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Comment by lsd5you | Hacker News Reader

There is a perception in right wing circles that this is also related to trumpism, after all this crash is happening with the stock market at an all time high. A lot of these publications are at the 'progressive' end of the spectrum and they may have misread the market, even for their core readers.

Specifically the media (and in particular digital media's) response seems to have been one of all out activism against him may be working against them. People don't explicitly want to be told what to believe. Or listen to people drone on for over a year about the same stories (rightly or wrongly - but at some point it ceases to be news).

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Perhaps one of the reasons that a lot of the struggling media outlets are on the progressive end of the spectrum is that they mostly need to be profitable through advertising whereas the conservative side can be run at a loss while their backers recoup their investments through deregulation and tax cuts. If someone could figure out a similar way to profit from Democratic government, that could solve most of the funding problems for those progressive media outlets.

> they mostly need to be profitable through advertising whereas the conservative side can be run at a loss while their backers recoup their investments through deregulation and tax cuts

This is insane. Show me one conservative-leaning media startup that was saved (or turned profitable!) through "deregulation and tax cuts" without reliance on other streams of revenue.

Unless you somehow mean that a better, faster-growing economy via deregulation and tax cuts results in better business outcomes overall, regardless of political leanings, which I would agree with enthusiastically.

> Show me one conservative-leaning media startup that was saved (or turned profitable!) through "deregulation and tax cuts" without reliance on other streams of revenue

How about two:

https://franklincenterhq.org

https://www.watchdog.org

Notice the complete lack of advertising. It's unlikely that either of these two has much of a revenue stream beyond being funded by the Koch brothers. But Koch industries has made billions being one of the largest polluters in the world. Relaxing EPA guidelines on pollution is a huge business for them. So there's no need for either of those two media outlets to ever make a dime on its own, it just has to provide assistance for Republican politicians who are friendly to their environmental agenda.

Arms distance. It's not the startup being profitable, it's Breitbart being funded by people who make more money off the influence Breitbart has on national discourse than they spend on Breitbart.

> People don't explicitly want to be told what to believe.

The idea that "telling people what to believe" is a phenomenon unique to one side of the political spectrum is absurd. What's been the most watched cable news network in recent years?

"People don't want to be told they're wrong" is a more realistic claim, but a very different one.

But this is happening to non-political media too, so the idea that it's politically driven at all is probably dreamy-eyed wish-fulfillment.

>The idea that "telling people what to believe" is a phenomenon unique to one side of the political spectrum is absurd. What's been the most watched cable news network in recent years?

This is true, but there's an asymmetry here, and it's best summed up by Conquest's Second Law: any organisation not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing. So in the US nowadays we have right-wing media outlets, which are right-wing, and we have everything else, which is left-wing.

Breitbart is right-wing, and Salon is left-wing, and that's fine -- people go to those sites explicitly because they want news from that perspective. It's what the readers want, and it's what they provide. But GQ is a magazine, dating back to the 1930s, ostensibly about men's fashion and suits and watches and cars and things... so why is it filled with left-wing political content and Trump bashing? It doesn't seem to be a sensible business decision, it just seems to be driven by the personal opinions of the editors.

That, I think, is what the OP means about people not being told what to believe. They don't mind it when explicitly political outlets push a political point of view, but when neutral territory (like GQ or football or Entertainment Weekly) gets politicised then that really turns off at least half the population.

I wonder how much media out there is primarily profiting off of anti-Trump endorphins.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. I made a conscious effort to not consume media sources which engage in blatant and one-sided activism. I just want the facts, and all the facts, not just the subset that fits a narrative. And I don’t need the commentary at all. In investigative journalism I want them to tear into both sides of the political spectrum equally, not suppress/ignore one side. I struggle to name a single media outlet that would do that, so I mostly just read tech blogs these days. And then only the subset that don’t insist on shoving their politics down my throat. The Verge is out.

0xbear up-voted, I made a conscious effort to consume media sources which engage in blatant and one-sided anarchism, fact's are only relative to experience there is no narrative. no comment?! political spectrum?! Why would you even bring politics into computer classes?

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