Comment by outlace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outlace | Hacker News Reader

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Some people say it's impossible to have unbiased news. Of course this is true in a trivial sense, in that anything written by a human with intent to be interesting to read is likely to have some bias. And of course one can bias the news simply by choosing what to report and not report (eg if all you report are all the things fmr Pres. Bush did wrong, then the audience will get a bad impression).

However, there is absolutely a difference between journalists attempting to report news in a neutral way and journalists intent on spinning news to forward some agenda, even to the point of using strategic omissions and what not to completely mislead the reader about a conclusion.

Moreover, a reasonably intelligent human can (and should) read a variety of new sources (that at least attempt to be unbiased) and generally can get an idea of what actually is going on. When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.

>> When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.

You list three left-leaning news organisations, and expect their biases to cancel out? Wouldn't they reinforce each other?

I am not accusing you personally of this, but the tactic of continually accusing more and more mainstream publications of being left-leaning in order to make room for e.g. Breitbart / InfoWars is becoming increasingly common, and it's a wholly fallacious argument. All you need to do is push the boundary of the extreme right quite far along and all the sudden all ordinary news outlets lean "left" by comparison.

There is wide-spread consensus that BBC, NPR and NYT are left leaning.

But this is not about right/left anymore - the scary fact (and becoming patently obvious to more and more people) is the fact that all "mainstream" media is pro-establishment (whether it is left or right is less important). That's why outlets like Breitbart, warts and all, have been gaining so much popularity.

I know there are extreme right-wing news outlets, but there are also moderate "sensible" ones as well - the Daily Telegraph and Spectator in the UK, even the Daily Mail.

Breitbart isn't the anti-NYT, it's the anti-Daily Kos.

To be fair, the opposite is true as well.

Absolutely - it's less about left/right and more about "I can discredit reasonable sources as biased by recalibrating what bias means based on these extreme outliers"

It is a sad reality that by now much all "right-leaning" media in the US freely lets unchecked lies permeate their reporting. This is true even for the WSJ's political news, let alone USA Today or Fox News which give equal space to fact and fiction.

Pretty much the only readable right wing media is foreign - but if he had suggested The Economist or the Financial Times you probably would have called them left-leaning too...

I'd have thought the WSJ was pretty reliable. I'm not sure whether they permeate lies, but on the other side you have the NYT giving Hilary's campaign team copy-approval on what they write.

If you're after other right-wing UK publications you could try the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator.

Both the WSJ and The Economist represent interests of the Republican Party elite (WSJ) or the globalist elite (The Economist)

I could not believe my eyes when I saw The Economist devoting a full page to Trump's badly-fitting suits and overly-long ties, but musing over Clinton's numerous corruption scandals, because she is the preferred globalist candidate.

I am sad that even The Economist has fallen - I have been a subscriber for 25 years. Perhaps not much longer.

I agree with you on the Economist. Their Brexit coverage has been shocking.

Whether or not those three have a similar political viewpoint, they probably have different regional viewpoints, so there's still some value in combining them.

Almost any combination will omit some political stance. I don't believe that political viewpoints are binary, or even that they vary only along a single dimension.

I'd say US news sources strive to hard to be "fair" where their definition of fair is based on a prior of both sides being on opposite sides, but equally distant, from some "center".

I can't go to CNN (what most on the "right" would consider "left") most days without seeing some headline about Trump unaccompanied by a headline about Hillary, in what I can presume is an attempt to be "balanced". The headlines are crafted to make things look equally revelatory. But when you read the articles you find that one is a serious strike (saying shocking things on a mic), and the other is usually a non-story, ie. leaked emails showing the candidate saying pretty much exactly what their public stance has been all along.

Do you mean establishment leaning rather than left-leaning, that's what I heard from trump and bernie people.

BBC news is not left leaning. They're frequently criticised by the left in the UK for attacking the left.

They certainly are left-leaning. I'm not saying they are Labour party supporters, but they certainly espouse the same position as the Guardian on many subjects.

It's also very difficult to write neutral news.

For instance an event where an old man drives his car into a wall. A neutral headline could be "Old man drives car into wall". But the problem with this is that a lot of people will now assume he drove it into the wall because he is old. So a better neutral headline would be "Man drives car into wall" and then the article has to explain the reason. This is a very subtle change but makes a lot of difference.

Now lets say an old woman drove her car into a wall: "Woman drives car into wall". A lot of people think women are worse drivers than men, so this will already be a sensational title for some.

A good read about this is "Why you should stay away from news" from Rolf Dobelli.

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