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Comment by barrygwn | Hacker News Reader

Now that Michael Bloomberg is running for president, I can't help but question if there is an ulterior motive behind each article at Bloomberg.com

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Honestly, I assume all media outlets have ulterior motives behind each article (ranging from the simple "catering to their specific audience with facts supporting their view" to more nefarious "willfully manipulating the people with falsehoods").

A good start would be to ban wholesale both Bloomberg and Washington Post articles from HN. Nothing from those publications should be trusted.

I can think of better places to start, but that's not the point, is it?

The point is that you should be aware of individual biases, and should diversify your media consumption.

Apperantly not. According to this thread and hacker news in general you shouldn't diversify your media consumption. Unless what is meant by that is different sources with broadly the same agenda.

Personally, I find this boring. Perhaps you agree.

I believe this is the Fed Philadelphia source

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/research-and-data/re...

> and Washington Post

Is Jeff Bezos running for Political office too?

You just moved the line from running for Presidential party nomination, skipped over mayor of major city, and jumped right to billionaires.

Add on; If all of a sudden you can't be wealthy and own (part of?) a media company, it really hurts the quality of journalism; you'd be left with small town or independent blogs; more susceptible to fake news -- and, more concerning, fear of publishing.

On the contrary, the media consolidation that has left papers in the hands of a few individuals has been tremendously bad for journalism. The only safe types are either diverse private ownership (more than two owners) or blind trusts. Yes, this rules out a lot of existing news outlets.

Virtually all the UK papers are now narrowly owned by individual billionaires whose agendas are very visible in the paper.

Blind trusts are a political fiction.

Why would we treat Bezos any differently? At his level of rare air, making/breaking regulations is just as important to profit as playing in the market. He has a whole lot more on the line politically than any politician.

Even in the most extreme possible case where the WaPo is an outlet for Jeff Bezos' personal opinions, is it really the case that Jeff Bezos couldn't have anything interesting to tell us? One billionaire-owned newspaper isn't that bad on its own, because the other newspapers can still report on the owner of the one. What's really scary is when the billionaire owners go golfing together, which would be a failure of the system that banning a couple publications couldn't help us with.

Hasn't this been the case for some time? The number of people who actually matter in the news industry is only a few thousand, and their social graph looks like they're all married to each other's cousins (which is only half a joke).

Could you expand on that for those who dont follow the news industry closely.

Outlets also don't need ulterior motives to produce biased output. If most of your staff hold a conservative outlook, they'll naturally be more skeptical of non-conservative viewpoints in their reporting etc.

Healthy skepticism is a feature of conservatism.

That explains Fox news so clearly.

Then how does the converse explain the other media outlets?

Logically, that doesn't follow. Here, let me explain the joke: You claim that conservatives have healthy skepticism and yet my observation is that the conservative television news outlet continuously streams nonsense and yet seems to be doing quite well. These circumstances are a retort to your assertion.

Conversely, what? Nobody asserted that liberals possessed a healthy skepticism or that liberal news outlets don't also continuously stream nonsense.

If you'd like me to make some assertions, I'd happily do so, but if you're looking for a partisan viewpoint to attempt to deconstruct, you'll not find one here.

Sure, but mostly I assume that the alterior motives are things like "Make the reader excited to read more here (and make us more money)" or "Don't make the reader feel confused (and possibly go away and stop making us money)." It's unusual that you have situations where a news purveyor has forces acting stronger than the idealism of its employees or the necessities of the markets.

s/alterior/ulterior

You say this, but we see partisanship and ideology placed before profits all the time, almost every time. How many major newspapers are worth basically zero; how many broadcast news have seen their viewership fall into the toilet; how many internet newsies have lost their jobs - all because they do nothing but grind axes all day and do their best to covertly manipulate their audiences?

Mostly I see broadcast news programs trying to survive by flattering the ideological preconceptions of their target audience while viewership falls for other reasons. There's a greater diversity of entertainment available which sucked for cable news. And Craigslist in particular decimated the income of most newspapers. Also changes in the media landscape open up the possibility of competition in a way that didn't exist when ABC, NBC, and CBS had their comfy oligarchy. And these days, as far as I can tell, the salaries of the reporters I respect seem to be payed for by the ad impressions viral clickbate put out by the same journalistic outfits except for the weekly I'm paying $225 a year for.

Bloomberg.com's reputation has yet to recover from The Big Hack non-retraction. Until they speak publicly about it, I consider them the same tier as toilet paper.

It's clearly an issue that the news service is grappling with, though you can argue how successfully. Bloomberg has a long-stamding policy of not covering Bloomberg. But how do you make that work when he is a candidate? Their solution: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/25/michael-bloomb...

Yes, eleven years into a ZIRP-induced asset bubble, the ISM collapsing, China deal still unsigned, CAPE ratio at the second highest level ever, increasing tensions with Iran, six months after the yield curve inversion, a repo market on "not QE" life support, a stagnant housing market, massively underfunded pensions in most states, exploding CRE, corporate junk, student, auto, and revolving debt, and a near-term demographic consumption cliff: Anyone reporting data that may perchance suggest that perhaps, maybe, the party might be wrapping up is only doing it for political reasons.

   Billionaire presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is
   refusing to buckle under pressure and change the 
   rules of engagement for his news outlet's political
   reporters—who are forbidden from investigating him
   or any other Democratic White House hopeful.

   Bloomberg News journalists will 'just have to learn
   to live with some things,' he told CBS News in an 
   interview that aired Friday morning.

   'They get a paycheck,' the former New York City mayor 
   lectured, 'but with your paycheck comes some restrictions
   and responsibilities.'[1]

[1]

'With your paycheck comes some restrictions': Mike Bloomberg doubles down on censoring his journalists from investigating non-Trump candidates

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7765273/Mike-Bloomb...

Well, that can’t possibly have any chilling effects.

Here are other, much more nuanced analyses of this decision:

* Factual summary: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/25/782732936/bloomberg-news-says...

* Opinionated: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/473542-bloomberg-report..., https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/michael_bloomberg_news_p...

(Daily Mail is widely considered a poor source, and while they do report some actual news, their analysis of anything is not worth citing. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/)

The URL on Daily Mail that you cite has "factcheck" in the domain name and calls itself "The Most Comprehensive Media Bias Resource". It has no about page and is exactly the sort of URL that I'd expect to get emailed from my impressionable 78-year-old mother.

Fair point. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia... is probably a better summary of how Daily Mail is perceived.

Wikipedia prohibits its use as a source, explaining: "volunteer editors on English Wikipedia have come to a consensus that the Daily Mail is ‘generally unreliable and its use as a reference is to be generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist.’"

They cited "the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication."

The Guardian article you link is simply reporting on the Wikipedia vote from a couple of years ago. Wikipedia keeps a unreliable sources list, and a perusal of it will show you that it's not an impressive exercise in fairness. In fact, Wikipedia's fairness standards are somewhat notorious.

As a minor funny/sad side point to all this, Peter Hitchens over at the Mail on Sunday -- owned by the Daily Mail, but with a separate editorial team -- has complained frequently about his Wikipedia page being defaced by this very policy. Apparently some enterprising editors thought that it was their duty to remove all Hitchens quotes from the article because his articles had appeared in the Mail on Sunday, and was therefore an "unreliable source" despite being a quote of what the man said. What a shitshow!

My own guess, as a sometimes Daily Mail reader from the States, is that the "unreliable" thing is simply a talking point somehow related to UK politics. The Daily Mail has a severe sensationalist bias, but their reporting is often quite good, and they have more than their fair share of scoops.

Interesting that Bloomberg is missing from his own billionaire index list: https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

Very odd...

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

On Forbes he is listed to be worth ~$56B.

I think this topic is worth its own HN submission by itself.

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