Hacker News Reader

Comment by wu_tang_chris | Hacker News Reader

You’re almost close at the end there. The echo chamber of the MSM is worse because it has an air of legitimacy afforded by a history of journalism that doesn’t exist anymore. Once great institutions like NYT and NPR are scant more than propaganda arms for the left’s authoritarian communist regime. And you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo. IMO the left is no different from us, we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world.

Neither accepts that it’s not just the other side distorting reality; both are oblivious to their own distortion.

View on HN

NPR? I think that at a certain point you might realize that it would be worth taking a step back and reevaluating your information diet. When you accuse NPR of being a propaganda arm for the left's "authoritarian communist regime" is probably about that time. Way past it, in fact.

I'm really not sure where the whole communist thing came from, anyway. Go to the far left of the Democratic Party and you are still pretty far to the right of communists.

If you think that NPR is close to a balanced outlet, I'd venture you're unfortunately the one off. I wouldn't call them communist for sure, but more times than I can count they've shocked me with partisan or incorrect reporting.

What is your idea of a balanced outlet, then?

None! I wouldn't claim any outlet is. Read from many sources, from all over the spectrum, build a model of each ones moral foundations, find reporters who seem to be in it for good reasons and model them. There's no bastions of reliable news, just you vs a stochastic void of political claptrap, your only hope is to Thompson Sample the widest set of half-popular sources for nourishment.

This is related to another point that's been floating around in my head for a while. The amount of effort involved in just trying to get a balanced view of our political situation is insane, and few people are willing to spend that much energy. But even though few see the whole picture, most have very strongly held political opinions. This naturally tends towards echo chambers which is obviously really bad if you're in a democracy which vitally depends on everyone being well informed.

I think this is mainly because we set the wrong incentives, for example outrage drives clicks which drives ad money, though we can also throw evolution some shade for lacking foresight when it made outrage such a strong emotion and gave us a tendency towards reaffirming our own views.

In any case, I don't know how to solve it, and it's certainly not a new problem (I guess it's been a thing since democracy is a thing), but it seems the web amplified it a lot, to the point where I think it's to blame for our current political division.

> authoritarian communist regime

That's where you completely lost me. Yet another person who doesn't know what communism is and just uses it as a blanket, non-sense label for leftists.

> the left’s authoritarian communist regime

> you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo

> we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world

I see what you did there, do you?

Hopefully you see what you did there as well.

Makes sense to me in the context of an assault on speech. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> authoritarian communist regime

Breitbart is leaking.

But honestly, care to elaborate? I'm genuinely curious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com