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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

"Fake news" is an awkward word choice by the President but I think I understand who he is targeting. There is a trend among major news organizations to do reporting with an agenda in mind. Whereas traditional reporting was "this happened and then this happened...", the agenda-driven reporting reads like "this happened because so-and-so is trying to <insert politicized opinion>". Sometimes these pieces push the facts to the very bottom of the story. Sometimes they exclude them entirely. I place the blame on editors with agendas driving the reporting process.

This happens on both the left and right. Fox News, Washington Post, L.A. Times--they are all frequent offenders. I'm just so sick of it. Any sophisticated reader can spot this biased reporting quickly but other readers can't and are sucked in. I wish there was a strong just-the-facts movement/resurgence in reporting. I'm basically down to the Wall Street Journal in my daily reading selections.

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Fox News and the Washington Post are about as different as could be when it comes to the level of their reporting.

Fox is straight up propaganda, to the point that it is ridiculous that anybody would even take them serious, they're about at the level of Russia Today. The Washington Post is more along the lines of 'manufacturing consent', and if they lie it is by omission.

> Fox is straight up propaganda, to the point that it is ridiculous that anybody would even take them serious.

Even conservatives, including some recent Fox commentators, are starting to acknowledge that with Fox’s shift from a fairly broad right-wing/Republican propaganda machine to a more specifically pro-Trump propaganda machine.

It's about time, but at the same time there will be many more months of damage and it will at the present rate of destruction take multiple election cycles, maybe as much as decades before the damage is undone, assuming it will even happen.

To me, "manufacturing consent" is scarier. Fox News is ridiculous and everyone - _especially Fox News_ - knows it.

The Washington Post is as you claim, which feels dangerous. The same with the Times (and the Journal on any non-free market health policy) in the modern era - there's a lot that's left out: important context is intentionally omitted to shape the narrative or to produce an angle, which is much more malicious.

Fox News/HuffPo/Breitbart/TPM don't scare me because they're somewhere between junkfood and supermarket tabloids. It's the people who lie when they appear to tell the truth - like WSJ coverage of any single payer country - that freak me out.

While I agree with you to a certain extent, I feel you may be underestimating just how much sway Fox News, conservative talk radio, and Facebook have with rural white Americans. When you (intentionally or not) only get your information from one source, at some point it seems you stop questioning it.

I think outright falsehoods will always be more dangerous than "lies by omission."

Though leaving out certain facts may make the remaining facts more persuasive one way or another, the remaining facts are still, by their nature, true and open to interpretation by the viewer.

> To me, "manufacturing consent" is scarier.

I don't know about that. The way in which Fox News now makes policy by influencing that 'audience of one' is having a real and direct impact on the world far outside of the United States.

As for malice: I think that purposefully destroying your country in order to pocket some $ is far more malicious than shaping public opinion, even though of course I would much rather have that people would really take the time to educate themselves on the various issues and that we would all follow the Swiss model of Democracy - in my opinion the only country that currently gets it right.

That's a pipe dream given the degree to which people typically wish to invest in the political process but that's the thing to strive for, even if it takes another couple of decades to get there.

And in Switzerland the media are of a fairly high quality for much the same reason: the electorate is pretty smart there and very hard to dupe.

This became painfully clear to me particularly during the 2016 primaries. I watched as news organizations I formerly respected--CNN, NYT, NPR, WaPo--shamelessly twisted facts and spun deliberatly misleading narratives, even on their front pages. CNN now acts indignant when Trump calls them fake news, but because of what they did, they've made him not entirely wrong, and I'm annoyed that they gave him that ammunition.

I think the best way to combat fake news is to have trusted, respected news organizations. But now both the right and the left no longer fully trust these organizations, so people have started looking elsewhere. IMO, the only way to fix it is for these organizations to start reporting honestly to try to regain our trust---so I think fake news is going to continue to be a problem.

Disclaimer: I know that CNN/NYT/NPR/WaPo propaganda is nothing compared to Fox News/conservative media. But it was misleading enough to shatter the trust of many people, including me.

> shamelessly twisted facts and spun deliberatly misleading narratives, even on their front pages.

Examples?

> But it was misleading enough to shatter the trust of many people, including me.

Which story was so fake that you can't trust them anymore?

Honestly, I think people like you are a big part of the problem. OH you know that places like Breitbart are worse, but you just can't bring yourself to trust the Washington post.

Do you not see how much that sort of attitude contributes to the much bigger problem?

I mean there were constant examples throughout 2016, but here was a fun one to rewatch:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/05/17/cenk_ugyu...

In the wake of Wikileaks revealing that what CNN called a baseless conspiracy theory was actually true, this was a fun trip down memory lane.

CNN gets stuff wrong from time to time, sometimes badly wrong. But I would stop at seeing this as a structural problem, they're not lying wholesale, all the time like Fox does and even though I'm fairly sure they have a bias - just like almost every other news organization - unless you are hyper partisan yourself it likely won't influence you.

The Sanders/Clinton controversy may be a huge issue to you but what the likes of Breitbart, Fox and so on are doing is on an entirely different scale. All this besides the fact that Clinton stood a much better chance against Trump than Bernie Sanders ever did. She even won the popular vote.

> All this besides the fact that Clinton stood a much better chance against Trump than Bernie Sanders ever did. She even won the popular vote.

I mean, every poll at the time suggested otherwise: https://imgur.com/a/K9Rzr Additionally, Sanders is a guy who did very well with exactly the demographic that HRC lost. But I digress--

I agree that Breitbart and Fox are far worse than the rest of corporate media, and I still watch CNN/MSNBC every weekday. But I go into it with a much higher level of skepticism and the knowledge that I need to seek other sources of information if I want to know what's going on beside the corporate-friendly narrative.

That's Quinnipac which is about as biased towards the GOP as they can get away with. The game ahead of a general election is to try to sow as much division in the camp of your opponent and to get them to elect the weakest candidate that increases your own chances during the real thing.

The main takeaway for me is that elections are more often than not choosing the 'least bad' candidate rather than the best candidate. I personally don't think Clinton should have run at all, but I think the same about Sanders and Trump. All of them have substantial baggage and in some cases serious doubt about their qualifications and mental stability.

If those three people were the best that could be found in a country of 300+ million people then that's indicative of a much larger problem. I do think that neither Sanders nor Clinton would have fucked up to the extent that Donald Trump is currently doing. If this really will go on for almost three more years you'll be able to say you were there when America lost its place.

And no doubt CNN will cover it.

I believe you’re thinking of Rasmussen, not Quinnipiac. Q is respected, Rasmussen is known to be GOP-leaning: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/

Otherwise I agree, we are living a major part of history.

Ah yes, got that mixed up, thank you for the correction.

> Fox News is ridiculous and everyone

> Fox News/HuffPo/Breitbart/TPM don't scare me because they're somewhere between junkfood and supermarket tabloids

and yet fox news was the most watched cable network for how long?

Once you go a little deeper with this line of thinking you'll discover that the vast majority of our news media isn't simply enough pushing "here's what happened and here's exactly what you should think of it", as bad as that is, but it's more sinister then that: "here's what you should think about, what you should think of it, and least of all here's what actually happened". Sometimes the media is playing favorites to make someone money or to make someone lose money. Sometimes it's purely political. In any case, real fact based reporting is virtually dead and will only get deader as news empires continue to consolidate.

> I'm basically down to the Wall Street Journal in my daily reading selections.

Because.... somehow you think the WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch of all people, is not biased (start with [1])? Is it possible you're just selecting for the particular bias that creates the least amount of friction with your existing world view?

[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/02/01/wall-street-jou...

Not just in political news. On the Youtube shooting day, about 1 hour after the incident when the head cop briefed the press, CNN's "expert" was already confident that it was a love triangle.

Of course, they are kicking themselves for it, they could've had a field day if they found out the shooter had a muslim background.

Baha'i, actually. It's a weird offshoot, I'd say they're roughly like an Islamic version of the Unitarians.

> "Fake news" is an awkward word choice by the President

For context, it was the opponents of the President who coined the term. It was originally designed to discredit Pizzagate, etc. He co-opted it and turned the term against the MSM.

Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Where am I factually incorrect?

Using the term "Mainstream Media" without referring to Fox News is hilarious

Agree. I didn't say anything about Fox. They are definitely MSM.

An accurate perspective of the reality of uniparty puts Fox News mere nanometers to the right of CNN.

Agenda-driven reporting is older than you think. The 1898 sinking of the USS Maine comes to mind, where the papers put the public into such a frenzy that it led to war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8...

> but I think I understand who he is targeting

anyone who disagrees with him or criticizes him.

> This happens on both the left and right

oh cool, "both sides".

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