
Ask HN: Why are newspapers not talking about Wikileaks? - angry-hacker
I always thought the media being &quot;liberal&quot; and skewed was overblown, but I&#x27;m amazed no one is talking about Wikileaks right now. Neither HN.<p>CNN has on the front page news a woman who is &quot;accusing&quot; Trump on sexual abuse. Am I going crazy and starting to believe conspiracy theories?
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sheraz
Objective media is dead my friends.

I do not believe it is overblown. I am appalled at Twitter, facebook, youtube,
and definitely the more traditional media outlets. Their selective enforcement
of policy violations shows that they truly wish to censor.

There is definitely a bias against a lot of sites with a right/alt-right lean.
Sadly, I believe that bias exists here on HN.

It would appear that all links to breitbart.com are hellbanned/auto-flagged or
the community here simply wont tolerate it. [1]

I'm glad there are people like Andrew Torba and his gab.ai [2] project. (A
twitter alternative, not artificial intelligence).

1 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=breitbart.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=breitbart.com)

2 - [http://gab.ai](http://gab.ai)

~~~
tanderson92
There is excellent coverage at The Intercept, by Zaid Jilani and Lee Fang.

------
rkevingibson
I've seen articles in the past few days about the email leaks on the
washington post, and looking on CNN right now I see an article on the Podesta
emails on the politics page. I've seen a lot of talk about hacking and emails
this election. I would say the media is talking more about Trump's sexual
assault accusers right now because either: a) The emails haven't been verified
(as far as I know) b) There's nothing in them as scandalous as a sex scandal
(as far as I can tell) c) Trump keeps saying scandalous things, which draws
attention to himself.

A lot of the problems with the media, as far as I can tell, stem from the fact
that no one is paying for it anymore. This leads the media to going for
attention grabbing headlines, which means a sex scandal will always win out
over any allegations of corruption.

------
idlewords
I flagged this mostly because I'm part of the vast international Zionist
conspiracy, but partly because I believe it leads to no productive discussion
at all.

Not to mention that what Wikileaks is doing is unethical, and paying attention
to it enables them.

Read @zeynep's Twitter feed for a forceful argument against these document
dumps, and the harm they do to democracy.

~~~
ramtatatam
Is the way how documents had been obtained ethical or not? Well, too late for
this is it not? The question should really be what the origin of those
documents is - are they genuine or not.

It's like mounting provocation against officials so they accept a bribe. Is it
ethical? Well - in some countries this is how unethically-acting people are
being caught red handed. The only way they actually can be caught red handed.

~~~
sharemywin
The whole point is there's no way to prove they are true or not. or which
parts are true or not. Now if you trust wikileaks as some kind of authority on
truth...

~~~
ramtatatam
There is a way to prove if those sources are genuine but you don't have
resources to do so. However to say "there is no way to prove they are true or
not" is far from true. Such documents can be cross-referenced with other
documents we know are genuine, simply this requires research you have no time
nor resource to conduct. But there are others out there who have both time and
resources. I have seen some documents about my home government (not USA) which
were all (to the last one) true.

~~~
sharemywin
They can't insert words into the documents they published that were originals.

------
internaut
No. The Podesta emails are damning but have got very little acknowledgment.

This is the phenomenon of circling the wagons.

I've been going through them and there's all kinds of fascinating stuff. For
example if you do a search for 'ocra100' you'll see John Podesta receiving
three emails that sound like he's getting intelligence reports from Moldbug.
Too many WTFs to explain here. Just go and see.

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta-
emails/emailid/1637](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1637)

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta-
emails/emailid/295](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/295)

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta-
emails/emailid/197](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/197)

Well done to Glenn Greenwald though.

~~~
maxerickson
Receiving emails isn't damning, you'd want to establish a pattern of mutual
communication and reliance on the information contained in them.

(think about it this way, if my comment replying to you is really stupid, does
that somehow impugn you?)

~~~
internaut
I think the orca100 emails are more interesting than damning, both the content
and the context, I am very curious to know about how this happened since
everything orca100 is saying is totally orthogonal to the mainstream liberal
positions.

It's just amazing in general how overwhelmingly two-faced the system is. They
say one thing to each other and then the opposite to the public.

If the Americans don't trust their politicians it's probably because they're
not insane.

~~~
maxerickson
Look at the cc list on [https://wikileaks.org/podesta-
emails/emailid/1637](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1637)

It's a bunch of liberal reporters. Either it's a crank sending their crank to
people they think need to hear their crank or a bunch of 30 something politics
beat reporters are deep insiders.

~~~
internaut
I thought that too initially but now am starting to wonder. Some of the emails
sound like they were written by cartoon villains and if orca100 is a crank,
it's crank that sounds like they have been put up to this, cranks are normally
on the defensive and expository but this just sounds like a report with the
occasional personal opinion thrown in.

I suspect that political groups send out requests to see the perspective of
different factions and this may be what this is.

------
JamesBarney
I would argue it's 3 large factors.

1\. Scandal fatigue. People are tired of talking about Clinton's e-mails. Had
this release been before the previous e-mail controversy it would have been
picked up far more.

2\. Sex - Sex sells. Sex scandals always blow up more than non-sex scandals.
If Hillary Clinton has e-mails about banging interns it would be all over the
major newspapers.

3\. Sound bityness - There is a video where Trump says "Grab them by the
pussy". There's nothing like this in the Clinton e-mails. There's no big
damning quote they can throw up on headlines and get a billion clicks.

------
devinhelton
It's not a conspiracy, it's a prospiracy --
[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=67](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=67) The prestige
media -- NY Times, Vox, NPR -- all see themselves as being on the same team.
They seem themselves as having a public responsibility to guide America toward
a better, more progressive future, and to limit the errors of the retrograde,
perhaps bigoted middle American. Thus, they all slant their coverage to fit
that narrative and worldview. And if members fail to fit the narrative, if
they say, "illegal immigrants" instead of "undocumented immigrants", they
catch a lot of flak from their fellow teammates, they risk getting ostracized,
and so over time everyone falls in line with a certain consensus.

------
quickben
NH is a techie site, so most people don't care (or aren't from US)

As about the US news outlets, just google who owns whom and go up that
ownership chain. No conspiracy theories of any kind, just money as usual.

~~~
sheraz
Sure, but twitter, facebook, and youtube have been in the news lately about
their selective enforcement of policy violations. THAT is definitely of
interest to this community.

------
sheraz
... and now this Ask HN thread is getting flagged? C'mon HN! We're better than
this...

~~~
ramtatatam
Your post was flagged too. Nobody bothered to provide some feedback as to
why... Truly we are better than this...

