> This was a pretty minor story even in the tech blogs, let alone major news outlets.

This is currently the #1 post on HN. It might not be the biggest community, but it is influential, and many people bypass visiting blogs/sites and come directly here for their news. Things don't have to be on the front page of Time magazine to leave an impact on interested communities. And here, clearly people are interested enough in this matter to make it the most highly commented submission on the front page right now. So to try and paint a popular HN item as pointless chump change is quite disingenuous.

> It might not be the biggest community, but it is influential, and many people bypass visiting blogs/sites and come directly here for their news.

So then what does this have to do with "questioning ethics in any kind of journalism"??

I am a commenter on HN and a redditor and am in no way related to the "clickbait media", so how are my contributions to this thread "explained through the lens of questionable media"?

The problem is the deflection. It started as a discussion about the actual situation, but apparently "everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations", and is now about...biased HN posts? I really have no idea.

If you were worried about that, you should have discussed the actual situation and addressed what you thought were misrepresentations, not going off on some tangent about media ethics.

> I am a commenter on HN and a redditor and am in no way related to the "clickbait media", so how are my contributions to this thread "explained through the lens of questionable media"?

Herein lies the problem: there is increasingly less of a difference between you or I, some "random strangers on the internet", and 'trusted' news sources like the New York Times. So it's not so much that we're not related to the 'clickbait' media, it's that the media is now mirroring us, unfiltered, and many don't realize that this is basically the modern MO of 'news reporting'. The lines are blurring as a side effect of the influence social media has, that's the danger.

> It started as a discussion about the actual situation, but apparently "everyone needs to be much more sceptical about what they read in the press and there motivations", and is now about...biased HN posts? I really have no idea.

Yeah, I agree. It's certainly hard to follow, but we are on a platform that makes misinformation incredibly easy to produce. Technology is unfortunately a double-edged sword like that.

> If you were worried about that, you should have discussed the actual situation and addressed what you thought were misrepresentations, not going off on some tangent about media ethics

I agree, it would be nice, but at this point it'd be like playing whack-a-mole, with changing definitions of what it means to be a 'mole'. It's unfortunate, but it'd be pretty difficult to keep up with every possible distortion even if we tried, so the best I can do is just remind people that "hey, even when I'm not around to remind you, you should probably try to question things that you believe and might've picked up from somewhere".