I was going to ask what country with mainstream medicine has no profit motive, but then I saw your strawman where you equate herbal tea with chopping down phone masts.
Corbyn was smeared as an anti-semite with "evidence" every bit as good as Vice's "evidence" on Stallman.
BoJo had his gaffes covered with kid gloves, the BBC going so far as to pass off obviously fake footage to make him look competent. Despite his talk of "watermelon smiles" and "picaninnies", or the horror Tory policies had inflicted on Britain's vulnerable, or the srious, international lies Johnson was caught in, the BBC gushed on how affable and charming his persona was.
I would love a quantitative analysis, but I don't need one to see the truth. They can't be trusted much more than the Daily Mail or The Sun.
You probably aren’t interested because you have made up you mind already, but are you aware that the use of the watermelon smiles etc was in an article to satirise the kind of attitude that would use those terms? An article critical of outdated colonial attitudes.
Seriously, that was ridiculous. Their bias is practically worn on the sleeve.
I will never forget the way the BBC "covered" Corbyn, with the heavy handed propaganda techniques and constant repetition of patently ridiculous smears. Meanwhile, that BoJo prick had his gaffes covered over, such as [1].
I'll never forget how the BBC "covered" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and David Kelly.
The original article mentions ever so briefly how the BBC "covered" the troubles - it was a constant stream of one sided filth for decades. To this day, coverage of those years remains sheer propaganda, though with less naked venom and foaming at the mouth.
So, when people write articles like this implying the BBC walks a tight rope of bias, my stomach churns. Like the Guardian, they never deserved their reputation and have gotten tremendously worse in the last decades.
> I'll never forget how the BBC "covered" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and David Kelly.
Are you serious? There was a whole government-sponsored inquiry over this that kneecapped the BBC basically because it had covered the intelligence that led up to the war critically.
Yeah - they sure shut the fuck up about that inquiry when David Kelly showed up dead in a field two days later didn't they. They called it a suicide and never brought it up again.
Much like how the BBC has "covered" torture, collateral murder, and the likes which Assange and Snowden revealed - better than the tabloids, and not nearly good enough.
I’m sorry, but your facts are wrong. The inquiry was around the events leading up to David Kelly’s death, not the other way around .
And re: whether he was murdered - pretty much everyone who knew David Kelly, including his wife, called it a suicide because there was absolutely no evidence that his death was anything but a suicide.
I don't know who you're trying to fool, this thread was scrubbed from the front page. Anyway:
He gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the 15th and 16th of July, and was found dead on the 17th.
...
> One of the witnesses who gave evidence to Hutton was David Broucher, the UK's permanent representative to the Conference on Disarmament. In 2002 or 2003 he had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded; Kelly had replied "I will probably be found dead in the woods".
Don't remember BBC making much of a deal of that quote.
His wife was probably scared shitless and in no space to fight. And there were many who didn't find the official line credible including doctors, the former leader of the Conservative Party, and MP Norman Baker, among many others. Try checking your own facts before calling people wrong.
Yes, lots of people don't find the official line about the Kennedy assassination or the 9/11 attacks or the MMR vaccine convincing but hey, I don't pay attention to them either.
The idea that you know more about David Kelly's state of mind at the time than his own family is sort of galling.
The parent comment does not represent the views of most British people FYI.
The Guardian has come under fire recently for having a pretty anti-trans editorial board. At the same time, it's still one of the more left-leaning broadsheets in the UK.
The Guardian presents itself as Britain's establishment left newspaper, but undermined Labour's leader, the most effective left wing leader in the country, constantly and consistently for years.
The Guardian being fake left wing might not be the view of the average Briton, but Chomsky and Klein would agree. The average Briton voted for Brexit then Googled what it meant after they won. Also, I'm not British.
Left wing leaders should not be immune from criticism from the left-leaning press. Much of it well deserved I would say, as would a good number of his MPs. His replacement (announced today) has a mountain to climb
Thanks. As an example, as I mentioned above, stories about Gina Haspel were unceremoniously dumped directly from the front page while under active discussion, at least three times in a single day.
Any conversations here about mass surveillance, Snowden, Assange etc are chock full of misinformation and smears. Those comments are rarely removed, so I don't buy the 'that story doesn't fit in HN's remit' narrative.
My major gripe is more general though: How can we call ourselves a community of hackers and entrepreneurs if there is no space whatsoever for critiquing the forum itself?
There is currently absolutely no accountability here whatsoever. If this community were healthy I don't think it would be tolerated - instead people don't even see the problem.
Thank you for your perspective. I strongly disagree that important truths are not being silenced, because I saw :multiple: stories about Gina Haspel get removed while under heavy discussion on the front page. I don't have any idea what other important stuff got removed, because there is no way to know.
I would have thought that a community of so called tech hackers and entepreneurs could demand some form of logs to know that censorship :really: isn't a problem.
> If you want to criticize HN, I suggest that you do it outside of HN.
That's truly awful advice. Disallowing criticism is step 1 of bad shit happening. At a minimum it stifles any possible improvement. And it's :always: step 1 of fascism.
Gina Haspel sounds like "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I see some threads about her that are [flagged] but not deleted, so there is some level of accountability there. If your goal is to be the "paper of record" then you have to wade into every controversial topic; I appreciate the fact that HN is not trying to be that and by banning certain topics it allows us to focus our energy elsewhere.
Log-based accountability (on the blockchain!) is an interesting idea; unfortunately HN suffers from the same problem as some open source projects where it's a high-profile thing that some people get tons of value from yet it doesn't generate any money to spend on cool new features.
In principle I believe that internal criticism and governance are good things, but you absolutely have to separate it into a separate /meta/ section (which HN doesn't have and mods don't intend to ever add) so it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the site and even then it seems to always get flooded with crackpots and (more recently) culture warring.
I agree that threads about mass surveillance, Snowden, Assange etc are pretty low-quality but I think it's very difficult to discuss those topics in general. How do you discuss actual conspiracies without opening the door to misleading conspiracy theories? There's no one I would trust, including myself, to moderate or set rules for such a discussion.
Thank you - I think you've managed to point directly to the heart of the hypocrisy I am seeing.
America put the lady who ran a torture center and deleted evidence meant for Congress in charge of the mass surveillance revealed by Assange and Snowden.
If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too. As you say, who could we trust to moderate or set rules for discussions like that. At the moment, we are supposedly trusting dang, and I don't. And I can't say that here because it's "off-topic / meta"... Because dang said so.
The logic is circular.
And while solutions could exist (you mention blockchain logs), and HN is supposedly the community for those very people who would be able to create / understand those solutions (techy hacker entrepeneurs), talking about those solutions :here: is off topic. Is that not a glaring double standard?
> "If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too."
Assange and Snowden have too many ardent fanboys for their stories to get flagged off the front page but Haspel (I actually had to look up the name to figure out why I was supposed to care about this individual.) doesn't. Mystery solved; case closed.
Word of advice - pull your head out yer arse.