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Comment by warfangle | Hacker News Reader

> The news media has their own agenda, we shouldn't use "what they choose to write about" as a barometer.

I don't like this logic. It presumes that there's some dark cabal of web journalists conspiring to change the world.

Unfortunately their agenda is typically, 'will we get advertising revenue from our target demographic by publishing this?'

Nothing more sinister than that.

And given this was published to, uh, a _news site for and about POC_ and not a tech news site.... (take a look at the domain, maybe?) what nefarious agenda could they POSSIBLY be running? Maybe one that promotes POC, and responds positively to a company that celebrates its diversity?

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Frankly, this is wilfully ignorant. To suggest that the production of media is devoid of political or ideological interest beyond ad dollars is, I think, stretching the boundary of believability to a breaking point.

Well, sure. It's pretty impossible to be completely unbiased.

But the parent of my comment couched the phrase as if there's some dark cabal pushing some evil agenda. It reeked of a cis-gendered cis-sexual white male privilege soaked persecution complex.

You lost me with your jargon, not sure what your point is there.

Regardless, being _biased_ is most definitely _not_ the substance of any interesting critique of media. Rather, it's trivially obvious that the production of media is intricately related to ideological beliefs and political agendas - precisely because media is the primary tool of mass persuasion. Look no further than the long, storied history of newspaper barons.

Fundamentally, media functions as a legitimation strategy for normative beliefs; a structure for the normalization of acceptable opinion.

That's a really, really big (and insulting) leap you made there.

I didn't say it was sinister, I just said that we shouldn't use the existence of this article as a barometer of the problems in the industry.

> 'will we get advertising revenue from our target demographic by publishing this?'

I agree this is the most likely agenda. But it's not the agenda I want to use to determine what to do in this industry.

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