Hacker News Reader

Comment by swernli | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion: The Daily Show and/or Colbert Report. I guess you could say their only bias is toward comedic pessimism. Is it sad to say that a comedy network has become what I believe to be the least biased news? Or is it just our modern evolution of what has always been the place of good satire: to criticize, under the guise of comedy, that which "serious" outlets dare not discuss?

View on HN

I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Aside from not really being news, it's hardly unbiased. Perhaps the real issue is that there is no such thing as unbiased.

Personally I read The Economist and subscribe to a bunch of sections on news.google.com. In the end you have to make up your own mind.

Good point. I made the classic mistake of forgetting to correct for my own bias :). That said, I at least appreciate that they make fun of the parties on both the left and right, which are more and more becoming paradies of themselves rather than collections of reasonable human beings interested in debate and compromise. However I think the most important point is exactly what you and several other people have said: get lots of input and make up your own mind. I'm not sure how many people are interested in doing the legwork though...

>Is it sad to say that a comedy network has become what I believe to be the least biased news?

Both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are very biased, by their own account. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but they can't really be seen as unbiased.

Personally, I think the rise of comedy news shows isn't a good thing. Stewart & Colbert's first commitment is to entertainment, and they choose stories that are good comic material, not ones that are necessarily important.

Perhaps, then, this whole discussion is moot, for as Stephen Colbert would have it, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com