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Comment by mrscottson | Hacker News Reader

These news papers (NYT, WaPo & especially WSJ), will print whatever nonsense that is in the national interest and whatever narratives pushed by govt insiders regardless of whether true or not.

Makes sense to ban the propagandist news orgs on both sides.

Many that base their world outlook on knowledge gained from these sources are woefully ignorant of how the world really works.

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I think it's telling that the piece that started this whole episode was a WSJ opinion piece - I agree with you that the opinion sections of all three of these papers are pretty bad and that the WaPo opinion section in particular is a US military propaganda outlet by any reasonable definition. It's unfortunate that this is affecting their legitimate news gathering arms.

The opinion articles are on the same webpage, about the same topics as the “non-opinion” articles. The single indicator of the “opinion” status of these articles (which in the case of all papers mentioned here is just the word “opinion” above thw articles) is easy to miss on a skim.

If you ask me, the same journalism standards should apply to every word on the website of any news outlet that wants to claim to be “unbiased.” Whether a paper without opinion sections would stay in business is a good question of course.

Yeah, to me the main problem isn't bias it's just that: 1. It's not possible for any human to produce insightful opinion pieces on anything close the schedule that oped writers are expected to 2. So opinion pages end up being full of mediocre filler 3. The writing thus ends up just being a regurgitation of the biases of the writers / editors

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