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Comment by hyperdunc | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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".

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.

>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'.

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.

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/

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