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Comment by junkscience2017 | Hacker News Reader

junkscience2017

I predict this will end up somewhere between (HuffPost - celebrity news) on the low end and Atlantic on the high end. Not a news site but a service that crafts content for specific tastes and views with a veneer of respectability... but no dissent. There won't be ads, but most of the typical readers will use adblockers so this is just a moral position.

Fact-gathering is done, it's called Reuters. Or AP. Reuters already fact-gathers in a timely manner and in many languages. Everything else is just opinion pieces disguised as journalism. Increasingly, this also encompasses WaPo and NYT, where most of the content is editorial rather than journalistic. There is actually little demand for another Reuters.

Basically no one with power enters the news business to actually deliver the news. Look at Bezos, Jobs' widow, Koch(s), etc...they are promoting their worldviews and trying to steer society

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That's the thing, Reuters is already an excellent source, and is freely available. They seem to be the most unbiased news source out there: because they sell news to literally everyone, they're forced to be as non-biased as possible. Quote from a popular comment of mine a year ago:

>They might sell the same article to Russia Today, the New York Times, Fox, Al Jazeera, and the Times of India, so they can't cater to one crowd's political biases. I'm serious; all these news sources pay for Reuters articles.

>And even if you don't like Reuters, you've got to respect the speed at which they get out correct news. Before the Twittersphere erupts, before CNN loses its mind, before the alerts on the radio, Reuters has it. And if they don't know something, they say that they don't know it. It can make for frustratingly light articles, but any time I'm annoyed how empty the article is I realize that if it was bigger it'd be fluff or unverified claims.

Ultimately, wire services like Reuters are the best source of unbiased news today. They make their money selling news to papers, not consumers, so blowing small news out of proportion doesn't really help them either: if a paper wants sensationalized news, they're very capable of producing it themselves.

Honestly, I think this project could be interesting to watch, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. If it takes off, I think the biggest plus to it will be investigative journalism that isn't usually done by wire services. But ultimately I think I'll continue to read Reuters for news.

WashPo just broke the allegations against Roy Moore. Before, they did Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations into the Presidents' foundation, and how it channeled donations into his businesses.

The NYT has had dozens of investigative reports in the last year. They were, for example, the first to reveal the meeting of the President's son and advisors with the underbelly of Russian politics. I think they also broke the allegations against Al Franken.

The wire services do valuable work, but they don't investigate. They are a mechanism to lower the costs of journalism by de-duplicating the manpower needed to, for example, attend press conferences. That approach is important, especially in times of financial pressures on journalism. But it doesn't suffice for the fourth estate to fulfil its duty to inform the public.

So I'll preface this with saying I agree with your general point: newspapers are crucial to do important investigative journalism work.

That said, Reuters does do solid investigative journalism work. One example is the Taser scandal recently: https://gijn.org/2017/10/02/how-they-did-it-reuters-massive-... They also have opinion pieces, and long form pieces, although these aren't seen as much as their standard articles.

AP also does some investigative work. For example, "Americans buying salmon for dinner at Walmart or ALDI may inadvertently have subsidized the North Korean government as it builds its nuclear weapons program, an AP investigation has found" https://www.apnews.com/8b493b7df6e147e98d19f3abb5ca090a

Indeed! You’re right, and my third paragraph was wrong

Does anyone besides partisan Democrats really care about Trump possibly having ties to Russians?

The real news has already been broken by WikiLeaks (they are all spying on us) and TheIntercept.

That last site, produces more in-depth investigative reporting than any of the government mouthpieces you have cited.

The only news that is important is news that is hostile to the government on which it is reporting.

The rest is just propaganda.

> Does anyone besides partisan Democrats really care about Trump possibly having ties to Russians?

Literally anyone who cares more about the US, or their own country, more than they do about pushing an ultraconservative agenda. I get not believing the story, or believing it wasn't really that severe. But to just not care?

> The real news has already been broken by WikiLeaks (they are all spying on us) and TheIntercept.

Wikileaks has been exposed as partisan hacks at this point.

how can WaPo and NYT be government mouth pieces when the government is controlled by republicans.

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