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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

the FT do a pretty good job, without as much of the problematic editorials.

Probably not as useful to you if you're US based, but I find it really useful for living in Europe.

I would have agreed with you 5 years ago. Unfortunately pretty much every article in the FT has become politically motivated, following very much the NYT's "only the facts that fit the narrative". The FT is openly running campaigns on many topics, and then you aren't reading news, you are reading propaganda.

The editor changed in January, I unsubscribed a month before. Perhaps things have changed since.

It's gotten a lot worse since January.

I've subscribed for over a decade, and for the first time am questioning whether I should keep paying to be misinformed.

It's very strange as FT subscribers often have money at stake and the last thing they want is to be surprised by events.

Maybe their subscription numbers are falling and Nikkei is chasing the mass market and ad revenue. I don't see that working, as divisive clickbait is available everywhere for free... looks like a doom loop to me.

Can you describe how it's gotten worse?

I have found, in general, that there's a lot more sloppy editing across the news media, which is understandable given how much has happened.

I found that the WSJ is still fairly balanced, but of course a bit light on European news. Which in the heat of the brexit debate was a god-bless. But not ideal still.

I wish I could award you several upvotes for answering my question.

I really like FT myself. I am not in business so much but I think business news sources often get at a lot of interesting angles that others miss.

Absolutely, most journalists do not understand basic quantitative reasoning or economic principles.

For example, I read a BBC article a while back about a sand shortage in India. It turns out the government imposed a price-ceiling, and there was no shortage at all (sand was available in the black market) - there was just a shortage at the government mandated price point.

Any economics 101 student can tell you that if you set a price-ceiling there will be a shortage.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50386515

There was a (temporary) sand shortage due to a monsoon and availability does not imply sufficient supply. If there was no shortage of sand, even on the black market, the price would not have risen unless it was controlled by a cartel. Price capping is a good way to fight this kind of cartel because they were cornering the market by taking in all of the available supply and then raising the price.

Like the article says, sand was actually more widely available when the government had capped the price at $0. The Econ 101 student is blind to the interesting parts of this story.

"Econ 101" is pejorative term for making simplistic proclamations that ignore the complexities of a situation.

Yeah (fortunately or unfortunately), that's the world that capitalism has made.

To be fair, lots of people in the UK don't like them because of their stance on Brexit, but I really appreciate their coverage of conservative political voices is much more restrained rather than the click-driven style of the Guardian or the NYT.

Their environmental coverage is terrible though, so I wouldn't treat them as my only news source.

James Bennet, the Op-Ed Editor who had hired both Weiss and Stephens is Jewish. His brother is Colorado Senator Bennet. Their mother was in the Warsaw Ghetto and was sent out as a child by her parents just before the Nazis shipped the entire ghetto to the camps. She has an on-line oral history in the holocaust museum.

Both Stephens and Weiss are not only Jewish, but pro-Israel. Weiss had even written an entire recent book about anti-Semitism [1]. Many in the far left support the anti-Semitic Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement against the only Jewish country in the world. China invaded Tibet, puts 3 million Muslims in camps, taking their DNA and facial recognition but no China BDS.

Bennet had also been Jerusalem Bureau Chief for NYT for 3 years and thus would be knowledgeable about the situation there. He may have stopped inaccuracies printed about Israel in his role.

Bennet was the likely candidate to be elevated to Exec Editor when the current one retired in a couple of years. I believe a lot of the staff didn't like Bennet because of Jewish/Israel stance and the idea of him being the Exec Editor frightened/angered them.

I believe that an external inspector general type figure should evaluate the entire situation. Weiss's complaints are consistent with a toxic work environment that nobody should have to deal with. She said the source of some of the harassment she experienced was on an internal slack channel and thus easy to investigate.

Readers of HN are analytical enough to realize that when something obvious isn't mentioned it may well be the underlying cause.

[1] Weiss: How to Fight Anti-Semitism https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P51KC9Z/

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