Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtwest | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty clear from looking at the map that they didn't attempt to include as many of the left-leaning sites for whatever reason. All but one of the sites in New England (one of the most liberal areas of the country) are right-leaning. This is not a representative selection of the news sources in the area, they are missing lots of data.

Edit: I am not taking a political stance here. Just saying there are news sources left out of this survey.

View on HN

I don't see how that necessarily follows. These sites don't even need to be put up by someone who lives in the area.

From the article:

> We suspect many of the local sites are not based in or actually operating within the communities they serve. Timpone had previously operated “local” news sites using content produced by writers based in the Philippines and using fake bylines

I didn't mean representative of the people living there, I mean representative of the news sources there.

I am not taking a political side, just pointing out that this is not a complete survey of all sites, and the article at times suggests conclusions that can't be fairly made from this data unless it was a complete survey.

Another example: there is not a single site on the map in New York City. It would be very surprising if there wasn't at least one partisan local news site in NYC.

It's not supposed to be a complete survey of all news sites. It's sites that are posing as local news sources, when in reality they're just cookie-cutter "news" article farms that are connected to larger orgs that have a historical political bias. How does one not being around NYC invalidate the rest? Isn't it entirely plausible these organizations don't see value in attempting to persuade locals in those areas? Additionally, the vast majority of these appear to be in suburban to rural areas; there's none around Seattle, LA, or Atlanta as well.

Why is that "pretty clear"? Why should a count of web sites be indicative of the local population, when the contention is they're deliberate astroturf? Repeating the upthread point: the article claimed it was just measuring "partisan site counts", but in fact it was measuring "hyperconservative site counts", which is a different thing.

And you're replying without evidence that the stuff they didn't measure (and you didn't) must exist, because New England has democrats in it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com