Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

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The Trump campaign exposed some serious problems with traditional newspaper reporting, which tries to be even-handed. This is based on the assumption that presidential candidates will generally be honest, and will generally base their arguments on facts. Trump broke that convention by basing his political career (starting with Birtherism) on lies, which led to "false equivalence" in the coverage.

In other words, serious reporting (as opposed to opinion pieces) treated lies as though they were truths. This could only be considered harmful.

There has been quite a lot of discussion around this. See, for example:

The Death of 'He Said, She Said' Journalism http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/the-deat...

Big lie, little lie, and the media’s role in telling the difference http://www.cjr.org/criticism/trump_birtherism_lie_media.php

It’s Not Too Late for the Media to Fix Its Election Coverage: A final plea for sanity in how we report on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. https://newrepublic.com/article/136848/its-not-late-media-fi...

Thanks for the links.

There's also the issue of false balance (Edit: which is the point of your links, actually, so I'm just stating explicitly). I think the media, in an attempt to appear more unbiased, has been more giving air to statements which are misleading or arguably not true. Politicians have noticed this and taken advantage of it. (This is independent of actual bias in the media.)

Things may be about to get much, much worse, because Trump is an obvious threat to America's First Amendment rights:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/our-first-ame...

Including three tweets in a hour just yesterday strongly condemning the NYT for simply repeating his goal of nuclearizing Japan and S Korea eg [1]

[1]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/79783222980005068...

I can hear the arguments now: "Of course the MSM is going to say that! They're obviously biased against Trump! They're just representing their own selfish interest!"

Yup. A lot of media organizations endorsed Clinton over Trump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...

I've been (admittedly amateurishly) looking for research on media bias. Research is limited by its methods, and researchers hold opinions, results can be subject to confirmation bias, so this whole area is difficult for the every day person to sift through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...

I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success. The question to me is how much bias there is, how we can keep that in mind, and how we can agree on some shared understanding of facts.

It's also in the interest of these organizations to support the First Amendment. Hard to ask them to be against — or even neutral — the First Amendment, just as we'd expect for any business to support aspects of the Constitution or law that are in their own self interest (regardless of whether we agree with it).

It's also in the interest of Americans in general for strong First Amendment rights. It has broad support across parties. This kind of nuance doesn't fit easily in 140 characters or support the easy "us vs them" characterization.

> Yup. A lot of media organizations endorsed Clinton over Trump.

Pretty hard to endorse Trump, given that he's a crooked racist and narcissist, a sexual predator, a pathological liar, and wholly unqualified for any public office. Given what he said in his speeches, not many companies would even hire him.

As a result, even Republican newspapers broke with tradition and endorsed HRC, except for one Las Vegas paper owned by one of Trump's backers.

> I find it hard to believe that no bias exists, and I think a lot of journalists try to be objective, with varying success.

There's a strong bias towards getting the truth reported, which is why the leading newspapers have trained journalists, fact checkers, subeditors etc, plus ombudsmen to handle complaints.

If you have the facts then you can argue about causes and solutions, and you might have (say) a more Democratic or a more Republican approach to those. Those opinions may involve denying at least some of the facts, but people generally choose the outlets that suit their own opinions.

The problems start when news outlets no longer care about facts, like Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge etc. Fox actually argued in court that it wasn't obliged to tell the truth because it was an entertainment channel.

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