A lot of us here in the United States who are pickled in news about electoral politics at this time of year don't appreciate stories that are purely about electoral politics creeping on to Hacker News. The guidelines here say, after all, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I'm familiar with how to find Matt Taibbi's stories published in Rolling Stone, and I don't usually find them up to the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" standard expected here on Hacker News. This particular article digs into how a piece published online by the New York Times gradually underwent editing after first publication, which is interesting to any of us who do online publishing, so I thank the participant here who kindly submitted it, but it's apparent that most comments here are responding to the headline, or to the campaign in general, and not to the article's content at all.
But I would say this falls under "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". News pieces with large audiences being largely edited to deliver a different message after they've "gone viral" is similar to a high traffic website being hacked to deliver a message about something else.
I agree that the topic you mention is interesting, but the article as posted is practically guaranteed to devolve into political discussion rather than a discussion about the point you bring up.
A better article, IMO, would have noted that the NYT does this consistently and has done so in a way that has harmed all candidates, not to mention non presidential conversation. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870347 for another example of this practice.
> A lot of us here in the United States who are pickled in news about electoral politics at this time of year don't appreciate stories that are purely about electoral politics creeping on to Hacker News. The guidelines here say, after all, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Look, if you're going to cite the guidelines, read the whole thing. A little further down on the page:
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click "flag" at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html