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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

The opinion section of the NYT, and also many of the long form articles, are selected and shaped by the editorial staff which has an agenda. I’ve noticed that popularized science articles are especially bad, and if the science touches even slightly a controversial issue like race or ancestry the meaning and nuance can be warped to match their agenda.

This isn’t only the NYT but given their status as the premier news source in the USA it is the most glaring to me.

Also, I know it’s become a trope to post this on HN as it’s basically gospel at this point, but The Submarine essay by Paul Graham gives some nice insight into the PR and media industry http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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Simply put, editorial and opinion sections are supposed to be like that. It's not an error; it's by design, and it's a design that has existed for as long as editorial and opinion sections have existed.

You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means. In an ideal newspaper practicing journalistic integrity, letters to the editor like the one presented here would be published in future editions of the paper, or, failing that, published in competing newspapers.

Yes, everything is subject to bias. Everything is subject to bias. You cannot eliminate it. The point is to be aware of it's existence, and newspapers help do that by placing these types of pieces in their opinion and editorial sections.

> Simply put, editorial and opinion sections are supposed to be like that. It's not an error; it's by design, and it's a design that has existed for as long as editorial and opinion sections have existed.

There's a difference between cherry picking stories to support a narrative, and bending the truth. The NYT is engaging in the latter.

One problem I have with it, though, is that often all the most popular articles in their site, are the opinion pieces.

I'm still a subscriber, but there's a strongly "promoted" bias, IMHO, and it requires reading news from several sources with an open mind to get the complete story.

Also, NYT isn't immune to click-baity titles, where the meat of the story isn't necessary correlate with the title.

> often all the most popular articles in their site, are the opinion pieces

It turns out people like to read other people's opinions. Who'da thunk?

> I'm still a subscriber, but there's a strongly "promoted" bias, IMHO

If you want a balanced overall view of the day's news, the place to start is the front/home page, not the "Most Popular" list. Newspaper editors spend extraordinary amounts of time agonizing over exactly what stories should go there and how much prominence to give to each. "Most Popular" skips all that in favor of the "wisdom of the crowd," which it turns out is not all that wise.

(If the nytimes.com home page still contains too much opinion for you, you can get a digital edition of each day's print paper's front page at this stable URL: https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper)

It turns out people like to read other people's opinions. Who'da thunk?

Except that they don't like to read other people's opinions. They like to read their own opinions.

The most popular opinion pieces are overwhelmingly those which play to the prejudices of the majority of readers, not those which challenge people by presenting unpopular opinions.

I typically just read the article notifications when they come in, so I think I get a pretty big mix? And I like their evening in review, or morning review sections when I have time.

>and it requires reading news from several sources with an open mind to get the complete story.

I don’t consider this a negative. I have always had a bit of that “rebellious” streak in me, so I’ve been told. I have always questioned everything. I would ask “Why?” like 2 year old. I wasn’t asking to second guess coworkers, but because I wanted to learn to fish rather than being handed a fish. The question everything mentality stuck, so I’m constantly reading multiple sources to confirm or contradict any one single source.

Most people do not have time to do this.

This is true, but unfortunately the new reality. Imagine when "deep fakes" etc become much more mainstream. You can't rely on one single source of information. You're going to have to get used to checking the sources, and cross-checking with other reputable sources.

Which would be perfectly fine, except that digital newspapers have a pesky habit of putting "Opinion" or "Editorial" in very tiny font on the piece's header, with no other indication that the piece being read is, in fact, an opinion/editorial piece.

I think part of the blame is also on aggregators like Google News; I've noticed that GN mixes opinion/editorial content in with real news articles, especially on the sidebar (e.g. "Spotlight" section).

It also seems like the ratio of opinion content to actual news has been increasing lately. In the print version of the NYT, opinion pieces were generally only found on two pages, sometimes maybe overflowing a bit, but you'd never see them on the front page and they certainly weren't the bulk of the paper. Now it seems like the majority of "news" content from some outlets are actually opinion pieces.

> It also seems like the ratio of opinion content to actual news has been increasing lately.

Well, sure. Now that everyone has access to 24h news for free, the facts become commodities and lose their value, and therefore the reference publications start giving more space to the product over which they have some market power: the analysis of news by picked columnists.

If you just want an event log, you're better off skipping the uninterested middleman and just going to AP or Reuters or similar.

Yes! I've noticed GN has succumbed to the right-wing pressure and started showing me a lot more right-wing propaganda sites. So I get news and opinion mixed together like "CBS: Government shutdown continues." "Washington Examiner: Why Democrats want migrants to kill you"

Choose a better paper!

The Guardian labels comment articles with a big orange “ in the headline on the homepage, an orange "Opinion" on the article page, a pastel orange background in both places, the author's name under the heading in orange, and "commentisfree" in the URL.

The Guardian is a pretty terrible choice for people who want less opinions mixed in with their news. Their front page with all opinion stuff removed would have a lot of blank space. Not only is your statement about proper labelling false (random recent example: [1]), but on top of that they seem to think that their own opinion entitle them to their own facts. A non-political example: they accused in passing the journalist Matt Taibbi of rape. When confronted with the debunked claim [2] the Guardian contributor's response was, essentially, "it wasn't news, it was opinion" (does that remind you of some cable news channel?). For context TG is not some 4-person blog with no fact-checker, they are a 1400 employees company, and yet somehow these "mistakes" happen.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jan/19/is-standup-c...

[2] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/the-destructi...

But then the Guardian also publishes opinion pieces outside of their opinion section as well.

I think this is increasingly a feature of British newspapers: a strong editorial slant in news selection and presentation.

NYT opinion pieces at the start say "Opinion" in a font that is larger than the article text font and larger than than the article subtitle font. The only thing I see offhand that is in a bigger font is the article title. It's not at all tiny.

Once you start reading the article and scroll the above off, the fixed position thingy at the top of the of the page that has the hamburger menu, search box and says "The New York Times" centered changes to contain article specific controls, such as social media stuff, comments, bookmarking, the "The New York Times" string moves to the right, and the centered text becomes "OPINION | <title of article>", with "OPINION" in bolded all caps.

This seems fine to me. I can't think of an occasion where I've ever failed to realize when I'm reading an opinion piece or editorial there.

I would hope most literate readers could tell the difference.

There's an obvious distinction between a pundit advancing a point of view and factual accounting of some event. That's not the say that the news section never betrays bias with the facts a reporter chooses to include, or by omitting contrary perspectives.

But really, I hope readers do not need a giant header banner "THIS IS AN OP-ED" to recognize one.

That's assuming the op-ed is not intentionally taking a journalistic style to mislead readers.

You can increase the font size in your browser if you're unable to read the indications for editorials and opinions.

But it's also kind of odd that you consider there to be a problem in the first place, because it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials just from their writing stile.

it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials

It turns out that's not true for most people any more.

https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/native-advertising-in-f...

It's trivial for New York Times articles. Your link is about advertisements disguised as news (which are illegal where I live).

Every individual article will have some bias. But GP is complaining that the entire editorial staff seems to share a bias, indeed a single agenda, meaning that there is a lack of rigorous discussion.

There's a long-existing term for this: "editorial policy," which is a fundamental feature of all publications. All.

In programming, this would be like complaining about the existence of indenting.

If I thought indenting was lowering the quality of programming I would comment about it too.

If the last decade or so has shown anything it is that people are tired of the standard operating procedures of legacy media. Maybe the idea that the editorials all present a unified narrative is part of that.

"Legacy media" is itself a misnomer, unless you're suggesting that something replace "editorial policy?" What could that something be?

On reread, is it actually about "editorials?" Because that's not what editorial policy is entirely about. Partially, yes, but not completely.

>You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means.

No. They know most people take news articles, editorials and opinion articles as the same thing and exploit it.

It's from the "Magazine", not the news section, nor is it opinion ala "This political party sucks and why". It is the magazine, which is long-form narrative storytelling. I don't think that should exempt them from leaving out or otherwise ignoring facts.

Funny. I just read another “suits back in style” story yesterday.

https://www.france24.com/en/20190119-dowdy-no-more-men-suits...

Great catch and that's hilarious. I saw the same story from multiple sources/platforms yesterday. I thought the paul graham article was about yesterday's news and then I read the date "April 2005". 14 years ago.

Anyone who pays attention to news for any amount of time sees redundant news and agenda. But PR stooges?

If PR firms are so entwined with traditional news and media, I wonder how entrench PR firms are in the social media space.

If PR firms are so entwined with traditional news and media, I wonder how entrench PR firms are in the social media space

Watch the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix

Most social media platforms are designed with their clients needs in mind. Often, those clients are PR firms.

Your concept of objectivity is more flawed than their agenda

It's so disturbing that "integrity in journalism" and "not political" (as an adjective) has become synonymous with advocating causal relationships between behavior and race/sex.

Assuming that all of those relationships are absolutely true, and would hold in a world of equal opportunity that didn't reward conforming to certain stereotypes, or punish deviating from them; even in that world, you'd assume that there'd be far more important issues at all times than these tiny postulated differences.

NYT is awful, but just in the way all corporate media outlets are awful; they cater to the powerful, and protect an encourage industries in which they are also invested.

Yeah, the only traditional outlet that I trust to actually present a diverse set of editorial viewpoints is The Atlantic. The others, like NYT, WaPo, etc. all seem to mostly provide a very narrow set of party-line editorials.

Doesn't David Brooks and Barris White write for them as well?

How is Atlantic not a narrowly left wing mag (which is fine if that's your taste)?

Isn't neutral opinion just a fact.

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