Comment by kmlevitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmlevitt | Hacker News Reader

I got a subscription to the NYT for a special price, but I don’t think I’ll renew it at the end of the year. Compared to the Washington Post it seems oddly bereft of any real editorial identity anymore. They are trying to be all things to all people and so it winds up being a contradictory mess that just makes everybody angry.

A generation ago a newspaper could still claim to be impartial and to be a neutral forum for people from both sides of the political spectrum. But the partisan divide is so strong now but to except the ideas of one side necessarily means you have to believe the other side is crazy, evil or both; the ideologies are to diametrically opposed for it to be logically possible to see “good points“ on both sides now.

So they are just sheets in the wind. They publish an op Ed written by Tom cotton about using the army on protesters, get backlash, fire whoever green lit that idea. Then some freelance editor dares to say Joe Biden‘s inauguration was emotional for her and they immediately fire her for not being “neutral“ or some bullshit.

These decisions pissed off conservatives, pissed off liberals and made nobody in the middle any happier. They need to just pick a side and run with it.

>>> They need to just pick a side and run with it. So you don't care about objective journalism?

I’m talking about their editorial content. There’s nothing about “objective journalism“ that obligates them to run an opinion piece defending China‘s actions in Hong Kong, for example.

No, but if there are opinion articles for both sides, it will create a more informed reader. Newspapers should provide enough information for readers to be able to make their position on the information alone

Right, that’s the classic neutral source model: report what the person on the left thinks, report what the person on the right thinks, and expect the informed reader to make their own decision, which will probably be somewhere in the middle.

That model worked fine when people had things in common other than their views on policies, and could politely agree to disagree on many things. But it’s another matter altogether when both sides literally think the other side is trying to destroy America. If you have a paper that tries to show “both sides“ of issues that illicit opinions from OAN, Newsmax, Fox and literal Chinese state propaganda and put it next to commentary by people like Ezra Klein you just wind up with a publication that is intellectually incoherent.

The “both sides“ model of reporting assumes that both sides exist on the same planet and share a basic understanding of the axioms of reality. And they don’t anymore. Any publication that attempts to do this is just going to elicit outrage from both sides on a routine basis. And the NYT frequently does now. Nobody who supports BLM he’s going to feel “informed“ by an editorial by Tom Cotton about how troops should be called in on protesters, and vice versa.

Do you think the polarisation is driven by media drifting further apart, rather than the media drifting further apart due to polarisation?

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