[dpifke]

It's off-topic, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This submission is literally a TV news broadcast.

There are lots of other places on the internet where this is on-topic, I wish people would have their debates there instead.

[TimTheTinker]

Since it was censored in some significant parts of the world, including Silicon Valley, it could arguably be on-topic.

[dpifke]

Strong disagree.

Gay porn is censored in a lot of Muslim countries, that doesn't make it on-topic for HN.

[TimTheTinker]

Generally, porn isn't included in "anything that good hackers would find interesting". Censored news arguably is.

[dpifke]

Lots of hackers find porn very interesting. In fact, my first "real job" as a hacker was for a company with ties to the 1-900 industry that had decided to expand out onto the internet (not just to sell porn). Stories about porn would be interesting, submissions of nothing but pornography itself ("because it's censored!") are not.

I would be more sympathetic to the argument that this is relevant if the submission was an article about media censorship, or CBS's audience or leadership, and how said censorship, audience, or leadership relates to technology or emerging trends in media.

But this is literally just a controversial TV news broadcast, that people of one political persuasion say was "censored" and people of another political persuasion say was held off the air "temporarily" until it met network fact-checking standards. That sort of political bickering is most uninteresting, and is most definitely not why I've been reading HN for the past few decades.

[TimTheTinker]

Hackers generally appreciate links to hard facts and analysis that are not available through popular channels.

[dpifke]

This seems similar to the "Is Github Down?" submission problem, where the submitter simply links to github.com.

That's a poor submission, because by the time most people click on it, Github will no longer be down.

There might be an interesting discussion to be had about outages at Github, but the better submission would be an article or blog post about the outage, not just a link to the site and a three-word title.

If someone wants to write an article or blog post about this news broadcast, which links to "hard facts and analysis not available through popular channels," that seems like it might be a worthwhile submission. But just a link to the broadcast by itself is not leading to interesting or on-topic conversation—the top comment right now is an ad hominem attack against Larry Ellison, without any supporting facts or analysis that he had anything to do with this story at all.