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Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

> where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out.

Deeply incompetent is an opinion, not a fact. So yes, it is a form of bias.

Actual fact-based reporting would be articles like "President did XXXX on YYYY" and leave the opinions and talking heads out. It would also be fairly dry and not generate outrage click traffic which media companies seem to thrive on these days.

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So you know what's in that "actual fact-based reporting"? Editorial decision of coverage. "What you choose to talk about" is editorial. That "fact-based reporting" is no less subject to lies of omission. And, beyond that? Contextualization of those "facts". What are these facts? What do they mean? Why are they worth reporting on? Why are they worth reading about? Are they even "facts"?

I don't blame you personally for propagating this misunderstanding of journalism as there is a lot of power and money behind not having actual journalism, but "actual fact-based reporting" is a canard designed to keep the populace dumb. Reportage--journalism--has always contextualized information and explained why you should care. That cannot, repeat cannot, be divorced from the act of reporting. A stock ticker is not journalism. You can get it if you want. But it doesn't mean squat to the overwhelming majority of people, nor is it expected to, and the dull ignorance of a wave of decontextualized "facts-only" reportage is an idea designed to create a dumber and less civically capable society.

It also happens to make the comfortable and the comparatively powerful, a class to whom I belong, feel less challenged about things. Convenient, that. But bad for us, no matter how convenient it is.

It's the same issue as social media. People love to read opinion pages so the news orgs end up providing more and more of it. The eyeballs Fox News gets is like 99% for their opinion programming.

I would find it hard to argue that any of the current POTUS work has been competent.

We just had a thread on hacker news where most folks agreed the administrations changes to the H1B program were welcome.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Competence is demonstrated over time, not in a vacuum of individual decisions. Someone that is competent at Chess proves it over an entire game. A novice can still make a few good moves over the course of that same match.

Pretty much any competency can be demonstrated that way.

No need to move the goalposts. The original comment wasn't arguing whether POTUS was competent or not, which is what you are trying to argue.

The original comment was arguing whether any of the POTUS work was competent. And that H1B change seems to have been competent, according to the general consensus on HN.

Is the entirety of the rest of POTUS' work incompetent? Maybe. That wasn't the original claim though.

But did POTUS do any of that? Part of his administration may have some competence, but the wast majority don’t seem to have the greater good in mind nor interested in respecting democracy. To me that is part of competence in government.

I think that a very real argument could be made that this PoTUS was elected as a direct intolerance of the corruption and intolerance of the normal citizenry of the US by the professional politicians. To expect him to be competent at the job was to be naive (which a lot of people were), but it was a knee jerk reaction to the options left to them, I think.

Trump does not have the competence to responsibly constrain a pandemic to the same deaths rates as all the other first-world countries.

He has demonstrated his incompetence in wrt to this, it is not objective.

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