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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

The "newsfeed" pattern is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had. Never has it been so easy to manipulate public opinion at will. 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism. Now anypoliticalblog.com's headline has been promoted to the equal status of an actual news organisation by means of the implicit legitimacy of appearing in a news feed. This insanity has reached a crescendo with the official endorsement of sites like breitbart.com by the White House, and I don't think there's any going back.

It's a psychological hack, and the promoters of this technology know it.

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> 10 years ago there was a such thing as standards in journalism

Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies.

I've seen better journalism from bloody buzzfeed than I have from some of the "proper" news networks in Australia...

>Was there? Because last I checked all that these so called 'reputable' sources of news seem to put out is biased garbage full of misleading data and often blatant lies.

The inculcation of this sentiment is precisely the effect I'm referring to. The waters have become so muddied with nonsense that no one can tell right from wrong anymore. And thus, actual news organizations with trained reporters and fact checkers and a tradition of at least being held to some kind of accountability lose all credibility. It's not a perfect system, but it's one which evolved to solve the exact problems we are facing here. There's a reason Trump attacks the media's credibility on a daily basis. Throwing your hands up and saying "it's all fake news" is precisely what the propagandists want.

Is there a reason most of the MSM attacks Trump's credibility on a daily basis?

The reasons are ratings and political ideology. They know that a lot of people hate Trump so they attack him. Any evidence of wrongdoing on Trump's part is merely a happy extra for the MSM.

If Obama did the same things that Trump does, do you think the MSM would behave the same way?

The MSM have cried wolf so many times that now half the country will not listen if they actually find something solid against Trump.

Whatever your position on Trump, it's hard to think of the MSM as being driven by actual journalism. And that's a real shame for the small number of journalists in the MSM who actually have integrity.

I agree; the right-wing press lacks high quality journalists. Journalists seem to happen to lean left a whole lot more.

If 90% of the press is left leaning, no surprise that 90% of journalists lean left, high and low quality alike.

Um, no, that's not the reason. The people that choose to become journalists often do it for idealistic reasons. They want to enlighten the public about issues they care about. Palestine, for example. Right-wing people generally don't have that many issues they want to tell people about. Everybody already knows how high their taxes are, no journalism needed.

Let me assure you right wing people have as many issues they want to tell people about as left wing people. You might not like them or consider them idealistic, but they do. To be blunt, your comment comes off like you live in a left wing enclave and you have no real human experience with people with differing believes. Which is funny, because that is also how modern journalism comes off - privileged white rich kids at liberal schools who then shuttle down to the equally liberal newsroom, never interacting with half the country.

It is almost as if reality has a left-wing bias.

This is a convenient fiction.

There are plenty of right-wing journalists who have similar quality to left wing. Publishers like The National Review have fine writers and it is hard to argue the a publication founded by William F. Buckley is some liberal organisation.

The "problem" is that all these organizations are critical of Trump too.

>The National Review

And who else?

Certain other commentary magazines (eg Weekly Standard and Commentary), think tanks (AEI, Heritage, Cato), business newspapers (Wall Street Journal).

I do think there is an issue in that these sort of commentators have much less visibility than before in American politics, so it's easy to form a negative opinion about right wing journalism. Partially as a result, I can name several commentators that have migrated from "Republican conservative" to a more "independent" oriented stance. Names like David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, David Brooks, and George Will come to mind. None of these names are 100% "liberal", neither are still today. They just don't fit well with right-wing media that has increasingly become populist.

It is probably my bias, but I can't think of a similar type of left-wing commentator that's made the same transition. On the other hand, I've noticed increased populism in more left-oriented media too...

This is a shame, because even when these type of commentators were at their most raucous, I always got the impression that both sides respected each other. (You saw the same thing at, say the Supreme Court, where Scalia and Ginsburg were friends.) A lot of media these days in contrast is extremely us vs. them and tribal oriented, with seemingly no respect for the other side at all.

> Is there a reason most of the MSM attacks Trump's credibility on a daily basis?

1. He's the most powerful head of state on the planet. 2. He's demonstrably not fit for the job. 3. IT'S THEIR DAMN JOB.

1. Yes 2. By your criteria 3. Their job is to inform the public, not to make things up

I don't even like the man, yet I am compelled to defend him against what I see as a greater injustice.

I'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're blaming blogs and online media for the decline in credibility of newspapers.

Newspapers aren't credible anymore because they continuously make the conscious decision to run bullshit stories full of twisted truths in the pursuit of sales, as they have always done. The only reason they had any credibility before is because people blindly accepted what they said without the tools to verify it.

They've had the same amount of journalistic integrity as they've always had. I.E plenty until there's a buck to be made by forgoing it.

> Newspapers aren't credible anymore because they continuously make the conscious decision to run bullshit stories full of twisted truths in the pursuit of sales, as they have always done.

Sources for that claim please?

Of course there were always plenty of papers that operated like that (tabloids etc), but I doubt they were as influential in main political discussion as e.g. Fox News seems to be today.

>I doubt they were as influential in main political discussion as e.g. Fox News seems to be today.

Why do you assume that? Absolute garbage tabloids have been influencing elections and dominating mainstream political discourse in western countries for decades[1]. In the UK an entire political ideology was created to try and work around the influence of right wing mass media (spoiler: the answer was allowing media barons to dictate policy).

If anything tabloid influence is lower today than in the past. Compare the result of the 1992 UK general election with the 2017 one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_The_Sun_Wot_Won_It

You've clearly not seen the UK press. The Daily Mail has been around for decades, and has quality standards roughly on par with Fox News at best. The tabloids have spent years posting any old speculation they can find and sometimes even hacking people's phones for information.

And the more respectable papers have generally had their own problems with reporting standards. The likes of the Guardian and the Telegraph should be on the lower end of what's considered journalism, not the upper one.

Honestly, the introduction of online news sources has probably helped in a lot of ways, because it meant people might at last be checking information from sources other than tabloids. There's at least a niche for good quality journalism online now rather than it being an 'occasional' fixture in some newspapers on a good day.

Ah, the UK press. How did that happen? Why do the British like that sort of thing?

And I'd also add that the Greek press is also garbage. They don't turn a profit at all and are simply propaganda for their owner's point of view. Their owners usually being family-owned conglomerates. It's as if the Kochs started their own newspaper. I get the impression this is actually pretty common in many countries, particularly eastern European ones.

South America too

I find LeMondediplomatique (in all it's countries regions) to be a light in the darkness of propaganda. Check it out

Makes you wonder if countries with good quality newspapers and media outlets are the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe the US just kind of lucked out there.

Wait. You think the US has good quality newspapers and media outlets?

I can't think of one "reputable" US news outlet that hasn't knowingly spread misinformation or half-truths at least once over the past year.

The "good" sources are generally the least bad ones that happen to confirm your biases more than the rest.

It's relative. From my point of view as an outsider the US print media scene appears to be dominated by what I'd describe as broadsheets (NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, LA Times etc). These papers can at times be pretty bad and I don't agree with the editorial position of any of them but even something like the WSJ which will publish crazy climate change conspiracy theories is in a different league to the papers that dominate in the UK: The Sun and Daily Mail. Imagine that the most widely read US paper by far was the National Enquirer and that it was treated as a serious and important paper by other media outlets and political parties.

I can't help laughing at your quaint idea that spreading misinformation "at least once over the past year" is a major offence. Dozens of major inaccuracies (with blatant political motivation) per day is the kind of standard we are talking about here.

Not to mention the abhorrent behaviour of journalists towards victims of crime etc in trying to get stories, which is a whole other side to the UK media which probably isn't appreciated from the outside.

Let's stress – some of the UK press. The Express, Daily Mail, the Sun, and so on. Tabloid journalism is still a thing, and has been present for an awfully long time globally – it's not a new thing, nor particular to the UK.

But then there's also The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist, the FT – all of which have bias and flaws in their own way, but are indisputably higher-quality.

The mistake is in assuming that there can ever really be a realistic, completely-free-from-influence publication. In reality, we have to rely on a diversity of publications, funding models and political viewpoints, and make informed decisions. This needs to be backed by strong FOI laws and a culture of press freedom, which sadly is something which the UK has not been doing well at recently.

These are the current headlines of http://wsj.com and the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com).

Please point out which stories, specifically, are "blatant lies", or "biased garbage".

WSJ:

- Investors Brace for Clues on ECB’s Tapering Plans

- Fed Faces Inflation Riddle

- Top Court Revises Trump Travel Ban Scope

- Bank Earnings Highlight Diverging Paths Since Crisis

- How a Saudi Prince Unseated Heir Apparent

- Trump Urges GOP to Seek Agreement on Health Measure

- Sen. John McCain Diagnosed With Brain Cancer

- Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort to Speak to Senate Panels

- Where Will Banks Go After Brexit? Frankfurt Takes Lead

- Tech Stocks Eclipse Record From Dot-Com Era

- Court Overturns Convictions of Two in Libor Scandal

NYT:

- Two Weeks on Ice in McMurdo Station, Antarctica

- McCain Has Brain Cancer; Tumor Was Found in Surgery

- Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions

- Trump Loans From Deutsche Bank Face Regulatory Scrutin

- China Woos Myanmar as U.S. Focus in the Region Wane

- Getting High in Uruguay Is Now a Pharmacy Stop Away

- Somalis in Minneapolis Shocked by Police Shooting

- President Persists on Health Bill, Urging Senators to Revive It

- Opinion: Gustavo Dudamel: A Better Way for Venezuela

- Opinion: Charlie Gard and Our Moral Confusion

- Editorial: The Dark History of Defining ‘Family’

Other front page stories from New York Times.

-How Fear of Falling Explains the Love of Trump

-Trump is his own worst enemy.

-If Dr. Trump were your surgeon.

All of those are op-ed pieces. While still part of the organization, they shouldn't really be used in an argument about reputability of a news source.

Understood.

But "Biased garbage" I think was part of the original statement.

If this doesn't speak to bias of a publication I'm not sure what will. Besides I'm not sure all of the general public understands the difference.

Yellow journalism has been around for forever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

+1. It's very hard to take seriously reputable sources when the work they produce is of such poor quality. Lies, partial truth, clear lobby/politics/companies influences, lack of fact checking... Even the correct ones, doing a decent work, don't provide much interesting analysis or insight.

That's why many people are on sites like HN: we get often more values from the comments that the articles themself.

Like most things in Australia I was impressed by Australian mainstream news outlets (coming from the US). I have a memory of reading the comments after an article on a real estate related story published by one of the bigger newspapers and being genuinely impressed by the quality of the reader discussion.

That kind of feedback and engagement is the only thing that can keep journalism standards high I think.

Can you remember which newspaper? There are second/third-tier news sources in Australia that might have quality discussion, but generally it's pretty appalling.

I haven't seen any of them make a solid play at community-oriented commentary - things like persistent identities, karma systems, etc. Baffles me when sites like HN and Reddit are visited as much for their comments as the source articles. So many of the comments on mainstream news sites are drive-by insults instead.

It was legal required in the US for the news to be at least "factual" until... /checks .... a 2003 appeals court ruling.

"Actual news organizations" don't exist in the sense we'd like. They're all agenda driven and constantly lie by omission.

Breitbart is shamelessly pro-Trump. They will publish stories that others won't but also won't publish anything counter to their narrative.

The Guardian, which someone else mentioned, is massively left-leaning and is also very selective about what they cover. Their articles are often poorly thought out and extremely regressive.

Both sources are poison if taken in isolation, without the antidote of the other.

The MSM have earned the lack of trust they receive. Anyone who wants to end up receiving an approximation of overall truth will consume a variety of sources with different biases.

I unfortunately and reluctantly am forced to agree with you. Except about Breitbart being legitimate (sorry, can't do it).

My dad explained this to me very crudely some years ago, (but as he's a Daily Mail reader I dismiss everything he says by default).

In this case though, it really does require you to read broadly to get out of your opinion bubble.

The BBC is a perfect case study of this. It's got a charter that is supposed to make it explicitly neutral, but of course that's unenforceable in reality (what's biased and not is going to be a matter of opinion), as evidenced by their approach anytime the question of the license fee comes up in public discourse.

There's probably money to be made by crawling a variety of news sources, throwing the output into an AI fanoogler, and using it to write a separate article that balances the views on the given topic as a separate news site.

Obviously I'll require majority equity. Fanoogler R&D isn't cheap you know.

I made up the word fanoogler thinking it didn't already exist.

I just googled it in case it already exists and has offensive overtones, and this turned up:

"To scam someone out of something they owe you but do not want to give you."

Deep, yo.

Reuters maybe? They actively try for neutral coverage.

edit: But yeah, organizations of people with biases can't be perfectly neutral

Ideally, we'd all read something like Reuters or AP* . The problem is that because there isn't any bias, the stories tend to be quite dry. While that's great for impartiality, people get bored reading it. The BBC has a problem where they have to be impartial and non-accusatory, so articles are plagued with quote marks (e.g "The minister said he was 'shocked' ").

The majority of people read the papers because they want to read something sensationalist from their point of view.

* Actually what everyone should do is read a spectrum of papers from left to right wing. This avoids the bias problem because it becomes immediately obvious and it forces you to think about what the real story might be.

I honestly don't believe breitbart and the guardian are equally bad. There have always been varying degrees of bias and different degrees of standards.

The right spins this as everyone is equally biased in order to justify there readers picking their own alternative facts to justify whatever positions they hold however improbable.

You may be correct but surely you recognize that the left can just as easily be accused of the same bias you attribute to the right?

The real problem is diverging narratives and very little constructive communication between. Both sides have very valid concerns that aren't understood by the other.

Equating Breitbart and the Guardian shows your bias I'm afraid. Something like the Huffington Post would have been a better comparison.

I didn't really equate them, I just used as them as examples since they'd both already been mentioned.

Also, don't you think that suggesting Breitbart is worse than the Guardian might point to your own bias?

The Guardian is designed to look less like a tabloid, which gives the appearance of it being more honest - but is it really a less biased source of news? It's very hard to judge such things.

I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years. Someone else might contend those elements are warranted.

The differences in news reporting today seems to come down to the values we prioritize and the narratives that push them.

So because you don't like what they write, they're biased?

That's effectively what is happening with media consumption. Beause of special interests and ideologies, it's very hard to tell how biased or honest information really is without doing a lot of research.

Ideally, journalists would do that research for us and present the information as objectively as possible. And we would trust them. But doing that takes a lot of time and doesn't result in a lot of clicks.

>I've been reading the Guardian for a long time and I've noticed it's been embracing some of the more unsavory elements of the left in recent years.

What elements? If you mean deliberately antagonistic opinion pieces from transphobic feminists (TERFs) then yes you're right. But I'm guessing that's probably not what you were referring to. If you mean run of the mill socialists then I can't see any truth to your claim - there's a small handful now and it's mostly the same small handful they published 10 years ago (Monbiot, Jones, previously Milne, and a couple of others). The Guardian as an institution hates socialism, even if it occasionally allows a mild opinion piece from a socialist about how it might be nice to raise the top rate of tax by 1% to pay for hospitals.

Other than an increase in the amount of clickbait the Guardian is mostly the same as it was 10 or 20 years ago. The editorial position has actually shifted to the right slightly since Viner took over. But historically it's always been a liberal paper. It supported the SDP, has supported the Lib Dems at various times, supported Blair and supported Iraq.

Part of liberalism involves giving voice to any old opinion no matter how dangerous, crazy, offensive or wrong, at least as long as it comes from the elite class and doesn't do anything as gauche as question the property rights of the wealthy middle class readership (coincidentally this leads to great clickbait on a lot of social and religious issues). So that's why you see the Guardian doing things like publishing articles by Ergodan or other fairly repulsive people as well as hosting flamewars over atheism/islam/feminism/cultural appropriation etc. It's not being left wing that leads to any of that. If it was a left wing paper it would contain far fewer articles of that type because the left wing generally doesn't subscribe to a "free market of ideas" like liberals do.

I can think of several common opinions surrounding Islam, gender and culture that the Guardian would not publish today. So I don't believe its as liberal as you say.

If you are making these statements, you need to identify the things you think will not be published.

It's very easy to whip out an accusation like "This would never be published" if you never say what "this" is.

I'd love to specifically describe what wouldn't be published. However, last time I wrote about one of them on HN I was very quickly flagged.

It is possible to be biased and still behave in a fair minded way. In some media the trend is towards intentional misreporting to drive a particular agenda. This does not exactly promote constructive communication. And when the publication aligns with your own views it is easier to forgive.

The Guardian is at most slightly left-leaning.

For a massively left-leaning publication, you need to look to something like the Morning Star: https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/

This is false equivalence.

It's comforting to think that Breitbart and The Guardian are equally biased, and if you average them together, you get the truth.

But I'd challenge you to find headlines on The Guardian that match Breitbart stories like these:

"Pro-Nazi Roots of Planned Parenthood Revealed"

"The Solution to Online Harassment is Simple: Women Should Log Off"

"Huma Abedin Most Likely a Saudi Spy With Deep Inarguable Connections to Global Terrorist Entity"

"Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy"

It'd be more productive to compare the substance of articles and not their clickbait headlines. For example that last headline in your list is incendiary but the points it makes are well cited.

From memory here are a couple of Guardian headlines:

"Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency"

"Have we reached peak beard?"

And here's a couple they're serving up right now:

"'Soon you'll be able to afford a BBC man' / Emily Maitlis mocks pay gap at conference"

"'Bigger than yours' / Randy Newman writes song about Donald Trump's penis"

"Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping"

Not exactly indicative of unbiased, quality journalism. But never mind, because how much do cherry picked headlines really tell us?

The "click bait headlines" are part of their substance. And, in many instances, it is the substance -- as it's the only part of the article people do read.

With the exception of Peter Dutton's new mega department will streamline dog whistling and fear whipping I cant see how you could compare these with the Breitbart articles in anyway.

For example, "Your worst nightmare: a successful Donald Trump Presidency" is an article critical of the left(!) The headline itself comes from the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson. The complete quote is:

“I think one of the things Guardian readers, and their counterparts on the American coasts, don’t want to think about is the possibility that despite his obvious ineptitude, Trump might actually be successful.

“I said last summer to a bunch of liberal friends: ‘Your worst nightmare is not a Trump presidency; it’s a successful Trump presidency.’ The successful Trump presidency scenario is one in which, despite it all, the economy does better thanks to deregulation and tax cuts, foreign policy delivers some big wins on North Korea, the Middle East.

“It doesn’t take an awful lot for a president to start looking good. If the expectations start really low, which they have done, it may be one win, and I definitely don’t rule out a kind of ‘success in spite of himself’ scenario. And then you begin to wonder if a left-of-Clinton Democrat in 2020 would be blown away. We’ll see. The fun thing about doing history is you really can’t tell at this point which way it will go. It could quite easily go Jimmy Carter and he could be a lame duck.”

I just don't see how you can compare this to the Breitbart "reporting".

>The Guardian, which someone else mentioned, is massively left-leaning

It really isn't. It's a liberal paper not a left wing one. That's not a theoretical distinction; you just need to look at their coverage of the UK Labour party over the last 2 years to see that.

It does publish a range of people in the opinion pages, including conservatives and socialists, but the reporters and most importantly editors are nearly all liberals. That's what informs which articles get published and which anonymous "senior labour party insider" they quote in the headlines and front page news stories.

Fair enough. I'll dial 'massively' back to 'significantly'.

Let's not forget that standard media diet includes Fox News and One America Network (which has ~15% the viewer count of Fox News). Old media isn't necessarily great at filtering out nonsense.

Though I agree that the newsfeed tends to put these things next to the NYT or the Guardian, I feel like "page rank"-y stuff could help smooth this out. I've already seen improvements to my FB newsfeed for this kind of stuff over the yearse.

As a longtime Guardian reader, I'd be careful about implicitly declaring the Guardian as any more "legitimate" than anyone else.

Can't speak on the topic of NYT, but at least in the case of the Guardian, it's clearly lowered its standards over the last several years to find a market.

(I still read it, but it's slowly becoming a left-wing Daily Mail cough Owen Jones cough, which is really disappointing).

That recent article about the rebellious self-owned Greek factory was case in point.

Great story, but the journalism was lacking significantly.

Yep, I read the Guardian's Australian edition every now and then and some of their stuff is absolute rubbish.

I'd love to know what the go-to center-left news source is over here. So far I haven't found it...

bloomberg.com, I think. Many of their articles border on totally apolitical.

edit to add: their core business isn't actually selling ads on news articles, which also helps quite a bit.

That's quite interesting to me.

I was always under the impression that Bloomberg was the non-WWE version of CNBC (i.e. primarily markets news, without Cramer's hysterics).

Will have to check it out again if its got broader coverage than I realized. Thanks for the tip!

Echoing some of the other replies to your comment, The Guardian has really gone down in its quality of journalism.

Not saying I like the current climate at all but TV stations and newspapers have always had their own bias and "newsfeed" so to speak. Is it really easier today than before to surround yourself with news that lacks credibility? There's always been junk newspapers and junk TV news channels.

People need to develop their own critical thinking skills and not rely on e.g. a specific newspaper they believe to have standards to do their thinking for them. I mean do you personally have an issue with identifying inaccurate news stories? If not, why not? People that want to believe obviously made up news are going to find some way to get their fix of news like that whether Google or Facebook filter it out for them or not.

What rock have you been living under? You could put one TV on MSNBC and one on Fox News in 1997 and 2017 and it would be about the same result.

I'd also like to remind you, it's not just quality of coverage that matters, it's what you cover.

Human nature was always as easy to manipulate. It was just never so transparent.

Is there an app/portal that, at least, just tries to provide unbiased and unadultrated news (just aggregation; if not the source of the article/post) for events from

(a.) particular country (b.) around the world (c.) and maybe few topics of interest (or not)

with a clean and simple interface w/o those fancy "social features" and not based on "trending" and "highly voted" features and charges a fee?

I may have agreed with you at some point in my nearly century long news junkie-hood, but now i rule by this:

"i dont need to know about a person i will never meet or a place i will never go."

Most of any media is junk

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