Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sjeohp 2551 days ago
Not sure what you are hoping for beyond the self-evident unwillingness of most journalists to challenge state enthusiasm for the Foreign Intervention of the Month.
1 comments

This has less to do with most journalists consciously doing it and more to do with people just riding the wave of their biases and their editor's biases.

The reality is that most journalists are not proficient in the content they try to cover, and for the select "elite" that are proficient and considered to be "experts", they almost always come with some sort of insanely strong bias that made them proficient to start off with. There's almost a revolving door between "expert" journalists and think tanks/pressure groups.

I see this heavily with Middle Eastern coverage. It's basically an all-out shitfight of the most bigoted, racist and sectarian people war mongering through fear, dishonestly and in some cases outright lies. In some cases this has had tragic consequences - things like ISIS' adventure through Iraq could have almost certainly been avoided.

Sometimes the dog whistling moves from just dog whistling and we see writers that have written for publications like The Boston Globe outright tweeting that they wish for the suffering of Syrian children - verbatim - and then deleting the tweets after realising they're on a public platform.