Comment by Brain_Thief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brain_Thief | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't previously aware of this website, but after reading the article and noticing its rather brash style I decided to take a look at the front page. Several headlines stand out to me, including "Wrinkled, white, and wrong — this is the face of the Democratic party", "Black lives matter, until they’re ended by black people", and "Project Fact: how scared should we really be of a no-deal Brexit?", as well as a few statements seemingly designed to emphasize the racial and social undertones of various national debates. An admittedly cursory skim of these articles leaves the impression that the site's theme is low-key outrage generation and the propagation of divisive talking points that tend in a somewhat novel rightward direction.

Although I agree with the premise of the featured article, I have to wonder if this site's intent is actually aligned with the notion of a harmonic western social order incorporating political cooperation and tolerance for diversity of thought and belief, or if it is yet another low-key radicalization / division vector designed to appeal to those who are too intelligent, educated, naturally docile, or otherwise moderate to be swayed by the more extreme purveyors of discord such as Brietbart, etc. In other words, the site seems to be right on the edge of dog-whistling without actually going over that line, and my instinct is to not upvote articles sourced from it.

I was curious of the same thing.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-spectator/

It appears that it is a publication that leans heavily to the right, though apparently their reporting is factual. I would take that to mean that while anything that is explicitly stated as fact is likely true, the takeaways and editorials on the course of action is going be quite biased.

Skimming some of the other articles, they don't seem to be particular fans of Trump, with a couple of exceptions, so I'd guess they are probably of the Neoconservative Bush/Reagan bent rather than Trumpian.

Remember that bias is just as much about how they filter what facts to report as it is about how they distort the facts they do report.

Just because what they report is factual, doesn't mean they're unbiased. A newspaper that reports every crime by black people while only reporting serious crimes by white people might be factual, but it displays clear bias. A newspaper that reports every truth told by President Trump (but conveniently neglects the lies, rants and tantrums) might be factual but it is clearly biased.

I'm not sure that I feel that some bias is all that bad... while I'd rather see more from the likes of The Guardian, BBC News and Al Jazeera. There's clearly polarization from the more U.S. based sources towards one direction or another.

I tend to lean pragmatically towards classic liberal / libertarian. I get miffed less often from right leaning sources than left. Left news often just feels so far to the left that the center is now right.

Many Britishers consider The Guardian and BBC to be very biased, if not completely then atleast on certain topics.

Separating sponsored propoganda from legitimate news will only get harder as time goes on and media companies continue the buyout sprees that generally have the outcome of aligning narratives and interests.

Indeed. An interesting experiment would be to go on https://www.theguardian.com/uk and search for the word 'vest' or 'gilet'. Then go on Twitter and independently decide how newsworthy/baghdad-like Paris is.

I can understand that, and I guess it's relative to the US, is where I'm coming from. Reporting on US issues is at least generally more balanced than what I see from CNN or Fox domestically.

A good extra bit of data to have. Your link to the Media Bias / Fact Check for the site states that it "is biased and uses loaded language especially in headlines" while not actually misreporting anything. It's an interesting and rather disturbing situation: how to define the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable levels of headline and conclusion sensationalizing w.r.t. providing an overall ranking of a source's "factualness"? There is presumably some level of sensationalizing that would undeniably transcend a hypothetical site's nominally-factual reporting to render its value as a socially-beneficial information source net negative. The hypothesis there would be that exposure to heavily-biased sensationalism over time might psychologically prime site readers to accept more and more extreme headlines as true, or that the sum total of the sensational headlines, while not directly deceiving the reader, might give him or her a false perception of reality along some specific axis of bias. However, I haven't studied the matter deeply and I have some reservations about this "gateway drug" theory. I wonder if any actual research has been done on this topic.

> though apparently their reporting is factual.

One of the most effective forms of misleading reporting involves cherry-picking facts that support your narrative.

You can also conveniently ignore stories where it is obvious that facts may disrupt your desired meta-narrative.

Some organizations have even found ways of doing this whilst being revered for taking a balanced stance and presenting the full picture.

> One of the most effective forms of misleading reporting involves cherry-picking facts that support your narrative and not exploring stories where it is obvious that facts may disrupt your desired narrative.

Isn't that what about 100% of existing news media is doing? They key here is to read more than one source, but having a source that would alone represent more than one narrative by now is pretty close to hopeless.

> I would take that to mean that while anything that is explicitly stated as fact is likely true, the takeaways and editorials on the course of action is going be quite biased.

Shit, you've almost nailed what journalism used to be.

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