> “I think he finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace,” Trump said. “The press is very dishonest.”
It’s projection, as usual.
Jefferson: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Reagan: "There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our 'noble experiment' in self-government"
FDR: "If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free."
Trump: "The press is the enemy of the people."
Who owned the presses when Jefferson or FDR or even Reagan discussed the role of the press; who owns it now?
Diversity and the (political/social) range of press is an important aspect of this matter.
---
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy."
Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]
---
[1] - https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
Presumably you mean "dishonest". Do you think OAN is dishonest and perhaps disruptive to world peace?
Thinking the press is dishonest does not make one a Nazi. Even if disliking the press were a sign if despotism, Clconsider what makes Nazism unique compared to other despotic regimes, disliking the press ain't it.
The current mechanism is
1) Fringe theory gestates in the internet.
2) Fringe theory gets into the podcast network and is covered
3) Relatively famous personality comes on a Fox program and mentions the theory
4) Government figures repeats theory that was covered on the news
5) Fox repeats government coverage
People on the right who have alternative theories, simply do not get air time. They aren’t suppressed, they are simply not competitive.
In a more economic framing of their efforts - they have found a way to offset the costs of inaccurate content to the future.
So they are now able to “sell” cheap “junk food” content, while the center and left spends more effort in forming more accurate content.
The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.
But today the NYT is more a site dependent on its wordle revenue than its subscription revenue. Consolidation of markets means advertisers do not need smaller local newspapers, and platforms get the lions share of attention.
There is no business model to sustain a free information economy.
Up until about 2016 I would have agreed to this. After the last month or two, I don't see how a rational human can think this anymore. Neither side has any mainstream news outlet which tries to be honest in its reporting. You want facts? The talking heads have their own YouTube channels now. If you can find a decent selection of them, they provide more honest reporting and far better analysis than the media on either side provides currently.
Am I alone in thinking that "woke" was the catch-all for the enemy this time around?
The Trump admin is the most transparent admin in decades and they provide much more access to the dishonest press than most admins.
Citation needed
I don't have actual numbers, but I know how often Biden spoke to the press, and I know it was always scripted on who can ask what.
Trump's DoD just threatened to revoke press credentials of anyone who reported on things they didn't authorize. Also, the other current scandal is one of the people reporting on RFK both slept with him and gave him positive coverage, which is wild.
Trump regularly kicked reporters out of the press pool for saying things he didn't like and then took over deciding who can be in it and who isn't.
It's not really transparency if you make sure to include only people who promise to say what you want them to say, is it?
Edit: in case you believe I am being just flippant. That’s an illustration of the ”journalism” favoured by scammers.
If Trump sneezes we find out that sneezing is something Hitler did, if Trump stops a war in Gaza we hear how one time Hitler talked about ending wars.
Our dishonest state-owned press is against wars except when Hamas loses, then they think that war may not have been that bad and want to tell us all the good things about war and the bad things about peace.
Biden was senile for years and the press were telling us it's a right-wing conspiracy theory, until the point the Democrat party dropped him because he was senile.
You, uh, you do know this whole idea is right wing propaganda, right? None of that is what actually happened, it's what right wing media says happened.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx
Basically the press claimed that the Spanish sabotaged a US navy ship called the USS Maine. The Maine had a boiler accident which caused it to explode but the press claimed it was the Spanish. The government used this as an excuse to take the remaining bits of Spain's empire away from them. So that might be an example of the press being 'an enemy of world peace'. No, I'm not sure the current media would do that. But it is an example of a free press starting a war to sell fish wrap.
If they don’t go back in a week, which can be seen from several examples, like Hungary, that it doesn’t work. I think compared to the Hungarian government, this was a misstep of Trump (which I hope they make it more). In Hungary, when something like this happened, you always lost when you didn’t succumb to authoritarianism. You lost your previous privileges no matter what, but you lost more if you protested. They tried to keep up a facade that nothing changed, while everything changed. In this case it seems to me as an outside observer, that nothing value was lost by quitting compared to signing up.
Or Trump and co don’t want to keep a facade at all. But then they need to bet on that most people in America are really fascists.
If Trump says "I've ended 7 or 8 wars" or says "I've lowered drug prices 800, 900, 1000 percent" and no one says
"Sir, how is it possible to lower a price by 900 percent" or "Could you specify which conflicts it is you refer to by those 7 or 8 wars?" then you aren't a journalist.
If you go to an event where such things are said and there is no opportunity to ask these obvious follow up questions, then you stop going there, or you aren't a journalist.
If someone asks these questions and that leaves them excluded from those events - then you also stop going there in solidarity, or you aren't a journalist.
> Instead of toeing the official line, that reporting helped people understand what U.S. troops were really facing. Far from being a success, the fall of Baghdad marked the beginning of an insurgency that stretched on for years.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/14/g-s1-93297/pentagon-reporter-...
They turned in their badges that allows them to access certain spaces in the pentagon. They're still reporters, they still work for their employers, and they can still do reporting.
In (Part Two) it was external actors laying bricks that isolated Waters' protaganist, and in (Part Three) cause passes the Rubicon as everyone and everything is lumped together as just more bricks in the wall.
If you did agree to the terms you'd be limited to publishing the official story (and can't talk to anyone for off-the-record stuff), but you get that for free anyway even if you never show up, so why bother with the extra expense of actually going to the Pentagon?
Obviously this rule would apply only to real journalists. Members of the party will get free roam. They will stay.
Just another day in the life of a regime.
I think it's worth it for anyone that cares about the aesthetics of journalism more than actually reporting anything of value.
Imagine being an aspiring blogger/independent journalist. One can only dream of such a possibility as to join the press corp of Pentagon. Of course many will agree to all restrictions and rules for the opportunity.
You choose to keep at it because you think military stuff is pretty neat; you get paid by the view; getting briefings from the pentagon makes you seem important to yourself and others; and you like being a celebrity (albeit a very minor one)
The ones who stay are influencers. Not journalists. Their viewers (almost certainly not readers) don’t know the difference.
Nothing stops them from publishing criticisms of the administrations talking points, or conversations that happen outside of press conferences.
Although the silent treatment the generals dished out at recent meeting wasn’t bad either
They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.
Now they suddenly grew a "backbone"?
They just see the signs of lack of long term legitimacy for this particular government and play pretend at safe courage.
I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.
The journalists and the generals can presumably still talk to each other over drinks after work. The journalists were only ever going to be tolerated in the building because US leadership thinks they are helping them achieve military propaganda aims which are rarely noble things. There isn't much at stake here beyond classified information.
US classified information has been a bit of a disaster for them. It just means the government is slowly escaping accountability for what it does. They have that massive spying program on US citizens and the last I heard of the story was they can't sue anyone over it because the courts aren't allowed to believe it exists.
That is what makes it an interestingly complex issue. We have to form an opinion on whether it is likely to be a "better" narrative with the journalists in the building or in a building a few blocks away. That isn't an obvious one and it largely hinges on what access they were getting in the building that they weren't officially supposed to have and what they then did with it.
Hold up, that's starting to conflate two very different ideas of what's going on:
1. "We cannot tolerate any outside visitors because it could possibly give them an opportunity to commit espionage and other serious federal crimes.
2. "We cannot tolerate specific vetted reporters that haven't promised us control over what they write and how they write it."
We can tell this isn't a (#1) concern over actual security. If it were, this (#2) "deal" would never be offered at all.
This is about controlling messages and opinions, rather than securing specific facts.
* whether you need to limit people learning something
* whether you need to limit people publishing something
"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.
1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.
You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.
If that's the case, shouldn't we also ban the top brass from restaurants, bars, churches and golf courses lest they encounter strangers there?
I know classified US secrets, the leaks around the Snowden era were pretty interesting. Guarantee you the people in the building know more than me. The NOFORN stuff actually tends to be the spiciest if you feel an urge to go look at something.
It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.
As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.
So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.
He acts like every other person (myself included) that i know that had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed but still looks funny at his favorite drink. With a guy like this you literally never know what the clear liquid in the glass bottle is.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/03/political-j...
I wonder at what point in time people will have enough with what they are changing. How does the HN crew based in the US think about the current administration?
Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.
But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
Likely at least a third of Americans do actively support the current administration and their decisions, so "having enough" is out of the question.
I don't get why California doesn't just join the European Union and exit the US; it's not like the red neck states like California.
Everything I've seen so far from Trump is what I voted for. And almost everything Democrats have said and done has reaffirmed my choice.
Every one I've spoken to that has been surprised Trump was elected lives in a bubble. Hacker News is one such bubble.
You're not going to get any reliable "when are the masses going to revolt" info here.
Did you always have fascist tendencies or did Trump bring them out?
What percent of the US population is eligible to vote, what percent actually voted, and which percent did Kamala receive?
The aggressiveness is losing people who may have supported his immigration policies initially.
Losing, but hasn’t lost. Point is if someone is proudly pro-Trump right now, immigration probably isn’t going to prompt introspection.
I used to be a very "live and let live" type of person.
Then the relaxed "let live" part got abused. I've seen what happens first hand having lived in NYC for 6 years, and now living in London.
It's amazing the power of fear of crime to get people to demand the Federal government jackboot.
HN and the broader tech community have had their mask off moments.
The notion that American exceptionalism inoculates America's war criminals from facing justice at the hand of International bodies set up specifically for that purpose, is incorrect and anti-human.
It is time for justice.
You can't maintain this culture of warrior narcissism, Americans.
It will end in tragedy - as it has already brought chaos and calamity to millions of innocent people across the globe, this century. The USA and its allies are, by a huge margin, the #1 cause of terror and war on the planet at this time. Nobody even comes close to the level of criminal war-mongering that occurs at the behest of the US' political establishment. No, not Russia. Not China. The USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none.
Come to grips with the crimes of your state. It is the #1 most important thing for Americans to do, for the rest of the world.
The American people are the only force on the planet which can reign in their monsters. It has to be done by the people, for the people.
Totally disagree. The ICJ makes sense within the scope of geopolitics. The ICC is, best case, a mechanism by which a country can cleanse itself of a bad former leader. More realistically, it is a relic of the unipolar world of the 1990s.
America needs to deal with itself through its own laws. (Same as Russia, China and India will.)
> USA and Five/Nine Eyes states are #1 at illegal war and murder of innocent human beings, bar none
Ah, got it.
If the ICC is good enough for Laurent Gbagbo, its good enough for Obama, Bush, Biden, Trump and Clinton.
The ICC delivers one thing Americans refuse to deliver: justice for victims of war crimes.
That this is not obvious, or prioritised, clearly belies the situation vis a vis American Exceptionalism.
It’s sad that your speech has been chilled by the misuse of the karma system by some large faction of users here.
That's not exactly what's happening.
>>The rules limit where reporters can go without an official escort and convey “an unprecedented message of intimidation” for anyone in the Defense Department who might want to speak to a reporter without the approval of Hegseth’s team
On NPR (National Public Radio) a few days ago, a reporter said they could wander the halls of the Pentagon and ask anyone they ran into any question about anything. This will not be allowed anymore and, considering it's the Pentagon, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
What bad things have happened from what you're describing?
It's good for garden mulch.
With an access badge, at least you can leak something important anonymously.
You think generals leak to journalists at press conferences?
I don't really get what the journalists' role is? To goad and harass employees of the Department of defense in to slipping up and saying more than they should? To encourage people to leak information?
Given the secretive nature of the whole institution, It seems sensible that there is some formal process for deciding what information should and shouldn't be shared. The previous setup seems sort of insane.
If the army is putting babies on spikes and it needs to be leaked.. it seems that that should happen outside of the Pentagon itself and shouldn't involve getting some government approved badge...
"In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn't able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018."
Kicking journalists out would probably not make things more auditable so to speak.
Leaks and whistleblowers do not form in a vacuum. Less press means less oversight, fewer connections built, fewer threads pulled.
And even so, not all Pentagon business is all “life-and-death-top-secret”. Censorious governments LOVE the “national security” excuse.
It seems to me there is some hope for America after all.
War journalists will keep reporting. This just means the government’s position doesn’t get a say every time.
Since nobody is protesting now you can expect that 5 years from now the regime will start making disappear people vaguely opposing the gov decisions or being suicided on a regular basis.
[1] https://brendonbeebe.substack.com/p/history-of-pentagon-pres...
It kind of shows that "democracy" was never real to begin with.
Certainly with Sora 2 level of technology they can just claim whoever they don't like has blown up a federal building while they were asleep. It's not like you can have an alibi when you sleep and everyone sleeps. In a way, this AI nightmare necessitates protocols for protection against false accusations like only being able to open the door exiting a house when three other witnesses are present. There are cryptographic solutions like verified cameras, but almost nobody has those now, not even news crews publish signed videos.
Journalism in war time has no real meaning, because if it's secret information the journalist basically becomes an adversary and at some point it becomes cheaper to kill them. Those waging wars have historically always been corrupt. So, that leaves repeating whatever the Pentagon wants you to know.
Also, calling the US a democracy is like putting lipstick on a pig and saying it's a hot babe.
Perhaps Switzerland still has a democracy, but most kind of suck in various ways (and most importantly, don't do anything to improve their democracies). In a real democracy, there would be continuous improvement with better checks and balances. At some point you start to wonder whether democracy just exists to give people the illusion that their voice means anything. Also, in a real democracy there would be equal opportunity and advertising budget for all political parties. That's just not the case in many democracies.
So, blatantly obvious autocracies are probably worse than our current "democracies", but let's not pretend democracy is a thing right now.
bigyabai•3h ago
ndsipa_pomu•3h ago
charcircuit•3h ago
exe34•3h ago
charcircuit•3h ago
ndsipa_pomu•3h ago
troupo•3h ago
baubino•3h ago
radley•2h ago
kstenerud•2h ago
If your answer is "the government", then every cover up will never be revealed, and the government will answer to no one.
If your answer is "journalists", then you have the status-quo in any functioning democracy.
And when it actually moves into sedition territory, that's what an independent court system is for.
Unfortunately, once things devolve into a two-party system, it becomes ever increasingly difficult to keep the various branches independent.
intended•2h ago
Moving on to a new version is to waste your own intelligence in reactionary sentence creation.
JuniperMesos•2h ago
nandomrumber•2h ago
bigyabai•3h ago
lelandfe•3h ago
They’re not subject to FOIA you say? Perhaps there’s a difference to the organizations after all.
f33d5173•3h ago
troupo•3h ago
However, Apple is a private company and can do whatever it pleases, however shitty that behavior is.
esseph•3h ago
lm28469•3h ago
wtfwhateven•3h ago
j4coh•2h ago
RobotToaster•2h ago
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/29/we-will-coup-whoever...
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
I had a friend go deep into addiction. I think there was a period when every headline was his doing, too.
virtue3•2h ago
uncletammy•2h ago
blitzar•2h ago
croes•2h ago
ok_dad•3h ago
nutjob2•2h ago
The word you're looking for is 'murdering'.
guerrilla•2h ago
Terr_•48m ago
_factor•3h ago
You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.
Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.
DeepSeaTortoise•1h ago
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
somenameforme•2h ago
I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.
croes•2h ago
Any information that isn't approved by Hegseth is unauthorized. In other words, only what Hegseth allows could be written.
To call the bad would be an understatement.
DeepSeaTortoise•1h ago
I'm honestly not sure which rules the media outlets actually want changed.
ben_w•2h ago
IMO at best this is frogs* jumping out of water that was boiled too fast.
* an idiom based on a stupid truth, as the real frogs were sans-brain at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
matwood•2h ago
People are not being hyperbolic. This is reducing the transparency of Pentagon to the American people. See also the Whitehouse banning the AP earlier this year.
> It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon.
Without access it's going to be very hard to do good reporting, adversarial or otherwise. This is the government working to control what is said.
> You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
The world is built on relationships. One of the keys of being a good journalist/reporter is being able to have relationships which help to build stories while also staying objective.
Terr_•45m ago
Yeah, any "benefit of the doubt" burned away months ago.
The administration is trying to control published opinions and value-judgements, as opposed to concealing sensitive military data.
blitzar•2h ago
parineum•2h ago
croes•2h ago
vintermann•2h ago
Maybe they think they'll get access to them eventually if they're loyal.
It might seem cowardly, but it isn't that different to what happens every day in business. Society is full of organisations working on the "make the boss' opinions your own" principle.
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Then you aren’t a journalist.
vintermann•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•59m ago
The people winning White House credentials are political influencers. Chomsky was an interesting linguist. His political observations are about as scientific as our current crop of Silicon Valley elites’.
mikkupikku•34m ago
vintermann•27m ago
What he said, and I agree is true and important, is that you won't get to work as a journalist and do things like, say, interview people for BBC, unless you believe most of the things your employer believes.
eagleal•35m ago
In fact the most common form of journalism you will find is what's akin to a Propaganda channel of a Sponsoring Party (Defense, Media Company, Political party, Rich Individual with an agenda, etc). Essentialy a PR employee.
But this is true since always.
The kind of journalism we usually think of though is Investigative journalism, but that's a different beast and usually doesn't really pay.
notarobot123•1h ago
intended•2h ago
There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.
It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.
There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.
It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.
The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.
And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.
solatic•2h ago
jrflowers•2h ago