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Comment by tropo | Hacker News Reader

The example puts Fox at one extreme. Uh, might this be your own filter bubble? Not too long ago, there was a study posted here with statistics-derived positioning that showed Fox being barely right of center. (BTW, can anybody dig that study up?)

FWIW you're missing Drudge Report, Breitbart, Stormfront, The Daily Stormer, The Daily Caller, /r/The_Donald

You had more on the other side, but Mother Jones was notably missing.

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I'm not sure how much value anyone could get from reading the Daily Stormer or Stormfront. These are not conservative sources, they are "third position" sources (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position). I'd also argue that pro-communist, anarchist or tankie sources represent another position that is neither left nor right as it is also opposed to liberalism. Including sources that reject classical liberalism altogether would be valuable, if only to understand the views of extreme positions, but certainly not valid on a left-right scale (in my opinion).

The video is just a demo. There will be news to the right of Fox News, don't worry. Also note that the farthest left source shown is HuffPo. We'll likely include farther left sources also, like Occupy Democrats. Ultimately, the list of sources will be driven by the crowdsourced voting. There is also voting on partisanship ratings.

Thanks for pointing out how this could come across though. We certainly don't want to turn anyone off, even inadvertently.

> FWIW you're missing Drudge Report, Breitbart, Stormfront, The Daily Stormer, The Daily Caller, /r/The_Donald

News?

Breitbart and The Daily Caller are definitely news sources. The_Donald and Drudge Report are news aggregators, and Stormfront and the Daily Stormer are "third position" i.e. fascist/nazi sites that reject both liberalism and conservatism.

FWIW the list misses a large number of right-wing outlets, but that's likely to do with the author's lack of familiarity.

The center is defined constructively as "news presented in order of significance and without providing commentary". These are objective metrics, though they are very hard to calculate. And while any particular ranking is likely to be subjective, the standard is not.

The news is infinite though. Inconvenient news could be left out, and that would still meet your standard.

There is also the matter of the English language having numerous ways to express the same thing. Choice of words matters, even if the cold facts don't change. Example: did the cars collide, crash, hit each other, smash into each other, or have an accident? Was the child spanked, swatted, hit, whacked, struck, or paddled?

I said ordered by significance. If something is left out of my ideally objective news outlet, then it was, by construction, less significant than the things that were included.

To address your second point, connotation is objectively a part of meaning. I did not merely require that this ideally objective news source SEEM objective. It has to actually be objective.

Frankly, the argument you made was that the existence of "farther right wing" media pushed fox towards the center.

All I have to do is demonstrate that there exists an objective presentation of newsworthy facts, even if only in an abstract sense, and then show that fox has not changed its position relative to itself, over time, to show that your argument is false.

Centered does not mean average, when it comes to reporting, it means objective.

It's not the existence of "farther right wing" media that puts fox near the center, though that is suggestive. It's the fact that fox more closely aligns with mainstream opinion.

Ah, here, this looks like a story on the study I remember:

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outl...

For your convenience, it links to this:

http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/

http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...

Great links! We were planning on using some of the Pew polling data in our partisanship determinations, since in some ways the question is not "what is left and what is right" — it's "what is outside of your bubble"?

objectivity is very different from mainstream

that doesn't make sense, because if your scale is based on subjectivity vs objectivity, there is no partisan divide. There is just objective journalism approaching one side (approaching, as I don't think any journal could be truly objective without being purely numbers-based) and highly subjective content from any viewpoint approaching the other. That defeats the whole point of reading across the aisle and is more a metric of yellow journalism vs fact reporting. To attempt to split subjectivity onto a left and right wing would be to cause a lot of difficulty determining the limits and whether a report is subjective or objective at a partisan level would inherently be poisoned by the reviewer's own bias.

I'm not trying to measure bias, the statement that I am challenging is that fox news has been moved to the left by the addition of other sources which are to the right of Fox news. This is only the case if the definition of unbiased is "average".

My reasoning is as follows:

Partisan bias is a type of bias. If there exists a way of presenting information without any bias, then it presents information without partisan bias.

if such a method exists, then we do not need to measure news sources relative to each other in order to talk about what qualifies as non-partisan. This means that partisanship is a static quality of a piece of journalism, i.e. any method you propose of measuring partisanship should always give you the same answer for the same piece of journalism.

If you interpreted fox as having a far right bias in 2004, and don't notice any particular change in their reporting, then you should interpret them as having a far right bias now.

but if fox is far right, where does that leave Breitbart? Most would say that Breitbart is more partisan, but you can't just make it "far far right". A scalar with a limit means that as you add new values towards the limit, other values have to shrink towards the root to compensate. Fox was "far right" in 2004 when politics was generally quite centrist, but now that politics has become much more polarised on both sides, fox is still fairly centrist but new, more partisan sources have come along.

Fox's level of partisanship hasn't changed, the environment has, leading Fox's "relative partisanship" to go down.

In that time period, the biggest change has been CNN making a dramatic move to the left. They went from near the center to being out with MSNBC, which was already well to the left and moving left.

With that, we lost the closest thing we had to unbiased mainstream media. It's pretty disturbing that Fox is now the least biased.

I miss the old CNN. :-(

This is a dumb idea. The whole matter is too subjective to be easily quantifiable. In a free country, no one dares to attempt to hold some kind of claim to what is true and what is not true. Any such behavior is akin to what China, East Germany, and the Soviet Union did--they attempt to manage reality for people. It never worked, it doesn't work today. Only the willful foolish are ever tricked by state propaganda.

It's sad that we live in a nation that is so broken that disinformation is a daily problem for each of us, but it is and it is not going away. Your best bet is to remain skeptical of all information at all times.

Also, there is more at play than just reporting of so-called facts. The NY Times will typically run a story and for no reason at all, there will be a paragraph bashing Trump in some way, right in the middle of an otherwise unrelated article. They just find ways to inject stupid editorial opinions into otherwise "clean" news articles.

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