[ch4s3]

That's not really a good comparison. Being an asshole to journalists if really different than putting them in jail for their reporting. The difference here is that some Republicans who have no power to actually do that talk shit about doing it, but Putin actually jails a lot of journalists.

[jmull]

It's pretty weird this comment is downvoted to being greyed out at the moment.

As if it's wrong to point out that tweeting and a 15 year jail sentence are not equivalent.

I can't understand what this means... are there really Russian vote-bots here or something?

[JAlexoid]

Yes. This whole comments section is full of very specific posters.

There's a clear intent to derail and muffle.

Welcome to the world of Russian digital propaganda machine.

They even have puppet accounts arguing with each other, as was discovered by Russian media.

[ch4s3]

I get it to some extent. People really hate Trump, and I understand that and largely agree. I think it can be threatening to people when their identity is wrapped up in really heated partisanship to have an attack on their enemies questioned. It's only human to want to rally around something and have a hated outsider. And Trump truly is a bag of shit, he just wasn't as bad on this one narrow thing as newspapers and cable news might want you to think.

[pmcollins]

clearly, yes

[klyrs]

Meanwhile, on page 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30541671

[ch4s3]

What do you want me to say? They shouldn't be doing that and anyone involved should be booted out of government. I've long argued that most of the really awful shit done by the US domestically is perpetrated by local governments. They're still not going to be able to successfully prosecute any journalists.

[frabbit]

That's okay. We can always play with semantic definitions of what it means to be a journalist -- and lock Julian Assange up without trial.

[ch4s3]

Assange should be let go, what's happened to him has been awful. But that's the result of the Obama administration's policy and is literally 1 person vs. the eradication of all independent press in an entire nation. We should free Assange and condemn Russia jailing at least 293 journalists right now.

[frabbit]

Completely in agreement. But it's important to note that we have more power over what happens to Assange than we do over Russia.

Empty condemnation of Russia while we simultaneously prosecute the publisher of information which helps us decide whether we are behaving in an immoral manner is not merely hypocritical: it's corrosive of the fundamentals of our society.

Right now the Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians that we murdered and the Yemenis that we are helping murder make condemnation of the Russians not just odd, but erodes all possibility of working in a fairer world.

[ch4s3]

You can walk and chew gum at the same time as the expression goes. I've written to representatives specifically about cutting off arms and intelligence to the Saudi effort in Yemen, and as I said I'm against prosecuting Assange.

However bringing up Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (where Russia is inflaming the situation too), and Yemen is whataboutism. The discussion was about Russia's shitty record on press freedom.

But if we are trying to dig into the current conflict, the US hasn't invaded anyone for territorial expansion in a long fucking time. Russia has recently invaded Ukraine three times, Chechnya twice, and Georgia.

[frabbit]

I don't care if the US "invaded anyone for territorial expansion" or did it for shits'n'giggles. It has done all the above and more which weakens any chance that calls for democracy, international order, peace, stability and trade can work.

The US is deeply disruptive to any of that happening because it opens the door to the MiniMe despots being able to claim that spending stupid amounts of GDP on weapons and having a "strong leader" is the only thing which will see them safe from being invaded "not for territorial expansion" during a "long fucking time".

That's why it is appropriate, relevant and not simply whataboutism.

Russia and other states are worse than the USA because they need to be in order to claw their way up the dungheap piled up by US foreign policy. And there is little inherent in US norms or culture which would prevent similar anti-democratic and anti-liberal punishments. To back to the OP: these are all shades of authoritarianism and we see calls all over the media and this very forum in favor of censorship, war and other stupidities.

Don't kid yourself, this isn't whataboutism, it's the very subject under discussion: Russia is violating international agreements and norms and in part this is because the USA has shat all over those for a very long time.

[cromd]

I don't think they're saying that Republicans are currently doing what Putin is currently doing. They said some people want to jail journalists, and you seem to be agreeing by saying those people "talk shit" about jailing journalists. Maybe one could say that talk is harmless, but I think most would challenge that.

[ch4s3]

My claims is that the phrase "the previous American president also waged a war against every media outlet" is overblown nonsense. There are a mere handful of marginal Republican nobodies who support this stuff and we saw for 4 years that the courts are happy to slap down any US politician makes big constitutional missteps.

[klyrs]

No, that phrase isn't 100% true. Trump didn't wage war on Brietbart, OAN, and the like. Only "mainstream media" like CNN and even Fox when they reported what he called "fake news," actually facts he didn't like.

[ch4s3]

> During the BLM protests, there were hundreds of assaults and detentions of members of the press, along with an enhanced surveillance apparatus. That these actions didn't go through the strictest official channels doesn't mean that they didn't happen. Trump's commentary on the violence against the press: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/19/media/trump-velshi-msnbc-shot...

I agree that local police assaulting journalists is awful, they should be fired and prosecuted. And I'm aware that Trump made some dumb ass comments praising that shit, but it doesn't constitute a war on the press. You're talking about some isolated disparate instances perpetrated by unrelated local police departments during a summer of protests and riots. That isn't an act of the executive branch of the federal government. The US doesn't have a strong presidential system like say for example France. The us president has virtually 0 control over any individual police departments other than threatening to yank some drug war funding.

There do exist levers the executive branch could pull to attack the press, e.g. via the FCC or by having the DOJ prosecute sources. The Trump admin didn't do those things despite all of his bluster. He basically ended the policy of aggressively prosecuting leakers and spent all day engaging with the media. Sure he's a shit bag who did crimes, but the war on the press stuff is overblown.

[klyrs]

> The Trump admin didn't do those things despite all of his bluster.

Yes, it's an administrative motte & bailey. Police support, individual and organizational, for Trump is incredibly high and their loyalty to him transcends official channels. He's explicitly endorsed violence against journalists, brutality towards suspects, and celebrated the execution of Michael Reinoehl. While he didn't have direct control over the state police, he spoke directly to them frequently, and encouraged all of this.

[ch4s3]

Again, encouraging bad actors is 100% different from using the full power of the executive branch to persecute journalists which he did not do, and Russia does.

[ch4s3]

It's also not true at all. There was no war on any journalists. I'm not aware of a single journalist jailed by the Trump DOJ, the FCC didn't yank any licenses, nothing. It was all talk.

[klyrs]

During the BLM protests, there were hundreds of assaults and detentions of members of the press, along with an enhanced surveillance apparatus. That these actions didn't go through the strictest official channels doesn't mean that they didn't happen.

Trump's commentary on the violence against the press: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/19/media/trump-velshi-msnbc-shot...

[cromd]

This seems to be largely about your definition of war. No elections were overturned, but could you say he waged war on elections? He had his team out there saying that Hugo Chavez created the rigged voting machines and that it was statistically impossible for Biden to have won. It was an ideological war, not a physical war. You don't have to jail anyone to nonetheless do broad damage to an institution. I agree that people can over-analyze sloppy comments from fringe weirdo politicians, but here is something the president tweeted:

>“They can’t stand the fact that this Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs,” he continued. “They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

(https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-cal...)

And surely media can be bad, can harm people, can lie, but "ENEMY" is interesting.

[ch4s3]

Being a shit-bag and. a bully just isn't a "war". Arguably the controversy saved most of the legacy media landscape from financial ruin and gave them 4 more years to adjust to some new revenue models, the NYT in particular seems to have figured out how to pivot to a profitable online subscriber model that works. It wasn't clear in mid 2016 that they would be able to do that.

You can make a good case that the guy damaged the discourse and eroded trust in institutions, but news and journalism have flourished in recent years.