a state where the government was trying to control the narrative to the same state.
That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.
> The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative.
At that point you can just claim everyone working in the government is doing the same, or given the fact that they are working for the government it’s even worse since they’re employed full time (or were) to advance the government’s agenda!
Except that the government’s agenda is by and large the agenda of the people that it represents.
Not only is the point of view you’re expressing uselessly cynical, you’re depriving others of agency as well. It’s still a free country - press access doesn’t mean “government mouthpiece”. There are lots of news organizations and journalists with differing levels of professional standing and points of view and you can read all about them for yourself.
> Except that the government’s agenda is by and large the agenda of the people that it represents.
In this case the government's agenda is that these journalists should either get Hegseth to stamp their articles or pack their cardboard boxes and get out of the building. Make of that what you will.
Sure, but if I'm going off the OP who said:
> The reason they were in the building in the first place was to give the US government control over the narrative.
Them packing their boxes would imply that the US government doesn't want control of the narrative?
The deal is the journalists (propagandists) get to be in the building if they're compliant with whatever narrative the US government wants to be spread. The US government is changing the narrative they want to target, implementing that policy with some administrative changes and some of the journalists aren't compliant with it any more. They now have to leave the building and sit in a different building. It is quite challenging to tag whether this development is good or bad in the big picture. The basic deal on offer to the journalists hasn't changed - the ones in the building are compliant, the ones out of the building may or may not be compliant with what the US administration wants said.
There's arguments that no journalists should be in the building, there's an argument that more eyes are always better and it is easier to keep track of these people if they are in the building.
Access is what allows them to form the relationships and contacts that let them report information that counters the propaganda. It is a two way street. The NPR reporter you mentioned, Tom Bowman, is not OANN and has reported many times very critically of the military.
Comments like these ruin the comments sections. I with there was an "original thought" button that just showed root comments.
> Comments like these ruin the comments sections.
Unlike yours, which are off topic and do not contribute at all.
> I with there was an "original thought" button that just showed root comments.
I think you meant 'wish', there is a little - mark at the beginning of each comment thread, if you click that the comments will collapse, there is also a 'start with collapsed comments' setting that only appears above 200K karma.
>They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.
As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.
So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.
Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time. Which is why many, except for quatari al jazeera djihadis refused to go.
Same as with the tulkarem incident where the west bank police lynched two israelis on camera and the mob noticed the filming reporters and smashed the cameras.
For bystanders, some Israeli sources against this 3-day-old account's baseless claims:
- 2025 Jun 7 oped about why it's a good thing that Israel doesn't allow journalists into Gaza (https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/409591)
- 2025 Jul 9 article "Israel Blocks All Foreign Journalists From Gaza, High Court Delays Ruling on Appeal for Access" (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-09/ty-article/.p...)
>Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time.
Israel has killed dozens of journalists, officially marked as press, in targeted killings.
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Yeah ok, that's why foreign reporters had to shoot footage clandestinely from foreign aid airplanes:
https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/stain-on-humanity-journali...
Aand its repackaged al jazeera as evidence
Since your unsubstantiated comment did not reference the content of the sourced article in any way I can only conclude you're replying in bad faith and trolling.
This might be what we need. SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised. Giving him less earned media may be a win.
>SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised
He acts like every other person (myself included) that i know that had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed but still looks funny at his favorite drink. With a guy like this you literally never know what the clear liquid in the glass bottle is.
> had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed
I assume you meant lapsed - Freudian slip, maybe? ;)
The silent treatment is part of a long standard official directive. https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/975910/dod...
Its good it stayed but just be aware it wasn't the same as a room of normal people being silent.
>First sign of a profession having a backbone in months.
Probably 25 years. Let's not forget that they haven't shown spine after 9/11
The silent treatment was basically required by law, when it became clear the event was really a political rally using them as props. They just didn’t break the law (unlike what other, hand-picked service members used as props at Trump rallies have done in the past)
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But that's a separate issue, different circumstances and, mostly, different people. Similar to how they (in part) reported during epidemic.
But now they did something good and it's somehow nullified by the other things?
Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?
Also, in some cases the press did apologise, e.g. https://archive.ph/F3Ra1 . Fox news were notoriously the worst propagandisers in this case; I searched but could not find any apology from them.
> Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?
I have to ask -- why? Your population is hundreds of millions, you can afford to let go of bad people and replace them with better people. You don't need to let go of a grudge against war criminals and their media collaborators. They're not your family, or people that you simply have to learn how to deal with because you can't lose them.
I'm assuming here that it is a goal to get rid of such people eventually. Then that requires making steps towards that goal. Be unforgiving towards people who wield power unethically.
> Also: You are promoting that we keep a grudge. Are you planning to let go of it sometime?
Sure! Once the people responsible for the wars have been punished. Any day now...
It puts in question whether they are acting out of good conscience now rather than just because they see it as advantageous for themselves.
Your right it’s different, but the problem is that I want a fair and consistent standard.
Shouldn’t telling the truth and apologize when you “accidentally” misinform the public be the standard?
They collectively have proven themselves to be untrustworthy and now they can’t be trusted anymore but some people continue to pretend they are authoritative sources of truth despite the facts that they help lie America into a war that kill many and caused massive financial damage to the economy.
I’m saying that people and corporations should be held accountable and responsible for their actions?
This kind of boycott needs to happen for the WH press corps. If there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions, or being expelled from the room for asking tough questions, then everyone needs to walk. Immediately.
Game theory applies here. There will always be one journalist without any moral qualms that’ll stay, betting on everyone else leaving, and making a scoop.
> There will always be one journalist without any moral qualms that’ll stay
They’re outed as stooges. That doesn’t matter to the influencer crowd. But I bet this costs the DoD a lot of narrative-shaping power.
I'm growing more convinced that there is a significant subset of the population that wants all of the press to be stooges.
> there is a significant subset of the population that wants all of the press to be stooges
A significant fraction of Americans are addicted to rage bait. They don’t care about accuracy as much as entertainment and ideological predictability.
When they're obviously lying to you, at least you know that they're lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vranyo
Known lies can still be effective.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0900636106
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212126109
https://sjdm.org/~baron/journal/14/14715/jdm14715.html
> making a scoop
The chances of making that via a White House press conference is pretty close to zero.
>Game theory applies here.
Rely on traditional trade craft. A bouncing bevy of brothel, escort service, deepthroats; historically and dramatized, is a staid and proven primary source.
Only the one? Found the optimist.. ;)
...so why did they unite in this case?
Because there’s nothing to win here? Nobody gets a Pulitzer for copy-pasting a press release from the DoD (or DoW, for what it’s worth)
That's some bar moving. In one case we're saying that even if you report garbage, your competitors are going to occupy the niche without you, therefore something something game theory.
But in this other case, well there's just no value to reporting garbage.
Have you ever seen a White House press conference? People scream their questions in the hope of being the loudest, because the president only answers a few. If most of the competition for question time leaves, there’s more time for you to get that juicy soundbite you’re after.
Have you seen a white house press conference lately? It's all just the same talking points. Everyone gets to report on the sound bites. You're choosing to describe these things as if the game theoretics are qualitatively different. Your description is doing more of the work than the game theory.
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Well, the White House press corps has already been changed to (how do I write this in a way that won't get me downvoted?) include more reporters friendly to the current administration since the White House asserted the right to determine itself who gets access (formerly it was the White House Correspondents' Association), so the chances of such a more-or-less unified boycott are slim. And I don't have any doubts that the Pentagon will also quickly find enough "warm bodies" (besides those from OANN) to prevent an embarrassing almost empty room at the next press conference...
It's less about having an effect but all about moral integrity. They want to signal that they still abide to their professional standards in order to keep their reputation among their peers and the public, those who aren't gleichgeschaltet (yet).
> And I don't have any doubts that the Pentagon will also quickly find enough "warm bodies" (besides those from OANN)
You mean like Tim Pool lol?
Could you, in a million years, ever imagine seeing his face in the White House briefing room? We're a pathetic country right now.
> (how do I write this in a way that won't get me downvoted?)
It’s sad that your speech has been chilled by the misuse of the karma system by some large faction of users here.
dang is, at best, oblivious to the fact that that this site has become a battleground. At worst, he's intentionally chosen sides with his selective removal of flags.
dang is not the only moderator. There is apparently an unspoken moderation guideline that if enough people (i.e., a mob) think something should be here then it stays regardless of how many guidelines it violates. To the detriment of the community, in my opinion.
They should all ask the hard questions. If they're going to not have access either way, why not take the way that also exposes the corruption?
The press corps is already 50% right wing podcasters and 5th-tier far right / conspiracy outlets. And any time one of the remaining actual reporters asks even a mundane and non-confrontational question they just get called names, told their network/paper is failing, told their question is “nasty”, and don’t get an answer. The access they have is even more pointless than it usually is, they may as well not show up.
> The press corps is already 50% right wing
This is supposed to be unfair?
You left off one rather important word in your quote, there.
>>there is a fear of not being selected to ask questions
That's not exactly what's happening.
>>The rules limit where reporters can go without an official escort and convey “an unprecedented message of intimidation” for anyone in the Defense Department who might want to speak to a reporter without the approval of Hegseth’s team
On NPR (National Public Radio) a few days ago, a reporter said they could wander the halls of the Pentagon and ask anyone they ran into any question about anything. This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Here is Tom Bowman’s (NPR’s lead defense reporter) opinion article where he mentions wandering the halls of the Pentagon
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g-s1-93297/pentagon-reporter-...
If you don’t quote it out of context you’ll see that a) he doesn’t have any problems with not having physical access to parts of the pentagon and b) the quote was part of a broader anecdote where generals contradicted the secretary of defense.
The new pledge would not allow him to report that disagreement. Which is extremely telling.
They wouldn't have full access, but yes, journalists should be able to ask anyone anything. Asking is legal, and it's up to the person being asked to not say anything that a journalist isn't supposed to know.
What bad things have happened from what you're describing?
I would think anyone visiting this board would be educated enough to figure out for themselves what could happen should a foreign agent posing as a reporter asking questions inside a top military organization. Or any reporter discreetly obtaining information they shouldn't have.
They wouldn't get an answer hopefully. You do know that allowing journalists to ask all questions isn't the same thing as anwering all those questions?
In a democratic functioning society the gold standard is that citizen are allowed to ask anything and allowed to answer nothing. The GOP wants to reverse both.
I don't see that happening, they're just not allowed to do it IN THE PENTAGON.
That’s not what the new rules say. They say they will be denied access to the pentagon if they ask questions of military or DoD personnel that isn’t explicitly cleared by the DoD.
Access to the Pentagon is the privilege they are revoking but the action they are punishing is not related to the Pentagon.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/15/business/medi...
That link has the actual rules.
Well, military personnel shouldn’t be sharing sensitive information with any reporter, so not a problem? Once you tell a reporter, you tell your enemy (assuming your enemy can read newspapers).
When your "enemy" becomes the oversight providing public, we have a major problem.
A government with public alignment and maybe a slow leak will be fine. A government without public alignment needs to have every crack pried open until alignment with the public is restored.
Thus my point.
The status quo is that they have access credentials, which presumably come with some sort of vetting. So a "foreign agent" showing up and impersonating a reporter is unlikely.
I've visited the White House a couple of times and even setting foot on the complex as a visitor requires a background check, I assume the Pentagon functions similarly.
Hard to believe that for a long time you could just walk up and knock. Or picnic on the lawn.
We probably should have taken it as a sign things were heading a bad direction when stuff like that began to change…
You honestly think a foreign agent impersonating a reporter is any more unlikely than a foreign agent--or one working on their behalf--isn't likely to be working within the government?
> This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
I do love that despite the administration lying about everything there are still people who will take what they say at face value without a shred of critical thinking.
They're doing this because people keep leaking unflattering pieces of information and Petey gets his feelings hurt pretty quickly. It has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control.
What is the right structure for the Ministry of Truth?
An industrial reel spool of paper, direct from the mill, feeding into a continuous printer tanked with lemon juice ink, then feeding into an operating shredder.
It's good for garden mulch.
What I want to know is: why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
If you did agree to the terms you'd be limited to publishing the official story (and can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff), but you get that for free anyway even if you never show up, so why bother with the extra expense of actually going to the Pentagon?
They'll get exclusive interviews, they'll get to be visible on TV asking questions to important people, they'll get invited on trips where they can film in front of a cool background like a military base or something.
I think it's worth it for anyone that cares about the aesthetics of journalism more than actually reporting anything of value.
Lol you're making it out like the individual reporters make these calls. If anyone stayed it's because their employer believes there's money to be made in staying. The end.
This sentiment is just simply not true. People care about more than money, even people who run companies.
So those news agencies made the decisions to stay in the press corps just as a nice treat for those reporters (nice trips etc)? Is that what you're saying?
Clearly I did not say that.
I also honestly don’t see the point you are trying to make, can you clarify?
Can you first clarify what point you're trying to make in the context of these news agencies staying or going?
Edit: the equivocation about people not being cynical always in their roles in a corporation (a very trite claim to begin with) is extra funny in the context of the literal laws that bind employees of corporations to do exactly what we all already know they are bound to do:
> They must discharge their actions in good faith and in the best interest of the corporation, exercising the care an ordinary person would use under similar circumstances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_care_(business_associa...
You can be quite literally sued into oblivion for not being cynical in your roles and responsibilities as an employee of a C corp.
Well I don’t live in the US, maybe there are only cynical people there. Somehow I doubt that though.
Also remember that “best interests of the corporation” doesn’t necessarily mean get money now and lose reputation for a long time. Some people might interpret it that way, others not. It is all context dependent and there is no guarantee people would be convinced for taking the long view if they can provide justification.
My guy you're moving the goal posts so far back you're about to fall off the end of the earth
Ok guy.
> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
The ones who stay are influencers. Not journalists. Their viewers (almost certainly not readers) don’t know the difference.
I can buy that. But even then, I've seen plenty of videos where one person is just commenting on another video, so even for those influencers… they can do it without actually showing up.
Edit: I suspect you're right anyway. Typical mind fallacy on my part, as there have been people giving anecdotal stories of DOGE recruiters offering them a pay cut relative to their current roles just for the chance to do that work and get DOGE on their CVs, recruiters very confused that the response was that DOGE would be seen as a negative by future employers.
> why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
Imagine being an aspiring blogger/independent journalist. One can only dream of such a possibility as to join the press corp of Pentagon. Of course many will agree to all restrictions and rules for the opportunity.
Then how are you different than the "press release" page on Pentagon website?
Your audience chooses you over the press releases because you sound like a human, trim out the boring items and more obvious propaganda, place things in context, reduce jargon/simplify things, also report on other things the pentagon doesn't have press releases about, and throw in some jokes.
You choose to keep at it because you think military stuff is pretty neat; you get paid by the view; getting briefings from the pentagon makes you seem important to yourself and others; and you like being a celebrity (albeit a very minor one)
But you don't need to have a pass for that. You can just read press releases from your basement.
You don't get access to networking and opportunities by reposting press releases from the warmth of your basement.
Ok, but you can't publish anything from such networking otherwise you will lose your pass. So what's the point?
If you do a good enough job publishing the official government narrative, you might get promoted to cabinet member. Half this cabinet are former teenage youtubers who did a good enough job supporting the regime's first term.
As somebody from former Eastern Block, getting promoted by your own party often times meant that you will be also first to end up in gulag/labor camp/prison as a scape goat when dear leader made wrong decision because you have provided him misleading information.
So many communists ended up imprisoned by other communists because they weren't pure enough or because scape goat was needed.
It means you'll either to go to gulag or you'll become supremely wealthy. Possibly both, first the latter, then the former when you outlive your usefulness.
Which is better than just being a normal person who goes to gulag with no wealth.
You saw it on a smaller scale before. Supporters of the current regime would get paid a lot for a while, then promptly forgotten about. Remember Steven Crowder complaining that 50 million dollars was too little - but where is he now? He's irrelevant. That was before they had gulags.
> Remember Steven Crowder complaining that 50 million dollars was too little - but where is he now? He's irrelevant.
To be clear, his career imploded when he got caught on camera abusing his wife. It's not like he ended up on the wrong side of a power struggle.
And it's worth noting that as of last month he's now the #1 right wing influencer on Youtube. (The reason why he's now in that spot is left as an exercise for the reader.)
That would work as a warning if people studied history. Especially of other countries.
These YouTube kids...
There's no right answer. Stay and you can only publish the approved messaging except maybe once. Go and you give them a shroud of secrecy.
It seems like basically the only ones who stayed are OAN; in their case it's probably just a demonstration of loyalty to Dear Leader. As you say, being there under those rules seems otherwise rather pointless.
That's not true. It's an agreement not to publish classified information that has been leaked to the media.
Nothing stops them from publishing criticisms of the administrations talking points, or conversations that happen outside of press conferences.
“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,”
Thanks for sharing the exact language.
So it's purely leaks.
Seems like the wrong way about it. If your own people are leaking information, you should fix that, not force the press not to report on it.
They get to publishing official "leaks" and the ability to ask additional questions that allow the story to be tailored towards their readers.
> can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff
Obviously this rule would apply only to real journalists. Members of the party will get free roam. They will stay.
Just another day in the life of a regime.
Hey I embrace remote working too, but not everyone views it that way
> What I want to know is: why would anyone else bother staying given these new rules?
Being a toady often has career benefits - and at least on the right it's often lucrative to boot. I mean, look at how Hegseth got his job.
I'm pleasantly surprised that journalists are doing this due to how tepid news companies generally are.
They couldn’t do anything else. The power grab happens even when they would have succumbed. At least they quit with a spine.
If they don’t go back in a week, which can be seen from several examples, like Hungary, that it doesn’t work. I think compared to the Hungarian government, this was a misstep of Trump (which I hope they make it more). In Hungary, when something like this happened, you always lost when you didn’t succumb to authoritarianism. You lost your previous privileges no matter what, but you lost more if you protested. They tried to keep up a facade that nothing changed, while everything changed. In this case it seems to me as an outside observer, that nothing value was lost by quitting compared to signing up.
Or Trump and co don’t want to keep a facade at all. But then they need to bet on that most people in America are really fascists.
This is move by the journalists is inspiring to be honest, ending press freedom is what they want.
The pentagon and jornos embedded there were always playing the access journalism game all along. Nothing new is happening, this was just the secdef being so thick he asked them to put the punches they'll pull in writing. It should be seen as a union walk-out.
Secwar, right?
Are we sure this isnt exactly what the current administration wants to happen? Less press so they can get away with more?
Well every step they do seems to be copy/pasted from North Korea.
Since nobody is protesting now you can expect that 5 years from now the regime will start making disappear people vaguely opposing the gov decisions or being suicided on a regular basis.
> Since nobody is protesting now
Not the case, there are quite large protests, one is this weekend I believe.
As for disappearances, ICE is already doing that. Although in Chicago their attempts to disappear people are going increasingly poorly, since ICE's appearance in a neighborhood now typically draws dozens of people onto the street to protest.
And Russia of course.
> Less press
War journalists will keep reporting. This just means the government’s position doesn’t get a say every time.
The government gets that even if journalists agree.
Why is there always someone to hint that Trump &co are 280 IQ geniuses and all of their batshit insane actions actually are a 8d chess move we're too dumb to understand ?
I used to share your opinion, but were to the point where it’s difficult to say it’s dumb luck. Look at the amount of change and impact they’ve had on the country in such a short period - it feels wrong to say that chance/luck/whatever rather than intentional, planned, and skilled manipulation.
Look at the change and impact Pol Pot had on Cambodia in such a short period! Must've been a visionary genius, and not at all a crazy person.
_Change_ is easy. Anyone can break stuff. _Positive_ change is more difficult.
"Impact" is easy.
Good impact, that's much harder.
But even with the benefit of hindsight, it's not always clear if a politician's impact was good or bad: people over here are debating how good Angela Merkel really was, and she's been out of office for 4 years (after 16 in power).
The “good” they’re after is power that keeps them out of prison, and stealing money.
They’re doing great at both those things.
I'm not sure they even have that: Trump has the power to stay out of prison for now, but not the rest of them, and they might fight him for it.
Not that it matters: my previous point was more that "being fast" doesn't preclude them being idiots, nor being malicious to the interests of voters.
It's well planned, but the same subtlety as flying planes into a skyscraper.
The skyscraper is the size / scope / power of the US Federal Government (although incidentally it's also housing the US Constitution). And the planes are the entirely unqualified loyalists and useful idiots appointed to top positions of power.
Flying planes into a skyscraper has historically worked out well for US government interests (es well as some bankers).
It's not really rocket science though.
Not a US citizen but affected by the current trajectory of the policies by the current administration.
I wonder at what point in time people will have enough with what they are changing. How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
> How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
HN and the broader tech community have had their mask off moments.
I do think the HN and tech community is a more diverse group, than just the ultra libertarians, opportunists, and outright fascists. Maybe that's just my naive hope. In any case I would also like to know how US based techies think about this administration and the direction the country is heading in.
if you look at any recent article here on the current US trajectory there is a pretty large contingent of people who are very much not happy with the way things are going. Of course the articles then get flagged and removed from the front page but from my reading more and more people are speaking up over here. And as US techie I certainly don’t support this BS.
>people who are very much not happy with the way things are going. Of course the articles then get flagged and removed from the front page ...
Can you explain, we're in one now on the front page. In fact, I see the opposite, anything positive of the current administration is drowned out by comments about all the other things not going well.
I could have been clearer but that is what i mean, there is a large contingent with very negative feelings for the actions of the current admin.
Ahh got it, agreed. I do experiments every once in awhile where I try to find one thing the current administration has done objectively well, there are some. Some people can't admit to one thing being good, and I'm not even saying the ends justify the means.
I mean no snark, but can you link to some things that are objectively well done?
Worth noting that I did not realize how many articles are getting flagged regularly here until I switched to active view eg https://news.ycombinator.com/active
> than just the ultra libertarians, opportunists, and outright fascists.
I mean, I would think that actual libertarians, even right-libertarians, would be extremely alarmed by ol' minihands, tbh.
> people will have enough
Likely at least a third of Americans do actively support the current administration and their decisions, so "having enough" is out of the question.
People keep saying this, but have you actually asked 100 people yourself and found at least 33 agreeing?
I don't get why California doesn't just join the European Union and exit the US; it's not like the red neck states like California.
The election was less than a year ago. As an outsider, my genuine belief is this is what an average American wants. And honestly, it is what it is.
I mentioned this before as well, but this all can be viewed as a side effect of the general population not feeling improvements in their lives and not having optimism. Hard issue to solve, if I’ll be honest.
They had an election, and in California there was 1 vote for Trump for 1.52 votes for Harris [1] so even within one of the bluest of blue states, 40% of voters support the current administration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
California, like a lot of other "blue" states, turns deeply red once you get away from the cities and into more rural areas. It's just the cities have so many more people that they dominate statewide elections.
What's wrong with that? Do you think the popular vote should pick the president and half the country is ruled by people that prioritize living in a city and all that entails.
Ah yes, the problem of "more people" determining elections. It should be the minority that determines elections!
> affected by the current trajectory of the policies
Curious how you're are directly affected? And as a non us-citizen, why does it matter?
Trump is affecting the economy of other countries. The tariffs and the massive uncertainty is causing layoffs and makes companies more hesitant to invest.
The destruction of US scientific institutions has effects on other countries as well, science is very interconnected. It also affects all companies that supply scientific equipment and supply.
The foreign policy has effects on other countries, the US is still the most powerful nation at the moment. And let's assume that there is a chance his threats to invade Greenland or Canada are actually acted upon, that would change world politics in a fundamental way.
Every country in the world is severely affected by Trump's reversal of climate change policy.
Not who you're asking, but the extreme changes in US foreign policy (well, maybe not necessarily policy because I doubt there's much paperwork going on to make the rapidly swinging changes official) are affecting, basically, the stability of global security and making US allies very nervous.
Whilst this is at an international political level, it has effects on individuals world views and therefore psychologies, which can be experienced viscerally.
As an obvious example, I'm sure Ukrainians have gone through some personal ups and downs as a result of the current administrations interpretation of diplomacy.
”Let’s not talk politics, it’s just inflammatory. Hey, cool LLM model. Shiny!”
That would be very funny if it weren't disturbingly close to the truth.
I believe 90% of mean people on the web talking about politics are actually bots.
Are you a bot? Prove it, one way or another.
Also, is there something like Poe's law but for bots? Bot Attribution Fallacy?
And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, or making statements they expect the group to agree with. Nobody comes out of the conversation smarter than they went in.
Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.
Problem: Everything is political. Pretending not to talk about politics, is mostly just supporting a certain kind of politics (the one that you get by default if you avoid talking about politics).
Disagree, not everything is political unless you make it so. Otherwise we should fork this to political discussions only.
I don’t think it’s that I’m avoiding politics…
It’s that I know the day-to-day headlines from DC are mostly noise, and do not inform in the same way that ESPN talking head analysts do not inform about football.
To understand the state of American politics and of the world, I have news sources I trust. Hacker News will never be one of them. Neither will Reddit. Nor will Facebook.
I don’t want HN to turn into another outrage-bait pseudo-news commentary site. Look at the front page of Reddit (it’s atrociously bad) to see how far this forum could fall.
I flagged this article. If you want to talk about daily political news with other internet people, there are myriad options: WSJ, NYT, and Washington Post all have comment sections. Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and Threads all have comment sections. YouTube has comments. Blogs have comments.
Why do people insist that keeping HN free of politics is tantamount to being blissfully ignorant of world affairs? And why do people insist on turning HN into Reddit v2?
Most people do the same thing with shiny technology topics too.
But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference.
It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
1000%. Don't talk about Religion, Politics or Sex. It's a great way to fight and divide and we will NEVER agree.
That's not even close to what I said. You should absolutely talk about these things, but you should find knowledgeable people who will challenge you and help you to grow. HN isn't the place for that, when it comes to topics outside of tech.
How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”?
Hacker news should not become strictly or dominated by political discussion, but given AI and its impact on society amongst many other technologies like social media, which are intertwined within political discussion these days, some of the “knowledgeable“ people and particularly those whose careers have been impacted by AI are right here on hacker news.
> How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”?
How do we do this with tech topics? We rely on our expert knowledge to evaluate the claims of others. If someone is seriously asking this question about political discussion on HN that means they're not at the point where they're ready to have political discussions that are anything more than just saying "hey did you read that mainstream news article?" "yeah".
If you know even a modicum of politics or political theory it's almost trivial to prove, disprove, or add color to what's being said in these threads. If you want a really simple way to do this hop onto one of the big prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi. You can probably disprove a solid 15% of top-ranked commenters just by doing that.
If you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings.
The conclusion I've come to on this site is that the incentives around participating on a public internet site, like HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc are such that they attract a crowd of people who are more interested in talking than listening or understanding. There's a subset of them who really enjoy debating but without being grounded in fact or consequence from misprediction it turns largely into verbal sparring games. There's also little difference between these sites because from what I can tell it's the same set of people attracted to all of the same sites.
you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings.
Why do you think, an US centric, vaguely leftist think tank focused on US politics with seat in Washington, financed by American donors, initiates the use of brainpower and understanding? More than any other media, that is. There is such a thing as the rest of the world (95% of the world population) who may be more incentivised to ask honest questions on HN than reading yet another U. S. publication that regards them as a remark in the margins, as demonstrated by the CEIP front page https://carnegieendowment.org/?lang=en
CEIP is just one think tank. There are plenty of others there. I frequently read CEPR [1] for a more EU perspective or JIIA [2] for a more Japanese perspective. I just referenced CEIP because it probably most neatly represents the dominant HN perspective.
> Why do you think, an US centric, vaguely leftist think tank focused on US politics with seat in Washington, financed by American donors, initiates the use of brainpower and understanding?
Incentives. Do you really think that internet commenters are going to produce better research than folks paid to research things and provide insights to decision makers? Everyone has a bias. Having a bias doesn't stop you from doing deep analysis. The CCP traces its ideological origins from Marx-Leninism and still uses that to develop their policy positions. It's a very different perspective than US policy which traces its philosophy back to the European Enlightenment, but that doesn't mean their analysis is any less rigorous.
[1]: https://cepr.org/ [2]: https://www.jiia.or.jp/en/
CEPR is yet another leftist (less vaguely than CEIP) U. S. American think tank with the same attributes as CEIP (donors, location etc.) So, more U. S. centrism with a heavy focus on Vox News. Might just as well read Vox.
JIIA is the only one of your examples, covering worldwide topics right there on the front page, even Africa. Promoting research.
So far, your selection confirms only one of your statements: bias. Everyone has them. Do you really think, the first two of your choices would engage in"deep analysis" on topics contrary to the political agenda of their donors and hence their incentives?
I'll hold that I get more varied opinions and links to sources on HN than from strictly conforming U. S. publications, but thanks for introducing me to JIIA - which, you know, verifies the first part of this sentence.
The philosophical roots of states is not on topic here, so I'll skip that.
I almost responded this but the condescending nature of it doesn’t deserve one. Later.
> I almost responded this but
Glad that it was almost :)
> And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions,
A-MEN.
Ton of takes by armchair enthusiasts who think they have the ability call a spade a spade because they're grandmother told them they were a genius after restarting her computer.
I swear to god, DHH has to got to be the best example of this. His blog piece about free speech is so funny in retrospect it's hard for me to read and believe he takes himself seriously.
In fairness, the LLMs are also inflammatory.
To my GPU.
For the record, I’m also dog tired of hearing about LLMs as well…
But LLMs are great piece of technology and closest analogue to the AGI in past 30 years! It's truly a gamechanging future technology.
... And, incidentally, knowing that my value judgements are as broken and human tangential as Borg transwarp control computers, I know that it's a massive bubble that is going to financially ruin absolutely everybody.
The people who say that mostly support Trump, but are just embarrassed to say so in public.
I voted for Trump. I don't support everything he does as he's not my sports team, but I agree with a lot of what he's doing.
I've started this line of discussion on reddit many times being open and honest. Nobody wants to engage in honest discussion.
> but I agree with a lot of what he's doing.
As an outsider: what do you agree with he's doing specifically?
It's always some combination of "screwing over foreigners / immigrants," "lowering my taxes" or "owning the woke libs."
"It's always". Please keep your generalities on bluesky or reddit with the other kids.
You have been asked this exact question multiple times on this post and you have not answered a single time.
It's the truth.
I don't hate people who voted for Trump. I sympathize with or outright agree with most conservative grievances (but not their expressions of those grievances).
Supporting Trump, in the general sense, is not the same thing. E.g. "a lot", as you say, implies "majority" or at least more than one or two things, which, of the dozens of (meaningful) things Trump has done, is about how many I'd peg as "theoretically defensible" (for example: Immigration control and getting jobs back to America, both of which I agree with; but obviously not in practice due to his counter-productive/performative/un-American implementations). The rest fall pretty clearly into the category of "materially hurting my home country and my community".
For example: Obliterating discourse, disrespecting rule of law, disrespecting the constitution, disrespecting rights and American principles, encouraging petty hatred and childish mockery, threatening to deport American citizens, calling every crime that might have been committed by a liberal "domestic terrorism", threatening via policy announced on Twitter to imprison my wife (who is a government worker) for the apparent crime of merely attempting to find a legal way to support our local legal immigrant(s) jailed by ICE for months for past non-violent non-drug-related crimes they have already finished serving for, which didn't even include jail time. The hysterical debasement of the amazing country my family has loved and served for hundreds of years.
Just off the top of my head.
There is no "I agree with some of it", or, "on average". It's moot, is what I mean. Yes, "honest discussion" is depressingly rare, but even truer: Focusing on the common person who isn't good at dispassionate political discourse is itself dishonest, when what's happening is hell.
Fwiw I never said here or anywhere else that I "support Trump"... taken out of context I don't know what that is supposed to mean.
Just like every president I've voted for, I support some of their ideas and some not. This isn't a sports team where there is a winner and loser.
Please, just list one or two things you actually support. You are being so evasive on actually backing up what you support of Trump.
Maybe he’s on a list of some disrepute!?
Do you agree with things like the following?
1. Blatantly violating the 14th Amendment by signing an executive order that ends birthright citizenship, potentially stripping tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship.
2. Sending the military onto the streets of major cities, in a fundamental break from the centuries-old principle that the military does not police American citizens.
3. Tolerating open corruption by senior officials, such as the border czar Tom Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe.
4. Openly calling for the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and firing people who refuse to do so.
5. Appointing dangerous and unqualified people like RFK Jr. and Kash Patel to head agencies whose missions they oppose. RFK Jr. is out there making wild claims about autism and vaccines.
6. Trump trying to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results, including calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and demanding that he add 11,000 votes to Trump's total, in order to flip the state in Trump's favor, while threatening to criminally prosecute the Secretary of State if he refuses to change the election result.
7. Trump repeatedly threatening that he will annex Canada, and refusing to rule out the use of military force.
I could go on and on, but I think the above is enough to make the point. This is not just another administration that you can have this or that view about. This is the downfall of the American political system. RIP, 1787 - 2025.
With all of this, you should be sheepish about saying you support Trump.
It's all about trade-offs. Sadly the package deals keep getting worse and even if you refuse to buy, one shows up at your doorstep and they charge you anyways. The parties exist more to oppose each other than to identify and address issues. They serve their donors more than their electorate and sew discontent amongst the populace to distract from the role of capital in the current system. I think it's unrealistic to say you "support everything Trump does" just as it is to say you "do not support anything Trump does". The trend of extreme polarization has allowed them to continually worsen the package deals offered because they know that for a lot of people, it's all or nothing.
If you say you support someone who is fundamentally ripping out the American democratic political system, root and branch, then that's what you support. That's central to the "package deal."
There's no, "Well, I don't like that he's ending the entire system of rule of law and respect for the results of elections, but I like policy X."
There definitely is: "I disagree with X (and maybe A, B, and C too), but I agree with Y." You may not feel that's reasonable or that the negative impacts of X far outweigh the positive effects of Y, but it's possible for people to arrive at this conclusion due to having limited choices and specific interests.
Maybe you want to buy a sports car, but the dealer only has one coupe and it has a sunroof (that you don't want). You can go look at other dealerships for one with the package you like, but in a world where there is only one dealership you have to take what they give you. Lots of people will end up buying that coupe with a sunroof to take to the track. Especially if they approach their decision from a "I want a sports car" perspective and the other option is a minivan.
We're not talking about buying a sports car. We're talking about the end of democracy and rule of law in the United States of America.
It's just a decision making analogy. If you want better decisions that produce solutions that are a better fit for the problem then it makes sense to offer more choices of increased variety.
If the situation is as dire as you feel, then I certainly hope that someone mounts an opposition to Trump because that's how we all win... a better alternative that most people recognize as such. Where and why are they hiding the alternatives?
I know what an analogy is. It's just that your analogy is absurd.
We're talking about someone who is obliterating the American democratic political system, and you're basically saying, "Well, there are pros and cons with any package deal, just like when you buy a sports car." These aren't little pros and cons with some trifling issue. This is the continued existence of the United States as a democracy.
>obliterating the American democratic political system
What I think is absurd is people keep writing these things as if they are facts, when a majority of this country doesn't agree. And any amount of anecdotal or skewed headlines won't change minds.
You need a better approach.
The fact that a majority (a slim plurality, actually) of the country voted for someone who is ripping up the Constitution is a real problem. It doesn't mean that he's not ripping up the Constitution.
> anecdotal or skewed headlines
How are any of my examples above anecdotal or skewed? Did Trump issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship as enshrined in the 14th Amendment or not? Just one action like that would be an incredible break with the American political tradition, but he's done dozens of things that are just as bad or worse.
I don't know what "my approach" is. I'm describing reality as it is. I don't know how or if the American political system will overcome Trump and survive, but that system is facing extinction right now.
People are absurd... a majority of them got together and elected Trump in the first place. Lots of those people never considered any other option. A lot of times the reasoning goes: "Abortion is bad. I vote Republican." or even "I don't like that guy's face. I vote Democrat." People 100% make decisions and affect outcomes based on things that others consider trifling. Most people are not up late racking their brains over some Machiavellian scheme; they're like, "Nah, I want the sports car tho, minivans suck".
I agree that there's still no good option, and that's stupendously frustrating, but even the frustrating status quo is obviously better than outright attacks on America's principles, culture, laws, most citizens, etc. Trump isn't "shaking things up". He's destroying them.
I agree w/ you, but the people elected Trump; It's not Trump that worries me, it's the weakness of his opposition. So long as he continues to stand largely unopposed he will continue to break things.
That is a radical way of thinking, nobody I know IRL talks or thinks this way. The idea that you have to support everything that some group says or you are out is complete BS.
I've seen this over and over again, it's similar to "If you're not with us, you're against us" but on every topic.
Do you think it's reasonable to support someone who tried to strip tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship by executive order, in blatant violation of the 14th Amendment?
How about supporting someone who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election by every means at his disposal?
This is actually a clear case where you have to take a stand. "Well, I like some other things he's done" is not a valid answer here.
49.8% of the population voted for Trump, myself among them. First time voting Republican.
Everything I've seen so far from Trump is what I voted for. And almost everything Democrats have said and done has reaffirmed my choice.
Every one I've spoken to that has been surprised Trump was elected lives in a bubble. Hacker News is one such bubble.
You're not going to get any reliable "when are the masses going to revolt" info here.
People being grabbed off the streets and transported to prison in unrelated country is what you voted for?
The people who are in the US illegally, 1000% yes.
What about the US citizens that also got hauled off by unmarked white vans?
You’re okay taking a massive economic hit, removing large amounts of population from the country? Who cares if they’re “illegal” or not? Why does it matter if they’re less criminal than US born, and harder working? And don’t give me, they use services, I work for Medicaid and they don’t get it. So why? You just dislike brown people?
Where is this massive economic hit? GDP and stock market are up.
> stock market are up.
Multitude of sins being hidden by the devaluation of the dollar there.
So same as it ever was? Or just still happening but hopefully at a lower rate of change.
The dollar has fallen pretty drastically against other major currencies since the start of the year. That is, this isn't loss of value in the rather abstract monetary inflation sense but "dollar is down 15% relative to euro in under a year" (that's a pretty rapid shift in such a short timeline).
Ok, so? That doesn't affect most of wage earning Americans. You are cherry picking something to generalize everything being bad.
A decline in the dollar absolutely does impact most wage earning Americans. Those wages are being paid in dollars! A decline in the dollar on that scale will tend to lead to higher price inflation.
> Where is this massive economic hit? GDP and stock market are up.
Stock market recovered when Trump TACOed, it crashed hard when he tried to implement his actual policies.
What economic hit? Yes, they're illegal and we don't care how hard working they are, they can go be hard working in their own countries. The US is not a soup kitchen. If you want to come here, go through the official process. If they bring as much to the table as you claim, they'll have no problem getting a visa.
> If they bring as much to the table as you claim, they'll have no problem getting a visa.
Nah, you see the fundamental problem here is that (based on Biden's estimate), there's about 10 million or so, and that 60–70% of all U.S. agricultural workers and 15–20% of construction workers are such people.
They do this at a pay rate that is both higher than they'd get in their home country, and lower than any American would work for. This itself, being too cheap, precludes them getting a work visa: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a
What they bring to America is: your food.
Not the question that was asked.
And you support this being done with no due process, meaning we just have to trust Trump and his cronies when they claim someone is in the US illegally?
If there is anything Trump is doing popularly, it’s aggressively removing illegal immigrants from our streets. To the extent there is tolerance for Fourth Amendment violations, it may be from historic indifference to enforcing our immigration laws.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
The aggressiveness is losing people who may have supported his immigration policies initially.
They gave him his second term, he doesn't need them anymore.
> aggressiveness is losing people
Losing, but hasn’t lost. Point is if someone is proudly pro-Trump right now, immigration probably isn’t going to prompt introspection.
This is it, exactly.
I used to be a very "live and let live" type of person.
Then the relaxed "let live" part got abused. I've seen what happens first hand having lived in NYC for 6 years, and now living in London.
100% And most don't realize that many EU nations have tighter restrictions on immigration now than the US after seeing what effect lax policies have on their nation.
.. and people who are legal immigrants, and people who've just left immigration court, and of course some actual US nationals.
It's amazing the power of fear of crime to get people to demand the Federal government jackboot.
Thank you for being brave enough to speak up and say that this is what you voted for.
How do you feel it squares with the Constitution?
Are immigrants bankrupting / destroying the country?
Should the Democrats give up their attempts to prevent health premiums from doubling next year?
Do you believe the Democrats want to fund healthcare for illegal immigrants?
Are you 100% supportive of the way ICE has been going about their business?
Do you believe Portland is a war zone?
Do you believe the US can compete with China in manufacturing?
Did Russia start the war with Ukraine?
If it came to choosing sides would you choose Russia or Ukraine, or should the US extract themselves from it entirely? (passively choosing Russia)
Is inflation over?
Should the Fed be cutting rates?
Is the economy booming?
Would it be possible to briefly list what you voted him for?
Immigration is #1.
Do you mean illegal immigration in this case or immigration in general?
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Thank you for your vote. Its great to see Pax Americana dissolve in real time.
We are certainly witness to history at the moment. I just hope all those that deserve to, survive to see how this snippet of history gets recorded.
You must be bummed out that your party didn't get a candidate that follows your morals and values and on top of all that is a convicted felon.
Wouldn't you have wanted a better candidate?
Good luck finding a candidate that follows your morals and values that’s willing to run for president.
lol
You're admitting that you wanted to vote for a guy who is committing an unprecedented amount of corruption? Taking bribes via his own personal bitcoin?
You wanted a President that pardons people who give him money? lol. Really?
Or have the guy who had a literal brainworm and doesn't believe in germs determining American's health? lol
Did you vote to have a WWF person run the dept of education? Are you an adult with a functioning brain?
You voted for a recession lol.
You voted for tanking an economy and prices getting higher lol
You voted to have college students writing op-eds critical of Israel deported (No offense, get out of this country if you don't think people should have the right to criticize any government they want)
You voted for the guy who wants to jail people for burning the flag
You voted for the guy who wants to take away news licenses because they;re mean to him
You voted to have more expensive healthcare
You voted to have all our allies abandon us and laugh at his speeches
You voted for a pedophile. Like an actual pedophile. Congrats on bragging about that one.
You voted to have coal mines reopened lololloooollollo and for the people who don't think solar energy is renewable because it can be nighttime too hahahahahahahahahahah
What is it lke having the worldview of a toddler?
So you want a dictator? You want random tariffs based on Trump's gut feeling? You want foreign-looking US citizens to be detained at will by ICE? You want every part of the government to be corrupt, rampant insider trading based on political decisions? You want a government that retaliates against companies and people it doesn't like, and uses the force of the government to harrass them?
None of what you said is true.
You're the bubble I'm talking about.
Until people like you start dealing in facts the pendulum will continue to swing right as it pushes people like me further in that direction.
You deny that ICE has arrested US citizens and only released them after hours or days?
You deny that Trump and his family are using their political status to earn money?
You that Trump's tarrif policy is erratic, with vague announcements on social media that are often reverted or not followed through later?
You're not arguing with someone who is willing to change their mind. Vague responses about "this is what I voted for" and "you're forcing me and others to vote for Trump" are typical signs of someone who's in the cult. It's common for them to feign interest in multiple parties, but they were always going to vote for the Republican candidate and proclaim Dems are the evil elites.
This is common with "centrists", "moderates", "undecided", etc... they'll always be shy Republicans who are too scared to say that they're drinking the kool-aid.
When I argue about stuff like this on the internet, I'm never talking to just the person I'm replying to. It's always mostly for the other readers.
Is it not true that non-illegal immigrants are experiencing more harassment from ICE? And that foreigners entering the US are more likely to be detained, especially if they have anything that might be perceived as anti-Trump on their social media?
I don't live in the US, so I have no direct experience (though I travel there for work once or twice a year)
Come now, be reasonable. You have one side denying climate change, wiping government websites of climate data. You have Trump, the most lying politician in history, who rampantly cheats at golf, and is a pedophile and liar about Epstein. Talking about facts, the GOP has thrown reality to the wind. At least have the wit to see your side doesn’t care about base reality, and admit it. It’s a party of the religious right and corporations, which has been taken over by Trump and a cult of personality has set in. None of these people are served by truth.
We can only conclude yes. Or rather, these people want Federal government violence and troops on the street because they just hate "immigrants" that much. I'm surprised they haven't chiseled the poem off the Statue of Liberty yet.
> Everything I've seen so far from Trump is what I voted for.
Did you always have fascist tendencies or did Trump bring them out?
ap99 The replies here are why politics should not be discussed here. You said nothing wrong, but the replies are ridiculous. They summarize down to something like "When did you start becoming a Nazi" or "When did you start liking pedophiles, are you also a pedophile?"
I dont believe in this fucking kid gloves bullshit. If you made a decision then man up and fucking own its consequences good or bad otherwise admit you are a coward and liar.
I voted for Trump and generally think he's doing a good job. I don't agree with a lot of things he is doing. Am I a Nazi/Fascist or whatever the term of the week is today?
Voting has consequences, and burying your head in the sand is no way to deal with that. If the accusations of fascism make you uncomfortable: good. Maybe you should encourage your side to take less steps in that direction and vote for better people.
As for the pedophilia accusations: one of Trump's main talking points was releasing the Epstein files, his AG "had the files on her desk", right wing media pundits were proclaiming everything was going to get exposed and... we get nothing. He now calls it a "Democrat hoax" and tells everyone to forget about it.
Yes, voting does have consequences. My head isn't buried, I'm not easily manipulated by loud internet activists that resort to name calling.
Idk about Epstein or the files, doesn't affect me or 99% of the daily lives of the average wage earner in America. If you think that makes him a pedophile or anyone who supports him a pedophile, well good luck with that.
About 77 million people voted for Trump in 2024, that is 22% of the US population. He is actually far more unpopular than people think.
That would be approximately the same percentage of the population that voted for Obama in 2008. (69 million votes, 304 million people, 22%.) I don't think this is a crazy argument to make, but only if you make clear by this standard almost no President has ever been "popular", and almost no PM in other countries.
This is how you lie with statistics.
What percent of the US population is eligible to vote, what percent actually voted, and which percent did Kamala receive?
Curious how long this will actually last before the outlets cave under access pressure again. Has anything like this worked before?
It has worked in the UK. The then government had decided to unilaterally exclude some "hostile" media from the room and all the others walked out in protest.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/03/political-j...
Naive way of thinking. If authorities hold on to power long enough, nearly everybody will cave under - some minority will go indie route. I've seen this happening in Turkey first hand over 20 years, first some select reporters got banned, than some news organizations got bought out by friends of the president, then a handful of more liberal news orgs lost money, they got bought by some other friends, who actually kept their "opposition" mask, but actually made them a false-flag opposition and fired all the real reporters, some of which went to jail for made up reasons, others went on to be indies on youtube.
Just check how quickly the elite has switched sides. You would have expected some more backbone.
Not sure if it this was ever tried before by any US government entity - but, if the condition for remaining an accredited Pentagon reporter is only reporting the official statements of the Pentagon (which you can also copy from their press releases), then having the accreditation seems largely pointless to me?
The Pengagon Press Corps was born out of WWII censorship [1]. Shutting down this institution may be for the best.
[1] https://brendonbeebe.substack.com/p/history-of-pentagon-pres...
Time was when the liberal press looked down on journalists who were embedded with the military. The article mentions one who has had a desk in the pentagon for almost two decades. I would question the independence of someone so well embedded and note nobody is resigning here, just moving to other offices.
Why would they resign? Their beef is with the government, not their employers
They didn't resign.
They turned in their badges that allows them to access certain spaces in the pentagon. They're still reporters, they still work for their employers, and they can still do reporting.
You're agreeing.
I don't think they should resign, I just want to be clear that this is taking a stand which won't cost them their pay.
I used to watch Donald Rumsfeld daily giving his briefing… the hardest questions asked to him by the beacons of democracy in the press corps was “how are you”.
> I remember how then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ecstatic after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, insisting that it showed the success of the U.S. invasion. Not long after, I ran into an officer at the Pentagon who told me, "No, Tom. It's not a success. Saddam Hussein's supporters are attacking our supply lines. Now, we have to send more troops back to guard them." That was because the United States, at Rumsfeld's insistence, never sent an adequate number of forces to Iraq to begin with — a fact another Army general warned me about, unsolicited — and I reported on, before the war even began.
> Instead of toeing the official line, that reporting helped people understand what U.S. troops were really facing. Far from being a success, the fall of Baghdad marked the beginning of an insurgency that stretched on for years.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g-s1-93297/pentagon-reporter-...
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Maybe I'm not thinking this through clearly enough but isn't this "just fine" for the current administration? From their perspective what exactly is the downside to this?
Of course they’re fine with it. They pushed the policy. They’re enemies of truth and reality, journalism and reporting information is their natural enemy.
Are there any good-faith justifications for an American military censor?
They’ve started bombing fishermen, you tell me why they want one. It’s not in good faith.
> They’ve started bombing fishermen
The word you're looking for is 'murdering'.
Yep, this cannot be called anything less than MURDER today, for sure.
I was literally a Naval Officer on a ship doing counter drug operations about 10-15 years ago, and it was made very clear to us at the time that we were not to use weapons unless fired upon. The only exception was trained sharpshooters from the Coast Guard who were allowed to shoot outboard motors, though they were extremely careful about not harming the people on the boats. We'd "arrest" them (the Coast Guard would) and then turn them over to one of several partner countries. Once we captured the same person twice in one deployment. Today, I am not proud of what we did back then, as I am sure we caused more harm than good and spent more resources than was worth it to capture those drugs.
To be PERFECTLY CLEAR: we RARELY found fishing boats that had drugs on them, or who were even supporting drug operations. The fact that several fishing boats have been hit now makes it CLEAR to me FROM EXPERIENCE that we've MURDERED INNOCENT FISHERMEN because I KNOW that there is ZERO POSSIBILITY that all of these guys were a threat in any way. AT MOST these fishermen would refuel a drug boat, and I don't think that's worthy of death. Furthermore, those people usually were forced to do these jobs under threat from the gangs in their towns against their families, so killing these folks makes even less sense because they aren't the actual dangerous people who are running the narco-gangs.
It's a FUCKING SHAME what this country is doing to those people now and I am ASHAMED of having "served in the military" when in reality I was obviously just a tool for a fucked up regime that has finally gone mask-off.
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Don't be silly. That's obviously what they meant. Not everyone is your enemy, relax.
Personally, I read it as added-emphasis rather than a retort against the author, but I can see how it could be taken that way depending on assumed verbal delivery.
I also read it that way, I didn't take it as an assault.
Because I was in the military in the past and because I grew up on the US continent, I probably have it ingrained in me to not use the words of violence like "murder" for these things, and instead I use the softer words that don't explicitly call out the death that is inflicted by the "bombing". I should work on that, for sure.
I see what you mean.
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Funny jokes about extrajudicial killings, ha ha
Source: trust me bro.
What is the point of being a Journalist (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "write", word for word, the article they give you to publish?
If you identify sufficiently with the people giving you the article to publish, it's not a "they" but an "us". Even if the decisions are taken in rooms you don't have access to.
Maybe they think they'll get access to them eventually if they're loyal.
It might seem cowardly, but it isn't that different to what happens every day in business. Society is full of organisations working on the "make the boss' opinions your own" principle.
> If you identify sufficiently with the people giving you the article to publish
Then you aren’t a journalist.
You're never heard of biased or militant journalists have you?
In fact the most common form of journalism you will find is what's akin to a Propaganda channel of a Sponsoring Party (Defense, Media Company, Political party, Rich Individual with an agenda, etc). Essentialy a PR employee.
But this is true since always.
The kind of journalism we usually think of though is Investigative journalism, but that's a different beast and usually doesn't really pay.
> You're never heard of biased or militant journalists have you?
You seem to have presumed your conclusion.
Not a good journalist maybe, but if you identify too little with them, you probably don't even get to "sit where you're sitting", as Chomsky said.
> if you identify too little with them, you probably don't even get to "sit where you're sitting", as Chomsky said
The people winning White House credentials are political influencers. Chomsky was an interesting linguist. His political observations are about as scientific as our current crop of Silicon Valley elites’.
Scientific? That's neither here nor there.
What he said, and I agree is true and important, is that you won't get to work as a journalist and do things like, say, interview people for BBC, unless you believe most of the things your employer believes.
Chomsky's observations about how the media works may not have been solid science, but from the way you describe the present circumstance it really sounds like Chomsky is still on target.
> from the way you describe the present circumstance it really sounds like Chomsky is still on target
The refutation is there are lots of places to sit. Like, yes, the people at a linguistics conference will predominantly be linguists. That doesn’t suggest a linguistics conspiracy.
> "That doesn’t suggest a linguistics conspiracy."
That's Chomsky's point. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky explains how the appearance of collusion can arise without conspiracy. Like-minded people hiring and promoting like-minded people isn't a conspiracy, it only looks like one because people with similar incentives and values will behave in similar ways given similar circumstances.
So you don't have any problem with the Hegseth Pentagon demands then? There are still many places to sit, and who gets access is mostly decided by neutral competence anyway? (That's what your linguistics conference analogy suggests).
Chomsky's whole point is that it doesn't take a conspiracy for journalists to share their superiors' views. Not for those superiors to be very aligned with each other.
What is the point of being a Developer (except for easy money and not having to do anything other than copy + paste) if you are only allowed to "code", word for word, the feature specifications ("user stories") they give you to build?
They're still allowed to write whatever they want, they just won't be invited to Christmas parties anymore.
You mean they are cut of from an important source of information so the adminstration can always claim hearsay
There can always be good-faith justifications.
There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.
It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.
There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.
It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.
The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.
And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.
I think people are being slightly hyperbolic. It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon. In general I think this is a good thing but not because I think it's a good idea. Rather, I think that the government, regardless of who happens to be in power, and the press should have an adversarial relationship, but the deep intertwining of the government and the press undermines this, even without corruption. You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.
> I think people are being slightly hyperbolic.
People are not being hyperbolic. This is reducing the transparency of Pentagon to the American people. See also the Whitehouse banning the AP earlier this year.
> It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon.
Without access it's going to be very hard to do good reporting, adversarial or otherwise. This is the government working to control what is said.
> You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
The world is built on relationships. One of the keys of being a good journalist/reporter is being able to have relationships which help to build stories while also staying objective.
The Pentagon Papers are one of the biggest leaks that the corporate media has ever published. Its effect on the military industrial complex and the government in general cannot really be overstated. It was published in 1971. [1] In 1972 the Pentagon created the 'Correspondents' Corridor' where journalists could 'embed' with the Pentagon effectively permanently.
From your worldview, do you not find the timing odd? The media releases one of the biggest ever leaks, completely embarrassing the government, and then the government welcomes them in, with privileged access no less, to one of the most sensitive locations in the entirety of the country? And this all happened under Nixon, a man who wasn't exactly known for his benevolence.
There was a time, not that long ago, when embedded war reporters were looked upon negatively. The reason is that it's impossible to remain impartial. This is not only because of the relationships you form in such a location, but also because if "imparial" ends up being negative, you're getting 'unembedded' quite quickly. So it ends up being defacto propaganda.
Think about what "transparency" we've gained from the media being embedded with the Pentagon since 1972. It mostly doesn't exist. Even if somebody wants to leak something it's not like they're going to walk up to a journalist in the Pentagon to do it. On the contrary, the media seems to have become ever more ingrained into the military industrial complex ever since this date, to the point that in 2023 WaPo spent more time trying to track down a leaker and assess his possible motives, than covering what was leaked.
Government and media should be kept separated, and this act is, probably unintentionally, helping to do exactly that.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
[2] - https://nation.time.com/2012/09/27/pentagons-correspondents-...
>> The media releases one of the biggest ever leaks, completely embarrassing the government
The Pentagon Papers covered the period from 1945 to 1968. Nixon took office in 1969. If the leaks were embarrassing, they were particularly embarrassing to the JFK/LBJ administrations. Nixon initially didn't intent to do anything about the leak. Henry Kissinger convinced him that allowing the leaking of classified documents in the press would set a bad example:
"President Nixon’s reaction that Sunday morning was that the damage fell mostly on the Johnson Administration and that he should leave it alone. That afternoon, however, security advisor Kissinger convinced Nixon that he had to act on “this wholesale theft and unauthorized disclosure.”
“The massive hemorrhage of state secrets was bound to raise doubts about our reliability in the minds of other governments, friend or foe, and indeed about the stability of our political system,” Kissinger said in his memoirs.
Once energized, Nixon soon became obsessed. Dissatisfied with the FBI’s progress in the case, he organized his own group of investigators in the White House. They styled themselves “the plumbers” because their job was to stop leaks."
-- https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0207pentagon/
If Nixon had ignored Kissinger that day, he would probably close to the top of the typical lists of greatest US Presidents rather than close to the bottom.
It's always amusing to see attempts to cast Nixon as an "otherwise great" president while simultaneously attempting to distribute the blame for his decisions on those around him. Poor Dick somehow found himself surrounded by the untrustworthy, incompetent, and/or craven sycophants he personally chose to surround himself with.
A man is accountable for his own actions. That's true for Nazi grunts and most certainly for a US President. Nixon had already been wiretapping journalists since his first months in office. [1] The guy was paranoid, anti-media, and then invited the media into permanent residence at the Pentagon. It's not hard to see the ulterior motive because the ulterior motive was the only motive.
As for the impact of the papers directly on Nixon, he could have been honest and immediately come forth with the truth when entering office. He chose not to, which made him complicit in the lies of previous administrations. This is also why if you ask somebody who's war was Vietnam? Most of everybody is going to say Nixon.
You can see strong parallels with Trump and Ukraine in modern times. It's obvious the government is not being at all honest about their assessment of the situation over there, yet Trump continues to 'play along' with the lies and indeed this is a big part of the reason why Ukraine will likely go down in history as 'Trump's War.'
If the 'Ukraine Papers' were leaked, Trump would certainly first try to pin it on Biden, but in reality nobody cares about Biden anymore - and instead the papers would mostly just reveal his own lies and complicity.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_wiretaps
> See also the Whitehouse banning the AP
Yeah, any "benefit of the doubt" burned away months ago.
The administration is trying to control published opinions and value-judgements, as opposed to concealing sensitive military data.
I get the same feeling, but I don't think I can justify the feeling.
IMO at best this is frogs* jumping out of water that was boiled too fast.
* an idiom based on a stupid truth, as the real frogs were sans-brain at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
>if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
Any information that isn't approved by Hegseth is unauthorized. In other words, only what Hegseth allows could be written.
To call the bad would be an understatement.
There is an updated draft of the rules from october 6th that rectifies this and some other prior issues.
I'm honestly not sure which rules the media outlets actually want changed.
They want to use the journalists to spread their propaganda rather than have them uncover inconvenient facts.
With the blatant disregard for any rules and decorum, and a proven self-serving track record, I wouldn’t bet on it.
You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.
Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.
The rules were updated on Oct6 to allow media outlets to report using any information even if classified and unapproved for release, as long as they didn't solicit it or were given it with the premise that it won't be released.
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
This is a hyperbolic take. In countries with military censors, articles are submitted, from the newspaper's offices, to the censor's office for approval before publication. Nothing under this arrangement stops an American colonel from walking into the NYT's offices, dropping a folder at reception, and persuading the NYT to publish the contents of that folder. While it does prevent investigative journalism in the military, which is despicable on its own merits, the fact that it turns newspapers solely into PR outlets is neither new (i.e. as a general phenomenon in American media) nor limited to only the officially sanctioned point of view.
I like your reasoning. There’s nothing stopping a news outlet from publishing anything other than the clearly outlined consequences. In a similar vein there’s nothing stopping anybody from finding out what happens if you swallow a D battery but for some reason none of my friends are doing that
> In a similar vein there’s nothing stopping anybody from finding out what happens if you swallow a D battery but for some reason none of my friends are doing that
Nice caveat, noting that none of your friends are doing that. But plenty of people do really dangerous, stupid shit and upload it to YouTube for the advertising dollars. Because news media is usually ultimately financed by advertising or partisan donors pushing a specific viewpoint, they're incentivized to publish dangerous stuff - but only the kind people want to see, which is why outlets like the New York Times didn't host video clips showing the outright gore from Charlie Kirk getting shot. The democratic value of an independent media rests on editorial discretion finding content that shocks its audience but not its advertisers.
This is no different than pretty much any company. Do you think Apple lets reporters wander throughout their campus looking for new hardware, and allow them to ask engineers information about what they are working on? No. Apple does not let them wander around, and they advise all of their employees to never talk to press.
Hey you’re on a roll, don’t stop there. How does Apple respond to FOIA requests?
They’re not subject to FOIA you say? Perhaps there’s a difference to the organizations after all.
What possible relevance does what companies do have? I can't believe you're arguing this in good faith.
Apple doesn't demand ideological conformity from news oganizations before letting their reporters in, no.
Well, it kinda does. Reporters Apple doesn't like get cut off from early access, interviews etc.
However, Apple is a private company and can do whatever it pleases, however shitty that behavior is.
Apple is neither a state nor a democracy. The journalists and the government are there to aserve the same boss: the people. Now one of the people's employees sabotages the work the other employee.
If Apple had the ability to deploy military forces on behalf of my democratically elected government I'd actually be pretty concerned with them locking out the press too.
We've already seen Musk boasting about the CIA organising a coup for him, so it wouldn't surprise me
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/29/we-will-coup-whoever...
> We've already seen Musk boasting about the CIA organising a coup for him
I had a friend go deep into addiction. I think there was a period when every headline was his doing, too.
Apple doesn't require you to pay a significant portion of you paycheck to them either.
Unless you're a developer
You are right, Apple should have its own nukes and bombers.
Apple is a private company that answers to shareholders. The DoD is a government department that used to answer to the people.
I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answered to me (a US citizen) by its previous policy of letting a bunch of reporters from some mainstream news outlets have offices inside the Pentagon under one set of rules, and I don't think the US DoD meaningfully answers to me by its current policy of putting more rules on those reporters that they don't like and are willing to resign over. I have a healthy amount of mistrust for both the US military and mainstream US journalism operations, and I don't assume that the military-related stories these reporters covered previously were the ones that were actually important for me to know.
No one resigned.
Answering to the people doesn't mean that every secret must be made immediately public.
No one is suggesting that secrets be made public. The gov can and does classify info that must be kept secret.
Who is allowed to decide which secrets should or should not be made public?
If your answer is "the government", then every cover up will never be revealed, and the government will answer to no one.
If your answer is "journalists", then you have the status-quo in any functioning democracy.
And when it actually moves into sedition territory, that's what an independent court system is for.
Unfortunately, once things devolve into a two-party system, it becomes ever increasingly difficult to keep the various branches independent.
But it does require answers. Answers are a response to questions, otherwise they're just statements.
This is about not wanting the journalists to even ask for information from e.g. generals. No-one is saying that they want immediate disclosure of all secrets - I'm concerned that you're building a strawman.
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>Journalists asking for classified and sensitive information are acting in bad faifth.
How?
>They know that these people are not allowed to give away the information,
Not true, nor is everything is classified.
It appears you've not actually read the article, or what the new restrictions even asked for. You're acting as if journalists were allowed to go rummaging in office drawers and journalists dislike being told they can't do that anymore.
Or they could be trying to uncover malicious acts hidden behind classification. You may be too young or too old to understand, but historically it goes both ways.
I completely disagree. Their job is to uncover truths that may not be immediately obvious and they may not even know the classification status of sensitive information before asking about it. The military should instead say something like "that information is classified".
Why would the public want journalists to not even be able to ask the questions, never mind actually get the information?
> Why would the public want journalists to not even be able to ask the questions, never mind actually get the information?
because "the public" in this case are cult members that agree with whatever the eternal leader wants.
You have classified information for that reason. It's not the same as requiring journalists you literally let into public press conferences to shut up and spread propaganda unquestioningly
This is moving the goal posts from your original position. Spend the time to refocus - if your position was erroneous, it was erroneous. Correct it, figure out what that means, then proceed.
Moving on to a new version is to waste your own intelligence in reactionary sentence creation.
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Despite all the fanfare, it is actually still DoD. The decree merely allowed the use of DoW as a "secondary title".
https://www.ngaus.org/newsroom/president-renames-dod-departm...
Fuck that, it’s DoD until Congress changes it.
No it isn't.
no, actually that requires congressional approval, and the government is currently shut down, mostly as a way to defer the release of the Epstein files. nice try, though.
> mostly as a way to defer the release of the Epstein file
How many disappointments will it take for people to realize there isn't any more there there than what's already been found?
Or are the Epstein files are going to be what the minority party rambles about from now on instead of having a coherent message?
Should be quite simple to release them and move on then, that will be great.
But then they can't release them at a convenient time to distract from something much bigger. Which I'm afraid they will, eventually.
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> there isn't any more there there than what's already been found?
I thought this until seeing Trump look completely guilty every time it comes up, and the GOP leadership mobilizing to stop the release of the files.
Democrats could have released yhem already. It would have been bipartisan. They didn't, because there's nothing there and it was better politics to let fringe Republicans obsess about it.
Democrats were bound by laws. Trump made his whole personality about breaking them.
Apple doesn't own a monopoly on violence. Your argument doesn't carry any weight.
For Apple that makes sense as there are financial damages. Can/should the US be able to sue for defamation if the claims aren't libel?
Governments are companies now? The capitalism brain rot is in its final stages
How does this help at all with transparency about what the government is actually doing? Now they can just get away with anything...
Ah, "We are currently clean on OPSEC"
We are currently clean on triple sec
https://archive.is/slfnP
> "When the new policy was issued two weeks ago, news organizations were concerned that signing the rules conveyed agreement with them, including to a restriction that they not report on any news — even if unclassified — without official approval."
https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-journalists-new-restrict...
Awfully reminiscent of a certain *other* autocratic regime, and its tyrannical control over public discussion of its armed forces.
> "These laws establish administrative and criminal punishments for "discrediting" or dissemination of "unreliable information" about the Russian Armed Forces, other Russian state bodies and their operations, and the activity of volunteers aiding the Russian Armed Forces, and for calls to impose sanctions against Russia, Russian organizations and citizens.[1][2]"... The adoption of these laws resulted in the mass exodus of foreign media from Russia and the termination of war reporting by independent Russian media. More than 10,000 people have been prosecuted under these laws,[4]..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_2022_war_censorship_la... ("Russian 2022 war censorship laws")
>> news organizations were concerned that signing the rules conveyed agreement with them, including to a restriction that they not report on any news — even if unclassified — without official approval
Where in the memo does it restrict journalists from reporting on any news without official approval? Can you quote me the relevant section?
I see a section about "unauthorized disclosure of CNSI or CUI", but CNSI and CUI are specific classifications of information that the government is required by law to protect.
> "“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” the directive states. The signature form includes an array of security requirements for credentialed media at the Pentagon."
https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-press-media-restrictions...
That section does not restrict reporters, it restricts government employees at the Pentagon from releasing information without authorization.
The section of the memo that pertains to reporters losing badge access only mentions classified and unclassified but controlled information.
"The Pentagon should let reporters report anything they want" is a very different claim than "Pentagon employees should be allowed to tell us anything they want".
I am so proud of the journalists for standing up to what is right.
It seems to me there is some hope for America after all.
I couldn't find what the restrictions are? Does someone here know?
You're not allowed to use leakers or leaked documents when reporting.
Isn't that easily circumvented by being antonymous source to a colleague that is not accredited?
Its a foot in the door. If you dont slam the door shut quickly, you'll find yourself thrown out of your house and locked out (remember what android's safety net was when it got introduced and look at ehat it has become now)
Any kind of restriction, no matter how trevally exploitable will become legally and technically insurmountable if given time to metastasize.
" if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release"
The American people need to start prosecuting their war criminals, plain and simple - and this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court.
The notion that American exceptionalism inoculates America's war criminals from facing justice at the hand of International bodies set up specifically for that purpose, is incorrect and anti-human.
It is time for justice.
You can't maintain this culture of warrior narcissism, Americans.
It will end in tragedy - as it has already brought chaos and calamity to millions of innocent people across the globe, this century. The USA and its allies are, by a huge margin, the #1 cause of terror and war on the planet at this time. Nobody even comes close to the level of criminal war-mongering that occurs at the behest of the US' political establishment. No, not Russia. Not China. The USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none.
Come to grips with the crimes of your state. It is the #1 most important thing for Americans to do, for the rest of the world.
The American people are the only force on the planet which can reign in their monsters. It has to be done by the people, for the people.
> this has to begin with a willingness to comply with the mandates of the International Criminal Court
Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense within the scope of geopolitics. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. More realistically, it is a relic of the unipolar world of the 1990s.
America needs to deal with itself through its own laws. (Same as Russia, China and India will.)
> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none
Ah, got it.
Your position amounts to "but ma' America Special".
If the ICC is good enough for Laurent Gbagbo, its good enough for Obama, Bush, Biden, Trump and Clinton.
The ICC delivers one thing Americans refuse to deliver: justice for victims of war crimes.
That this is not obvious, or prioritised, clearly belies the situation vis a vis American Exceptionalism.
> Your position amounts to "but ma' America Special"
Literally listed three other countries, none of which accept the ICC’s jurisdiction [1]. (A majority of the world’s population lives in non-ICC member states.)
> Obama, Bush, Biden, Trump and Clinton
Sure. This is why it doesn’t work. If you’re going to ignore Putin, Xi and Modi, it just turns into another tool of geopolitics. Not law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute
I am not Russian, Chinese, nor Indian - I am a citizen of the 5-eyes criminal military junta, however.
The notion that a citizen of a war-crime committing nation can only have justice if they also demand that other war-crime committing nations face justice, is a dire fallacy.
You cannot, as an American citizen, do anything at all effective about Russia or China or India until you have prosecuted your own war criminals. You simply do not have the moral standing in the world, any more: the entire world sees the crimes of the American people, even if they don't.
Only then will the appropriate precedent be set for others to face justice too.
The whataboutism is why there is no justice.
First, we citizens jail our own war criminals. Only then will we have the tools go go after theirs. There is no other appropriate order of events.
All you do, otherwise, is justify your own states' war crimes without having the moral authority to go after any other states war crimes.
Given the enormous magnitude of the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights at massive scales that the 5-eyes nations have committed THIS CENTURY, there is no higher priority than for us to get on with it and start prosecuting our own war criminals first.
The moral authority you think exists, simply does not exist. Ours are the worst-offending states. Other states cannot even come close to matching the magnitude of OUR states' crimes.
> The notion that a citizen of a war-crime committing nation can only have justice if they also demand that other war-crime committing nations face justice, is a dire fallacy
I agree!
I’m not saying we need to commit war crimes. I’m not saying they should go unpunished. I’m saying we have to deal with this within our own laws. Unilaterally punting to the ICC doesn’t make sense if it has limited global authority and thus questionable legitimacy.
> Given the enormous magnitude of the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights at massive scales that the 5-eyes nations have committed THIS CENTURY, there is no higher priority
I think it’s a priority. Far from the priority. (If American goes right-wing imperial authoritarian, our past war crimes become something of a joke.)
> justify your own states' war crimes without having the moral authority to go after any other states war crimes
Nobody is justifying anything. But post-War international law was first based on a bipolar world, with one set of rules for America and the USSR, and another for everyone else, and then on a unipolar world, where America volunteered to subject itself to international rules and institutions. (We didn’t. But powerful elements within us tried.)
Now that world has fallen. We’re in a multipolar world. Not only is international law falling back into spheres of influence, with every global and regional hegemon regularly committing war crimes, it’s an open question whether anyone with power actually wants to enforce those rules.
(As for the ICC, has any ICC-member state has executed an arrest warrant against a third party’s leader? I return to my thesis that the ICC is a rent-a-Court for post-regime change reconciliation. Not a venue for trying cases and controversies.)
> Ours are the worst-offending states. Other states cannot even come close to matching the magnitude of OUR states' crimes
The facts are not with you on this one. To the point that you undermine your entire argument with the bias. I won’t argue America is better than Russia or China. But if you’re saying we’re in a different league from the USSR or China, you’re an unreliable narrator.
And you can’t vest the ICC with legitimacy while ignoring that it actually issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
The recent TrueAnon podcast on Peter Brian Hegseth is very entertaining and informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7nA-9wWAi8
Related:
New York Times, AP, Newsmax and others say they won't sign new Pentagon rules
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575755
The Pentagon Press Corps Is Gone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45600281
The US is preparing for war and disinformation is a tool in such a war. The Pentagon just wants the same level of control as the other authoritarian regimes.
It kind of shows that "democracy" was never real to begin with.
Certainly with Sora 2 level of technology they can just claim whoever they don't like has blown up a federal building while they were asleep. It's not like you can have an alibi when you sleep and everyone sleeps. In a way, this AI nightmare necessitates protocols for protection against false accusations like only being able to open the door exiting a house when three other witnesses are present. There are cryptographic solutions like verified cameras, but almost nobody has those now, not even news crews publish signed videos.
Journalism in war time has no real meaning, because if it's secret information the journalist basically becomes an adversary and at some point it becomes cheaper to kill them. Those waging wars have historically always been corrupt. So, that leaves repeating whatever the Pentagon wants you to know.
Also, calling the US a democracy is like putting lipstick on a pig and saying it's a hot babe.
Perhaps Switzerland still has a democracy, but most kind of suck in various ways (and most importantly, don't do anything to improve their democracies). In a real democracy, there would be continuous improvement with better checks and balances. At some point you start to wonder whether democracy just exists to give people the illusion that their voice means anything. Also, in a real democracy there would be equal opportunity and advertising budget for all political parties. That's just not the case in many democracies.
So, blatantly obvious autocracies are probably worse than our current "democracies", but let's not pretend democracy is a thing right now.
a rare instance of american journalists showing spine.
What's next? Asking hard questions, or follow up questions?
If Trump says "I've ended 7 or 8 wars" or says "I've lowered drug prices 800, 900, 1000 percent" and no one says
"Sir, how is it possible to lower a price by 900 percent" or "Could you specify which conflicts it is you refer to by those 7 or 8 wars?" then you aren't a journalist.
If you go to an event where such things are said and there is no opportunity to ask these obvious follow up questions, then you stop going there, or you aren't a journalist.
If someone asks these questions and that leaves them excluded from those events - then you also stop going there in solidarity, or you aren't a journalist.
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These quotes are crazy to me, what kind of world are they living in?
> “I think he finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace,” Trump said. “The press is very dishonest.”
This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII, often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative. Both points were repopularised in the US around 2016 or so by Richard Spencer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Spencer). For some reason both are now entering more mainstream usage among the right.
> often in combination with Jewish-controlled also as pejorative.
Am I alone in thinking that "woke" was the catch-all for the enemy this time around?
Not only that, fake news is basically lugenpresse as Hitler called them.
Yes, calling the media liars is a thing the Nazis did. However, it's not a good reason to equate someone with Nazis because lots of other people from all parts of the political spectrum have called the media liars from time to time. And a number of times, the media has even deserved it. I challenge anyone who disagrees to go take a dive in historical newspaper archives.
I'm not equating Richard Spencer with Nazis because of this. He's quite literally a white surpemacist and neo-nazi who wants to get rid of the Jews.
Exactly. He has many opinions a lot more characteristic to Nazis than "the media sucks".
Fox News and OAN are part of the press. Do you think they're honest?
Well, I wouldn't shut down or lock out any press. I wouldn't shut down Jewish-owned press either. All news and media is biased, and there's no such platonic ideal of honesty. Then again, I don't have "enemies" that I need to destroy so maybe you're asking the wrong person.
> This pejorative was fairly famously used in Germany leading up to and during WWII,
Presumably you mean "dishonest". Do you think OAN is dishonest and perhaps disruptive to world peace?
Thinking the press is dishonest does not make one a Nazi. Even if disliking the press were a sign if despotism, Clconsider what makes Nazism unique compared to other despotic regimes, disliking the press ain't it.
I don't think any free press is disruptive to world peace. Even if you get your wish and shut up any outlet you personally find dishonest you're not going to achieve world peace. At least not the kind I'd like to live in.
No. They are propaganda outlets, and must not be considered separately from the Republican Party.
The current mechanism is
1) Fringe theory gestates in the internet.
2) Fringe theory gets into the podcast network and is covered
3) Relatively famous personality comes on a Fox program and mentions the theory
4) Government figures repeats theory that was covered on the news
5) Fox repeats government coverage
People on the right who have alternative theories, simply do not get air time. They aren’t suppressed, they are simply not competitive.
In a more economic framing of their efforts - they have found a way to offset the costs of inaccurate content to the future.
So they are now able to “sell” cheap “junk food” content, while the center and left spends more effort in forming more accurate content.
The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
But today the NYT is more a site dependent on its wordle revenue than its subscription revenue. Consolidation of markets means advertisers do not need smaller local newspapers, and platforms get the lions share of attention.
There is no business model to sustain a free information economy.
> The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
Up until about 2016 I would have agreed to this. After the last month or two, I don't see how a rational human can think this anymore. Neither side has any mainstream news outlet which tries to be honest in its reporting. You want facts? The talking heads have their own YouTube channels now. If you can find a decent selection of them, they provide more honest reporting and far better analysis than the media on either side provides currently.
I can say this because the most comprehensive research that covered this indicated this is the case.
Funnily enough - it was also indexed to 2016, however the drift on the left has yet to catch up to the right.
Wouldn't call Der Stürmer honest either.
> “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” 1984
> what kind of world are they living in?
It’s projection, as usual.
Trust in the media is at an all time low [0]. You might be the one living in a crazy world where you trust everything the press says.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx
I'd be surprised if anyone believed everything the press said. It doesn't even seem possible as different press outlets will say conflicting things. But even if someone did, that isn't really an argument that a free press is an enemy of world peace so I'm not seeing how your point is related.
Let me try. About 125 years ago there was something called the Spanish-American war. It only lasted 4 days so most people forget about it. It was basically started by the press, specifically by Hurst. It is where we get the term 'yellow journalism'.
Basically the press claimed that the Spanish sabotaged a US navy ship called the USS Maine. The Maine had a boiler accident which caused it to explode but the press claimed it was the Spanish. The government used this as an excuse to take the remaining bits of Spain's empire away from them. So that might be an example of the press being 'an enemy of world peace'. No, I'm not sure the current media would do that. But it is an example of a free press starting a war to sell fish wrap.
> as different press outlets will say conflicting things.
Really ? Here [1] they seem to say the same things.
[1] two different EU countries.
It's always fun to compare Trump quotes against other presidential quotes.
Jefferson: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Reagan: "There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our 'noble experiment' in self-government"
FDR: "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."
Trump: "The press is the enemy of the people."
Even more fun when we add the dimension for press ownership.
Who owned the presses when Jefferson or FDR or even Reagan discussed the role of the press; who owns it now?
Diversity and the (political/social) range of press is an important aspect of this matter.
And then there’s Nixon.
The issue comes in theory vs practice. Obviously in theory a free press is absolutely key to a free society, but in practice the press often ends up with different motivations. Another, rather more famous comment from Jefferson on the press [1]:
---
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]
---
[1] - https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
This is what Trump has been saying for years. What exactly surprises you in this?
Doesn’t make it any less crazy
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I'll take a a free press over an authoritarian controlled one any day. A boot stamping on a human face forever is not the kind of world peace I'm interested in, even if it's my boot. But I can understand the allure for a certain kind of person.
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Karoline, is that you and your machine gun lips?
https://youtu.be/iRk7YW5-Dvg
Edit: in case you believe I am being just flippant. That’s an illustration of the ”journalism” favoured by scammers.
You're European. You have zero excuse for buying into that ridiculous propaganda.
It's exactly because I know what our dishonest state-owned press reports about Trump and what they did report about Biden, and I also know what is happening in the US.
If Trump sneezes we find out that sneezing is something Hitler did, if Trump stops a war in Gaza we hear how one time Hitler talked about ending wars.
Our dishonest state-owned press is against wars except when Hamas loses, then they think that war may not have been that bad and want to tell us all the good things about war and the bad things about peace.
Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
> Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
You, uh, you do know this whole idea is right wing propaganda, right? None of that is what actually happened, it's what right wing media says happened.
So he didn’t get dropped?
We all saw the debate. Barry even ghost wrote a book about how senile he was. The gasslighting can only be pushed to a certain point, and we passed that point years ago.
“ The Trump admin is the most transparent admin in decades and they provide much more access to the dishonest press than most admins.”
Citation needed
Cabinet meetings with the press present, press is present at nearly every event, they have significantly more access to cabinet members.
I don't have actual numbers, but I know how often Biden spoke to the press, and I know it was always scripted on who can ask what.
Not really. Biden had a press pool like every president before them, and the press was free to disagree with him. He just didn't do interviews.
Trump's DoD just threatened to revoke press credentials of anyone who reported on things they didn't authorize. Also, the other current scandal is one of the people reporting on RFK both slept with him and gave him positive coverage, which is wild.
Trump regularly kicked reporters out of the press pool for saying things he didn't like and then took over deciding who can be in it and who isn't.
It's not really transparency if you make sure to include only people who promise to say what you want them to say, is it?
Source: trust me, bro
Why do we need journalists in a military building that is presumably full of classified information and people having conversations about said information? I was surprised to hear this was even a thing, it seems really odd to me.
If I was tasked to start the Pentagon from scratch and was asked, “should we setup a system to provide offices and constant access to journalists?” I’d be like, fuck no, what a dumb distraction.
Members of the military should not be talking to the press about their work while at work. Sure, talk off the record, just don’t do it at work. And talk as an individual, not as a representative of the military.
Unless of course your job is literally PR for the military. In which case maybe go to the journalist.
Because a large chunk of your taxes goes into projects planned and executed in that building. You have the right to know how it's used, and they decided they didn't want to disclose it themselves.
The whole thing Trump and his minions are doing is so very reminiscent of what was happening in Russia during its turn to fascism. Similarities go to such an extreme degree across the board that I now feel there has to be at least a consultant from Moscow working with the current admin, if not full blown department at the FSB. Blatant lying, complete disregard of any laws, open rejection of norms and mockery of process, justification of extreme cruelty , obsession with some made up concept of “liberals”, and blaming everything on the predecessors (Putin is still trying to blame all the problems on the collapse of the Soviet Union).
I sincerely hope that people of the United States reject being treated like mindless cattle and choose freedom instead of what appears to be a complete and utter national-fascist tyranny.
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In my opinion the role of the press is NOT to spin the narrative but to report objectively and contextualise the reported information, ask critical questions with the aim to uncover inefficiency, injustice etc. Sadly the media, at least the big one do little if that lately and rather feed on hollow sensations empty of information or critical reflection but generating clicks.
You are confusing journalism with media. That make your whole rant wrong from the beginning.
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You're calling anyone who bothers to reply to you dumb and delusional. The plea for rational debate is a bit funny in this context.
Yours isn't a rational argument, you are just barking stuff. You ended your comment with "End of story", ffs.
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...sigh.
My dude, I agree with the point you were making in the original comment before you edited it. But if you write aggressive comments with no room for discussion, you can't be surprised when people just downvote you.
Mandatory: "YouTube Commentators Fallacy" https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-offensive-truth
Rational argument: the government has lied innumerable times. The reason we know about a handful of them is journalism. If you want your spin straight from the tap, you can read press releases on the DoD website. If you want critical analysis, verification, and other perspectives you’re gonna need a healthy fifth estate. Journalists have biases, but so do governments.
The media is called the fourth estate (not 5th). A 5th column would be more like sleeper cells.
And the media lies at least as much as our government. That's why ratings are so far down. They have burned their credibility that previous generations of journalists spent decades building up.
Ah, you’re half right. The fourth estate is what I meant to refer to. The fifth estate means outsider media, not sleeper cells - idk where you’re getting that.
As for “the media lies”, sure, and if a person is speaking lies will be said - but that is hardly a fact that can be used to dismiss all journalism.
That is only part of the story, not the full story, where journalists and CIA analysts get together and determine the truth. you've seen the video Snowden posted about this? It is a known reality. Why hide it behind the facade of a free press? There are many dimensions to this story, including Zionist bias by mainstream "journalists" that told you there was no genocide and Israel is a victim, and they've kept up that lie even after the UN declared it a genocide.
Sorry, but demanding arguments against your baseless accusations?
I am 12 and this is deep
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Please stop, your enlightened contrarian takes are blowing my little 12 year old mind.
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Because it's interesting. We don't need to censor everything.
The news article is interesting, but political discussions on HN rarely are.
So just read the article?
Then you agree we should be flagging discussions?
Nope. People don't need to flag something that disinterests them. The proper move is to not spend time on the uninteresting thing.
From HN Guidelines:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate.
Another brick in the wall
That's not what the song is about. Its about mental illness. Pink was shutting out the world, one brick at a time.
In (Part One), sure.
In (Part Two) it was external actors laying bricks that isolated Waters' protaganist, and in (Part Three) cause passes the Rubicon as everyone and everything is lumped together as just more bricks in the wall.
Not at the time but they later said it could be applied to more
Pathetic posturing.
With an access badge, at least you can leak something important anonymously.
> With an access badge, at least you can leak something important anonymously
You think generals leak to journalists at press conferences?
Good. Journalist should not have some special access compared to your any person off the street. Such things only lead to un-democratic ends.
All of those newspaper-led coups d'etat throughout history...
While what the government is doing more widely is quite scary, this in isolation seems sensible?
I don't really get what the journalists' role is? To goad and harass employees of the Department of defense in to slipping up and saying more than they should? To encourage people to leak information?
Given the secretive nature of the whole institution, It seems sensible that there is some formal process for deciding what information should and shouldn't be shared. The previous setup seems sort of insane.
If the army is putting babies on spikes and it needs to be leaked.. it seems that that should happen outside of the Pentagon itself and shouldn't involve getting some government approved badge...
Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?
Leaks and whistleblowers do not form in a vacuum. Less press means less oversight, fewer connections built, fewer threads pulled.
And even so, not all Pentagon business is all “life-and-death-top-secret”. Censorious governments LOVE the “national security” excuse.
Accountable in what sense? How are journalists trying to pry extra info from staff helpful? If they want to ask questions at press conferences and whatnot - as far as I understand they still can?
> Without proper press access how is there any real accountability?
No.
Real accountability is that the people can torture their leaders when they fail, but that just doesn't happen anymore.
Imagine that this was just a big rock and Trump was sitting on top of the rock like with a group of apes. Also, let's assume that Trump had set fire on the entire banana supply. Do you think the apes would not have picked a different leader immediately?
Rational people would understand that if you make people lose billions that there should be consequences, but someone the world population is more stupid than a bunch of apes.
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Free Press is part of checks and balances. If you are going to rely on leaks for this stuff to come out, you are going to have a bad time.
isn't what they're doing at the pentagon essentially getting people to leak stuff?
by questioning them publicly and holding them to account. That's not a leak. That's keeping people in check (or force them to lie in front of camera). Remove that and you only rely on Edward Snowdens of the world.
My understanding is they want off-the-record information from unnamed sources. These aren't public questions like at a press conference. Those can still occur under the current rules.
If they publish off-the-record information without approval of authorities, they will no longer be accredited to attend press conferences. Of course no self-respecting reporter is going to accept this - if you do, next step is "if you publish lies about our president, you will not be accredited" - trust me, I know, this is how it starts.
https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-...
"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."
Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.