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Comment by forgottenpass | Hacker News Reader

And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post

Yea, yeah it is. I'm a liberal and can see how HuffPo is trash. I might be willing to grant that HuffPo uses softer titles and hides their outrage/fear/hate-mongering slightly better. Maybe it's not just seeing them as more tame because they're more agreeable to one's politics.

But as I was writing this comment I flipped over to both to check their headlines. Right now HuffPo [0] looks exactly like the Drudge Report when they think they've got something juicy. Does nobody else think that font treatment should be saved for a "holy shit airplanes just hit the twin towers" level of importance and immediacy?

Spoiler alert: HuffPo is no better than Breitbart. In fact they share a co-founded, Andrew Breitbart.

[0] http://archive.is/jAnzR

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On a lark, I registered as a republican back in 2008 specifically so I could vote for Obama as a republican. That action, however, got me registered to all sorts of conservative mailing lists that initially boggled my mind with how full they are of pure sh*t. At first it was amusing how crackpot and deranged they could be, but it quickly just became sad and/or scary. Since I am fairly liberal, I am also registered to quite a few dem mailing lists, and the comparison isn't even close. The liberal mailing lists and news sources I might describe as having click-bait headlines, or be a bit too bleeding-heart for my tastes, but the conservative side of the aisle is almost pure fear, mis-truths and hate mongering.

I can second that. I'm a liberal (well, sort of - more like strongly left-leaning libertarian), but I'm also [sanely] pro-gun, and so I am, or was, a member of various corresponding organizations. It appears that they share member lists, because I'm also getting a bunch of Republican political spam, both email and snail mail.

And yes, it is definitely much more nutty than anything I've ever got from being a member of ACLU, or subscribing to various Dem mailing lists in this cycle. Your description is spot-on - left-wing political spam tends to be click-baity and appeal to emotion, while right-wing one is chock full of debunked conspiracy theories and blatant fear-mongering.

Huff Post is complete trash, but there is a big difference between fabricated stories and garbage presentation.

Well if we're comparing Breitbart and HuffPo I'd say that they're equally mendacious.

Breitbart trades in hyperbole - they will tell us straight up that refugees are mugging grannies which proves Europe has fallen or some such.

HuffPo peddles distortion - their articles come wrapped in intentionally misleading statistics, righteous indignation and snark.

Both terrible. Both hugely popular. I weep for the web.

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