Peter Thiel Is Exploring the Creation of a Conservative Cable News Network | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel Is Exploring the Creation of a Conservative Cable News Network

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32 pointssmacktoward75 comments

I realize this idea is a bit old fashioned... but how about a news network where they simply try as hard as they can to report objective reality, and we don't worry about whom that favors?

I don't know about cable news, but istm that's what most high quality, mainstream news outlets (eg NY Times) do. I mean, you can find editorial as well, but good papers tend to do a decent job of keeping that separate from journalism.

I beg to differ. A Harvard study confirmed that news sources have been overwhelmingly left-leaning, especially since Trump.

Even former President Jimmy Carter has said so.

So no, there is no unbiased, high quality mainstream media. There is only biased reporting from the right (Fox) and the left (just about everybody else).

Which study?

Probably this one:

“News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days”[0]

Summary:

“A new report from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzes news coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office.

The report is based on an analysis of news reports in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, the main newscasts of CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, and three European news outlets (The UK’s Financial Times and BBC, and Germany’s ARD).”

——-

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

Here are a few links on the study:

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-harvard-study-c...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-trump-...

So conversative outlets that are much more critical of Trump than they were of Bush are now showing a liberal bias?

"Fox was the only news outlet in the study that came close to giving Trump positive coverage overall, however, there was variation in the tone of Fox’s coverage depending on the topic."

When you consider this line especially, with everything else, it seems more consistent with "Trump is unusually unpopular and criticized" than "the media is even more liberal now."

Maybe you should think about your own biases here, before continuing to equate "negative towards Trump" with "liberal/left"?

If I wanted to write a post criticizing Trump I'd have an incredibly easy time doing it from several right-wing perspectives: religious/moral, small government/individual freedom, anti-corruption/pro-transparency, take your pick. It's all fish in a barrel.

It's a good point that it could be my own biases, or it could be that Trump really is terrible while Obama was just wonderful.

But I don't think those are it. When Jimmy Carter says the media is applying a different standard to Trump, it lends credibility to the idea that they just might be.

I think it's true that the mainstream media may give too much play to stories about fairly innocuous things that Trump has done. I'm not sure that's much different than with previous presidents though. I recall Obama and Bush being criticized for some fairly silly things too.

I honestly believe the difference now is Trump itself. He's uniquely unqualified to be president on every intellectual or moral metric I would consider relevant. Therefore, an objective press would be expected to be far more negative than positive.

The other problem (or clever strategy on the right) is to paint mainstream outlets like NY Times or Washington Post as the 'other side', while basically ignoring truly left-leaning media, like Huffington Post or Vox. In doing so, they portray a spectrum where Fox and Breitbart lean to one side, and NY Times / WaPo lean to the other, with the unbiased position somewhere in the center - when in reality, the average of those publications is pretty far on the conservative side of the spectrum. (Even more so for those who actually believe Fox is 'balanced' and other mainstream outlets are in fact far left.)

I don't think it's necessarily impossible to do good journalism while being biased; I think Vox does a fair amount of good reporting for instance. It is necessary though to clearly distinguish between fact and opinion.

Just noticed my "Trump itself" there. Wasn't an intentional slight; chalk it up to either a typo or a Freudian slip, as you like.

> When Jimmy Carter says the media is applying a different standard to Trump, it lends credibility to the idea that they just might be.

Not really. Carter is a qualified expert in some things, but analyzing media bias is emphatically not one of them. Now, as a statement that seems at odds with Carter's assumed partisan bias, him saying it may be more credible as a genuine statement of belief than of a source said the same thing with either no obvious partisan bias or consistent with obvious partisan bias, but that's not the same as lending credibility to the claim itself.

An equally plausible alternate explanation for the results of the study is that Trump's actions by and large have had negative consequences, and the media is accurately reporting them.

>A Harvard study confirmed that news sources have been overwhelmingly left-leaning, especially since Trump.

Have a link? I know Fox is the most watched cable news network. I assume television is still the majority of the way Americans consume the news.

http://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/fox-news-is-basic-cables-most...

And here's the link to an article on Carter's quote.

Jimmy Carter has been in that seat, and he says the media has been harder on Trump.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017...

I agree on that part of the assertion, that they have been unnecessarily hard (WaPo mostly) on Trump, and they don't even have to be. It dilutes their credibility.

Being overly hard on Trump and being overwhelmingly left-leaning isn't necessarily the same thing though. I mean Lindsay Graham who is fairly conservative went on a Trump slam tour before the election. Mitt Romney did the same thing, as did other conservative leaders.

While I would also appreciate a source, whether Fox is the most watched network doesn't really affect his statement.

I agree, but the right wing news companies have been shouting this for 20 years, and I'm not sure if it's any more true today than it was 20 years ago.

I mean there is a reason Fox blathers on about being most trusted and all that, just like a used car salesman says, "trust me."

Are you talking about this[1] study? Because it doesn't say that the media is "left-leaning". Rather, it says that their coverage of Trump has been more negative than positive (in the first 100 days, the period the study examines). Rather than the result of bias, it could simply be that he's done a bunch of obviously-bad things. Which one can certainly argue.

Another point: the article points out that, despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage, most of the time, they're using his own voice:

What’s truly atypical about Trump’s coverage is that it’s sharply negative despite the fact that he’s the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage. Typically, newsmakers and groups complain that their media narrative is negative because they’re not given a chance to speak for themselves. Over the past decade, U.S. coverage of Muslims has been more than 75 percent negative. And Muslims have had little chance to tell their side of the story. Muslims account for less than 5 percent of the voices heard in news reports about Islam.[31] So why is Trump’s coverage so negative even though he does most of the talking? The fact is, he’s been on the defensive during most of his 100 days in office, trying to put the best face possible on executive orders, legislative initiatives, appointments, and other undertakings that have gone bad.

[1] https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

> So no, there is no unbiased, high quality mainstream media.

At the same time, the first unbiased & objective human being has yet to be found.

While NYTimes might have been that once, I’ve seen multiple times where it’s pretty biased. I think the Iraq War was what broke me, but there’s lots of situations where there is editorial bias. It’s not necessarily liberal, just not based in reality.

I would really like an objective, original, pay news service. No ads. NPR is biased to US, BBC to the UK, Al Jazeera to UAE. I can sort of triangulate, but would like an objective source.

Do you have an example of a biased news piece from the NYT? (Not their editorial section or op-ed section).

There's a section on the NYT wikipedia article detailing many examples with footnotes. Including quotes of Times editors and reporters basically admitting as much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Accusations...

There used to be a monthly news magazine to provide examples of the "Lies of Our Times" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Our_Times

The NYT has a long history of bias in favor of the major powers in the US: the military being one of them: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561532ade4b0fad1591a3193

Also, 'mainstream bias,' for lack or a better term, is still bias. Unjust death and arbitrary transfers of wealth via the military, healthcare lobbies, Wall St, and the Fed Reserve are not any different than murder or theft, they're just part of our economy and education, and our mainstream media sings their praises(it's true of all the mainstream media outlets): https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...

You lost me at "unjust death... is not any different than murder..." Those are clearly different things to me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you?

If a nation's military kills you for profit, that is no different than murder. But our healthcare lobbies also kill people, as do the banks and Fed. That is what I was trying to get at with a general statement, but failed to say accurately.

Every article Paul Krugman has ever written?

That would be the best. I wish it would happen.

Choosing what to show (and what not) is just as important in shaping opinion and worldview while still allowing for objectivity. We have limited time, limited attention spans, and limited concern (or outrage).

For example, one can cover, say, the illegal immigration situation in the US. While a more liberal outlet might focus on humanitarian concerns of the immigrants, the "good ones" leading virtuous lives in the country a conservative one might focus on the humanitarian concerns of Americans, major crime, etc.

What would be nice is an objective outlet that provides reasonable consideration of both sides in a concise manner, analyzes potential benefit and harm, etc. I'm sure this is the "Good, cheap, or fast" of news.

Politically "active material" is, for some reason, the only branch of knowledge that we all seem to agree can't be expressed in words. I can tell you everything known about the effects of... caffeine on general health: all I have to do is start talking, and then not stop until I've said every well-supported, relevant fact. There's absolutely no fundamental reason why I can't put the profile of an undocumented hard-working fruit picker in the same broadcast as a report on a brutal drug-related homicide believed to have involved people here illegally. There are many political reasons why I wouldn't do that, most of them related to the motivations that drove me to do character profiles (a dangerous combination of emotional credibility and statistical weakness) in the first place, instead of having calm talks about the large averages that we use to illuminate every field of truth that's devoid of strong ulterior motives.

You still require an audience which understands you, believes you... otherwise you do what you just said for vaccines, and you still get anti-vaxxers. Besides. 90%+ of your audience just flipped to the channels which tell them what they want to hear.

The tools that we could use to get the "uninterested" to believe the truth work equally well for falsities, and are usually used to spread beliefs of convienience. If those tools were just sent down entirely, you'd be left with "right" and "random," and the random would always average out at the polls. Sadly, in our present world stupid is dangerous because machiavellians and martyrs alike are magnetizing it with arguments that are as wrong as they are emotionally convincing.

Sadly, in our present world stupid is dangerous because machiavellians and martyrs alike are magnetizing it with arguments that are as wrong as they are emotionally convincing.

I don’t usually do this here, as it’s not strictly substantive, but damn that’s a concise and lovely way of putting it.

Yes, I've read Manufacturing Consent :) Fully agree.

I mean, I'd watch it. But I feel like we're the minority. Sensationalism gets eyeballs gets ad revenue. The corruption is inherent in the system.

This is surely naive, but what makes you think that isn't what Thiel sees himself as doing?

In other words: NPR/PBS.

Every news organization will have bias because every person has bias, and news organizations are made up of people. So the real choice one has to make is: what sort of bias do I want in my news?

The easiest way to identify bias is to look at where the money comes from. In the case of CPB-funded organizations yes, some of their funding is government based, so they're likely to be biased toward reporting that favors government funding for public institutions (or, in the extreme: socialism). However they also receive a significant portion of their funding from volunteer donors, so their reporting is also likely to be biased in favor of people who altruistically give without expectation of any specific ROI.

Now, if you favor small government and self-sufficient individuals who look out for #1 above all else, NPR/PBS is probably not your cup of tea.

I’m not American, but I do listen to quite a few NPR podcasts and enjoy them a lot.

Your claim that NPR isn’t biased is quite frankly ludicrous. Their programming features a clear and unmistakeable liberal* bias, and the fact that you seem to be unaware of this probably just means that you share this worldview. That’s absolutely fine with me, but you should really re-examine your idea of objectivity.

* In the American sense of the word.

Edit: I acknowledge that you admit that all news organisations are biased, however I’m responding to your central claim that NPR fills the objective role referred to by GP

> Their programming features a clear and unmistakeable liberal* bias, and the fact that you seem to be unaware of this probably just means that you share this worldview.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

All joking aside, I definitely acknowledge NPR's liberal bias. My main point was to "follow the money". More traditional liberal (and conservative) media outlets have funding that is much more "active" (for lack of a better term) than NPR.

On the other hand, NPR and PBS exist partly because they are effective at lobbying Congress for funding.

NPR and PBS are extremely ineffective at lobbying Congress for funding; what federal funding NPR gets is indirect through member stations, but federal funding is far behind listener support and corporate sponsorship in the revenue streams reaching the member stations; the CPBs federal funding, adjusted for inflation, is basically flat for 40 years.

You're saying that PBS and NPR get nontrivial amounts of money from the federal budget. Their ability to maintain that despite challenges (which have been effectively countered with pleas Mr. Rogers and Big Bird) is notably effective lobbying.

Extremely ineffective lobbying would be having elbow-patched public intellectuals testifying about federal funding's benefits on the broader Hegelian dialectic.

> You're saying that PBS and NPR get nontrivial amounts of money from the federal budget.

No, I'm not.

The best you can get is an organization that has a consistent and clear bias, which NPR has - also why people like BBC and the Economist. Additionally, I’d caution against extrapolating NPR’s journalistic bias by their podcasts - it’s a podcast, whereas radio content was produced expressly in line with their journalistic and reporting standards (I don’t listen to any of their podcasts dealing with politics so I couldn’t judge those).

NPR doesn't own its bias, so I'm not sure I'd use the phrase "consistent and clear" to describe the NPR viewpoint.

Here's NPR poorly representing the controversy over the Google memo this summer:

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/08/542180434/google-fires-engine...

I just read that transcript, and I think it is the least histrionic and probably most charitable to Damore that has come out of the mainstream media. I read the memo (in full, with annotations), and I think it is being properly represented in this interview.

Without relitigating the whole kerfuffle, I believe that whether or not you think the media is fair to Damore depends on whether or not you are in agreement with the presuppositions he held when writing the memo.

I don't agree with the presuppositions. I also think his views were not fairly summarized, which is critical to the story since his expression of his thoughts are what got him fired. If you mess up that reporting, the story becomes "Google fired a crypto-sexist guy and sexist people are grumpy about it", which is pretty close to how the NPR story reads to me.

Grading on a curve, maybe NPR did fine (I've ready Fox News accounts that read similarly), but on topic, some people (Thiel) think there's some monoculture in the media that needs disrupted.

Government cash is no cure for bias.

I’d take your thought one step further: Government cash is often a SOURCE of bias.

There are always two sides to an argument. How do you define objective reality?

Is there such a thing as objective reality?

If Thiel is going to use his own ideology, it would likely be more of a Libertarian news network. It isn't clear tho if that's the case. Maybe he just thinks there's more market for "conservative" and thus would go that direction. Or a third possibility (what I think is most likely actually) is that nobody knows what words mean other that "Conservative" and "Liberal" so they picked "the closest one."

There's not really a conservative news network, a libertarian one, or a classically liberal one. Fox News has positioned itself in a tabloid/populist space. It's hardly ideological (is cutting corporate tax rates pro little guy?), so something with a more definite point of view as opposed to virtue signalling would be interesting.

I worry about being on the cusp of not being able to discern real from non-real. Pictures, stories, audio, video can be convincingly fabricated. Our society and the rule of law may not be able to function. Maybe (hopefully?) we can develop technology that will help solve some of these problems. We're only in the first inning when it comes to political divisiveness.

Is he confused about what Fox is or is he trying to copy it?

I do wonder what "there is room to flank Fox News from the right" is supposed to mean. What does that network look like?

Probably alot like http://www.oann.com/

At least in the US, libertarians typically consider themselves "right" of the Republican party. It's confusing, because right/left in politics exists on multiple dimensions. One of those is religion/social morality, and on that dimension libertarians are far to the left of mainstream Republicans. On the economics/gov't size dimension, however, they are solidly to the right.

The Republican party is more diverse than most commentators appreciate. Trump didn't even have a majority of the vote in the Republican primary. Consider that the median Republican voter did not consider Trump to be their first choice. And that basically all the candidates except for Kasich ran to the right of Trump.

Also, libertarians are generally to the right of the Democratic party on religious liberty issues. Hardcore libertarians have no problems with people having kooky or unhealthy religious practices, for that matter.

Isn’t Breitbart flanking fox from the right?

Edit: apparently he’s looking to the financier of Breitbart for funding. So Breitbart 2.0?

It looks like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Tomi Lahren, RT, etc.

Rupert Murdoch sold the majority of Fox. While he's conservative, his sons appear to be less so. Thiel might be trying to hedge against a world where Fox doesn't exist.

This is a great point, and a real possibility. With Murdoch's sons in charge, look for Fox to really move away from the right. Their willingness to cut O'Reilly so quickly despite his massive audience was indicative of this new approach I think.

Well that would be just another billionaire owned blabber box then wouldn't it?

Wanna know what I don't see much at all of on the FB feed right now?

Links to FOX News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, produced "News". Almost none.

People are getting tired of tilted "News" and I promise right now do my best to help bleed Peter Thiel's cash as fast as I can by exposing bullshit they produce every chance they offer, and I'm sure that will be constantly.

Bring it on...

MSNBC and CNN both tried to go hardcore conservative and out-Fox Fox briefly around the same time many years back, both lost ratings and failed to dent Fox when they did.

I'm not sure there's a market here; the demand for a conservative cable news network has a strong tribal identity with Fox News.

We need to be careful that our news outlets do not become basically state media when their party/ideal of choice is in power, and opposition media when their party/ideal is not. It appears that is what we are leaning towards right now, and all it does is foster more polarization.

If your news only aligns to a political ideology it is not news.

Great!

No thanks.

Numerically, there are a great many more left-leaning sources than there are right.

Another conservative network would be good. If we can't have fair news, at least we can get biased news in equal and opposing doses.

cosmic brain

I will take your word for it that there are more left-leaning sources. I will also assume for the sake of argument that it is possible to quantify the political alignment of a news outlet.

What is your definition of "left-leaning"?

What is your definition of "fair" in the context of news?

Why do you believe news cannot be "fair" or that we cannot have it?

Is the numeric quantity of sources at any point on the political spectrum relevant? How do you find the middle? Is it an average of all sources? Is it just a scale from MIN to MAX? If it is min/max then can't an extremely conservative (or liberal!) organization move the middle simply by making outlandish claims on their side of the spectrum? Does that make sources that would otherwise be considered "fair" appear biased?

These are good questions.

I'd say left-leaning sources are those that tend to report negatively on conservative politicians and positively on liberals. The Harvard study purports to measure what constitutes negative coverage, so this seems like it could be measured.

About numbers, it seems today often Fox reports favorably for the GOP, while CNN, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, and the BBC seem to favor the political left. (I think the Harvard study seems to suggest this.)

I suppose a microcosm of the 'balanced list' I'm describing might be 'Real Clear Politics'. This site posts leftist articles, then immediately follows them with right-leaning articles in equal numbers one after the other. It's an interesting way to get news, and it allows the reader to study different biases, often on the same topic.

Thanks for that explanation. I'm still unclear on why the total number of sources or articles with a given alignment is relevant.

In your "Real Clear Politics" example two perspectives are given equal weighting in their representation. This seems to make an assumption that there are exactly two valid perspectives and that they can be easily balanced.

Can't that system be exploited by extremists? If an extremely left-wing organization publishes a story that is nearly fabricated in its bias does a right-wing organization need to publish an equally flawed piece on the other side? Should people even read the stories?

I think it's accepted that there is bias in reporting. I also think it is a trap to believe "middle" == "balanced" == "fair" because extremists can exploit that perspective by making increasingly extreme statements. This is the basis of much of cable news as I understand it and I believe it oversimplifies the issues and creates echo chambers by rewarding the biggest delta in opinion.

In my opinion it is more important to get diverse news sources than it is to try and balance ideologies, especially when those ideologies are defined by someone else.

Thanks for that. I agree, diversity in news sources is a good way to get differing perspectives. (Also, perspectives not being pushed from the same opposing ideologies, as you suggest.)

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