Hacker News

Not quoted as saying that there should be some sort of budget or spending increase, which is the sort of evidence being presented in this report, but merely some historical context statement about how the armed forces had been 'right-sized for the era'; and with his political ties also mentioned.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if AOAV had a blind spot with respect to The Guardian. However, that doesn't show one; and they did do lists of news media for several of the 19 (e.g. Richards) indicating that they aren't just picking 1 example publication for each person. Which is why I'm still inclined towards this telling us that there is a certain subset of U.K. publications in which this occurs.

If they hadn't mentioned Nation Cymru I'd be inclined towards this telling us that the report is highly London-centric and not reflective of 'U.K. media'. But they did.

And The Times and The Sun aren't even British. They're owned by News Corp which is American

And The Telegraph is about to become German

GB News is quite likely Russian ultimately lol

Yes, and I was slightly disappointed, from a statistical point of view, that they didn't tell us how many people they excluded from the original sample for this reason. That could have told us things.

If (say) they threw out 967 to leave those 33, then one possible explanation that that leaves the door open for is that journalists are so used to there being no conflict of interest, it being the case the majority of the time, that they don't check in the minority of cases where there is.

I suspect that they didn't throw out anywhere near as many as that, though. But, still, I would have liked to have been told the figure.

Not wrong, that format requires a regular parade of guests with some kind of subject matter expertise, and if it's a military or national security topic, most of those subject matter experts are inevitably from a military or at least military policy background.

The listed supposed conflicts of interest mostly aren't any clearer than the baseline assumption "ex generals will generally favour more defence spending" which anyone with more than two brain cells should already be working on.

How is an General Everard being a patron of an armed forces charity, a software company enhancing onboarding experiences, a skills training company or even an "informal network of strategic thinkers" who write blogs likely to influence his defence spending views more than being a general?

It's not like it's standard journalistic practice to provide the entire resume of any other type of commentator.

For talking heads/opinion you have, I would say, two choices:

    - Retired people with historic experience.  The longer since they were actively involved in the sector, the less useful they will be of course.  There is also going to be something of a demographics bias here.
    - Currently employed people, and given their primary skillset is "Defense industry expertise" I'm going to posit that they always have a commercial role in the defense industry.  Maybe there's some subset with a non-commercial role or a purely political role... but both of those have their own implications too

Whilst not commenting on that, a fascinating quote from the article you are replying to is:

"Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian’s celebrated investigative team, whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations."

This tells you something about why you might feel that way.

I mean they operate as a trust and wear their journalistic bias proudly on their sleeve; in terms of intent their altruism is self-evident.

That said, no British media is exempt from adherence to D Notices and tenets of their legal system like the concept of a super-injuction, whereby a court order prevents the reporting of the fact that the injunction exists at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English_l...

That the term was coined by a Guardian journalist covering the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump scandal should be context enough as to their motives and constraints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJW_v_Guardian_News_and_Media_...

I sort of disagree with this. I bet if you asked liberals and progressives in a country like America for a foreign newspaper they read -- if they do read one -- in most cases it is probably the Guardian. So it may be only the best of a bad bunch but it does have that reputation.

The Guardians role in modern UK society is to launder right wing talking points through a few layers of progressive sounding rhetoric so that the average person on the street can say "Well if even The Guardian agrees, maybe there is something to it."

A worthless rag of a paper.

And based on the earlier concept by Walter Lippmann, first expressed in his 1922 book Public Opinion, which arguably birthed 20th century putatively impartial professional journalism.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)#Manufact...>

What you're seeing there is churnalism; journalists just want to get a piece printed and move on. Sometimes the whole piece comes from a source that benefits from the piece being printed, not just the expert. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

Sometimes the expert benefits just by being in the news, see for example NPR banning the expert they quoted 77 times, law professor Carl Tobias. Mainly because he'd write to them offering his opinion on the topics of the day, and as he is a law professor, even if the topic isn't law, NPR journalists couldn't help but accept his quotes to pad out their articles. https://www.mediaite.com/media/nprs-new-rule-for-2026-stop-q...

One thing I've seen a bit in Norway, and which is relevant this month, is opinion pieces by "concerned parents" that get their writing into national news, but a quick search show that they're often head of some bigoted organization. Of course they should be entitled to their opinion and be able to express it as any other, but the news papers not disclosing this is unethical imo.

> Quack doctors spruiking amazing new treatments (that they hold shares in).

Doctors commonly have kickback arrangements to prescribe specific medication. Sometimes it's the correct course of action they just always go for the particular brand, other times it's the wrong course of action but they prescribe it anyway for the kickback (the OxyContin scandal comes to mind).

Well yeah when you hire at a senior level it goes unsaid that you're partially hiring for that persons influence. The labour value alone would not reflect such a high price.

Does it say that in the full report somewhere else? I can't find that in the text.

I think most people would be surprised if ex senior military Personnel didn't think military spending should be increased.

"People who have seen the state of the military first hand are saying that we need to fund the military" is not really shocking or sinister.

In the context of Assange turning out to be russian mouthpiece. Well deserved.

i used to have a great way to sum this all up but i stopped arguing with people via that medium so i have since forgotten my spiel. It's not that the media will lie, necessarily - although let's not pretend they're above lying - it's the editorial staff get to choose what runs and what doesn't. If there's a new study saying acetaminophen or whatever is actually more dangerous than we thought, it won't get air on normal media for a long time. Hard to get earnest reporting on wars when defense contractors are a major underwriter, hard to report on businesses when most of them are at least partially owned by the same companies that own the media outlets and/or are major advertisers.

I really need to sit down and think for a while to remember how i used to explain this, because it nearly always got a "oh... that kinda makes sense... dang"

i dont buy it ..if the concren is undisclosed affiliations, then study all undisclosed affiliations .. instead we get a defence only study, because "defence industry ties" are assumed to be inherently suspect ..

Regardless, when the topic is national security, defence- ector experience is often exactly the expertise you want... not some acadmic or commie whod rather we not

Iraq and Afghanistan might disagree with your first point.

Last time I looked Iran and the UK are quite some distance from each other, and Iran has inexplicably neither been launching missiles at the UK, nor threatening to, and is apparently not even capable of it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm120x4lzxo

So the justification for these "defensive" bombing runs on Iranian mountain sites from Fairford remains mysterious.

The UK's arms industry is - like most things associated with the establishment - an exercise in turning privilege into cash, so it's not a surprise to see Senior Figures doing the media rounds in establishment narrative factories like The Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

Readers with the money and connections to make a difference already know how the game is played.

Readers who don't should perhaps be allowed to keep their happy fantasy that the UK isn't one of the most corrupt countries in the world, as a mercy.

> In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability or incoming missiles.

Claiming that the UK doesn't support diplomacy through violence then transitioning into this gem has to be one of the wildest juxtapositions I've seen this year. Do you classify the US strikes on Iran as uniformly offensive or defensive in nature? Or do you think there is a mix? How would you classify a US bombing run on anti-air defences in the opening phase of the conflict?

> In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability ...

Reminds of the old joke, "What propaganda? We don't have propaganda."

> In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability

If Iran struck all of the UK's missile factories and military bases, would it be considered a defensive or offensive action?

I can't tell if your first sentence is a joke or not...

Iran.

It didn't attack anyone until it was attacked.

It has been defending itself.

Defending those launching illegal strikes is still offensive, in both meanings of the term.

war is peace etc etc

> The UK doesn't have some imperialist policy of land grabs

Not directly, mostly; and not through land grabs. The age of land grabs is pretty much over - but imperialism lives on in different form - including massive military interventions and covert operations for manipulating or replacing regimes, more that properly conquering and settling lands.

Today's UK is not an independent empire of this kind. It used to be; but now it is relegated to being a junior partner in its alliance with the US empire, mostly, and with the EU, to a lesser extent. This is reflected in its top 10 arms recipients, e.g. for 2024 [1]:

Saudi Arabia, £14bn United States of America, £8.3bn France, £5.2bn Qatar, £3.5bn Italy, £2.8bn Oman, £2.5bn Turkey, £2.3bn India, £2.3bn Norway, £2.2bn United Arab Emirates, £1.7bn

and there are also arms Israel for about £0.572bn; and the arming of Ukraine, a cooperation with both the US and European powers, as part of NATO's struggle against Russia.

The UK also sends troops as part of US imperial interventions, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. There are also UK-dominated or UK-only interventions abroad, but mostly if we go a few decades back [2].

[1] : https://www.thenational.scot/news/24272310.uk-arms-exports--...

[2] : https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-uks-83-military-intervent...

Defensive missions? Was the UK under attack?

They still own Falkland Islands.

You are quite the hypocrite to call the UK not a imperialistic country. They are probably the greatest of them all. They have far more blood on their hands in foreign interventions than Russia and China combined. In fact they are still occupied with abuse and destruction throughout the world. You are naive and victim of propoganda for not seeing this.

>The UK doesn't have some imperialist policy of land grabs

It has centuries of exactly that at a global scale, and continued post-war neo-colonial land grabbing and pressuring, plus eager participation in all the imperialist games of its larger brother.

I mean, just mentioning "Tony Blair" is enough...

Just on the facts,

* assisting US offensive actions,

* weapons sales for offensive usage (eg: The UK government admits that Saudi Arabia has used UK weapons, made by companies around the UK, in its attacks on Yemen.)

He is quite correct though. By calling it "defence" industry, it is insinuated that this is always a moral right use of arms. In reality one would have to look on a case by case basis to see which use really qualifies as defence. In many cases I would not call it defence, for instance, if money is used to overthrow other governments and so forth. Or the Falklands War as an example - technically one could claim the UK had to "defence" its territory, but at the same time one has to question the use of colonies in the first place.

What informs your "probably"?

They are anticipating a flood of complaints from various well-connected groups and individuals that it's an unfair hit piece. They want to be able to point to all the "Hey, we didn't say this ACTUALLY MATTERED" disclaimers they front-loaded it with.

> The UK does have a few right wing pro Russia people

"Right wing" people like George Galloway? Put your obvious bias aside for a moment and just say "a few pro Russia people".